The Night Boat Read online

  Coconut began to bark again. “Hush! Hush, I said!” The old man reached down for his flashlight and snapped it on, pointing it into the water at the submarine’s hull.

  A rush of foam kept him from seeing anything; he moved the light toward the stern, his mouth suddenly gone dry. Then the grinding noise returned, full force, and from the foam came a clump of coral and weed that looked like a decapitated head. Water rolled in, hammering, pulling. At first he didn’t understand, but as he followed the beam of the light the realization came clear to him, and it clawed at his heart. The boat had moved, just slightly, but it had moved. It was sliding backward, grinding over the reef. The currents were freeing it.

  “Great God!” he cried out; the hulk shuddered, and he almost dropped his light. The grinding quieted, almost vanished, then picked up again: a hideous scream of iron ripping coral. “Hey!” the old man shouted toward the sleeping village. They had to hear it. They had to, the sleepin’ fools! “HEY! HEY!” But now the grinding was too loud, it filled his brain and ears and mouth so he could neither shout out nor hear his own words. When the skiff rose over the next swell he tripped over the dog; as he grabbed for the starboard gunwale the flashlight fell from his fingers and into the sea. In blackness, he reached for the tiller.

  But before he could grasp it, he was riveted in place.

  His eyes, accustomed to the darkness now, saw the shadowy thing begin to slide off the reef with a low, ominous groaning and a hissing of foam. Something unnatural, his wife had said. Water roiled across the boat’s deck as it settled down; it gurgled through vents and sloshed across the deck debris. Something was hammering, hammering, hammering…

  It’s sinkin’! he thought, glad to see it go. He twisted the tiller around, his breath harsh and forced, and made for the reef entrance. The dog was whimpering at his feet, but even when he shoved him with a foot, Coconut wouldn’t stop crying. He could see the swirls of water at the entrance, and the two buoys were clanging simultaneously, like church bells, again and again and again. He was only a few yards from the passage when he turned in his seat to watch the hulk go under.

  But there was something black behind him, something huge, bearing down on him, cutting the sea to ribbons on either side. It twisted his guts in utter terror and forced his mouth open in a soundless scream. He let go the tiller, held up his hands to try to ward it off. The skiff, out of control, turned broadside in its path.

  The looming bows drove across the fisherman’s craft, splitting it, grinding it down; timbers exploded into the sky, then whirled in circles and fell back. Iron roared, tearing through reef bommies. The buoys clanged madly, the sea almost smothering them. With a long, piercing shriek the hulk passed through the entrance, struck sand bottom with a hollow, reverberating boom and finally lay still, the water still churning all along it. The submarine lay just inside the harbor, stuck on a narrow sandbar. Behind it, spreading like an oil slick, was a mass of timbers. In the midst of it was a crushed thing that had been a human body.

  Lights began to come on in the village, one yellow dot at a time, and a dog howled as if trying to scare the moon away.

  Five

  IN THE PEARLY morning light three men waded through the surf, pushing aside shards of timber, and lifted out what was left of a corpse. An old woman in a tattered green gown screamed on shore as she watched.

  “Careful, careful,” Kip told the other two quietly. “Come on back. Watch your step, now.” The body felt like something made of straw in their arms, a sack of broken bones hardly recognizable as something that once walked, breathed, lived. The gases hadn’t had time to build yet. One arm was thrown out, a frail lance defending against attack. Teeth glistened in the remnant of a face. Kip averted his eyes, controlling himself with all the willpower he could muster. Christ, what a terrible way to die! he thought. One of his helpers in the grim chore shook his head back and forth; the other simply stared straight ahead at the group of people who had congregated on the beach. The old woman could not stop shrieking, and the rest of the women couldn’t quiet her. Staggering out of the surf, the men came up the beach; the onlookers backed away, faces drawn. The men laid the corpse on a canvas tarpaulin and Kip closed the folds over it.

  “You bastard…” Kip breathed at the submarine. He found himself mesmerized by the thing. Painted in vivid reds and black shadow by the rising disc of the sun, the massive hulk was now motionless. The currents must have lifted it off Kiss Bottom, and then…and then what? How did it crush the old man? The hulk could have turned before the man got his skiff away, but how in God’s name did it clear the passage so perfectly? Now it was within the reef, sitting right inside Coquina’s harbor. He walked forward a few feet, the surf swirling around his shoes and sucking the sand from beneath them. It must have happened very fast, he reasoned, and the old fisherman had panicked, losing control of his skiff. How many tons did that boat weigh? Seven, eight hundred? Something bumped his foot and he looked down; a gray, spongy mass had washed up. He realized what it was when he saw the eye: the severed head of the old man’s terrier mutt.

  He stepped back and the head was dragged away by the surf.

  The woman had stopped her shrieking now; her eyes were fixed on the canvas-enclosed form, and one of the others was soothing her.

  “Take her home,” Kip told the women. “And one of you get Dr. Maxwell for her.”

  They pulled at her but she resisted, shaking her head violently. Her gaze didn’t move from the tarpaulin, as if she expected her husband to throw it aside like a sheet and get up, whole and alive again. “Go on,” Kip said softly. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  She looked at him and blinked; heavy tears streamed copiously along the deep trenches of her face. “I tell him,” she said suddenly, in a weary voice. “I tell him. Masango!”

  One of the women gently grasped her arm.

  “Masango!” she said again, her eyes flickering from Kip to the submarine. Then she allowed them to lead her, like a sleepwalker, back to her house further along the harbor. Kip watched them leave, wondering what she was talking about. An evil spell?

  A battered green pickup truck drove toward him along Front Street; it slowed, pulled off into the sand. Moore climbed out and came quickly across the beach to where the constable stood. “Who was it?” Moore asked, and Kip saw that there were deep hollows under his friend’s eyes, as if he’d only slept for a couple of hours.

  “Kephas, a fisherman,” the constable said. “I don’t think you knew him.”

  Moore gazed down at the tarpaulin; when he looked up, his eyes fixed on the submarine. “How did this happen?” he asked, a strange note in his voice.

  “The currents must have worked the boat free; it went right over his skiff. He’s not a pretty sight.” He glanced over at the group of islanders. “All of you get on, now. I need a couple of men to carry the body, but the rest of you go on home.”

  “My God,” Moore muttered as the people dispersed. “I saw from my terrace that the thing had gotten into the harbor, and I knew something bad had happened when I saw the commotion on the beach, but I didn’t know…”

  “We gon’ take him to the rev’rend?” one of the men asked, coming forward.

  Kip started to agree, but then shook his head. He was staring out past the black’s shoulder. “No need,” he said finally.

  Moore and the others turned to look. Standing in the shadows that stretched across the sand was a tall, gaunt figure in black, leaning on a thin ebony cane. The man blended with the darkness except for the circles of light that caught in the lenses of his glasses. He stood where he was for a moment more, then approached, his cane probing the ground in front of him. Moore saw something glittering around the man’s neck: It was a glass eye on a long chain. Boniface did not look at any of them, but instead he bent down and drew aside the canvas. He crossed himself, closed the folds, moved past Moore and the constable, and faced the submarine as if confronting an ancient enemy. Moore saw his eyes blaze and then narro
w into slits.

  “I see it has come through the passage,” he said. He took a long breath and sighed deeply. His breath came in a tortured gasp, as if he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs.

  “It crushed Kephas…” Kip began.

  “Oui. One of the women came for me.” Boniface regarded the two blacks. “You men, take his corpse to the church and leave it there.”

  Without hesitation they lifted up the canvas, holding it between them, and made their way toward Front Street.

  “Where did you find this thing, Moore?” Boniface asked, not looking at the man but at the boat.

  “On a ledge in the Abyss, about a hundred and fifty feet down, maybe a little more.”

  “And what’s to be done with it?”

  “For the time being,” Kip said, “it’s going to have to stay where it is.”

  Boniface whirled around to face the constable. “You must not…” the reverend said; the orb hanging around his neck glinting in the sun. His eyes had a power which Kip had rarely seen before. “You must not allow it to stay in this harbor. You must take it back over the Abyss, cut a hole in its hull and let it sink. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No,” Kip responded, “I don’t.”

  “One man is dead,” the reverend said quietly. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Just a minute,” Moore interrupted. “It was an accident.”

  “Certainly,” Boniface said, with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Do as I say,” he ordered Kip. “Get it out of the harbor. Where that thing goes there is much to fear.”

  “That’s voodoo talk!” Kip said disdainfully. “That’s an old, dead machine out there. I think it’s right you’re concerned, but…”

  “Concerned?” A thin smile slithered, lizardlike, across the man’s lips. “Concerned, oui.” He lifted up the eye so both men could see it; sunlight flashed, reflecting an arc of light. “This is my sight, my aché. I have seen terrible things, and I ask you to do as I say.”

  “I don’t believe in your visions, Boniface,” Kip said. “Or your voodoo.”

  “I don’t ask you to believe!” The reverend’s voice was sharp, and his words had meaning behind them he evidently could not divulge. “I ask you to be warned. Everything the gods have created on this earth has a power…including that machine.”

  “No gods created it,” Moore said. “Men did.”

  Boniface nodded gravely. “And are men not guided by their gods, be it the god of peace or the god of war?” He stared into Moore’s face for a moment and saw something there that disturbed him. Then he turned to the constable. “All manner of things have their life forces, for good or for evil, and I am very familiar with the forces that rule that boat.”

  The man was openly talking voodoo now. “You speak of it as if you really thought it was alive…” Kip said impatiently.

  “Because I know!” Boniface hissed. “I remember…” He caught himself, looked away into the harbor.

  “Remember what?” Kip asked.

  “The fire,” Boniface said very quietly.

  Kip had heard hushed mention of it since he’d been on Coquina. It had happened during the war—a great blaze that had consumed most of the island’s dwellings, sweeping out across the jungle and killing a score of people. He’d tried to learn more, for the sake of curiosity, from Langstree at the boatyards and some of the other old-timers, but it was a subject no one wished to discuss freely. “What about the fire?”

  The sun was slowly filling in the shadows of the reverend’s face, settling into the lines. They were like wrinkles in an ancient piece of parchment. He was silent for a long long while, and when he spoke it was with a genuine effort.

  “It began with a screaming in the sky, as if all the heavens were wailing, as if the night sky had gone mad. At first it sounded distant…very distant…then louder and louder, cloaking the senses in noise and heat. There was an explosion in the boatyard, and another and another; glass burst from windows and people were thrown to the ground by the blow of an invisible fist. I remember; oui, I remember too well. Something exploded among the fishermen’s houses and the flames began there. The wind whipped in, tossed sparks into the sky, scattered them through the jungle. The strongest of us helped whomever we could to get away from the village, and we escaped to the sea in the few boats that were still moored to the broken wharfs.” He paused, his eyes bitter; his tongue darted out and licked his dry lower lip.

  “We could see the blossomings of the fires all along the beach and stretching toward the jungle. The British had a few freighters and a patrol boat moored in the burning boatyard, and they were trying to get them out to the open sea; there was much shouting and screaming, and their patrol boat crew was firing at something beyond our boats. At that time there were shore batteries—the big, ugly guns in their concrete bunkers—near the yard and built higher up on Coquina; their yellow tracks streaked across our heads into the distance.”

  He looked from Kip to Moore. “It was such a long time ago, you see, and the cruelty of it is that I recall every detail so clearly, so terrible and perfect. We were all in the mire of a nightmare, jammed together in skiffs and sailing sloops. There were many hysterical and wild, others trying to keep order as we watched our island burn. Mon Dieu, there can be no worse torture than that! Coquina was a mass of fire. There was no fleeing, for those of us who had taken to the sea could still hear our brothers and sisters screaming on shore. The heat touched our faces; we saw the bodies contorted in pain, racing into the surf where they only felt a worse pain as the salt hit their raw burns. The wailing, the terrible wailing…the night was full of it. I can never forget it as long as I live.

  “And through the thick curtain of whirling smoke a noise reached us, more terrible even than that of human agony: It was a heavy pounding that made the ocean tremble. The timbers of the boats shuddered under us. We thought we would be capsized, and perish. We waited, and then out of the smoke came a thing that could drive a man mad, haunt his sleep until he despaired of ever finding rest again. One of the men aboard my skiff had a pistol and in his rage he fired at the thing, but there was no stopping nor slowing it. The sea thundered around it. Its great rolling bow-wave came under us, throwing our boat over; we clung to its upturned hull like rats. The monstrous thing, all black and gleaming like a huge, hungry predator, passed just before us.

  “And that was when I saw the man. He stood high up on a platform of some sort. He stared at us for a moment and then he disappeared. The boat—for I had realized it was such—passed on and then suddenly dropped away like a stone into the sea. The waves rushed across it, and we sat stunned in the midst of the sea. Still we could hear the terrible screams of the dying from Coquina. We always had the fear that the monster might return.”

  Boniface raised his cane and pointed it like a rapier. “And that was the thing I saw. The thing of iron and evil; it came from the night and returned into the night.”

  “A sea-to-land shelling,” Moore said after a moment. “Then it was a German submarine after the island boatyards.” The thing looked wicked enough, like some sort of vengeful iron demon; Moore could understand why the islanders had feared it.

  “To us it was a thing from Hell, crewed by faceless, inhuman creatures of another world. We wanted no part in that white man’s war and yet it was forced upon us. We were not to be spared. The boat came again, and brought death until it was itself destroyed.”

  “How?” Kip asked him, intrigued. “What destroyed it?”

  “That I don’t know. But many nights I stood on this beach, perhaps in this exact spot, and watched the fires burning out at sea, the strange green and crimson comets streaking the black. And each morning the debris washed in, parts of ships and men. Frozen bodies with twisted, terror-struck faces; sometimes only a tide of blood or of arms and legs.” He drew in his breath. “That…is the Night Boat, risen from its tomb at the bottom of the sea.”

  The men were silent. Kip could hear the buoys clan
ging out past the reef, and their sharp metallic sound grated on his nerves. The sea washed strands of clinging weed across the U-boat’s deck, and made a rhuthummmm noise along the iron. “There’s nothing for anyone to fear anymore,” Kip said. “It’s a dead hunk of metal now.”

  Boniface turned slowly to face the constable. “Not dead. Only waiting. And I beg you as I have never begged any man on this earth. Return it to the Abyss.”

  “For God’s sake!” Kip said, irritated by the man’s persistence and more than a bit uneasy beneath his powerful gaze. “You’ve preached spirits and voodoo for so long you’re seeing jumbies in a junkyard relic!”

  The reverend said nothing for a long while, looking from one man to the other, probing their belief and fear. “Dieu vous garde,” he said softly. “I have a body to attend to.” He turned from them and, picking his way with the tip of the cane, he moved away up the beach. He stopped once more on higher ground to stare back at the submarine, and then he disappeared among the clapboard houses fringing Front Street.

  Kip saw that Moore looked concerned. “Don’t listen to him,” he said. “Superstition’s become his second nature. But damn it all, I don’t see how that bastard cleared the reef and got through into my harbor!”

  The trawlers were preparing to move out for the fishing grounds from the commercial wharfs across the beach. Diesels rumbled; men shouted back and forth from boat to boat, and lines were cast off. There would barely be room for them to swing past the obstruction of the submarine and out to sea. The sun was rising now, a hot yellow orb in a sky that promised to be a clear azure blue. A few moments before, the hulk had indeed looked dark and spectral, with the weeds entwining its deck and railings. Now, in the clearer light, it simply appeared to be a battered, aged wreck.

  “Can you give me a lift back up to my office?” Kip asked, and when Moore nodded they began walking toward the pickup truck. “A hell of a mess,” Kip muttered. “The whole island probably knows about this by now, and if I judge Boniface correctly he’ll use it as an opportunity to strengthen his hold on these people. I’ve got to do something about that boat, David. I can’t let it rot here, but for the life of me I don’t…” He stopped suddenly, his eye caught by the sun glinting brightly off the tin roof of the abandoned naval shelter off in the distance. No, that would be one hell of a huge risk. Then he asked himself: more risk than leaving it unattended on the sandbar?