Bone Rattler (4 page)

His eyes fixed not on the circle but on the medallion. It was as if Adam had returned, to remind Duncan of his duty. He found himself stepping backward, until the captain seized his collar and shoved him toward the stanchion, where he fell to the deck. “Not a man jack will climb the masts!” he bellowed. “They listen to the old fools who say we are bewitched, who say one of their own had his heart ripped out, that those who died this voyage have returned with this storm to claim us.” The captain clenched his jaw, seeming to make an effort to calm himself. “Half the crew hide below, so we cannot even get a count to know if one is missing. Ye may be an insolent scofflaw, a damnable thief who steals from honest passengers, but now—”

“I never stole—” Duncan’s protest ended in a gasp as the captain kicked him in the belly.

“—but your good reverend tells us you are an anatomist, that you love God and serve the Company, that the men will listen to you. Surely the eye be from a great fish. But the heart . . . . Tell my crew they have nothing to fear. Tell them no man was killed. The cook lies passed out in his hammock. The damned rogue has animals, to provide fresh meat for the galley. He could tell us if it is from one
of his livestock. But we cannot wait. Break their damned enchantment! Tell them now, McCallum!”

But Duncan did not look at the bloody heart. His gaze went from the medallion to the Anglican priest, the lantern-faced man in black. Duncan had barely exchanged a word with him since boarding the ship. During most of the voyage the Reverend, like Lieutenant Woolford and Professor Evering, had stayed in the spacious forward cabins, where, it was rumored, another passenger, too ill to walk, stayed confined to bed.

“Reverend Arnold would have you tell us so,” the captain added in a taut voice, as Arnold offered a stiff nod of encouragement. The words had the sound of a threat.

As Duncan looked up he saw that the officer’s hand rested on the butt of a large pistol in his belt. “Do you understand, sir!” he roared. “My crew has been reduced to puss-gutted fools! Without them, this ship is lost!” he pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it at Duncan’s head. “Be it man or be it beast?”

Duncan’s hand went not to the heart but to the long mottled feather, rolling its shaft to see it better. It was not from a seabird, but from a hawk, a land bird of prey. It had been weeks since they had been near the home of such a bird. Near its top the feather was painted with two diagonal vermilion stripes. He used the shaft of the feather to roll over the heart. A round silver object was jammed into one of the arteries. He touched the claw, thinking of using it to dig out the object. It was as large as his index finger, its point as sharp as a razor. It was of no creature he had ever seen.

“’Tis how the demons dug out the heart!” someone in the shadows moaned.

“Black arts of the Highlands!” another crowed. “Toss over the damned clansmen!”

Duncan glanced up, feeling Lister’s stare. Scots would be blamed, the keeper had warned, and a clan chief had a duty to protect them.

“Who is given access to this chamber?” Duncan asked, raising his head toward the captain. With his gaze on the pistol in the man’s
right hand, he did not see the left fist that slammed into the side of his head.

The captain cocked the weapon. “You damned Highland filth! I won’t abide an escaped convict putting my vessel at risk,” hissed the officer. “There is but one way for you to be alive sixty seconds from now!”

“Dearest father,” a sober voice interjected, “guide this wretched soul in the hour of our greatest need.”

As Duncan glanced up, wondering to which of the wretched souls present Arnold referred, a new sound rose from above, a thin wailing that was not the wind, followed by more frightened shouts.

One of the men in the shadows darted out of the room, then another. “A sea witch!” a fearful voice cried out from the deck. As the captain turned, Duncan sprang away, grabbing Adam’s medallion, leaping past Arnold and through the open hatch, Lister at his heels, the captain’s curse close behind.

A dozen men were on the main deck when Duncan reached it, the medallion stuffed into his pocket. Three were sitting against a crate lashed to the deck, their arms thrown over their eyes, one holding an ax between his feet as if for protection. Two more struggled with a long rope stretched from high on the foretopmast, fastening it to a heavy rail stanchion, a foul-weather backstay meant to strengthen the mast, which Lister had proclaimed weakened. All the others were staring in abject terror at a pale apparition on the lower arm of the foremast, the bare cross-spar high above the deck. It was a young woman in a white dress, her long, dark hair swirling about her head, her feet bare.

It was impossible. There were no women on board, except the captain’s stout wife and some murderers kept permanently locked in the cells far below. He glanced at the keeper. Lister was looking not at the woman but at Duncan, with the same disapproval he had shown earlier, as if Duncan were to blame for her escaping and choosing suicide. Lister had reminded him that all those in the cells were Scottish. As they locked eyes Lister uttered a single fierce word, barely audible over the rising wind. “
Redeat.
” His prayer for all Scots.

The woman seemed to float along the spar, oblivious to the wet, treacherous footing, moving toward its end—one hand on the slender diagonal stay that connected the tip of the spar to the mast, her face forward, toward the blackening horizon, the other hand extended, fingers uplifted toward the sky.

“Banshee!” the sailor nearest Duncan cried. “She summons the storm!” One of the sailors securing the brace rope dropped the loose end, pulled two wooden belaying spikes from the nearest pinrail, and hurled them toward the woman. She gave the projectiles no notice as they flew past her head.

“Banshee!” another man echoed as the captain appeared on deck. The officer’s curse died in a strangled groan as he saw the woman.

Lightning lit the horizon. The deep snarl of thunder seemed to be coming from the sea, not the sky.

“Dearest Lord, I beseech thee!” a frantic voice gasped. Reverend Arnold was at the captain’s side now. “Woolford!” the clergyman cried, turning back toward the compass room.

The woman halted a moment. She turned slowly to gaze toward Duncan and the men behind him, revealing a graceful face, hollow with melancholy. Then she faced the sea and stepped over the end of the stay line.

The cries ceased. Even Arnold stopped his frantic praying. All eyes were on the woman as she released her grip on the line, both hands free and uplifted to the sky, one bare foot balancing on the swaying spar, the other braced against the base of the line. It seemed she would surely tumble to the deck as the ship rolled back, sending the tip of the spar high over the deck, but by some magic she held her balance. As the ship righted itself, Duncan saw Lister leap onto the foremast shrouds, desperately climbing toward the woman, followed a moment later by Lieutenant Woolford. But as the ship completed its roll, dipping the end of the spar toward the sea, the pale figure raised her hands higher toward the heavens and lifted her foot from the line that anchored her.

She seemed to hang in the air as she left the spar, tumbling slowly
downward, her white dress billowing against the black sky and blacker water, her pale arms ever upward.

No one spoke. No one moved but Duncan. For suddenly, without thinking, he had grabbed the ax, cut the backstay loose with one violent swing of the blade, and was tying the line to his waist. In the corner of his eye, Duncan saw the pistol raised toward him. “Seize him!” the captain bellowed, and flame belched from the gun barrel. Duncan’s ribs exploded in pain, then he was on the rail and over the side, diving into the swirling blackness below.

D
UNCAN’S HELL WAS A COLD black place at the bottom of the sea. In his youth he had endured more than a few sermons describing other torments the unrepentant might expect, and when he awoke in the darkness, frigid, wet, and shivering, he spent several terrible moments wondering which particular hell his lost spirit had found.

Suddenly the floor under him began to roll, and the wrenching pain in his ribs told him he had not died. He fell against a wall of heavy planks, then a violent pitch of the floor propelled him against another wall a few feet away. He threw his arms out and stood, desperately trying to understand what part of the ship he was in. It was a small chamber, barely seven feet long and even less wide, not quite high enough for him to fully straighten his six-foot frame. The floor was covered with moldy, rotting straw. One wall was canted inward at the base, and he sensed motion in it, or beyond it. A creature on the other side was groaning, pushing the wall with a furious power, as though trying to force its way through. No, he realized with a stab of fear, he was below the water line, and the thing clawing at the planks was the ravenous sea. Desperately he explored with his fingers, finding a long swatch of sailcloth hanging on a peg in one corner, and a heavy door in the wall opposite the hull. But the narrow door had no latch, no means of opening.

A gasp of despair escaped his lips, his chest tightened. He was in
one of the cells where the murderers were confined. Lister had declared that the ship was going to sink, and he was locked in a box, where he would drown like all the other rats. He paced back and forth, his heart racing, touching the moist, matted skin on his side where the captain’s bullet had grazed him, futilely trying to recall what had happened after the black water had closed about him. What had he done to be sealed into this oversized coffin? He had wanted so desperately to die, then after speaking with Lister and seeing Adam’s medallion, he had wanted so abruptly to live.

Frightened shouts rose from the decks above. Someone called for pumps to be manned, someone else for a Bible. He heard the sound of water running past the door and with a wrench of his heart felt a puddle forming at his feet. He pounded on the door until his fists throbbed; then the ship lurched, his head slammed into a wall, and he sank into unconsciousness again.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”

The thin eerie chant echoed in Duncan’s nightmare as he struggled back to awareness, the meaningless, haunting words repeating themselves endlessly, from nowhere and everywhere. He pinched himself in his dream and pushed at his eyes, trying to make certain they were open, then pressed the wound in his side. The flash of pain jerked him upright.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”

He was awake but the nightmare would not fade.

The storm, however, seemed to have passed. The sea no longer fought with the hull, the water had drained from his cell. He stripped off his wet clothes, wrapping the sailcloth around him, then sat in the black emptiness, listening to the chilling, melancholy chant a few minutes, realizing it was not a trick of his mind, but the utterances of a forlorn woman. He stood, trying to understand how he could hear her voice so clearly. Searching the locked door with his fingertips, he discovered a six-inch-square hatch halfway up the door, hanging open on a leather hinge. His hands shaking, he put his mouth to the hatch and shouted.

“It was a pig’s heart!” As the terrible reality of where he was sank in, he repeated the words in a hoarse, desperate voice. “Not a man’s! No man was killed!” There was no response, no movement in the darkness. He was on the prison deck, abandoned, alone.

Not entirely alone.

“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known!” The sad voice seemed more urgent now, almost frantic, and its source became clear. The woman was in the cell next to his. Duncan tightened the scrap of cloth around his waist.

“Who are you?” he asked, futilely pressing his eye to the hole, seeing nothing but a dim line of light at the bottom of a door several feet in front of him. “Are you ill?”

“Take the skin you are,” the woman replied in a thin, plaintive tone. “You will see this is the real earth circling about.”

He had found a new level of hell after all. He was wounded, trembling from the cold and damp, imprisoned in the dark without explanation, and his sole companion was not only a murderer, but a lunatic murderer.

“It was a pig’s heart!” Duncan cried again, shouting the words, continuing despite the low curses they now drew from cells farther away, stopping only when he realized they were coming out in long sobs.

“Fresh meat!” cooed a coarse voice from the darkness. “The storm washed up fresh meat for our pets!”

He dropped to his knees as he realized the prisoner down the passage was speaking of him, then sank backward against a corner, listening to the murmur of the sea until finally, gratefully, he found slumber.

When he awoke, Adam Munroe was with him, squatting in the opposite corner, urging his weevil forward, tossing from hand to hand the wooden buttons he was using for betting. This was the grinning, roguish Adam whom Duncan had come to know, the one who softly sang Highland ballads in the middle of the night and cracked jokes when Company spirits sagged. Except this Adam had seaweed in his hair. Duncan, trembling, spoke his friend’s name. Adam looked up, cocked his head, and, his grin fading, extended his
open palm with his betting pieces toward Duncan as the tail of an eel began squirming out of his ear. Duncan recoiled in terror, pressing against the wall, his heart thundering, as Adam slowly faded into the blackness.