Саймон Бествик - The Devil and the Deep - Horror Stories of the Sea

Swift’s throat was beginning to ache with thirst. He fumbled for a still-damp corner of his shirt. Tilting it to his mouth, he succeeded in squeezing free a drop or two.

“This is how it starts,” the Gunner said, watching him. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, a sure sign of thirst. “When we are driven to drink salt water, that’s when destruction comes.”

“You should not talk so much,” Swift said. He realized as soon as he spoke that he’d left off the obligatory “sir.” But the man did not deserve it, and he could not whip Swift now. “You’ll scare the women.”

The Gunner shrugged to show it did not matter, and lay back against the shrouds.

“We could dip our coats,” said a voice from below. Glancing down, Swift recognized his mess-boy huddled between two Lascars. He was surprised at his own surge of relief: he was glad the boy had lived.

The boy said again, in a small voice: “Captain Inglefield, in his Narrative, said he dipped his coat in the water and lay against it, so the water seeped into his flesh and left the salt on his skin.”

“Is such a thing possible?” A tar, dug into a lower ratline, sounded doubtful.

“Let us try,” Swift said. He did not say, “It will at least keep us busy.” Anything was better than lying endlessly against this swaying grid of ropes, thinking on death. He was a sailor: when Death came calling, he wanted it to catch him doing something useful.

A sailor donated his jacket. They fastened a rope belt to it and passed it down the ladder, so the lowest man could dip it into the ocean before passing it back up. It was a laborious, careful task on a swaying mast—exactly the thing to occupy a man and keep his thoughts from dreadful tales.

The women, however, had no such action to take. When Swift clambered up to the crow’s nest, he saw Mrs. Newman weeping, the other women staring straight ahead. Their skin had begun to blister in the heat. Swift passed the wet coat to the women first, and showed them how to daub their arms with it. Mrs. Newman moved slowly, as if in a dream. “Take your time,” Swift said, as kindly as he could.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “Truly.”

“We’re still afloat,” Swift said. “Perhaps a passing ship will spy us. Indeed,” he lied, “I thought I heard a gun last night. We are not the only ship in this sea.”

“Aye,” muttered a sailor below, “but I’d rather we were alone than with that ghost ship alongside.”

Mrs. Newman’s nostrils flared. She looked for all the world like a small animal trembling inside a Rangoon market cage. “What is he speaking of? What does he mean?”

“It is nothing,” Swift said. “Just tar’s talk.” He could have kicked the man.

“Don’t you worry about her,” the Gunner said as Swift retook his position on the standing rigging. “She’ll outlast us all. Her type always does.”

Night descended on them like a cloud. Though the weather was warm, Swift found himself shivering. Now that the wind had died, the groans and cries of terrified people surrounded him. The Zong, he thought, but he was not there; this was a different ship.

Swift woke with a start. Something—a feather? A wing?—had brushed his cheek. He thrust the bird away before it could peck out his eyes.

“Forgive me, Mr. Swift,” a woman’s voice said. Looking up, he saw the faint outline of Mrs. Newman’s face peering at him. A strip of fabric—the coat?—dangled in front of her. “I only thought—Is that a sail?”

Hope surged through Swift as he adjusted himself on the ropes, trying to get a better look at the ocean behind him. Something stirred in the haze of darkness, something pale and large.

“A sail!” came an exultant voice from the forecastle. “A sail to starboard.”

The shape turned. For one wonderful moment Swift saw it clearly, a square-rigger full to the wind.

“Does anyone have a pistol? A gunshot’s what we need.”

Another sailor hallooed into the wind.

Decurrs started forward in his ropes. “Do not hail that ship!”

“What?” Now Swift was fully awake. He glanced back at the vessel. This time he saw what Decurrs saw: the way the clouds slitted their gaze through the ship’s sails, the way her edges blurred with light.

“Do not hail that ship!” Decurrs shouted. From the foresail he heard a shout in Malay; angry voices rose from below. Others were realizing the danger.

And yet the hallooing man would not stop. Perhaps he was a landsman; perhaps he was desperate enough to not care about the consequences.

“Ahoy!” the man yelled. Bare-chested, he leaned out from the mizzen, his shirt fluttering in his hand as an improvised flag. “We are here!”

The man’s body flew away from the rigging. His arms and legs bewildered themselves in the air as he fell into darkness. The sailor who’d pushed him leaned back in, to the congratulations of his fellows.

“Too late,” Decurrs whispered.

Swift raised his gaze. The ghost ship was turning their way, her cobweb sails filling with impossible wind. Her whiteness was a loathsome thing: the white of a bone pushed through the skin; the white of a shark’s tooth as it eats a man alive.

“What is that?” Mrs. Newman said in wonder. Her words called Swift back to himself.

“Look away, madam,” he said. “Do not gaze upon that ship. Your soul depends on it.” He turned his face to the shrouds. The moaning, heaving noise of the wreck faded into a new kind of silence, in which Swift could hear only the breathing of the wind and the waves.

Light moved over the rigging. He squeezed his eyes shut.

In the distance someone wailed. The rigging trembled, then stilled.

After a long quiet the Malay maid spoke, her voice traveling far in the stillness. “Ship gone,” she said, and added, “It took.”

In the afternoon, a group of men from the lower rigging tried to swim over to the foremast, seeking a less-crowded position. The waves crashed over them. Four of them struggled through the spray to the mast and clambered up to the foretop. One of them looked like his messmate, Holdfast. A shout drew Swift’s attention to one of the less lucky ones, a man whose head now bobbed far outside the ship, drifting further and further away. Soon Swift lost sight of him altogether.

The tars had no shoes to eat. They’d worked the Minerva barefoot, in the Lascar style. Some tried gnawing the leather on the rigging but soon laid off, declaring it too bitter to be endured. Instead they made do with scraps of canvas and pieces of lead, which they passed up and down the line.

“You should not eat that,” Mrs. Newman croaked as Swift took up a piece of lead the size of a coin. “It’s poisonous.”

Swift put the lead into his mouth. It tasted like nothing; like the air itself. He sucked on it, enjoying the temporary sensation of moisture on his tongue.

“The haunt,” someone said wearily. “It’s here.”

The sun was still in the sky, and yet there the ghost ship was, a miasma against the waves. It approached silently, the way Swift had seen sharks approach a woman struggling in the water. He turned his head away.

But this time he saw.

White tendrils slashed out from the haunt, ropes that were not ropes. Some twisted around limp bodies—dead passengers, Swift thought, or the tars who’d drowned earlier—but one arced past him, right past him, and snatched a man from the mizzentop. Swift’s last glimpse of Captain Maxwell was of the man staring straight in front of him, too terrified to scream.