The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (65 page)

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An Adventure of the Deep Waters

T
his is an extraordinary tale. We had come up from the Cape, and owing to the Trades heading us more than usual, we had made some hundreds of miles more westing than I ever did before or since.

I remember perfectly the particular night of the happening. I suppose what occurred stamped it solid into my memory with a thousand little details that in the ordinary way I should never have remembered an hour. And, of course, we talked it over so often among ourselves that this no doubt helped to fix it all past any forgetting.

I remember the Mate and I had been pacing the weather side of the poop and discussing various old shellbacks’ superstitions. I was third mate, and it was between four and five bells in the first watch (i.e. between ten and half-past). Suddenly, he stopped in his walk and lifted his head and sniffed several times.

“My word, Mister,” he said, “there’s a rum kind of stink somewhere about. Don’t you smell it?”

I sniffed once or twice at the light airs that were coming in on the beam; then I walked to the rail and leaned over, smelling again at the slight breeze. And abruptly I got a whiff of it, faint and sickly, yet vaguely suggestive of something I had once smelt before.

“I can smell something, Mr. Lammart,” I said. “I could almost give it name; and yet, somehow I can’t.” I stared away into the dark, to windward. “What do you seem to smell?” I asked him.

“I can’t smell anything now,” he replied, coming over and standing beside me. “It’s gone again—No! By Jove! there it is again. My goodness! Phoo—”

The smell was all about us now, filling the night air. It had still that indefinable familiarity about it, and yet it was curiously strange; and, more than anything else, it was certainly simply beastly.

The stench grew stronger, and presently the Mate asked me to go forward, and see whether the lookout man noticed anything. When I reached the break of the forecastle head, I called up to the man, to know whether he smelled anything.

“Smell anything, sir!” he sang out. “Jumpin’larks! I sh’ud think I do. I’m fair p’isoned with it!”

I ran up the weather steps, and stood beside him. The smell was certainly very plain up there; and after savouring it for a few moments, I asked him whether he thought it might be a dead whale. But he was very emphatic that this could not be the case; for, as he said, he had been nearly fifteen years in whaling ships, and knew the smell of a dead whale “like as you would the smell of bad whisky, sir,” as he put it. “ ’Tain’t no whale, yon; but the Lord He knows what ’tis. I’m thinkin’ it’s Davy Jones come up for a breather.”

I stayed with him some minutes, staring out into the darkness, but could see nothing; for, even had there been something big close to us, I doubt whether I could have seen it, so black a night it was, without a visible star, and with a vague, dull haze breeding an indistinctness all about the ship.

I returned to the Mate and reported that the lookout complained of the smell; but that neither he nor I had been able to see anything in the darkness to account for it.

By this time the queer, disgusting odour seemed to be in all the air about us, and the Mate told me to go below and shut all the ports, so as to keep the beastly smell out of the cabins and the saloon.

When I returned he suggested that we should shut the companion doors; and after that we commenced to pace the poop again, discussing the extraordinary smell, and stopping from time to time to stare through our night glasses out into the night about the ship.

“I’ll tell you what it smells like, Mister,” the Mate remarked, once, “and that’s like a mighty old derelict I once went aboard in the North Atlantic. She was a proper old-timer, an’ she gave us all the creeps. There was just this funny, dank, rummy sort of smell about her, sort of century-old bilge-water and dead men an’ seaweed. I can’t stop thinkin’ we’re nigh some lonesome old packet out there; an’ a good thing we’ve not much way on us!”

“Do you notice how almighty quiet everything’s gone the last half hour or so?” I said, a little later. “It must be the mist thickening down.”

“It is the mist,” said the Mate, going to the rail and staring out. “Good Lord, what’s that?” he added.

Something had knocked his hat from his head, and it fell with a sharp rap at my feet. And suddenly, you know, I got a premonition of something horrid.

“Come away from the rail, sir,” I said, sharply, and gave one jump, and caught him by the shoulders and dragged him back. “Come away from the side!”

“What’s up, Mister?” he growled at me, and twisted his shoulders free. “What’s wrong with you? Was it you knocked off my cap?” He stooped and felt around for it; and as he did so I heard something unmistakably fiddling away at the rail, which the Mate had just left.

“My God, sir!” I said, “there’s something there. Hark!”

The Mate stiffened up, listening; then he heard it. It was for all the world as if something was feeling and rubbing the rail, there in the darkness, not two fathoms away from us.

“Who’s there?” said the Mate quickly. Then, as there was no answer: “What the devil’s this hanky-panky? Who’s playing the goat there?” He made a swift step through the darkness towards the rail, but I caught him by the elbow.

“Don’t go, Mister!” I said, hardly above a whisper. “It’s not one of the men. Let me get a light.”

“Quick, then!” he said; and I turned and ran aft to the binnacle and snatched out the lighted lamp. As I did so I heard the Mate shout something out of the darkness, in a strange voice. There came a sharp, loud, rattling sound, and then a crash, and immediately the Mate roaring to me to hasten with the light. His voice changed, even whilst he shouted, and gave out something that was nearer a scream than anything else. There came two loud, dull blows, and an extraordinary gasping sound; and then, as I raced along the poop, there was a tremendous smashing of glass, and an immediate silence.

“Mr. Lammart!” I shouted. “Mr. Lammart!” And then I had reached the place where I had left the Mate, not forty seconds before; but the Mate was not there.

“Mr. Lammart!” I shouted again, holding the light high over my head, and turning quickly to look behind me. As I did so my foot glided on some slippery substance and I went headlong to the deck, with a tremendous thud, smashing the lamp and putting out the light.

I was on my feet again in an instant. I groped a moment for the lamp, and as I did so I heard the men singing out from the main-deck and the noise of their feet as they came running aft. I found the broken lamp and realised it was useless; then I jumped for the companionway, and in half a minute I was back, with the big saloon lamp glaring bright in my hands.

I ran forward again, shielding the upper edge of the glass chimney from the draught of my running, and the blaze of the big lamp seemed to make the weather side of the poop as bright as day, except for the mist, that gave something of a vagueness to things.

Where I had left the Mate there was blood upon the deck, but nowhere any signs of the man himself. I ran to the weather rail and held the lamp to it. There was blood upon it; and the rail itself seemed to have been wrenched by some huge force. I put out my hand and found that I could shake it. Then I leaned out-board and held the lamp at arm’s length, staring down over the ship’s side.

“Mr. Lammart!” I shouted into the night and the thick mist. “Mr. Lammart! Mr. Lammart!” But my voice seemed to go lost and muffled and infinitely small away into the billowy darkness.
 

I heard the men snuffling and breathing, waiting to leeward of the poop. I whirled round to them, holding the lamp high.

“We heard somethin’, sir,” said Tarpley, the leading seaman in our watch. “Is anything wrong, sir?”

“The Mate’s gone,” I said blankly. “We heard something, and I went for the binnacle lamp. Then he shouted, and I heard something smashing things; and when I got back he’d gone clean.” I turned and held the light out again over the unseen sea; and the men crowded round along the rail, and stared, bewildered.

“Blood, sir,” said Tarpley, pointing. “There’s something almighty queer out there!” He waved a huge hand into the darkness. “That’s what stinks—”

He never finished; for, suddenly, one of the men cried out something in a frightened voice: “Look out, sir! Look out, sir!”

I saw, in one brief flash of sight, something come in with an infernal flicker of movement; and then, before I could form any notion of what I had seen, the lamp was dashed to pieces across the poop deck. In that instant my perceptions cleared, and I saw the incredible folly of what we were doing; for there we were, standing up against the blank, unknowable night; and out there in the dark there surely lurked some thing of monstrousness; and we were at its mercy. I seemed to feel it hovering, hovering over us; so that I felt the sickening creep of gooseflesh all over me.

“Stand back from the rail!” I shouted. “Stand back from the rail!” There was a rush of feet as the men obeyed, in sudden apprehension of their danger; and I gave back with them. Even as I did so I felt some invisible thing brush my shoulder; and an indescribable smell was in my nostrils, from something that moved over me in the dark.

“Down into the saloon, everyone!” I shouted. “Down with you all! Don’t wait a moment!”

There was a rush along the dark weather deck, and then the men went helter skelter down the companion steps, into the saloon, falling and cursing over one another in the darkness. I sung out to the man at the wheel to join them, and then I followed.

I came upon the men huddled at the foot of the stairs, and filling up the passage, all crowding each other in the darkness. The Skipper’s voice was filling the saloon, and he was demanding in violent adjectives the cause of so tremendous a noise. From the steward’s berth there came also a voice, and the splutter of a match; and then the glow of a lamp in the saloon itself.

I pushed my way through the men and found the Captain in the saloon, in his sleeping gear, looking both drowsy and angry, though perhaps bewilderment topped every other feeling. He held his cabin lamp in his hand, and shone the light over the huddle of men.

I hurried to explain, and told him of the incredible disappearance of the Mate, and of my conviction that some extraordinary thing was lurking near the ship, out in the mist and the darkness. I mentioned the curious smell, and told how the Mate had suggested that we had drifted down near some old-time, sea-rotted derelict. And, you know, even as I put it into awkward words, my imagination began to awaken to horrible discomforts—a thousand dreadful impossibilities of the sea became suddenly possible.

The Captain (Jeldy was his name) did not stop to dress, but ran back into his cabin, and came out in a few moments with a couple of revolvers and a handful of cartridges. The second mate had come running out of his cabin at the noise, and had listed intensely to what I had to say. Now he jumped back into his berth and brought out his own lamp and a large-pattern revolver which was evidently ready loaded.

Captain Jeldy pushed one of his revolvers into my hands with some of the cartridges, and we began hastily to load the weapons. Then the Captain caught up his lamp and made for the stairway, ordering the men into the saloon out of his way.

“Shall you want them, sir?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s no use their running any unnecessary risks.” He threw a word over his shoulder: “Stay quiet here, men; if I want you, I’ll give you a shout; then come spry!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said the watch, in a chorus; and then I was following the Captain up the stairs, with the second mate close behind.

We came up through the companionway on to the silence of the deserted poop. The mist had thickened up, even during the brief time that I had been below, and there was not a breath of wind. The mist was so dense that it seemed to press in upon us; and the two lamps made a kind of luminous halo in the mist, which seemed to absorb their light in a most peculiar way.

“Where was he?” the Captain asked me, almost in a whisper.

“On the port side, sir,” I said, “a little foreside the charthouse, and about a dozen feet in from the rail. I’ll show you the exact place.”

We went forward along what had been the weather side, going quietly and watchfully; though, indeed, it was little enough that we could see because of the mist. Once, as I led the way, I thought I heard a vague sound somewhere in the mist; but was all unsure because of the creak, creak of the spars and gear as the vessel rolled slightly upon an odd, oily swell. Apart from this slight sound, and the far-up rustle of the canvas, slatting gently against the masts, there was no sound at all throughout the ship. I assure you, the silence seemed to me to be almost menacing, in the tense, nervous state in which I was.