Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Duncan’s Hell was a cold black place at the bottom of the sea. In his youth he had endured more than a few sermons describing other torments the unrepentant might expect, and when he awoke in the darkness, frigid, wet, and shivering, he spent several terrible moments wondering which particular hell his lost spirit had found.

Suddenly the floor under him began to roll, and the wrenching pain in his ribs told him he had not died. He fell against a wall of heavy planks, then a violent pitch of the floor propelled him against another wall a few feet away. He threw his arms out and stood, desperately trying to understand what part of the ship he was in. It was a small chamber, barely seven feet long and even less wide, not quite high enough for him to fully straighten his six-foot frame. The floor was covered with moldy, rotting straw. One wall was canted inward at the base, and he sensed motion in it, or beyond it. A creature on the other side was groaning, pushing the wall with a furious power, as though trying to force its way through. No, he realized with a stab of fear, he was below the water line, and the thing clawing at the planks was the ravenous sea. Desperately he explored with his fingers, finding a long swatch of sailcloth hanging on a peg in one corner, and a heavy door in the wall opposite the hull. But the narrow door had no latch, no means of opening.

A gasp of despair escaped his lips, his chest tightened. He was in one of the cells where the murderers were confined. Lister had declared that the ship was going to sink, and he was locked in a box, where he would drown like all the other rats. He paced back and forth, his heart racing, touching the moist, matted skin on his side where the captain’s bullet had grazed him, futilely trying to recall what had happened after the black water had closed about him. What had he done to be sealed into this oversized coffin? He had wanted so desperately to die, then after speaking with Lister and seeing Adam’s medallion, he had wanted so abruptly to live.

Frightened shouts rose from the decks above. Someone called for pumps to be manned, someone else for a Bible. He heard the sound of water running past the door and with a wrench of his heart felt a puddle forming at his feet. He pounded on the door until his fists throbbed; then the ship lurched, his head slammed into a wall, and he sank into unconsciousness again.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”

The thin eerie chant echoed in Duncan’s nightmare as he struggled back to awareness, the meaningless, haunting words repeating themselves endlessly, from nowhere and everywhere. He pinched himself in his dream and pushed at his eyes, trying to make certain they were open, then pressed the wound in his side. The flash of pain jerked him upright.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”

He was awake but the nightmare would not fade.

The storm, however, seemed to have passed. The sea no longer fought with the hull, the water had drained from his cell. He stripped off his wet clothes, wrapping the sailcloth around him, then sat in the black emptiness, listening to the chilling, melancholy chant a few minutes, realizing it was not a trick of his mind, but the utterances of a forlorn woman. He stood, trying to understand how he could hear her voice so clearly. Searching the locked door with his fingertips, he discovered a six-inch-square hatch halfway up the door, hanging open on a leather hinge. His hands shaking, he put his mouth to the hatch and shouted.

“It was a pig’s heart!” As the terrible reality of where he was sank in, he repeated the words in a hoarse, desperate voice. “Not a man’s! No man was killed!” There was no response, no movement in the darkness. He was on the prison deck, abandoned, alone.

Not entirely alone.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known!” The sad voice seemed more urgent now, almost frantic, and its source became clear. The woman was in the cell next to his. Duncan tightened the scrap of cloth around his waist.

“Who are you?” he asked, futilely pressing his eye to the hole, seeing nothing but a dim line of light at the bottom of a door several feet in front of him. “Are you ill?”

“Take the skin you are,” the woman replied in a thin, plaintive tone. “You will see this is the real earth circling about.”

He had found a new level of hell after all. He was wounded, trembling from the cold and damp, imprisoned in the dark without explanation, and his sole companion was not only a murderer, but a lunatic murderer.

“It was a pig’s heart!” Duncan cried again, shouting the words, continuing despite the low curses they now drew from cells farther away, stopping only when he realized they were coming out in long sobs.

“Fresh meat!” cooed a coarse voice from the darkness. “The storm washed up fresh meat for our pets!”

He dropped to his knees as he realized the prisoner down the passage was speaking of him, then sank backward against a corner, listening to the murmur of the sea until finally, gratefully, he found slumber.

When he awoke, Adam Munroe was with him, squatting in the opposite corner, urging his weevil forward, tossing from hand to hand the wooden buttons he was using for betting. This was the grinning, roguish Adam whom Duncan had come to know, the one who softly sang Highland ballads in the middle of the night and cracked jokes when Company spirits sagged. Except this Adam had seaweed in his hair. Duncan, trembling, spoke his friend’s name. Adam looked up, cocked his head, and, his grin fading, extended his open palm with his betting pieces toward Duncan as the tail of an eel began squirming out of his ear. Duncan recoiled in terror, pressing against the wall, his heart thundering, as Adam slowly faded into the blackness.

When he stirred again-was it hours, or only minutes that had passed? — there was a new sound, someone whispering low, rhythmic words that had the semblance of prayers. Their meaning seemed to linger at the edge of his consciousness, as if he should recognize them, but the words were not in English, nor in Gaelic, nor in any other language of Europe.

“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee! Ohkwari! Ohkwari!”

Through the darkness he could not discover the source, only knew that the longer the whispers were spoken, the more they made his skin crawl. They could have been from the murderer next door or from another down the corridor, or even from someone roaming the aisle itself. Or something clinging to the hull outside. The dead were trying to take over the ship, the sailors had insisted. Or perhaps they were just trying to share their secrets.

He began shivering, though his wound burned like a hot poker. In the fever that took hold, questions and faces swirled in his mind. Lister. Evering. The ghostly woman who had drowned. Adam Munroe, again and again Adam, whom Duncan would dishonor because he was incapable of grasping his friend’s dying bequest. Nothing of that terrible day made sense, but he knew better than to think everything unconnected. Someone had performed the work of the devil in the compass room, leaving Adam’s strange medallion, then the melancholy angel had materialized on the mast and chosen to die by leaping into the raging water. The captain and Arnold had wanted him to prove no one had died. But instead he had shown them that Evering had died, and not, Duncan knew, in the way it appeared to the crew. Evering, who held the key, had died before Duncan could learn how to save himself.

Redeat, he kept hearing Lister say, over and over, and he kept seeing the chastising way the old Scot had looked at him. Surely it was just a bad joke, that anyone, even a dried-up old sailor, would consider Duncan a clan chief.