Post by The Evil Biscuit on Oct 1, 2012 14:07:50 GMT -5
Welcome back, all, to the second annual Halloween Horrortacular! The format has changed a bit from last year - rather than installments of one complete story, I'll be posting four stories back-to-back, updating Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enjoy them, and Happy Halloween!
It began with the bosun's mate, John Marbury, and the stones.
Something so trivial as the plunk-plunk of rocks against the hull now haunts my every thought. The savages, those of the outlying tribes we elected not to quarrel with, had gathered on the mooring in no small number as we cast off our tethers and made for the sea. They hollered in their savage tongues, high trilling and screeches, flinging the smooth flat stones from the shoals at the ship, the great wooden sea-beast they had come to fear and quake before.
This was not out of the ordinary for our practices - the men were seasoned to the business of cargoing slaves, and these sort of crowds seemed to send us off at every port. But it was John Marbury, damn his superstitions, who dredged up that age-old sea curse and doomed us all. John Marbury, who paled at the moment of his dreadful realization and seized Henry Gaddon by the sleeve of his tropical cotton and howled about the stones passing over the ship. A superstition is a demon unto itself; it sickens the mind and leaps from man to man until all are consumed by it.
Yet it is not the demon that even now bellows and tramples belowdecks, shuddering the bulwarks beneath me as I, Captain Franklin Pitt of the Anna-Sofia, cower behind my writing desk, barricaded in the captain's quarters. Nay, it only began with John Marbury's superstition. It is ending, now, with something far darker.
We held some five-hundred-twenty savages in cargo, gathered from Dutch harvesters working through the Congolese. Many of the tribes had been sold to the Dutch by their own citizens, or by rival chieftains. One only pities the baseness of these prehistoric cultures. The ship was older, the Anna-Sofia, formerly a ship-of-the-line for the Australians, those godless vagrants, but since purchased and renovated for use on the Atlantic Passage. She was once a twentyfour-gunner, but her gunwales now held the post-and-plank holdings for her cargo, as did nearly all of her decks save for crew bunking in the aftdeck and extra quarters crowded beneath the fo'c'sle. These were not Kru tribesmen, which was fortunate - Kru were mindless brutes who starved themselves, chewed through their wrists, or flung themselves into the sea within the first days of sea travel. Those that did last the trip were considered untrainable, and many went unsold. Nay, these were mostly Asante savages, which fetched a modest price. With over five hundred in holding, we would be able to make enough per man to spend a good six weeks on leave; with the exeption of one burly animal who nearly wrenched poor Will Tarpley's arm out of socket, we had no incidents from them, and expected a quiet trip.
We were also carrying to the Americas a diplomat from Her Majesty's court, a bizarre man by the name of Lord Tyson Ashley. Lord Ashley had spent over three years on assignment in the lower subcontinent, immersing himself in the land and culture for the education of the Crown in the affairs of the southern colonies and our interests therein. He dressed like a madman, swaddling himself in brilliant iridescent silks and strange turbans, fancying himself more of a Moor than a right and proper Englishman. He also drank, like no man I have ever seen. Two full sea-chests of whiskey and spirits we hauled on board for him, and until the thing in the darkness took him in its gnashing jaws from our flimsy barricade at the mizzenmast, he at all times held a bottle firmly in one hand. Lord Ashley possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the African tribes, their culture, customs, and rituals. He never once passed up an opportunity to educate those around him in some inane slurred academia about the war between the Utzu and the Rubi tribes and how it had influenced the Dutch gold mining operations that had been steadily generating fortunes for decades now, or blathering on about what the ritual scarring on the chests and faces of some of the more colorful savages belowdecks represented. On more than one occasion during the early days of our voyage did I remind the diplomat to mind his pickled tongue and permit my crewmen to see to their duties.
In fact, it was Lord Ashley who first described the monster to us, though not until far later. His first discovery came on the third night, when something screamed belowdecks.
The young landsman's mate, Julius Hodgson, was the man on watch for the second deck - it was he who met us at the stairwell. Lord Ashley had been souring my ears with tales of the horrendous storms that plague the southern Cape, and despite my command to remain in quarters, followed at my heels like a stricken dog. The bosun, Archibald Dollin, and the master-at-arms Benjamin Fall, also accompanied me, having heard the unsettling commotion and answered accordingly. Fall brought two extra lanterns from stores and we descended into the thick wet darkness.
"It weren't a death-shriek, cap'n." I recall Julius stammering. "More like a night-cat, or a..." Hodgson lost his words here, and I believe it was Dollin who suggested "panther", which seemed agreeable to the young landsman. Dollin immediately followed with a crack about how he was certain no extra wildlife had been listed in the manifest, but for the life of me, I do not remember any of us laughing.
The holds belowdecks were by and large avoided by the crew for most of the trip. It was impossible to tell in the flickering lamplight where one body ended and another began - so tightly chained were they. An endless black sea of flesh and hair and iron and sweat, writhing and contorting as they moaned and coughed and gurgled quietly. The floors were slick with sweat and who knows what else, and the humidity was unthinkable - I began soaking through my overshirt almost immediately, and a thin bead of perspiration was already beginning to dribble off of Lord Ashley's brow. But nothing compared to the stench - the overpowering odor of piss and excrement, mixed with the sweat and dirt of the savages, rotting on the mildewing oak, stagnating in pools of fetid slime. It crawled into the nose and rooted itself in the brain, a smell so powerful that it could haunt a man for years, as I knew from tales told by older captains. It was the landsmen's duty to see that the floors were washed out daily, but such a task soon became impossible - if they were purged once a week it was considered good form. We moved from the landing of the stairs forward towards the fo'c'sle, lanterns straining in the murky black to shine their light on the bound sinewy backs of our cargo. It was then that Dollin asked from which deck the scream had come. Hodgson replied that it had come from the ballast deck, he thought, and he had called down to the man on watch, an older landsman by the name of Ripple, but never heard a response.
The ballast deck. If the second deck were lucky to be scrubbed weekly, the ballast deck were lucky to be scrubbed at all. All the horror and pungency of the upper deck was compounded fivefold in the lowest, and lanterns gave little purchase to the hot, steamy shadows therein. This part of the ship was at all times completely submerged, and the pressure of the Atlantic currents caused the thick oak hulls to strain and scream and sometimes shriek as though they would shatter like kindling at any moment. In her war days, a fitting punishment for a deserving mate was a night in the ballast deck with his own fears and no lantern. Many captains swore that such a sentence carried more weight and command in it than any lashing before the mast. Ripple had drawn the short straw in guarding the lowest deck, and it was unusual for him or any of those unfortunate enough to draw the duty to not be sitting at the base of the ladder patiently awaiting his relief. We approached the hatchway reluctantly, feeling the hot breath pulsing from beneath, stomachs turning from that dreadful smell. Dollin hung his lantern down into the pit and hollered for Ripple. The only response were the groans and strains of the savages chained below. I joined him and commanded him, as his captain, to answer in kind. When no answer came, I gave the order to search the deck.
The savages were different here - we all took notice of it immediately. Above, they laid across their berths facedown, laid shoulder-to-shoulder for the length of the ship. These slaves were chained in the same fashion, but every single one had his neck craned to look us square in the eyes. The lamplight glittered against the yellows of their bleary eyes, making them seem even more savage than normal. I advised young Hodgson to focus on finding Ripple, as he had taken on a noticeable tremble.
The first thing we found was his shoe. It laid askance against the bracing beams, casually tossed aside. Fall called to him again, but there was no response, only the cold, unblinking stares of the savages. Lord Ashley found the next article, which was Ripple's overturned lantern. The wick was still smoking - it had not been extinguished for long. Dollin flew into a rage at this, presuming the savages had broken their bonds and taken Ripple, but Lord Ashley had already moved deeper astern and discovered something else entirely. He called to us to join him.
Ripple's clothes - all of them - were in a pile at the far end of the deck. They laid upon each other in such a way that it seemed as though Ripple had simply vanished out of them, leaving them to fall to the ground exactly as they appeared now. The savages still stared, but one of them now smiled, an older tribesman whose toothless gums were black and pitted with rot. Dollin's face darkened to a thick purple, and he raised his fist to readjust the savage's grin, but Lord Ashley stopped him, his own stare now focused on the raised scar tissue that traced across the old man's withered shoulders and spiralled down his gaunt, leathery back. He crouched down in front of the man, whose rictus grin grew even wider, ribbons of black drool dangling from his swollen lips. They spoke a few words in a tongue I cannot describe, some savage trilling and clicking from lands before time.
When Ashley stood again, he was pale as a sheet. He told me it was urgent that we speak in private, and without another word he turned and fled to the foredeck, his lantern quickly swallowed up by the pressing darkness. Myself, Dollin, Fall, and Hodgson gathered Ripple's clothes and followed suit, resolved to station a guard at the hatch for the night and send a full complement of deckhands in the daytime to thoroughly search the deck for Ripple, whom I was already assuming had stripped naked and flung himself overboard - a condition not uncommon to the seafaring. The poisons and afflictions of the African continent do many bizarre and unnatural things to the civilized man.
Ashley was waiting for me in quarters. In the mere minutes that separated my arrival from his, he had managed to drink himself into a near oblivion. "You've brought a monster onboard, Captain." he cried to me. The scarred man was a witch doctor, he explained, a dark shaman neither Asante, Utzu or otherwise. A man with powers tapped from the primordial creation itself. Whatever affliction had taken Ripple, Ashley moaned, it was most certainly the doing of this man. Such a sorceror could do a great many horrible tricks, he said. Shape-shifting, summoning beasts, calling down thunder and fire and all manner of plagues from the skies. We would be best to take that skeletal fiend and toss him into the sea with all due expedience.
I advised Lord Ashley to calm himself, that we would investigate the matter thoroughly in the morning and a rational conclusion would be reached. Whatever trickery the old man in the holds possessed, he was still bound and chained with iron, something I had yet to see broken handily, by magic or otherwise.
I was telling him something else, though I do not recall now what it was, for at that moment another bloodcurdling scream rose up from the lower decks.
A human scream.
THE PRISONER
Part I
Part I
It began with the bosun's mate, John Marbury, and the stones.
Something so trivial as the plunk-plunk of rocks against the hull now haunts my every thought. The savages, those of the outlying tribes we elected not to quarrel with, had gathered on the mooring in no small number as we cast off our tethers and made for the sea. They hollered in their savage tongues, high trilling and screeches, flinging the smooth flat stones from the shoals at the ship, the great wooden sea-beast they had come to fear and quake before.
This was not out of the ordinary for our practices - the men were seasoned to the business of cargoing slaves, and these sort of crowds seemed to send us off at every port. But it was John Marbury, damn his superstitions, who dredged up that age-old sea curse and doomed us all. John Marbury, who paled at the moment of his dreadful realization and seized Henry Gaddon by the sleeve of his tropical cotton and howled about the stones passing over the ship. A superstition is a demon unto itself; it sickens the mind and leaps from man to man until all are consumed by it.
Yet it is not the demon that even now bellows and tramples belowdecks, shuddering the bulwarks beneath me as I, Captain Franklin Pitt of the Anna-Sofia, cower behind my writing desk, barricaded in the captain's quarters. Nay, it only began with John Marbury's superstition. It is ending, now, with something far darker.
-------------------------------
We held some five-hundred-twenty savages in cargo, gathered from Dutch harvesters working through the Congolese. Many of the tribes had been sold to the Dutch by their own citizens, or by rival chieftains. One only pities the baseness of these prehistoric cultures. The ship was older, the Anna-Sofia, formerly a ship-of-the-line for the Australians, those godless vagrants, but since purchased and renovated for use on the Atlantic Passage. She was once a twentyfour-gunner, but her gunwales now held the post-and-plank holdings for her cargo, as did nearly all of her decks save for crew bunking in the aftdeck and extra quarters crowded beneath the fo'c'sle. These were not Kru tribesmen, which was fortunate - Kru were mindless brutes who starved themselves, chewed through their wrists, or flung themselves into the sea within the first days of sea travel. Those that did last the trip were considered untrainable, and many went unsold. Nay, these were mostly Asante savages, which fetched a modest price. With over five hundred in holding, we would be able to make enough per man to spend a good six weeks on leave; with the exeption of one burly animal who nearly wrenched poor Will Tarpley's arm out of socket, we had no incidents from them, and expected a quiet trip.
We were also carrying to the Americas a diplomat from Her Majesty's court, a bizarre man by the name of Lord Tyson Ashley. Lord Ashley had spent over three years on assignment in the lower subcontinent, immersing himself in the land and culture for the education of the Crown in the affairs of the southern colonies and our interests therein. He dressed like a madman, swaddling himself in brilliant iridescent silks and strange turbans, fancying himself more of a Moor than a right and proper Englishman. He also drank, like no man I have ever seen. Two full sea-chests of whiskey and spirits we hauled on board for him, and until the thing in the darkness took him in its gnashing jaws from our flimsy barricade at the mizzenmast, he at all times held a bottle firmly in one hand. Lord Ashley possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the African tribes, their culture, customs, and rituals. He never once passed up an opportunity to educate those around him in some inane slurred academia about the war between the Utzu and the Rubi tribes and how it had influenced the Dutch gold mining operations that had been steadily generating fortunes for decades now, or blathering on about what the ritual scarring on the chests and faces of some of the more colorful savages belowdecks represented. On more than one occasion during the early days of our voyage did I remind the diplomat to mind his pickled tongue and permit my crewmen to see to their duties.
In fact, it was Lord Ashley who first described the monster to us, though not until far later. His first discovery came on the third night, when something screamed belowdecks.
-------------------------------
The young landsman's mate, Julius Hodgson, was the man on watch for the second deck - it was he who met us at the stairwell. Lord Ashley had been souring my ears with tales of the horrendous storms that plague the southern Cape, and despite my command to remain in quarters, followed at my heels like a stricken dog. The bosun, Archibald Dollin, and the master-at-arms Benjamin Fall, also accompanied me, having heard the unsettling commotion and answered accordingly. Fall brought two extra lanterns from stores and we descended into the thick wet darkness.
"It weren't a death-shriek, cap'n." I recall Julius stammering. "More like a night-cat, or a..." Hodgson lost his words here, and I believe it was Dollin who suggested "panther", which seemed agreeable to the young landsman. Dollin immediately followed with a crack about how he was certain no extra wildlife had been listed in the manifest, but for the life of me, I do not remember any of us laughing.
The holds belowdecks were by and large avoided by the crew for most of the trip. It was impossible to tell in the flickering lamplight where one body ended and another began - so tightly chained were they. An endless black sea of flesh and hair and iron and sweat, writhing and contorting as they moaned and coughed and gurgled quietly. The floors were slick with sweat and who knows what else, and the humidity was unthinkable - I began soaking through my overshirt almost immediately, and a thin bead of perspiration was already beginning to dribble off of Lord Ashley's brow. But nothing compared to the stench - the overpowering odor of piss and excrement, mixed with the sweat and dirt of the savages, rotting on the mildewing oak, stagnating in pools of fetid slime. It crawled into the nose and rooted itself in the brain, a smell so powerful that it could haunt a man for years, as I knew from tales told by older captains. It was the landsmen's duty to see that the floors were washed out daily, but such a task soon became impossible - if they were purged once a week it was considered good form. We moved from the landing of the stairs forward towards the fo'c'sle, lanterns straining in the murky black to shine their light on the bound sinewy backs of our cargo. It was then that Dollin asked from which deck the scream had come. Hodgson replied that it had come from the ballast deck, he thought, and he had called down to the man on watch, an older landsman by the name of Ripple, but never heard a response.
The ballast deck. If the second deck were lucky to be scrubbed weekly, the ballast deck were lucky to be scrubbed at all. All the horror and pungency of the upper deck was compounded fivefold in the lowest, and lanterns gave little purchase to the hot, steamy shadows therein. This part of the ship was at all times completely submerged, and the pressure of the Atlantic currents caused the thick oak hulls to strain and scream and sometimes shriek as though they would shatter like kindling at any moment. In her war days, a fitting punishment for a deserving mate was a night in the ballast deck with his own fears and no lantern. Many captains swore that such a sentence carried more weight and command in it than any lashing before the mast. Ripple had drawn the short straw in guarding the lowest deck, and it was unusual for him or any of those unfortunate enough to draw the duty to not be sitting at the base of the ladder patiently awaiting his relief. We approached the hatchway reluctantly, feeling the hot breath pulsing from beneath, stomachs turning from that dreadful smell. Dollin hung his lantern down into the pit and hollered for Ripple. The only response were the groans and strains of the savages chained below. I joined him and commanded him, as his captain, to answer in kind. When no answer came, I gave the order to search the deck.
The savages were different here - we all took notice of it immediately. Above, they laid across their berths facedown, laid shoulder-to-shoulder for the length of the ship. These slaves were chained in the same fashion, but every single one had his neck craned to look us square in the eyes. The lamplight glittered against the yellows of their bleary eyes, making them seem even more savage than normal. I advised young Hodgson to focus on finding Ripple, as he had taken on a noticeable tremble.
The first thing we found was his shoe. It laid askance against the bracing beams, casually tossed aside. Fall called to him again, but there was no response, only the cold, unblinking stares of the savages. Lord Ashley found the next article, which was Ripple's overturned lantern. The wick was still smoking - it had not been extinguished for long. Dollin flew into a rage at this, presuming the savages had broken their bonds and taken Ripple, but Lord Ashley had already moved deeper astern and discovered something else entirely. He called to us to join him.
Ripple's clothes - all of them - were in a pile at the far end of the deck. They laid upon each other in such a way that it seemed as though Ripple had simply vanished out of them, leaving them to fall to the ground exactly as they appeared now. The savages still stared, but one of them now smiled, an older tribesman whose toothless gums were black and pitted with rot. Dollin's face darkened to a thick purple, and he raised his fist to readjust the savage's grin, but Lord Ashley stopped him, his own stare now focused on the raised scar tissue that traced across the old man's withered shoulders and spiralled down his gaunt, leathery back. He crouched down in front of the man, whose rictus grin grew even wider, ribbons of black drool dangling from his swollen lips. They spoke a few words in a tongue I cannot describe, some savage trilling and clicking from lands before time.
When Ashley stood again, he was pale as a sheet. He told me it was urgent that we speak in private, and without another word he turned and fled to the foredeck, his lantern quickly swallowed up by the pressing darkness. Myself, Dollin, Fall, and Hodgson gathered Ripple's clothes and followed suit, resolved to station a guard at the hatch for the night and send a full complement of deckhands in the daytime to thoroughly search the deck for Ripple, whom I was already assuming had stripped naked and flung himself overboard - a condition not uncommon to the seafaring. The poisons and afflictions of the African continent do many bizarre and unnatural things to the civilized man.
-------------------------------
Ashley was waiting for me in quarters. In the mere minutes that separated my arrival from his, he had managed to drink himself into a near oblivion. "You've brought a monster onboard, Captain." he cried to me. The scarred man was a witch doctor, he explained, a dark shaman neither Asante, Utzu or otherwise. A man with powers tapped from the primordial creation itself. Whatever affliction had taken Ripple, Ashley moaned, it was most certainly the doing of this man. Such a sorceror could do a great many horrible tricks, he said. Shape-shifting, summoning beasts, calling down thunder and fire and all manner of plagues from the skies. We would be best to take that skeletal fiend and toss him into the sea with all due expedience.
I advised Lord Ashley to calm himself, that we would investigate the matter thoroughly in the morning and a rational conclusion would be reached. Whatever trickery the old man in the holds possessed, he was still bound and chained with iron, something I had yet to see broken handily, by magic or otherwise.
I was telling him something else, though I do not recall now what it was, for at that moment another bloodcurdling scream rose up from the lower decks.
A human scream.