Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

September 1759

The North Atlantic

Hope, Duncan McCallum had discovered after two months on an English convict ship, was the deadliest thing in the world. It wasn’t scurvy that was killing his companions, nor any of the other shipborne diseases his medical training warned him to watch for. Hope was their poison, for hope was the seed of despair, and on the dark, dank prisoner deck those who had embarked with the greatest hopes were now dying of despair.

Had he time, and paper and ink, Duncan could have penned a treatise on the fatal contagion of despair, recounting how it consumed each prisoner differently, the final chapter being a description of himself. For Duncan, with strange detachment, had not missed his own symptoms. He had seen the sunken eyes looking back at him from his reflection in the water butt, observed the trembling hands, the absence of appetite, his abrupt obsession with memories of his Scottish boyhood, the only contented time of his twenty-four years. He had embarked for the New World clinging to vague ambitions about a fresh beginning, but the realities of the convict’s fate had overtaken him, and now the dim spark of his life was fueled only by his compulsion to decipher the ghastly death of his friend Adam Monroe.

“Give way!” Duncan heard a man near the bow shout, followed by the sound of feet running toward him. Springing up from his hiding place between two barrels, he launched himself onto the shroud lines. He had prayed to evade attention this time, had even convinced himself he could return unseen in the mist to the prisoners’ hold, but if they were going to beat him again, by God he would first make them work, wear his keepers down so he would have time to solve the anguished riddle that had caused him to steal away from the morning slops line. If his own despair had an antidote, Duncan knew where to find it.

As he climbed, the faces of the dead once again flashed before his mind’s eye. Ian, the handsome young printer, arrested hours before his wedding, who had started the voyage singing about love. On his last day, a fleet westbound packet had overtaken their ship, pausing to deliver mail that included a letter from his fiancée breaking their betrothal, saying her parents forbade union with a criminal. He had stared at the letter for hours, then that night had crept away to the head, lain down, and filled his throat from the bucket of sand kept there. And Stewart Ross, the stone mason and engineer who, after receiving news that his only son and heir had died in the war with France, had chewed open a vein in the middle of the night. But it was Adam, Duncan’s one true friend among the prisoners, whose face always lingered. Adam had been laughing one day, betting with wooden buttons as he urged on his entry in a weevil race, then had grown abruptly morose the next, transformed by something or someone unseen by Duncan. He had watched helplessly over the next twenty-four hours as Adam’s face had seemed to rot away, the life fading from his eyes as steadily as if it had been his blood, not his spirit, that had been trickling out of him.

Duncan climbed without looking down, instinctively pushing and pulling on the lines with hand and foot as he had so often in the Hebrides boats of his youth, swinging from one spar to the next, the spray of the wind-whipped waves soaking his threadbare shirt, stinging the open welts left from the last time the keepers had bound him to the mast and whipped him. He was taking the same route, spar for spar, as Adam had taken two days earlier while Duncan, pinned in the grip of the keepers, had helplessly watched. Adam had lingered in the maintop platform, scratching something into the wood of the mast, then lifted his hand in mock salute to the officers and others gathered near the bow.

As Duncan hurried upward, he heard the helmsman cry out in a fearful tone, doubtless concerned that one of his pursuers would fall as the great square-rigged vessel, eight weeks out of Glasgow, pitched forward into the heavy sea. Fog swirled around the masts as he frantically climbed, knowing they would never stop their vengeful race. Breaching the rules of confinement was no different from spitting on the king, the captain had declared, and had offered half a crown to the man who brought Duncan to him if he went missing again. Duncan had escaped three times already, the last time tasting the freedom of wind and sea for half an hour before they found him clinging to the bowsprit. He had become something of a reviled mongrel at the whipping post, the favorite of every bully among the sailors. The captain had vowed that next time Duncan would receive forty lashes and be tied to a mast all night to let the salt spray work on his raw flesh.

He climbed with grim determination, swinging from the foremast, finally reaching the maintop, the platform high above the deck where Adam had lingered, working on the wood. His heart leapt as he saw the lines scratched with a nail, then sank just as quickly. There were no words of wisdom, no explanation of what had so abruptly destroyed Adam, no secret instructions to explain the cryptic legacy he had left for Duncan. His friend had left no words at all, only two crude drawings-one a plump creature with a round tail and outstretched wings, the other two parallel, curving lines joined at the top and bottom, like a hollow letter S . The last meaningless gesture of another life wrung dry by the king.

Adam had no sooner finished scratching on the mast than he had slipped down a line onto the port rail, running along its flat top, sprinting as the keepers closed in. Duncan had broken free as he saw the empty grin on his friend’s face, and had been racing toward him as Adam scooped a set of chains off the shoulder of a keeper, draping it around his neck, then sped toward the stern. He had kept running when he reached the end of the rail, hugging the chain to him. Duncan reached the stern an instant later, in time to see that his friend made no effort to surface, had just spread his arms and dove deeper, his last mortal sign the bottom of one pale, naked foot kicking toward the depths.

Duncan extracted a small, dark object from his pocket, a four-inch piece of carved black stone. That terrible morning when they had climbed onto the deck for their breakfast slops, Adam had clamped a hand around Duncan’s shoulder, spoken into his ear, then leapt into the rigging so quickly Duncan had not at first realized he had thrust the stone into Duncan’s palm, bending his fingers over it as though to conceal it. Only several agonizing minutes later, after Adam was gone, had he become fully aware of the object, and of the exact words Adam had spoken.

“I am sorry,” his friend had whispered to him. “She is done with me,” he said, as if the stone were alive. “I failed her. ’Tis you she needs now.” In his few moments of privacy since, Duncan had studied the disturbing black thing, expecting it to yield some explanation. But it was nothing more than a stone shaped into a lumpy, ugly creature with fat haunches and a broad head lowered between two thick front legs, as if it were bowing. In a hole in its bottom, a small note had been wedged. I despaired because only a ghostwalker can understand what must be done, it said. But now I see you become one. Let the old one take you where she needs to go. On the back, more lines had been added in a hasty scrawl. Duncan, I vowed not to befriend you, but I never thought to find us so alike. I do not expect your forgiveness for what I have done to you and your clan, but I do pray that one day you will at least understand. What they say they want the Company for, they mean the opposite. They mean to use you, then they must kill you. They know who you are.