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

“You will drink the salt,” the dead man said. “It will help for a while, and then it will drive you mad.”

Then it was not the Gunner beside him on the ropes, but the governor, large as life. He had his pistol on his hand, same as he’d had on the Zong . Swift felt like laughing at the man, just as he had all those years ago. You did not threaten a slave-ship sailor with a quick death. They’d lost all fear of such things. It was the slow death and the slow pain they feared. The thirst, the pickling, the sharks.

“Water,” someone croaked above him. It was the Malay maid. She dangled the coat to him. Swift took it from her and wrapped it around his shoulders, for his hands were losing their grip. He descended the ratlines slowly, step by step, stepping carefully around the living and the dead.

The sea was calm. The boy lay stretched out on the quarterdeck. Swift shook him, and he stirred.

“You should climb,” Swift said. “The waves will wash you away in the next gale.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Swift,” the boy said. “I do not think I have the strength for it.”

Swift looked up at the rigging. The numbness in his muscles told him he did not have the strength to pull the boy up. But he grabbed the boy under his arms, and, leaning his weight back, managed to pull him to the rail. The stars overhead made fantastic patchworks of light. They reminded Swift of the Saint Elme’s fire that had danced on board, warning the sailors of their deaths. Such a beautiful thing , he thought in wonder. So beautiful.

He eased out his rope belt and lashed the boy to the quarterdeck rail. Then he lowered the coat into the sea. He dribbled some drops of salt water into the boy’s mouth. Lowering his own head to the deck, Swift lapped at the waves like an animal. The wetness in his mouth shocked him with a relief that surged through his body.

Then he saw the haunt.

It lay two points abaft the port beam, an eerie shine on the ocean. Its tendrils were out again, touching the water so delicately it resembled one of those strange underwater flowers that bloom and curl in foreign tide pools. It was feeding off the men on the raft, he supposed. Or was that something the Gunner had told him?

Swift soaked the coat in salt water and placed it on his back. The precious water cut icy pathways across his shoulders as he climbed, finding every groove in his shrinking body and pinching him with cold. Still he climbed, and at the crow’s nest he handed the three women who’d taken refuge there the sodden coat. They sucked at it eagerly.

“Will we die soon, do you think?” Mrs. Newman’s eyes had sunken so far it was almost a peeling skull Swift looked into, and not a face.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “It will all be over soon.”

But it wasn’t.

The living and the dead lay side by side on the ropes. The thick, sweet smell of death lay over everything.

Swift climbed up and down the rigging, wetting the coat and passing it to those too weak to move. The boy was still alive. He could tell by the way his limbs quivered when the waves washed over them, though Swift could no longer detect the sound of breath when he dribbled water into the corner of the boy’s mouth.

In the evening, when the air began to cool, Swift went in search of survivors. He grabbed the bodies he passed on the shrouds. He patted their bloated arms, their naked, festering legs. No one moved. They were as still as if painted, upon a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Mrs. Newman’s swollen body sat upright, looking expectantly ahead. From time to time Swift followed her gaze, trying to make out what she saw.

“Well,” the governor said. “What will it be, men? To die of thirst’s a cruel death.” He gestured again with that foolish pistol of his. The Zong ’s crew stared back at him. They’d been working on less than a quart of water since entering the Torrid Zone. The rainwater casks that loomed so lovely behind the governor’s pistol were never for the likes of them, and they knew it.

“A vote,” the first mate said. “A vote on this.” The first mate despised them all, Swift could tell.

“What’s the captain say?”

“Captain Collingwood’s sick abed,” the governor said. “And Kelsall’s been taken out of the chain of command. The situation is clear. The cargo must be jettisoned. Not all—only the sick and the dying. Collingwood has given me his list.”

“For your insurance monies, you want the cargo jettisoned. That’s murder, sir,” said the first mate. “I’ll have no part in it.”

“A vote,” the boatswain said. “We must have a vote.”

Silence on the Zong . A parched boat on a parched ocean.

“Who votes yea?” the governor asked. He raised his own hand and looked meaningfully around. A few of the officers hesitantly raised their arms in the air.

“If you vote yea,” the governor said, “I’ll see to it that every tar here gets a cup of water in his ration.”

Swift raised his hand.

Listen: there was a ship. She was called the Zong . She was low on water, or so they said. Part of her cargo needed to be jettisoned, or so they said. Her cargo was a collection of humans in chains.

They pushed the women and children out one by one, through the cabin portholes. The first ones went quietly enough, but the others struggled. The slaves could hear the screaming as it drifted through the hold. They understood they were going to die. You have no idea how much even a sick child can fight you when she knows you are dragging her to her death.

The governor kept pointing. This one , he said. That one. They took the healthy along with the sick. The governor couldn’t read, Kelsall said, so what was the point of a list?

Some of the tars joined in. This one. A woman scratched Swift’s arm as he reached for her chain-mate, so he grabbed her by the hair. This one.

It is no great thing to drown a slave or two, when they are sick, when they have caused trouble. It is a usual thing.

They jettisoned fifty-four the first day. The governor said the number should be noted down, for the insurance claim. 54.

The next day they marched the men up to the quarterdeck, this time with the chains and shackles still on. They’d fight less that way, the governor said. And the chains would drag them down quicker. 42.

They had to stop for a time, to see to the sails. One of the Negroes had some English; he said all in the hold were begging to live, promising to survive on no meat and no water until port. 38. Ten women committed suicide, leaping from the deck to join those in the waves below. 48. One man managed to climb back aboard. They kicked him from the netting, into the screaming ocean. 144 in all. Or maybe more? Despite the governor’s efforts, they’d lost count halfway through.

A usual thing. The descent into the stinking hold, the lash with the cat, the feel of a man’s arm resisting as you haul him forward, the shouts, the crying, the pleas. Usual things. Save that first day, when Swift rushed above, because the stench of the hold was getting to him, that was all, and he rested his burning arms on the gunwale, and saw. A pregnant woman, giving birth in the waves.

“I did not pass the whisper,” Swift told the boy. “Someone else did. I don’t know who. Before the second trial, one of the Gregson men found me on a dock, told me, ‘we know you’re a fine man, we know you’ll remember what’s good for you.’ But they never called me to testify. Not one of the seventeen crew were called. I never did get to find out what kind of man I was.” He raised his hand to scratch one of the scabs beneath his eyes, and noticed, idly, that his fingernail had fallen off. He did not remember losing it.