The Monstrumologist (17 page)

It was dusk, a somnolent hour for the
Anthropophagi,
when they burrowed into their bowers of straw, nestlike beds that, the captain informed us, the creatures had spent hours carefully constructing and hours more maintaining.
Anthropophagi
are nocturnal hunters and spend most of the day sleeping, nursing their young, or performing bonding rituals with other members of the troop, the chief—and most bizarre—of which is the practice of picking bits of human flesh lodged in one another’s teeth with the tip of their longest nail, the one extending from their middle finger. The
operation is a delicate exercise in trust and self-control, for the recipient must remain perfectly still while its companion reaches far into the recesses of its tooth-encrusted maw to clean the back teeth. If it moves, the razor-sharp claw might slice open its gums, causing a reflexive slamming shut of its jaw, thus severing the hand of the one performing this invaluable service.

Wilson could barely see them as they nestled together in the straw at the farthermost corner of the ship’s hold. The iron bars welded over the portholes limited the light within even on the brightest day, and now the sun was setting; the monsters were mere darker shadows among lighter shadows, barely discernible from the mounds of straw surrounding them; indeed, none could be certain whether those humped shadows represented their catch or were merely lumps of straw. Wilson swung the rope to and fro, calling softly for them to wake, that dinner was served. It had been more than three weeks since they had last fed, and they had to have been ravenous. His companions, Smith and the navigator, Burns, stood on either side of him, bending low, peering into the gloom, unable to contain their gleeful giggles. They urged Wilson on. “Lower!” they exhorted him. “Swing it closer so’s they can smell it!” Into the dark and fetid hole they called, that prison that had once held a thousand pounds of human cargo, chattel for the cotton fields of Georgia and the indigo plantations of Louisiana—for the
Feronia
had been a slaving ship plying the illegal trade in the years prior to the war.
And now it was littered with the rotting carcasses of goats, the unrecognizable remains of the poor little chimpanzees that had followed them to their unthinkable end, and the stinking excrement of the beasts that had torn the animals’ bodies apart with the ease of children pulling wings from flies. “Come on now, beasties! Wake thee up and have some dinner!” Their calls went unheeded. Unable to bring the bait within sniffing distance of the sleeping carnivores, Wilson shoved his right arm between the bars, dropping the rope another two feet into the hold. “Be ready to pull me up, lads,” he told his companions as he swung the dangling chunk of fattened calf, fresh blood flying from its tip. “You’ve seen how fast they—”

The thought would never be finished. Wilson, however, in less than thirty terrifying seconds, would be.

Later, before meeting the same awful fate as the foolish Wilson, as he cowered half mad with terror within the captain’s cabin behind the makeshift barricade, Burns told Varner what had happened in that horrifying half minute.

Whether she erupted from the straw bedding or from somewhere else, no one could say—Burns because he did not see it, Wilson and Smith because both were dead. Wilson, for fear he might drop it, had wrapped the rope twice around his wrist, so when she struck, her weight upon the hook yanked his shoulder clear through the bars, though he had released his hold in the instant of the attack. The rope unwound from his wrist and dropped
to the floor, but Wilson’s shoulder was now wedged in the narrow space between the iron bars. In a voice hoarse with rum and heightened by hysteria, Wilson cried for them to pull him up. Did he see her in the murk below? Did her black, soulless eyes, glowing in the light of a dying sun, meet his before the slathering mouth yawned wide and she leaped twenty feet straight up?

The claws that struck punctured clear through the muscle and sinew of his forearm, and, as they raked downward, borne by the creature’s enormous girth, she swung her other talon up and latched on to one of the bars, inaccessible to her before Wilson had generously offered her a hand up. His companions recoiled in horror and dismay amid her savage snarls and their foolish companion’s cries of fear and pain; his legs jerked; his feet pushed against the weathered planks as he tried to yank himself free, but the drag of her bulk upon his captured arm had wedged him even tighter. He threw back his head, twisting his face from side to side, for the she-beast had released his shredded arm, and now her bloody barbs slashed his face and swiped across the throat he had so considerately exposed. One of her nails must have found his carotid artery, for Burns reported that Wilson’s screams abruptly ended in a gurgling report and a veritable geyser of blood, most of which cascaded in a robust stream into the monster’s waiting mouth. His head fell forward with a sickening thud onto the metal bars. A final paroxysmal spasm of his legs, and Wilson lay still.

Too late did Smith remember the Colt revolver strapped to his side. By the time he’d freed it from the holster, she had ripped two bars from their heavy bolts, snapping the reinforced boards “as easily as a man snaps a toothpick,” the same two bars directly beneath Wilson’s lifeless body; his arm was free finally, but too late, and he tumbled into that noisome void to the hold below, where her companion, roused by the bedlam and, no doubt, the acrid smell of fresh blood, waited for him.

Smith fired wildly as she, hanging by one claw, tore out two more bars with the other. Burns could not say if any of the shots found their target; he turned and ran. The boards shuddered beneath his feet. The passage reverberated with the roar of gunfire and Smith’s hysterical screams. As Burns scampered up the narrow stairs to the quarterdeck, the gunfire abruptly ended: Either Smith had run out of ammunition or she had heaved herself through the hole, and Smith, like Wilson, was a denizen of the living world no more.

In any case, when the
Feronia
was boarded by Union forces after her grounding, what was left of Smith could have fit, in Varner’s words, “into a gunnysack.”

At this point in his grim narration Varner paused. All color had drained from his countenance, and his body shook beneath the sheets. Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after
peace of our twilight years. He had begged Warthrop not to make him recall those events he could not forget, for some recollections, as I myself know all too well, remain fresh in the mind whole decades after they are born.

Yet when he fell silent, Warthrop did not press him to go on. Perhaps he understood—as I have come to, much to my regret—that once we set forth upon certain lanes of our memory, there is no turning aside or doubling back. They must be traversed unto their bitter terminuses. It is that same compulsion that forces us to look at the terrible accident or stare with shameful curiosity at the pitiful victim in a circus sideshow. The memories of those dreadful final days aboard the doomed
Feronia
possessed her captain; he did not possess them.

“We stole below, brought up all the food and water we could muster, and sealed off the lower decks,” the old man gasped finally. “Posted armed guards around the clock. The weather turned in our favor; with a leeward wind and fair skies, we made good time. The days were quiet, but ‘twas an eerie peace, a deceitful calm, for once the sun sank below the foredeck, the pounding began and that infernal, incessant screeching. We could hear them, you see, testing the very boards beneath our feet, knocking and scraping and probing as they searched for weaknesses in the wood. The men drew lots for the night watch, but the winners could sleep no more than an hour or two, and each of those hours seemed longer than a day, and the nights longer than a year. The crew
was divided and quarreled bitterly among themselves. Some thought we should abandon ship, take to the lifeboats and pray for rescue. ‘We set her alight,’ they said. ‘Burn her to the waterline!’ Others averred that our only hope lay in a surprise assault, attacking them while they slept. ‘’Tis only a matter of time till they break through,’ they said. ‘Better to face them at a time and place of our choosing.’ I vetoed both these propositions. We were making excellent time; the ship seemed to be holding up under their assault; and by abandoning her we would only be trading the hazard of sharing Wilson’s fate for the hazards of sunstroke and starvation. We sailed on.”

At first the captain’s decision seemed wise, for the enforced truce, like the beneficent weather, held. For a week, then two, until the morning of the forty-first day at sea, when the Bermuda archipelago was sighted to the north. The winds, which had for days blown steadily from the east, abruptly shifted. The southern sky grew as black as coal, and the seas rose a foot in the next hour, then two feet, then four as the sun disappeared behind a shroud of swift-moving clouds; the
Feronia
pitched in the grip of the roiling sea while waves twenty feet high crashed over the rails. The wind began to gust to fifty knots, forcing the crew to lower the sails lest they be ripped from the masts. The rain fell in drenching sheets, a pitiless rain driven by the remorseless gale. For hours the men huddled on deck, exposed to the elements, while the man-eating beasts below stayed warm and
dry, an irony not lost on the men, and the debate was born anew. Already a man had nearly been washed to sea by a breaching wave. With each passing hour the storm strengthened; lightning popped and spat around the mainmast; wind drove the rain sideways in blinding sheets, making even the smallest step an exercise fraught with peril; and, as the day aged and the temperature plummeted, there was the danger of hypothermia. All watches and patrols were abandoned. As night fell the crew of the
Feronia
huddled in a single mass of shivering humanity on the quarterdeck, their fear of nature’s wrath outweighed by their fear of her insatiable progeny.

“I know not who spied it first,” confessed Varner. “Our lamps would not stay lit; the lightning was the only respite we had from the storm’s black grip. ‘Something’s washed onto the deck!’ someone cried. We waited all of us with bated breath for the next stroke of lightning, but saw nothing when it came, just shadows stark and a pall of rain. A second flash, then a third, and someone else shouted, ‘There, see it there? By the mizzenmast!’ They raised their rifles, but I ordered them down—what but the luckiest shot could hit the mark in that maelstrom? In truth I swear to you, I did not think these leaping shadows could be the beasts that roamed below. The man had seen it come over the rail, and what successful passage could one of those things have made up the slick sides of the
Feronia
’s hull in a wind fifty knots or more? More than likely it was a fish washed from the bowels of the briny deep, a shark or a sailfish. It was impossible.”

“No,” said Warthrop quietly. “It is not.” He was leaning against the wall beside the headboard, arms folded across his chest, chin down, eyes closed, as he listened. I recalled his warning in the cemetery:
Sharp eyes now, Will Henry. They are accomplished climbers.

“Through a porthole most likely,” ventured Varner. “And then up the side of the ship—but that is only my guess. I had seen a victim’s skull in Benin with a crescent-shaped pattern of holes where their nails had broken through the bone; as long as a sloth’s they are, Warthrop, and as hard as tungsten steel. Hard to believe now—impossible then—but up the side of the
Feronia
he must have climbed, punching hand-holds as he came, though why he chose to abandon shelter when the risk was greatest I do not know.”

“Perhaps hunger drove him forth,” said the doctor. “Though I doubt it. Fear, perhaps, either of those meteorological conditions utterly foreign to him … or, more likely, fear of his mate. They have that much in common with us: In moments of extreme stress, they have been known to turn upon each other.”

“Not that night, Warthrop,” groaned Varner. “That night he chose easier victims. Whether hunger or fear compelled him to strike, strike he did, quicker than the lightning itself, leaping forty feet from the deck below, landing square in our midst, and in the hellish racket that ensued—the screams and shouts of my startled crew, the snarls and roars of the attacking beast, the explosions on all sides of rifles and small
arms, and the howl of the wind, the crash of the waves, the roar of the thunder—from that bloody bedlam I was shoved down the stairs and dragged to the door of my cabin.”

It was the navigator, Burns, the sole survivor of the first attack, who hurled the captain into his quarters and slammed the door, while the battle raged on above them. The captain, still befuddled and weak from his bout of tropic fever, collapsed upon the floor as Burns ripped the heavy wardrobe from the wall and heaved it against the door as a barricade. He returned to the captain’s side, whereupon, if he was expecting any thanks for his cool thinking and quick actions under fire, he was summarily disabused. The captain roundly cursed and berated him. He had lost his pistol in the forced retreat, and now they were trapped like rats— a bit drier than the poor rats above, but trapped nevertheless. Burns endured the abuse stoically and without remark, dragging his commander to the bedside and cautioning him to remain rooted to the spot. From this position they had a clear shot at the door and were hidden from sight should anything look through the windows behind the bed.

“In my closet,” yelled the captain over the din on the deck directly over their heads. “Quickly, Burns!”

Burns scuttled across the floor—fearing if he walked upright he might attract attention through the windows— to the closet, in which he found an elephant gun and some ammunition. Varner ripped it from his hands and laughed bitterly while he loaded.

“A gift from the king of Ashanti. Never been fired. Let’s hope we won’t need to test it this night, Burns!”

They sat side by side at the foot of the bed. Lightning flashed through the windows, throwing long, fleeting, hard-edged shadows across the floor. The ship continued to roll and pitch violently at the mercy of the wind-stoked sea as the sound of gunfire gradually dwindled to one or two errant pops. The cries of the crew ceased altogether. It was the smashing sea and the earsplitting thunder and the yowling wind … and that was all. They strained their ears for any sound of the men left on deck. Had the men fled the onslaught altogether, scattering to the deck below and finding what cover they could? How many had survived, or had any at all? And what of the monster? Surely it had to be dead or seriously injured. Not even a creature of that immense size and speed could overcome twenty heavily armed men in a close-quarters fight… . Or could it? This they asked each other in hushed and breathless whispers, between the dazzling bursts of brilliant white light and its consort, the timber-rattling cannonade of thunder. Their teeth chattering, soaked to their skin, fingers nervously caressing the triggers of their weapons, they pondered and postulated but gave no thought toward what course of action they should pursue. Each moment that passed without incident was a victory; every second that ticked by uneventfully was a triumph.