The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (66 page)

“Hereabouts is where I left him,” I whispered to the Captain, a few seconds later. “Hold your lamp low, sir. There’s blood on the deck.”

Captain Jeldy did so, and made a slight sound with his mouth at what he saw. Then, heedless of my hurried warning, he walked across to the rail, holding his lamp high up. I followed him; for I could not let him go alone; and the second mate came too, with his lamp. They leaned over the port rail, and held their lamps out into the mist and the unknown darkness beyond the ship’s side. I remember how the lamps made just two yellow glares in the mist, ineffectual, yet serving somehow to make extraordinarily plain the vastitude of the night, and the possibilities of the dark. Perhaps that is a queer way to put it, but it gives you the effect of that moment upon my feelings. And all the time, you know, there was upon me the brutal, frightening expectancy of something reaching in at us from out of that everlasting darkness and mist that held all the sea and the night, so that we were just three mist-shrouded, hidden figures, peering nervously.

The mist was now so thick that we could not even see the surface of the water overside; and fore and aft of us the rail vanished away into the fog and the dark. And then, you know, as we stood here staring, I heard something moving down on the main deck. I caught Captain Jeldy by the elbow.

“Come away from the rail, sir,” I said, hardly above a whisper; and he—with the swift premonition of danger—stepped back and allowed me to urge him well inboard. The second mate followed, and the three of us stood there in the mist, staring round about us and holding our revolvers handy, and the dull waves of the mist beating in slowly upon the lamps in vague wreathings and swirls of fog.

“What was it you heard, Mister?” asked the Captain, after a few moments.

“S-s-s-t!” I muttered. “There it is again. There’s something moving, down on the main-deck!”

Captain Jeldy heard it himself, now; and the three of us stood listening intensely. Yet it was hard to know what to make of the sounds. And then, suddenly, there was the rattle of a deck ringbolt, and then again, as if something or someone were fumbling and playing with it.

“Down there on the main deck!” shouted the Captain, abruptly, his voice seeming hoarse close to my ear, yet immediately smothered by the fog. “Down there on the main deck! Who’s there?”

But there came never an answering sound. And the three of us stood there, looking quickly this way and that, and listening. Try to imagine how we felt! Abruptly the second mate muttered something:

“The lookout, sir! The lookout!”

Captain Jeldy took the hint, on the instant.

“On the lookout there!” he shouted.

And then, far away and muffled-sounding, there came the answering cry of the lookout man from the fo’cas’le head:

“Sir-r-r?” A little voice, long drawn out, through unknowable alleys of fog.

“Go below into the fo’cas’le, and shut both doors, and don’t stir out till you’re told!” sung out Captain Jeldy, his voice going lost into the mist. And then the man’s answering: “Aye, aye, sir!” came to us faint and mournful. And directly afterwards the clang of a steel door, hollow-sounding and remote; and immediately the sound of another.

“That puts them safe for the present, anyway,” said the second mate. And even as he spoke, there came again that indefinite noise, down upon the main deck, of something moving with an incredible and unnatural stealthiness.

“On the main deck there!” shouted Captain Jeldy, sternly. “If there is anyone there, answer, or I shall fire!”

The reply was both amazing and terrifying; for, suddenly, a tremendous blow was stricken upon the deck, and then there came the dull rolling sound of some enormous weight going hollowly across the main-deck. And then an abominable silence.

“My God!” said Captain Jeldy, in a low voice, “what was that?” And he raised his pistol, but I caught him by the wrist. “Don’t shoot, sir!” I whispered. “It’ll do no good. That—that—whatever it is—I— I mean it’s something enormous, sir. I—I really wouldn’t shoot—” I found it impossible to put my vague idea into words; but I felt there was a Force aboard, down on the main-deck, that it would be futile to attack with so ineffectual a thing as a puny revolver bullet.

And then, as I held Captain Jeldy’s wrist, and he hesitated, irresolute there came a sudden bleating of sheep, and the sound of lashings being burst and the cracking of wood; and the next instant a huge crash, followed by another and then another, and the anguished m-a-a-ma-a-a-ing of the sheep.

“My God!” said the second mate, “the sheep pen’s being beaten to pieces against the deck. Good God! What sort of thing could do that!”

The tremendous beating ceased, and there was a splashing overside; and after that a silence so profound that it seemed as if the whole atmosphere of the night was full of an unbearable, tense quietness. And then the damp slatting of a sail, far up in the night, that made me start—a lonesome sound to break suddenly through that infernal silence, upon my raw nerves.

“Get below, both of you. Smartly now!” muttered Captain Jeldy. “There’s something run either aboard us or alongside; and we can’t do anything till daylight.”

We went below, and shut the doors of the companionway, and there we lay in the wide Atlantic, without wheel or lookout or officer in charge, and something incredible down on the dark main-deck.

II

For some hours we sat in the Captain’s cabin, talking the matter over, while the men slept, sprawled in a dozen attitudes on the floor of the saloon. Captain Jeldy and the second mate still wore their pajamas, and our loaded revolvers lay handy on the cabin table. And so we watched anxiously through the hours for the dawn to come in.

As the light strengthened, we endeavoured to get some view of the sea from the ports; but the mist was so thick about us that it was exactly like looking out into a grey nothingness, that became presently white, as the day came.

“Now,” said Captain Jeldy, “we’re going to look into this.” He went out through the saloon, to the companion stairs. At the top he opened the two doors, and the mist rolled in on us, white and impenetrable. For a little while we stood there, the three of us, absolutely silent and listening, with our revolvers handy; but never a sound came to us except the odd, vague slatting of a sail, or the slight creaking of the gear as the ship lifted on some slow, invisible swell.

Presently the Captain stepped cautiously out on to the deck; he was in his cabin slippers, and therefore made no sound. I was wearing gum-boots, and followed him silently, and the second mate came after me, in his bare feet. Captain Jeldy went a few paces along the deck and the mist hid him utterly. “Phoo!” I heard him mutter, “the stink’s worse than ever!” His voice came odd and vague to me through the wreathing of the mist.

“The sun’ll soon eat up all this fog,” said the second mate, at my elbow, in a voice little above a whisper.

We stepped after the Captain, and found him a couple of fathoms away, standing shrouded in the mist in an attitude of tense listening.

“Can’t hear a thing!” he whispered. “We’ll go forrard to the break, as quiet as you like. Don’t make a sound.”

We went forward, like three shadows, and suddenly Captain Jeldy kicked his shin against something, and pitched headlong over it, making a tremendous noise. He got up quickly, swearing grimly, and the three of us stood there in silence, waiting lest any infernal thing should come upon us out of all that white invisibility. Once I felt sure I saw something coming towards me, and I raised my revolver; but saw in a moment that there was nothing. The tension of imminent, nervous expectancy eased from us, and Captain Jeldy stooped over the object on the deck.

“The port hencoop’s been shifted out here!” he muttered. “It’s all stove!”

“That must be what I heard last night, when the Mate went,” I whispered. There was a loud crash, just before he sang out to me to hurry with the lamp.”

Captain Jeldy left the smashed hencoop, and the three of us tiptoed silently to the rail across the break of the poop. Here we leaned over and stared down into the blank whiteness of the mist that hid everything.

“Can’t see a thing,” whispered the second mate; yet, as he spoke, I could fancy that I heard a slight, indefinite, slurring noise somewhere below us, and I caught them each by an arm to draw them back.

“There’s something down there,” I muttered. “For goodness’ sake, come back from the rail.”

We gave back a step or two, and then stopped to listen; and even as we did so there came a slight air playing through the mist.

“The breeze is coming!” said the second mate. “Look, the mist is clearing already!”

He was right. Already the look of white impenetrability had gone; and suddenly we could see the corner of the after hatch coamings through the thinning fog. Within a minute we could see as far forward as the mainmast, and then the stuff blew away from us, clear of the vessel, like a great wall of whiteness, that dissipated as it went.

“Look!” we all exclaimed together. The whole of the vessel was now clear to our sight; but it was not at the ship herself that we looked; for after one quick glance along the empty main-deck, we had seen something beyond the ship’s side. All around the vessel there lay a submerged spread of weed, for maybe a good quarter of a mile upon every side.

“Weed!” sung out Captain Jeldy, in a voice of comprehension. “Weed! Look, by Jove! I guess I know now what got the Mate!”

He turned and ran to the port side and looked over. And suddenly he stiffened and beckoned silently over his shoulder to us to come and see. We had followed, and now we stood, one on each side of him, staring.

“Look!” whispered the Captain, pointing. “See the great brute! Do you see it? There! Look!”

At first I could see nothing except the submerged spread of the weed into which we had evidently run after dark. Then, as I stared intently, my gaze began to separate from the surrounding weed a leathery looking something that was somewhat darker in hue than the weed itself.

“My God!” said Captain Jeldy. “What a monster! What a monster! Just look at the brute! Look at the thing’s eyes! That’s what got the Mate. What a creature out of hell itself!”

I saw it plainly now. Three of the massive feelers lay twined in and out among the clumpings of the weed; and then, abruptly, I realised that the two extraordinary round disks, motionless and inscrutable, were the creature’s eyes, just below the surface of the water. It appeared to be staring, expressionless, up at the steel side of the vessel. I traced, vaguely, the shapeless monstrosity of what must be termed its head. “My God!” I muttered. “It’s an enormous squid of some kind! What an awful brute! What—”

The sharp report of the Captain’s revolver came at that moment. He had fired at the thing; and instantly there was a most awful commotion alongside. The weed was hove upward, literally in tons. An enormous quantity was thrown aboard us by the thrashing of the monster’s great feelers. The sea seemed almost to boil in one great cauldron of weed and water all about the brute, and the steel side of the ship resounded with the dull, tremendous blows that the creature gave in its struggle. And into all that whirling boil of tentacles, weed and sea water, the three of us emptied our revolvers as fast as we could fire and reload. I remember the feeling of fierce satisfaction I had in thus aiding to avenge the death of the Mate.

Suddenly the Captain roared out to us to jump back; and we obeyed on the instant. As we did so the weed rose up into a great mound, more than twenty feet in height, and more than a ton of it slopped aboard. The next instant three of the monstrous tentacles came in over the side, and the vessel gave a slow, sullen roll to port, as the weight came upon her; for the monster had literally hove itself up almost free of the sea against our port side, in one vast, leathery shape, all wreathed with weed fronds, and seeming drenched with blood and some curious black liquid.

The feelers that had come inboard thrashed around, here and there, and suddenly one of them curled in the most hideous, snake-like fashion around the base of the mainmast. This seemed to attract it; for immediately it curled the two others about the mast and forthwith wrenched upon it with such hideous violence that the whole towering length of spars, through all their height of a hundred and thirty feet, were shaken visibly, whilst the vessel herself vibrated with the stupendous efforts of the brute.

“It’ll have the mast down, sir!” said the second mate, with a gasp. “My God! It’ll strain her side open! My—”

“One of those blasting cartridges!” I said to Captain Jeldy almost in a shout, as the inspiration took me. “Blow the brute to pieces!”

“Get one, quick!” said the Captain, jerking his thumb toward the companion. “You know where they are.”

In thirty seconds I was back with the cartridge. Captain Jeldy took out his knife and cut the fuse dead short; then, with a perfectly steady hand he lit the fuse and calmly held it until I backed away, shouting to him to throw it, for I knew it must explode in another couple of seconds.

Captain Jeldy threw the thing, like one throws a quoit, so that it fell into the sea, just on the outward side of the vast bulk of the monster. So well had he timed it that it burst, with a stunning report, just as it struck the water. The effect upon the squid was amazing. It seemed literally to collapse. The enormous tentacles released themselves from the mast and curled across the deck helplessly, and were drawn inertly over the rail as the enormous bulk sank away from the ship’s side out of sight into the weed. The ship rolled slowly to starboard and then steadied. “Thank God!” I muttered, and looked at the two others. They were pallid and sweating, and I must have been the same.