Best New Horror #26, page 37
The Bride slithered close to us. It was a struggle not to befoul myself when the fullness of her putrid stink came over me. The captain leaned near to her. Her tendrils danced on the edge of his ear. Not for the first time, I wondered what he heard. He nodded, and muttered, and nodded some more. When he straightened again to glower down at me from his full height, I saw in his face no sign of the man I’d served for years.
He regarded me with cold, black eyes, more shark than man, then mustered the crew. His purpose came clear enough when the bosun’s mates stripped my shirt and seized me to the capstan bar. If the captain read the Articles and declared my guilt to the crew, I didn’t hear him.
My offence? Nothing, Sirs, and may God smite me if that isn’t the truth. I am guilty for my role in bringing the Confidence to her end, but until that last day I minded my duties. There was naught else I could do.
Twelve times the lash ate skin from my back. I couldn’t fathom the source of the bosun’s rage. He flogged me with such glee that at six lashes I cried for mercy. At ten, I begged. Another dozen might have finished me.
Phineas helped me to my hammock—he must’ve been ordered, else he wouldn’t have—both of us with unfocused eyes and unsteady gait. But ‘twas his secret alterations to the grog, not concern for me, that affected him so.
I lay there all night with the hammock pressed into my face. I didn’t sleep.
Aye. Many an hour I’ve spent wondering why she didn’t kill me straight away, and oft wishing she had. Short-handed as we were, the Confidence could not spare many crewmen if we were to reach our destination. She had other plans for us, you see. And, powerless as I was to awaken the men from their trances, I posed no threat to her.
Though I was the first, I wasn’t the only man on the Confidence to get the lash for the Bride’s amusement.
Nor was I the only one to watch the captain and the Bride together. So did Thomson. With his expedition dropped by the wayside, he had no work to occupy him, and this freed him to imagine himself on evening strolls with ladies in distress. His gaze followed the pair, envy plain on his face for all to see.
Thomson got his chance to visit with her the day after my flogging, when Captain Nares excused himself to confer with Quartermaster Pasley. Soon the two officers were embroiled in charts, headings, and the best course for laying siege to the phantom raiders. Thomson seized the opportunity. He disappeared below and quickly returned with armloads of sketches from his unused laboratory.
They stood on the main deck, lonely man and writhing beast. Did she express a ladylike admiration of his education? Whatever her act, I doubt she enjoyed that gallery of dissected sea-life. No true lady would. Yet worse for Thomson, these were the Bride’s kith and kin sliced open and catalogued.
But he smiled, and laughed, and even felt emboldened. This last I know because he laid his hand on the tendrils of her arm. I didn’t know whether to be more shocked that he would take such liberty with a hideous creature like I saw, or with a fragile and sophisticated lady as he no doubt saw.
‘Twas a hot day, and even hotter up top. I passed the pair on my way to the butt for a mug of water to quench my thirst. She had Thomson’s ear, much the way she’d whispered to the captain when she urged him to flog me. His bearing was that of a man paying the strictest attention, nodding slowly and muttering. Though my ears were improving, they still rung like church bells on Christmas, so I could not hear him. Her orb twinkled at me over his shoulder. I drained my mug with haste and got away from her.
The old man returned soon after that and sent Thomson packing. He went below with his sketches, still nodding and jabbering. I did not see him the rest of the day.
I know you are men of honour and character, Sirs, never having felt the lash yourselves, but a topman’s chores make it difficult for the wounds to heal, and the wounds turn any attempt at sleep into agony. And the dreams had long since robbed my sleep of restfulness. So I welcomed my shift on the watch that night.
I had a quid of tobacco left in my cap, and chewed all of it. It eased my pain, but not my unease. I jumped at every shadow, for fear that the Bride would come slithering out of the night and do to me what she had done to Rogers.
I longed for the soothing noises of a ship under sail at night, but these were lost to me. Yet I found I could still apprehend the familiar rhythms of our frigate. I tried to find comfort in the sway of the deck against the soles of my feet, the vibrations of the mainmast against my fingertips as cables sang through the blocks. But a new rhythm played itself out in her rigging, too. Somewhere in the shadows overhead a cable had come loose. Occasionally, on the leeward side of larger swells, the mast shuddered as if struck by one of the yards. I’d been a topman for five years but could not place that rattling. But still my ears rung badly, and so I blamed my confusion on that. Elsewise, I reckoned, I’d know the problem at once.
My dreams again took me to that watery abyss when I finally managed sleep after the watch. The chanting had reached a frenzy, as if that ageless slumber were coming to an end.
My mates woke me when they jostled my hammock in their haste for the main deck. I wondered aloud at the commotion. But none would answer me, so I followed.
Captain Nares, the officers, and the Bride ringed the mainmast. Most of the crew was there, too. All craned their necks upward, toward where Thomson swung purple and lifeless from the topgallant yard.
How that walrus managed to gain the topgallant I’ve no idea. I did get a closer look at his corpse than I’d have liked, for while the captain laughed, Lieutenant Prescott dispatched us topmen to lower the body. Thomson had tied a line about his neck and jumped, though he hadn’t made a proper noose. He’d died gasping. We lowered him hand-over-hand. The life of science must be good, Sirs, for his girth was considerable.
As I hung there in the rigging, straining to lower the body with dignity, I spotted a black stain upon the larboard sea. A writhing mass, like that which had produced the Bride, but thrice the size of our frigate. The wind had a sourness upon it, too, that brought gorge to my throat.
I lost my grip, nearly took a tumble. I caught myself but let Thomson go. I’d no time to shout a warning to the others, so they lost their grips on old Thomson, too, and he plummeted to the deck.
I scrambled down. The captain seethed. He opened his mouth, no doubt to order another flogging, when Lieutenant Prescott shouted something. From his bearing and the way he pointed, I gathered it was, “Ship ahoy!”
Captain Nares gazed through his bring-’em-near at the blotch on the sea. The Bride murmured in his ear. I didn’t need to hear him to know what came next:
“All hands to stations!” The Confidence made straight for that churning mass.
We had reached the Bride’s destination.
Of course there were no ships on the horizon, but men bolted for their stations as though the captain was Nelson and our destination Cape Trafalgar. The crew lowered the boats to clear the deck, gathered their axes and pikes, and readied the twelve-pounders to fire on our invisible foe.
Where I saw tentacles and rot, they saw a brigantine peopled with rogues and murderers. A single Bride had driven this entire ship to madness. How many monsters would join her when we entered that foul nest?
The captain’s eyes were wide. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth when he snapped at Slade, another seaman, who went below. Then the captain pulled me close and bellowed in my ear. “Fetch Wythe!” No doubt he wanted the surgeon on hand to attend the Bride’s husband.
But I am a coward, and I confess my guilt. This order I disobeyed, and so violated Article Twenty-Two. Instead, in my panic, I made to escape in one of the cutters now trailing behind the Confidence. I had to get away.
But the Bride saw this. She must have called out, for Prescott and a pair of deckhands surrounded me. Phineas Grue was one, his breath still strong enough to curl a man’s toes. Before I found the King’s shilling in my ale, Sirs, the whoring life had taught me few things of value, but brawling was one of these. So when he came for me I treated him to a solid crack across the jawbone for his trouble, and so violated Article Twenty-Three.
We shuddered to a stop just as I made to dive overboard. I fell, knocking my crown on the deck. A deckhand pinned my arms from behind when I tried to stand. Prescott rounded on me.
Past his shoulder I glimpsed tendrils of seaweed and filth slithering over the bow. It should have been the last sight of my life.
But just as Prescott drew his sword to skewer me, Slade handed the captain a jar of grey slime.
I knew right then that Phineas’s secret drink hadn’t been rum after all. He’d been drinking Thomson’s pickling alcohol. But with those casks locked away in the hold, he’d been forced to sip from the sample jars, mayhap replacing the remainder with bilge water as he went. Whatever he’d done, it had ruined the Bride’s trophy, for Rogers’s heart had rotted away.
She yanked the jar from Captain Nares, smashing it to the deck. Her head tipped back, back, back, and the curtain of tendrils on her face fluttered as though in a vicious gale. Seamen and officers alike dropped to the deck, clutching bloodied ears.
The Bride speared Captain Nares square in the chest with a single tentacle. Then she unravelled, and smothered his screams under a putrid mass while she tore a new trophy, still beating, from his body.
The tendrils streaming over the bow took new forms, each like the Bride herself, and started feeding on the crew. I nearly became a meal myself, and had to wrest the sword from Lieutenant Prescott to fend them off. One by one they claimed the crew’s hearts. And just as in my dreams, I sensed the chanting, sensed it not with my ears but deep in the marrow of my bones. With every heart they took, that chanting grew more feverish.
Why? I do not know, Sirs. Perhaps they meant to feed their trophies to that thing stirring in the deep, as a mother suckles a newborn.
They swarmed around us, but I couldn’t dive for a cutter, for the very sea was alive with tentacles that whipped the water into a froth. The Confidence reared back, tossing me aft. Then she smashed the waves and I tumbled fore again. A cavernous maw emerged from the sea, half again the height of the mainmast.
I glimpsed that thing no more than a blink, but I’ll not forget it. Look at my sketch, Sirs, and you’ll know why.
Merely abandoning the Confidence would not save me. I had to kill as many of these beasts as I could if I wished to make my escape. And if I died in the attempt then at least I’d have died a proper mariner’s death, and not in some monster’s gullet.
I fought my way to the hatch, my goal the forward magazine. So many vines of seaweed did I slice that I felt like an explorer hacking his way through the jungles of darkest Africa. Prescott’s sword was black with slime by the time I got below deck.
The magazine sentries had abandoned their posts, and for this I was grateful. I had no wish to cut down my own crewmates. I smashed the magazine window with the hilt of Prescott’s sword, then flung the magazine lanthorn inside.
Again I’m guilty, Sirs, for I thus violated Article Twenty-Five and set fire to the magazine, and so did deliberate harm to a ship of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.
I dashed back to the deck with all haste as the Confidence shuddered under the weight of the thing that now consumed her up to the foremast. Tentacles lined with suckers, stingers, and hooks flailed at me as I made for the taffrail. They grasped my ankles and my wrist, but I’d not be here now had they gained my sword-arm, too.
The magazine blew before I could dive overboard, and the Confidence‘s bow erupted in smoke and fire.
The blast hurled me into the sea, battered and bleeding. Bits of stinking wrack and charred timber rained upon me while I gained the nearest cutter. I released the boat and started rowing.
I watched her sink, Sirs. The smoking ruins of the Confidence slid into the sea, ferrying the remains of that giant beast back to the depths. I rowed long after she disappeared beneath the waves, paying no mind to the lash wounds upon my back, so desperate was I to put the horizon between me and the last resting place of the Confidence.
Little crumbs of sargassum, debris from the explosion, swirled around the oars as I rowed. But they stayed abreast of the cutter even when the only sign of our frigate was a distant smear of black smoke on the blue sky, well outside the range of the blast. The sea behind the cutter turned green, then black, as more seaweed collected in my wake. And it kept pace with me, Sirs, no matter how hard I rowed.
I collapsed from exhaustion near sunset, and remember nothing more until I awoke aboard the Vigilant.
I tried to tell my tale, but the Vigilant‘s surgeon deemed me feverish, so he plied me with sleeping draughts as Wythe had done. Even so, I found no rest. Closing my eyes put me back in the abyss where still it echoed with that damnable chanting.
Though I had no fever, I feigned delirium when the surgeon made to move me. I could not bear to go up top, out of fear I’d find a message writ upon the waters. Only when we reached Portsmouth did I venture outside. And it was there, just as I knew it would be: a ribbon of black ooze stretching from the harbour to across the sea.
So I beg you, Sirs, and pray you will not deafen your ears to me. She lurks even now in the uncharted depths and will rise again when she has healed.
I, Samuel Frobisher, do hereby swear that events upon the Confidence transpired as I have stated.
God save the King.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
AT LORN HALL
RAMSEY CAMPBELL lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. Described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, he has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Convention and Horror Writers Association, the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.
Amongst his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk and Think Yourself Lucky. Forthcoming is Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, and he is working on a trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain.
Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki and The Pretence are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His regular columns appear in Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog, and he is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
“I don’t use audio guides when I’m visiting a place,” Campbell reveals. “I’d rather appreciate the architecture, or the contents or whatever’s there to be enjoyed, without an added soundtrack.
“While I don’t find other visitors’ use of headsets distracting or infuriating in the same way as personal stereos on public transport (where I’ve no wish to be treated to the insistent sneezing of percussion as I try to read a book), I do sometimes wonder what their users may be hearing and what might happen if the commentary turned stranger.
“That’s the kind of train of thought that leads to stories, and here’s where I ended up. The setting was suggested by Plas Teg, the haunted mansion between Wrexham and Mold.”
RANDOLPH HADN’T EXPECTED the map to misrepresent the route to the motorway quite so much. The roads were considerably straighter on the page. At least it was preferable to being directed by a machine on the dashboard, which would have reminded him of being told by Harriet that he’d gone wrong yet again, even when he knew where he was going. Although it oughtn’t to be dark for hours, the April sky beyond a line of lurid hills had begun to resemble a charcoal slab. He was braking as the road meandered between sullen fields of rape when he had to switch the headlights on. The high beams roused swarms of shadows in the hedges and glinted on elongated warnings of bends ahead, and then the light found a signpost. It pointed down a lane to somewhere called Lorn Hall.
He stopped the Volvo and turned on the hazard lights. The sign looked neglected except by birds, which had left traces of their visits, but Lorn Hall sounded like the kind of place he liked to wander around. The children never did, complaining to Harriet if he even tried to take them anywhere like that on the days he had them. They loved being driven in the rain—the stormier the better, however nearly blind it made him feel—and so he couldn’t help feeling relieved that they weren’t with him to insist. He could shelter in the mansion until the storm passed over. He quelled the twitching of the lights and drove along the lane.
Five minutes’ worth of bends enclosed by hulking spiky hedges brought him to a wider stretch of road. As it grew straight he glimpsed railings embedded in the left-hand hedge, rusting the leaves. Over the thorns and metal spikes surrounded by barbs he saw sections of an irregular roof patrolled by crows. Another minute brought him to the gateway of Lorn Hall.
He couldn’t have given a name to the style of the high broad house. Perhaps the stone was darkened by the approaching storm, but he thought it would have looked leaden even in sunlight. At the right-hand end of the building a three-storey barrel put him in mind of a clenched fist with bricks for grey knuckles. Far less than halfway from it on the unadorned frontage, a door twice as tall as a man stood beneath a pointed arch reminiscent of a mausoleum. Five sets of windows each grew smaller as they mounted to the roofs, where chimneys towered among an assortment of slate peaks. Even the largest of the ground-floor windows were enmeshed with lattices, and every window was draped with curtains to which the gloom lent the look of dusty cobwebs. Apart from an unmarked whitish van parked near the front door there was no sign of life.
The signpost had surely been addressed to sightseers, and the formidable iron gates were bolted open, staining the weedy gravel of the drive. One of the gateposts in the clutch of the hedge had lost its stone globe, which poked its dome bewigged with lichen out of the untended lawn. Ivy overgrew sections of the lawn and spilled onto the drive. The shapes the topiary bushes had been meant to keep were beyond guessing; they looked fattened and deformed by age. If Harriet had been with him she would have insisted on leaving by now, not to mention protesting that the detour was a waste of time. This was another reason he drove up to the house.
