Tales of Terror from the Black Ship Page 7

  Before George knew where he was, his father was informing him that he had used his considerable influence to get George placed aboard one of the many merchant ships that carried his goods across the globe.

  George tearfully begged him to reconsider, explaining in no uncertain terms that a boy of his tender health could not be expected to live such a life. His father’s response to this was to laugh loudly and clap him on the back, saying, ‘It will be the making of you, lad!’

  George had a much more certain presentiment that it would be the death of him and this feeling of approaching doom stayed with him as he was rowed across to his ship – the Swift – at anchor in Plymouth Harbour some weeks later. No man ever climbed the scaffold at his execution with more of a sense of dread than George did, climbing aboard that ship.

  His first voyage was not a happy one. The Swift was several days out of Hispaniola when a storm hit. The captain did all he could and were it not for his skills the ship would surely have gone down with all hands. They lost three men overboard and one who fell from the rigging and snapped his neck. Many others were nursing injuries.

  George himself had been laid low during the storm by violent sea-sickness, exacerbated by the lack of sympathy he was given by his fellow crewman in the sick bay. While the crew had battled valiantly to save the ship, George had cowered in his bunk, hoping to hide the storm out, praying tearfully that he would be among the saved.

  And so he was. The ship had been badly mauled though. The mainmast was broken in two and the rudder all but torn away. Sea water had leaked into the holds and spoiled the food stores; kegs and barrels had been smashed and split open and their contents floated in foul pools. All this should not have mattered as they had not been far from port, but with the rudder gone they were drifting aimlessly into unknown waters.

  When George was well enough to venture out on to the deck he found the ship in a poor state. The crew were in a foul mood and the cause was not difficult to detect. The ragged sails hung forlornly above them and about them the sea was calm to the horizon and back.

  As George walked to the gunwales and looked over the side, he saw that things were worse still. The ship seemed to have become entangled in a huge floating accumulation of weed.

  This weed was a sickly green in colour and seemed so thickly massed that George imagined that he could have stood upon it and it would have borne his weight.

  Even as he thought this, a putrid stench rose up from the floating weed – a vile smell that he could not place, save to say that it made him retch almost instantaneously. Two sailors stood nearby and George expected them to grin at his weakness as they had done so often on the journey, but instead they looked towards the weed with expressions of dread.

  George had always taken some heart in the past from the way that whatever difficulty they encountered – storms or shallows – the crew all seemed to take it in their stride, but he shuddered now as it became clear that this was something new, something they feared as much as he. For with the damage wrought to the ship by the storm and the lack of wind, they were imprisoned by this weed. Their food supplies were ruined. They would have to make as many repairs as possible and hope that help came soon.

  Attempts were made to free the hull from the encircling mass of vegetation, but to no avail. Men were sent down on the end of ropes, but no amount of hacking at the slimy stems seemed to have the slightest effect on the weed as a whole and the ship remained trapped. All that was left was to pray for a fair wind that would blow them clear, but as yet none was forthcoming.

  Then, as George looked back at the weed he noticed something strange sitting on top of it. With a nimbleness and cavalier attitude to his own safety that surprised all who saw it and had witnessed George’s fumbling and comical attempts at climbing the rigging, he tied a rope to the rail and, taking a firm hold of it, leapt over the gunwales and clambered down the hull. He managed to lean out and grab the thing and scamper back aboard.

  The captain stood amazed.

  ‘I never thought I should live to see the day that you would look anything like a sailor,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t been your father’s son, I would have left you behind at the last port and said good riddance.’

  George frowned at the grins of the crew all about him.

  ‘What is it, then?’ said the captain. ‘What has finally put the wind in your sails?’

  George looked from face to face and then slowly held the creature up – by its shell.

  ‘A snail, sir,’ said George. ‘Some kind of sea-snail. I believe it may be a new species and . . .’

  But he never finished his sentence – or rather he did finish, but the tail of it was hidden beneath the laughter from the crew. They slapped their legs, they pointed, they brayed, they turned and walked away.

  George pursed his lips and held back the tears that pricked his eyes. He looked at the snail. It was clearly some sort of sea creature, not unlike the common whelk – but of uncommon size. This creature was huge: its shell was the size of a bowling ball, coiling up to a shallow cone, patterned all over with streaks of pale pink and grey.

  Unlike the shellfish George had seen so often as a child among the rock pools of the Cornish coast, this creature did not have a watertight hatch to seal it against the sea, but instead seemed more like the land snails he had collected at home.

  A sailor walked by and looked at George and chortled.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your snail, then, boy,’ he said.

  George reluctantly held it out. The sailor leaned forward to inspect the squirming body of the exposed creature and could not resist the impulse to reach out and probe its flesh.

  The very second his finger touched the creature he cried out in pain and pulled his finger away, cradling it in his other hand and allowing no one near. When the poor fellow finally let others nearby help him, they were shocked to see that the end of his finger had been stripped of its flesh to the first knuckle. Gobbets of blood leaked from the wound and dripped on to the weathered decking.

  They turned as one towards George, still holding the sea-snail, whose blood-soaked flesh writhed obscenely. George snapped out of his trance and dropped the thing to the deck, where it righted itself with horrible efficiency and began to slide away, leaving a crimson trail behind it.

  The captain had by this time discerned that something was amiss and had stepped down from the quarterdeck to see what was occurring. With a cool speed he looked from the sailor’s mauled finger to the horrified faces of the onlookers and then to the escaping creature. He strode forward and stamped his boot heel down upon it with brutal force.

  George cried out as the extraordinary shell was smashed, but he had never seen such an awful expression of disgust on a face as when the captain lifted his foot and beheld the vile, ruined thing beneath. It was an expression mirrored in all the faces around him.

  For, in truth, the crushed thing amid the shattered remains of its shell seemed less like shellfish and more like something from a butcher’s block: more like raw meat or offal.

  ‘Do you see what you’ve done, you useless lump?’ the captain barked hoarsely, then he turned to the crew, telling them to get back to their work. George saw with some satisfaction that the captain walked with unusual haste back to his cabin. The boorish man seemed to have met his match – in a snail.

  The injured sailor cursed and bled profusely and the ship’s surgeon took him below to complete the work begun by the snail and sever his finger. George alone stared at the crushed sea-snail, marvelling at what an addition it would have made to his collection.

  ‘Clean that vile mess up, Norton,’ said the first mate as he walked by.

  But what they did not realise then, though it would have made little difference if they had, was that this fearsome sea-snail was not alone – that the mass of weed in which the Swift was entangled was home to a
whole colony of the creatures.

  Gradually, more of the creatures slowly appeared on the deck and George was not the only one to notice that it was the blood from the sailor’s ravaged finger and the smeared remains of the squashed snail that seemed to be attracting the newcomers, like nectar calls to a bee.

  To George this was fascinating; to the rest of the crew, his fascination was as loathsome as the snails themselves. The first mate had caught him attempting to keep one of the creatures in a box, and the captain said that if he did it again, he would be flogged, father or no father.

  At first, as each snail slithered slowly over the gunwales, a sailor would be ordered to pluck the creature off, taking care not to touch the flesh, and it would be tossed over the side. The captain clearly had no wish to see another of them smeared across the deck and neither did anyone else.

  However, as more and more of them came aboard, George privately began to wonder whether this method was not simply allowing them to return. He was at the point of voicing this concern when another thought occurred to him, one that might elevate his standing with the crew. In fact, thought George, it might make him a hero.

  George spoke to the ship’s cook. At first his idea got short shrift, but the more George elaborated, the more the cook began to see that there might be something in what George was saying: that here was a wonderful source of meat. All it took was a quick experiment with a pan of boiling water, and the cook was more than convinced.

  The cook spoke to the first mate and met with the same scepticism he had felt himself. But he had prepared the snail and offered it to him to sample. Did the French not eat snails? the cook said. Did the British not eat cockles and mussels and the like?

  George walked over just as the cook was getting to the end of his speech, holding out the platter with the snail in the centre, cooked in a little oil and garlic.

  The first mate grimaced but the cook laughed and said that it would be a fine revenge on the bloodthirsty devils. On the cook’s insistence, the first mate gingerly picked up the meat, sniffed it and then took a reluctant bite. George fully expected him to spit the mouthful across the deck, but instead his furrowed brow lifted in surprise and he began to savour it.

  He took no persuasion to have more and agreed readily with the cook that it tasted like some marvellous cross between the meatiest salmon steak and the tenderest piece of lamb imaginable. It looked like the Swift’s food worries were over – they had a seemingly endless supply of meat.

  The crew were initially as sceptical as the first mate, but once they too had tasted the meat, all doubts were thrown aside and even the poor man whose finger had been gnawed by one of the creatures was soon chewing heartily upon his attacker’s kinfolk.

  The captain had been the hardest to persuade. He retched in disgust at the thought of eating the snails, but, like the others, his revulsion disappeared when he was finally persuaded to taste it.

  That evening George and the crew sat down to a great feast of snails, with every man eating like a king. The cook had generously given George the credit for the idea of eating the creatures and he was cheered and patted on the back. He had never in his life known acclaim, and it felt good; it felt very good.

  They ate until their stomachs could take no more, and for the first time since George left port he went to his cot without even the faintest pang of hunger and fell into a blissfully deep and childishly trouble-free sleep.

  That night George dreamed a wonderful and poignant dream in which he was married to the elder of the two Harris daughters from Weymouth, whom he had admired on many an occasion.

  In his dream he was the vicar of a country parish and they lived together in an idyllic rectory on the edge of a charmingly picturesque village, where rosy-cheeked simple folk tipped their hats and said ‘G’mornin’’ to them as he composed his sermon in the shade of an apple tree, his young son and daughter playing merrily in the sunshine.

  He was deliberating which text to use as the basis of his sermon, with the Bible open in his lap, when he happened to notice a movement from the corner of his eye.

  A nearby rose with swan-white petals was being attacked by a huge snail that was grazing along its stem, biting off leaves and buds, sending them fluttering to the ground.

  George was incensed and reached out to grab the snail, but as soon as he did so it bit into his fingers, gnawing at the flesh and sending blood streaming down his arm and splashing across the pages of his Bible. He screamed in agony and woke up.

  But the screaming continued.

  George woke from his dream like a bear dragged from hibernation. It took him a few moments to even recall exactly where he was and he stumbled about in the darkness, striking his head painfully on a beam.

  Another scream sounded out, then another. They seemed to be coming from various parts of the ship, and he could hear the sound of running footsteps on the decks above. One of his fellows came over from the next bunk; the lantern he was carrying illuminated the fear in his eyes.

  ‘What is happening?’ he asked.

  George’s throat was so dry he could not find a voice and so simply shook his head in answer. But then he saw something on the beam behind the boy with the lantern and guessed immediately what the cause of the screams might be.

  George pointed and the boy turned to follow his gaze. Making its steady progress along the timber was one of the sea-snails, and as they looked about them they quickly saw that there were many, many others.

  As another voice cried out it became horribly clear that while they had slept the creatures had continued to climb aboard, and with only those on watch to check their progress, the creatures had overrun the ship.

  Where earlier they had delighted in their numbers when they regarded them as food, this abundance was now nightmarish. Eating the creatures had seemed to curb the crew’s fear of them and to mentally reinstate their rightful place in the scheme of things. But now they were once more reminded that as they were food to the crew, so the crew were food to them. They came aboard with one purpose only – to feed on human flesh.

  George and the other lad decided to quit the confines of their berth and go up on deck, where at least they might see more clearly. The sight that met their eyes when they did so was like a scene from hell.

  Everywhere there were men with vicious wounds to their arms and faces, men who had awoken to find themselves being eaten alive by the creatures. These men were relatively lucky, however.

  Lying partially hidden under a length of canvas near the hatch were two sailors who had suffered the attentions of the bloodthirsty creatures. The snails must have attacked some vital organ or artery, or perhaps induced a fatal shock; whatever the method, these men were plainly dead.

  A tearful young lad had been given the task of keeping the swarm of snails from feasting on the corpses. George could perceive a twitching movement under the canvas, which indicated that he had not been entirely successful.

  In spite of his exhaustion, the distressed boy pounced on every snail he saw and smashed it with a belaying pin. But though the snails were hindered by speed, they more than made up for this disadvantage by their numbers.

  No doubt attracted by the overpowering smell of blood, the snails were swarming over the bulwarks, through the gun ports and up the rigging. Though the entire crew was engaged in a frantic effort to stop them, inevitably they could not stop them all.

  As George stood there, dumbfounded, rooted to the spot by fear, he felt a strange sensation in his boot, as if the leather had suddenly sprung a leak. This was immediately followed by sharp pain and he looked down to see with horror that one of the creatures was gnawing into his foot.

  George cried and kicked out, but the creature held fast. He could feel it rasping into his toes and had he not had the presence of mind to stamp down upon it with his other foot the thing would have bitten clean thro
ugh to the bone. As it was, the wound was astonishingly painful and it did not take a deal of intelligence to determine why that should be.

  It took all George’s nerve to do so, but he managed to pick up the crushed body of the creature that had attacked him, its slimy body glistening horribly free from its shell, and hold it up to a nearby lantern.

  Amid the disgusting, offal-like substance of the creature’s body, he could clearly see concentric circles of sharp triangular teeth surrounding its mouth. George leaned forward for a closer look, when the teeth suddenly jerked into action, snapping together with horrible speed, as if it were some infernal machine.

  George dropped the thing to the deck at once and stamped and stamped with the heel of his boot until there was nothing remaining but a greasy smear of gristle and blood.

  A cry suddenly went up that there were men deserting in the lifeboat and George felt a desperate wish that he were among their number. He ran with others to the side and saw the boat pushing off into the weeds, a lantern at their prow and stern.

  He longed to be in that boat and would gladly have endured the taunts of his fellows in return for escaping from that hell. But it soon became clear that if there were to be an escape, it would not be by this method.

  As the deserting crewmen attempted to row their way through the encircling weed, their oars became so entangled that they could not shift them, though they strained and heaved with all their might. One of their number stood up to gain extra purchase on the oar and there was a crack as it snapped in half at the rowlocks.

  The others in the lifeboat berated the man, calling him every low name known to a sailor. He responded by waving the broken oar in the manner of a club and threatening to dent the head of the next man who insulted him. All this was greeted by jeers and catcalls from the crew watching from the Swift. After a little time, the man threw the piece of oar down and turned to the ship.