The Night Boat

The Night Boat Page 6

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 narrow 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 ache. 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 clanging 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?

The constable's office, a small stucco building painted a light green, was on the village square. There was an oval park of palmettos in the center of the street, and the weather-etched granite statue of a black man hefting a harpoon that had been erected by the British as a peace concession to the Carib Indian tribe. It honored one of the Carib chieftains - a man named Cheyne - who in the 1600s had led a rag-tag army against a band of pirates who were trying to seize Coquina as a fortress. The Caribs had been here at least a hundred years before the first British settlers had arrived; they lived off the sea and the land, keeping to themselves unless feeling threatened, and then their wrath could be awesome. It was clear that the Caribs were to be left alone, judging from the number of British settlers who were laid in their graves in those early years. Now they were mostly quiet, and Moore didn't know much about their current way of life. Across the Square were brightly painted buildings: Everybody's Grocers and Cafe, Langstree's marine supply store, an open-air market where the inland farmers displayed their goods on Saturdays, and the Coquina Hardware Store. Dirt-track streets cut back through the jungle to more houses. Beyond those, the foliage grew thick and wild.

Coquina was fifteen miles around, housing a population of a little more than seven hundred. In centuries past it had served as a battleground between the British and the French; the island, along with a dozen other small spits of sand in the area, had been possessed first, in the early 1500s, by the Spanish, who had left it pretty much alone, then a hundred years later by the British, who'd fought the Caribs to make a go of sugar and tobacco plantations. The French had attacked when the plantations had proven profitable. And so on in a spiral of naval and diplomatic warfare, until finally the British seized it as a permanent possession. Some of the old plantation great houses still stood in the deep jungle although now they were cracked mounds of rubble through which the vines and growth had reclaimed their own territory. When Moore wandered these old plantation houses through the long corridors and empty, ghostly rooms, he thought sometimes he could feel how it must have been: the land barons gazing out over their sloping fields to the seas beyond, the schooners with billowing sails slipping across the ocean to take on new cargoes for mother England. Coquina had been a good and inexpensive investment for the British, until the Caribs had rebelled and killed most of the plantation owners.

The island was so named because it was shaped like a coquina's shell; also because the beaches were filled with the little clamlike sand-diggers. They were thrown up by the surge of the surf and then would rapidly scurry down again into the safety of the wet sand, their paths marked only by bursting bubbles of air.

And now, over two hundred years since the French and British had battled here, Coquina was home to David Moore. Perhaps it would not be home forever, but for now it was good enough.

God, how the years have passed, he thought as he drove into the Square. Rapidly flashing by in swirls of color, of experience, of memories he kept close to his chest like a deck of cards. In the space of seven years, everything had changed and the changes had led him here. His mind sheered away from the old vision: riotous gray waves, soaring whitecaps, a storm that had swept up without warning, thunderclouds torn from the sky above the Atlantic into Chesapeake Bay. The ragged images tortured him, filled him with a sense of dull, throbbing rage and left him with the knowledge that at any given instant, the security and hope of a man's life could fall away like rotten flooring.

"You okay?" Kip asked, gently touching Moore's arm. "You just passed my office. Slow down."

Moore shook himself from the memories. "Sure. Guess I wasn't thinking."

He turned the pickup around and parked in front of Kip's office.

"You had your breakfast?" Kip asked.

"Not yet."

"Come on in and I'll throw something on the griddle." He opened the door and Moore followed him inside. Kip's office was piled high with varied and assorted things - there was scarcely room to turn around. There was a desk and a reading lamp, a few chairs, a bookshelf with legal volumes; behind the desk a locked gun cabinet, faced with glass, holding two rifles. On a wall hung framed certificates of merit from Kingston, and there was also a crayon drawing of a scene in Coquina harbor - the trading vessels with masts like telephone poles and all of them colored a different hue - done by Kip's five-year-old daughter, Mindy. Gunmetal-gray filing cabinets stood against the opposite wall next to a storage closet; another door with an inset of glass at eye-level led back to two cells.

Kip drew open the blinds; sunlight flooded in. He slid a couple of the windows open so the sea-breezes could enter, and then he went to the far side of the room. There was a small sink with a shelf above it holding a few plates and cups as well as a hot plate, which Kip plugged into a wall socket, and a portable icebox. He rummaged in the icebox, found a couple of eggs, and knifed strips from a slab of bacon.

Moore settled himself into a chair before the constable's desk and ran a hand across his face. He sighed wearily.

"What's wrong with you?" Kip asked him. "You not getting enough sleep?" He threw the bacon into a skillet he had placed on the hot plate. He smiled. "I understand your problem, my friend. You had too much company last night."

"How'd you hear about that?"

"I'm supposed to know everything that goes on around here." Kip picked up two of the cups, saw that they were clean but rinsed them anyway. He filled a teakettle and waited for the bacon to crisp. "You ought to stop living out of damned cans like you do, David. It's no trouble for Myra to set an extra place."

"She'd strangle you if she heard you say that."

"Possibly." The bacon was curling; the scent of it wafted about the office. One of Kip's duties as constable was to keep whatever prisoners he had confined in good health, which meant feeding them three times a day, and on his budget he couldn't afford to send out for food. "I made a call to my cousin Cyril in Kingston yesterday evening," he said after a pause.

"And...?"

"He couldn't offer any suggestions; he thought I was joking at first, and I had a bad time convincing him. In any event, Cyril's promised to pass the information along to the Daily Gleaner." Kip forked the bacon out of the skillet and onto the plates; he cracked the eggs and let them fry.

"It bothers me." Moore said quietly.

"What does?"

"The submarine. What made it go down? And what about the crew?"

Kip looked over his shoulder as he lifted out the fried eggs. "What about the crew?"

"I wonder... what kind of men they were, and how did they come to be so far away from home..."

"Well, there were a lot of U-boats patroling the Caribbean in the early part of the war," Kip reminded him. "You needn't be concerned about the crew. Most likely they're old men relaxing in slippers by their hearths, puffing their pipes, sipping their steins of beer, and swapping war stories. Here. Take this while I do the tea."

Moore took the plate. "But the hatches are sealed. How could they have gotten out?"

Kip shrugged. "All those old crates had to have an emergency hatch of some kind. I don't know; I'm certainly not an expert. Are you going to stare at that egg or eat it?"

Moore probed it with his fork. "I'm not sure; I think I might be safer just staring."

The kettle whistled. Kip poured water over a teabag in each cup and offered one to Moore, then he sat down behind his desk and began to eat. "I'm more concerned with the present," he said, in a graver tone. "I'll be going by to see the Kephas woman, and I'm not quite sure what to say to her. Damn it! The chances of an accident like that happening to her husband are one in a million." His jaw clenched. "Boniface worries me. Oh, he's pretty much harmless, but a lot of people on Coquina pay him heed. I don't want him stirring up trouble over the submarine. You've heard those drums going out in the jungle as many times as I have; God only knows what he's up to during those ceremonies. And of course there's no legal action I could take, if I wanted to - which I don't. I don't care what gods the islanders pray to, I just don't want undue and irrational fears taking over." He picked at his egg and then shoved his plate away. "I wish to God Boniface had stayed in Haiti where he belonged."

"Why didn't he?"

Kip drank down the rest of his tea. "Local trouble." He began to roll a cigarette for himself, using an island-grown tobacco. "A feud between him and another voodoo priest - a houngan - over territorial rights, I suppose. From what I gather there was a lot of bad stuff going on; Boniface's home was burned down and his family chased off into the jungle. Not long after that the other houngan was found in the Port-au-Prince bay, weighted down by a gutfull of nails. The police got on the track but nothing was ever proven; you know how those things go. But this houngan was supposed to have had some powerful friends, and they went hunting Boniface's head. One way or another he got out of Haiti and wandered around the Caribbean for a while. He settled here just before the war. Some day I'd like to find out just how many skeletons I can pull from his closet. Which brings us to that damned hulk. I'd love to donate it to Langstree to be hammered into scrap, but some museum curator would probably slit my throat. Now, with the thing in my harbor... something's got to be done." He lit the cigarette and stood up, taking the two plates over to the sink.

Moore got up and went to the door. "I've got things of my own to do. Shutters and drainpipes still need some patching."

Kip walked out to the truck with him, and they exchanged a few more comments about the ferocity of the storm that had just passed. Kip could only think of one thing: he dreaded the way the Kephas woman would stare at him when he said, I'm sorry, there's nothing I could have done, it was an unavoidable accident. Unavoidable?

Moore swung up into the truck and started the engine, waving back at his friend. He drove along the street toward the Indigo Inn. After he was out of sight, Kip turned toward the flat blue-green expanse of the harbor, watching the thing that grew across the sandbar like a cancer.

He drew on his cigarette, exhaled smoke. A trawler was moving out through the passage, with a gang of men on its starboard deck making sure they cleared the submarine's bulk. Far out at sea, an industry freighter was swinging in to take on a load of fish, coconuts, or tobacco.

It would take three trawlers to break it off the bar and guide it, he decided. Langstree would scream like hell, but that was something Kip had encountered before. He closed and locked the office door and in another moment was in his jeep, driving out of the Square toward the harbor below.