Tales of Terror from the Black Ship (11 page)

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 through 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.

‘Throw us a line then, damn you all!’

‘The snails can have you!’ shouted the first mate. ‘It’s no more than you deserve, you cowardly scum!’

‘For God’s sake!’ shouted one of the men in the lifeboat. ‘Show some mercy!’

‘Throw them a line, Matlock,’ said the captain.

‘But, sir –’

‘If we are to die, let’s all die together,’ he said quietly. ‘Throw them a line.’

The word ‘die’ tolled like a bell in George’s mind. Were they really in danger of dying? But of course they were. They were trapped. They could not keep these monsters at bay for ever. Was this how he was to die, unknown and unsung – his passing marked by nothing but a faint ripple in the ocean?

The first mate ordered a line to be thrown, but before the rope reached the side of the ship there was a cry from the boat. One of the deserters stood up, screaming and tugging at his clothes. When he turned we could see the cause: a snail had crawled on to his back as he sat in the boat and had clearly bitten into him halfway up his spine.

One of his fellows grabbed the snail and tried to pull it off, but this merely increased the poor man’s torments and he flailed wildly about in his panic, striking the other a blow to the side of the head and knocking him out of the boat.

The man in the sea tried in vain to get back to the lifeboat, but every movement simply served to further ensnare him in the green tentacles of the floating mass of weeds. He stretched out a hand towards the ship, shouting for help, but he was too far away for his friends to pull him aboard. All this was illuminated by the ghastly glow of the boat’s swinging lanterns.

Meanwhile more snails had begun to creep on to the lifeboat and the efforts of the men to halt their entry and the wild spasms of the man with the creature gnawing into his back caused the boat to rock violently, and to no one’s surprise it soon tipped over, spilling all the remaining men into the weed-choked sea.

A line was thrown from the ship and one of the deserters even managed to grab hold, but no sooner had he done so than he cried out in agony as an unseen snail took hold of his flesh. His screams were echoed by the screams of his fellows as each in turn fell victim to the creatures.

Tears sprang readily to the eyes of the crew who had only minutes ago wished these men would rot in hell. But hell itself could not hold torments worse than those souls underwent, eaten alive by the slimy demons.

George and the others stood and watched in a trance as each man writhed in his death throes and then went limp, held fast by the weed, heads lolling hideously atop the green carpet. It was only when the snails began to slide across the faces of their former comrades that they turned away. No man among them had the stomach for that sight.

It was as if the glut of food brought about by the sailors’ escape attempt had driven the snails into a kind of frenzy of bloodlust. As soon as they moved away from the remains of the lifeboat crew – remains which a quick glance told George were picked to the bone – they renewed their assault on the
Swift
.

They now came in numbers that made their previous attacks seem tame by comparison. There were thousands of them. They slid over the gunwales, over the deck, the rigging, the bones of the fallen. The dreadful ponderousness of their movement only made the invasion more nightmarish.

A sailor who foolishly panicked and sought sanctuary in the crow’s nest was simply pursued there by the snails, who slowly and relentlessly attacked him in such numbers that he threw himself off rather than be eaten alive.

He landed with a sickening thud on the deck, where the blood immediately attracted the attention of every snail in the vicinity. Some men moved to try to stop their advance but the captain called to them to halt.

‘Better that they feed on him than us,’ he said grimly. ‘He knows no different.’

Something in George snapped. He did not know what to do, but he could not stand there and watch death inch towards him in this way: to have that slow torture of knowing that the most excruciating end was laboriously approaching.

As the captain called them to the middle of the deck to form a protective circle with lanterns at their centre, George grabbed a lantern too before ducking out of sight and heading below deck. He had to sidestep several snails along the way; they altered course as soon as he passed and set off slowly after him.

George, almost hysterical with fear, threw himself headlong into a cabin and bolted the door behind him. He slumped exhausted on to a bunk and then realised he had not checked for signs of snails and set about doing so with a racing heart, and only when he was positive that he was quite alone did he lie back down on the bunk.

George put hands over his ears to block out the cacophony that throbbed through the fabric of the ship: the terrible distant screams of his crewmates as they eventually succumbed to the army of snails.

Worse still was the dreadful almost-silence that followed, in which the soft slither and rasp of the retreating snails could be heard on the decks above.

It was hours before George built up the courage to even consider stepping outside, and when he did, the eerie mother-of-pearl light of daybreak was seeping through the open hatch.

As he climbed the ladder to the weather deck above, George slipped on the slimy remains of a snail and cracked his head against the wooden handrail. He allowed himself a wry chuckle as he imagined the irony of having survived the onslaught only to break his neck in a fall.

George was grateful that he could see no sign of living snails, but the results of their passing were everywhere. It was like a battleground. The white bones of the crew lay all around: skeletons picked clean of all flesh so that they looked as though they were the sleeping crew of some ghost ship.

George went to the rail and looked over the side. The weed was gone, completely gone. The ship was free. A breeze ruffled his hair for the first time in days. But what good was it? He could not sail the ship alone. He was little use when there had been a full crew, but alone he was worse than useless. He was destined to drift in the open ocean until starvation or shipwreck did the work he had denied the snails.

Something trickled down George’s cheek and putting his hand to his face he realised he was bleeding from the blow to his forehead when he had slipped. A droplet of blood dripped from his hand and fell to the deck, striking the bleached boards with a small crimson splash.

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