Best New Horror #26

Ian Tregillis TESTIMONY OF SAMUEL FROBISHER REGARDING EVENTS UPON HIS MAJESTY’S SHIP CONFIDENCE, 14-22 JUNE 1818, WITH DIAGRAMS

I JOINED HIS Majesty’s Royal Navy in 1808, and a man more grateful for the press-gangs you’ll never meet. To answer your question, Sirs, I spent four years in the service of Captain Nares ere I beheld the tentacled Bride.

A brave and virtuous soul was the captain, never given to rage nor drink during my years with him. And upon my oath, never once did he take the lash to a sailor’s back without just cause before she arrived. But he changed the moment that accursed creature slithered upon the deck.

Begging your pardon, Sirs? I lost much of my hearing on the last voyage of the Confidence.

Aye. I get ahead of myself. I’ll start at the beginning.

The Confidence cut a fine feather when we sailed from Portsmouth in March of ‘18. Just over half the full crew complement we had, plus five more souls, Doctor Thomson and his men. If you’ll have my opinion, Sirs, Thomson deserved his invitation to the gallows dance, and damn him twice for this expedition.

That dandy nearly turned our frigate into a floating laboratory. In Portsmouth we loaded the bric-à-brac of his scientifical pursuits. We removed sixteen—sixteen!—guns to make room for the nets and dredges. Thomson also brought a dozen casks of pickling alcohol aboard. He tried ordering the purser to heave the rum, but Mr Newcomb told Thomson to shove off, Royal Society or no. Still, we’d been a’sea but a few days when we found that Thomson’s men had unloaded some of the rum themselves. I’ll tell you this: the prospect of thin grog won Thomson no friends among the seamen. We’d have liked to teach that dandy a lesson and heave his precious pickling alcohol, but he kept those casks locked away in the hold along with the remainder of the rum.

No crew worked harder, even in war. Thomson enjoyed the old man’s blessing, so never a day passed when we didn’t work the dredges. “Living beings exist over the whole floor of the ocean,” was his refrain.

He’d bluster if the tiniest worm went overboard before he had a chance to examine it. Many of the beasties we culled from those nets were curious and frightful things not seen by men before: fishes that glowed like lanterns, strange creatures more mouth than body, and other oddments. If it be of interest, I’ve sketched a few as best I remember them. Our catches went into the many jars that Thomson and his men brought. Captain Nares gave them the run of the wardroom (winning Thomson no love from the lieutenants, either) and soon it reeked of preservative spirits. Often I heard those jars clinking together during high seas.

Our voyage was peaceful, but for an engagement with French pirates off Bermuda. Though we had just half our guns, we bested them easily. I do wonder what might have happened if, in our zeal, we hadn’t sunken that brigantine before we could capture it. With a prize to be had, Captain Nares would have set a different course, to claim our head and gun money.

The only casualty of French treachery on that particular day was my hearing, after a mishap with a dry sponge on one of the twelve-pounders. Wythe, our surgeon, packed my ears with flannel and wrapped my head in bandages until I looked like a sultan from Persia. I dozed much, owing to his sleeping draughts.

We swayed hard to larboard two mornings after. Another engagement if we’re lucky, I thought, else it’s another whim of that damnable Thomson. He was mad to capture a leviathan in his nets, I knew.

Phineas Grue, a waster but still my mate, he fetched me soon after. I asked if Thomson had sighted another mermaid. There was a commotion on deck, he said.

In truth, my ears rung so badly that his words to me were more a mixture of yells and gestures. But his meaning came clear, and the gist was as I described it.

I smelt an odd odour on his breath, and not the watered-down grog we hands were drinking. It stung the eyes. I wondered if he had been hoarding his tots, or somehow found a way to bolster his grog.

Up top, the deckhands were cutting away one of the dredges. It seemed we were snagged on something, and so the captain had ordered the net abandoned. I was only sorry I couldn’t hear Thomson howl in protest.

Rogers, a fo’c’sleman, dived into the sea with a line around his waist. Man overboard? I wondered. With much effort, Phineas bellowed the old man’s words into my ear:

“Hold steady, Madam!”

Madam? I craned my neck to and fro, but all I saw was a mass of seaweed tangled in the net, for we were amidst the sea called Sargasso. Black and oily, it was a scab upon the water. Wrack like this I had never seen, but it was wrapped in Thomson’s net and so had come from the depths.

I pinched my nose against the stink of rot. Mayhap Thomson had found his prize after all, and this was the carcass of some dread leviathan.

Still, I could not see the mysterious lady to whom the captain directed his encouragements. But the sun had just crossed the main yardarm and the glare on the sea was bright. Was there a dinghy caught in that mess?

As we lowered the bosun’s chair for her, Rogers swam into that stinking wrack. A wave tossed vines over his head, and he forever disappeared. If not for the glare, I might’ve seen him flailing about and raised a cry.

Worse, my mates paid Rogers no heed. They were enchanted. But I didn’t yet understand this, nor that my injury had spared me.

There was no dinghy, there was no lady, but something moved into the bosun’s chair. What I’d thought a tangle of sargassum became a mess of tentacles and claws.

But Captain Nares gave the order to heave before I could say anything, and my mates hoisted the chair over the main deck. He stepped aside as that thing slithered aboard in a quivering mass. The creature pulled itself upright, and with much stretching and slithering sorted itself into a semblance of a woman, with a head, two arms, and two legs. Its head was a coil of those same tentacles, with a single milky orb in place of an eye, and before its mouth hung a curtain of hook-tipped tendrils.

Terror etched that sight into my eyelids, whence it still comes at night to haunt my dreams. I’ve rendered to paper the truest likeness I’m able of the thing that Captain Nares welcomed aboard the Confidence. I could do better work by carving—but if you’ve seen my scrimshaw, Sirs, mayhap you’ll grant me a crumb of talent, and agree ‘twas no lady we pulled from the sea.

I made to fetch Doctor Thomson, nearly bowling ol’ Phineas aside in my hurry and my fear. But then I saw the doctor was already there, gazing upon the monster with tenderness.

Every shiver of her body sent the twin stinks of rot and death across the deck, but not a single man covered his nose. I served His Majesty in the war, and I’ve seen decks slippery with the insides of men, but I’ve never smelt anything like the tentacled Bride. I leaned over the rail and tossed my hard biscuits and grog into the sea, like some rubber-legged dandy on his first voyage.

Into my ear Phineas shouted: “She has the sweetest voice. Like an angel.”

But I could hear nothing. With much repetition, I did gain the following yarn from Phineas. He must’ve yelled himself hoarse relating it to me: a London gentleman and his new bride were bound for her uncle’s Jamaican plantation when raiders beset their sloop. They pilfered every gem and bauble, then executed the crew before her very eyes. When the bride pleaded for her beloved’s life, the raiders’ chief sliced off her man’s ear. “For whispering sweet nothings,” he said and laughed. They set the sloop aflame, took her man, and left her to die. She floated amidst the flotsam nigh three days.

Heads shook and fists clenched all around. Captain Nares ripped the ‘fore-and-after from his head and kneaded the hat in white-knuckled fury. I gather he vowed to catch the raiders and rescue her husband.

I full expected Thomson to object at the notion of his nets idle and his sample jars unfilled. But he did not.

She writhed anew, and offered the oozing vines of her arms to the captain. He held out his hands, and the beast deposited in his cupped palms something glistening and red. No surgeon am I, but as I said, I’ve seen the insides of men, and this object was just that.

But ‘twasn’t poor Rogers’ heart, no monster’s trophy, the captain saw. He declared that it would be kept in Thomson’s preservatives until we found her husband, so Wythe could reattach the man’s ear.

No, Sirs. I’ve not heard of such physic, either, but that is how Phineas told it to me, as near as I could make out. As for what evil compelled the beast to preserve a man’s heart, I could not fathom. Only much later, after our doom was apparent, did her purpose come clear.

Lieutenant Prescott ordered us back to work. The murderous beast looped a tentacle around the captain’s elbow, and she slithered away with him. But as she did, she peered at me with that hideous orb. I swear to you, Sirs, that it twinkled.

And that is how the tentacled Bride came to live with us aboard the Confidence.

After that, Captain Nares spent much time closeted with her, except when ordering a new course. Soon we would overtake her assailants, he insisted. Every man put his back—no, his very soul—into the effort. The bosun’s mates got free with their starters. I know you banned them, Sirs, and grateful I am for it, but on my oath any seaman who didn’t devote himself to the Bride’s cause felt the sting of a rattan cane across the shoulders. Even Thomson stowed his nets and dredges to speed our voyage, and voiced nary a complaint.

Aye, Sirs. I did try to warn my mates about the beast. With every breath I could spare. But they had none of it. Jack Nastyface, they called me. Soon even the other men in my mess could barely stand to take meals with me.

Their dislike for me grew daily, as did my dread of what awaited at our destination. Something far worse than a ship of rogues, I feared. Night after night, my dreams took me to a cold abyss. A slumbering presence lurked in those depths. The darkness echoed with chants in a language I could not understand, nor could any man, for I sensed it was somehow older than the sea itself.

On evenings when the sea was calm and the sun a smear of orange on the horizon, the captain escorted the Bride along the deck, tentacle in arm. She even carried a parasol the crew had made. For they saw her as a lady of milk-white skin, you see, and it was the height of summer on the open waves. The Confidence had become a ship of madmen. No image could explain that better, so I’ve sketched it, that you might see the extent of the madness that had gripped the crew. I remember the scene well because I’d watch them from my perch in the rigging, stealing glances as I struck the yards. But sometimes I’d look down only to find the Bride gazing up at me.

These evening constitutionals I hated the most, for the Bride left a trail of filth and ooze wherever she trod. And it remained, that smell, even after we scrubbed and holystoned the deck. But by now the crew was so tangled in her spell that nobody noticed, or mayhap they didn’t care.

‘Twas during one of these strolls that, in desperation, I set upon a new tack. I crept up behind a bosun’s mate and stuck my fingers in his ears, hoping to free him from her charms so he’d see the beast as I saw her. But it did no good. Her spell was not so easily broken. He responded with his starter, and so I got the cane—and worse—for my trouble. The Bride had seen me, and my attempt to put the lie to her disguise would not stand with her.

The captain jabbed a finger at me, then to the planking beneath his feet. I presented myself with all speed.

The Bride slithered close to us. It was a struggle not to befoul myself when the fullness of her putrid stink came over me. The captain leaned near to her. Her tendrils danced on the edge of his ear. Not for the first time, I wondered what he heard. He nodded, and muttered, and nodded some more. When he straightened again to glower down at me from his full height, I saw in his face no sign of the man I’d served for years.

He regarded me with cold, black eyes, more shark than man, then mustered the crew. His purpose came clear enough when the bosun’s mates stripped my shirt and seized me to the capstan bar. If the captain read the Articles and declared my guilt to the crew, I didn’t hear him.

My offence? Nothing, Sirs, and may God smite me if that isn’t the truth. I am guilty for my role in bringing the Confidence to her end, but until that last day I minded my duties. There was naught else I could do.

Twelve times the lash ate skin from my back. I couldn’t fathom the source of the bosun’s rage. He flogged me with such glee that at six lashes I cried for mercy. At ten, I begged. Another dozen might have finished me.

Phineas helped me to my hammock—he must’ve been ordered, else he wouldn’t have—both of us with unfocused eyes and unsteady gait. But ‘twas his secret alterations to the grog, not concern for me, that affected him so.

I lay there all night with the hammock pressed into my face. I didn’t sleep.

Aye. Many an hour I’ve spent wondering why she didn’t kill me straight away, and oft wishing she had. Short-handed as we were, the Confidence could not spare many crewmen if we were to reach our destination. She had other plans for us, you see. And, powerless as I was to awaken the men from their trances, I posed no threat to her.

Though I was the first, I wasn’t the only man on the Confidence to get the lash for the Bride’s amusement.

Nor was I the only one to watch the captain and the Bride together. So did Thomson. With his expedition dropped by the wayside, he had no work to occupy him, and this freed him to imagine himself on evening strolls with ladies in distress. His gaze followed the pair, envy plain on his face for all to see.

Thomson got his chance to visit with her the day after my flogging, when Captain Nares excused himself to confer with Quartermaster Pasley. Soon the two officers were embroiled in charts, headings, and the best course for laying siege to the phantom raiders. Thomson seized the opportunity. He disappeared below and quickly returned with armloads of sketches from his unused laboratory.

They stood on the main deck, lonely man and writhing beast. Did she express a ladylike admiration of his education? Whatever her act, I doubt she enjoyed that gallery of dissected sea-life. No true lady would. Yet worse for Thomson, these were the Bride’s kith and kin sliced open and catalogued.

But he smiled, and laughed, and even felt emboldened. This last I know because he laid his hand on the tendrils of her arm. I didn’t know whether to be more shocked that he would take such liberty with a hideous creature like I saw, or with a fragile and sophisticated lady as he no doubt saw.

‘Twas a hot day, and even hotter up top. I passed the pair on my way to the butt for a mug of water to quench my thirst. She had Thomson’s ear, much the way she’d whispered to the captain when she urged him to flog me. His bearing was that of a man paying the strictest attention, nodding slowly and muttering. Though my ears were improving, they still rung like church bells on Christmas, so I could not hear him. Her orb twinkled at me over his shoulder. I drained my mug with haste and got away from her.

The old man returned soon after that and sent Thomson packing. He went below with his sketches, still nodding and jabbering. I did not see him the rest of the day.

I know you are men of honour and character, Sirs, never having felt the lash yourselves, but a topman’s chores make it difficult for the wounds to heal, and the wounds turn any attempt at sleep into agony. And the dreams had long since robbed my sleep of restfulness. So I welcomed my shift on the watch that night.

I had a quid of tobacco left in my cap, and chewed all of it. It eased my pain, but not my unease. I jumped at every shadow, for fear that the Bride would come slithering out of the night and do to me what she had done to Rogers.

I longed for the soothing noises of a ship under sail at night, but these were lost to me. Yet I found I could still apprehend the familiar rhythms of our frigate. I tried to find comfort in the sway of the deck against the soles of my feet, the vibrations of the mainmast against my fingertips as cables sang through the blocks. But a new rhythm played itself out in her rigging, too. Somewhere in the shadows overhead a cable had come loose. Occasionally, on the leeward side of larger swells, the mast shuddered as if struck by one of the yards. I’d been a topman for five years but could not place that rattling. But still my ears rung badly, and so I blamed my confusion on that. Elsewise, I reckoned, I’d know the problem at once.

My dreams again took me to that watery abyss when I finally managed sleep after the watch. The chanting had reached a frenzy, as if that ageless slumber were coming to an end.

My mates woke me when they jostled my hammock in their haste for the main deck. I wondered aloud at the commotion. But none would answer me, so I followed.

Captain Nares, the officers, and the Bride ringed the mainmast. Most of the crew was there, too. All craned their necks upward, toward where Thomson swung purple and lifeless from the topgallant yard.

How that walrus managed to gain the topgallant I’ve no idea. I did get a closer look at his corpse than I’d have liked, for while the captain laughed, Lieutenant Prescott dispatched us topmen to lower the body. Thomson had tied a line about his neck and jumped, though he hadn’t made a proper noose. He’d died gasping. We lowered him hand-over-hand. The life of science must be good, Sirs, for his girth was considerable.

As I hung there in the rigging, straining to lower the body with dignity, I spotted a black stain upon the larboard sea. A writhing mass, like that which had produced the Bride, but thrice the size of our frigate. The wind had a sourness upon it, too, that brought gorge to my throat.

I lost my grip, nearly took a tumble. I caught myself but let Thomson go. I’d no time to shout a warning to the others, so they lost their grips on old Thomson, too, and he plummeted to the deck.

I scrambled down. The captain seethed. He opened his mouth, no doubt to order another flogging, when Lieutenant Prescott shouted something. From his bearing and the way he pointed, I gathered it was, “Ship ahoy!”

Captain Nares gazed through his bring-’em-near at the blotch on the sea. The Bride murmured in his ear. I didn’t need to hear him to know what came next:

“All hands to stations!” The Confidence made straight for that churning mass.

We had reached the Bride’s destination.

Of course there were no ships on the horizon, but men bolted for their stations as though the captain was Nelson and our destination Cape Trafalgar. The crew lowered the boats to clear the deck, gathered their axes and pikes, and readied the twelve-pounders to fire on our invisible foe.

Where I saw tentacles and rot, they saw a brigantine peopled with rogues and murderers. A single Bride had driven this entire ship to madness. How many monsters would join her when we entered that foul nest?

The captain’s eyes were wide. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth when he snapped at Slade, another seaman, who went below. Then the captain pulled me close and bellowed in my ear. “Fetch Wythe!” No doubt he wanted the surgeon on hand to attend the Bride’s husband.

But I am a coward, and I confess my guilt. This order I disobeyed, and so violated Article Twenty-Two. Instead, in my panic, I made to escape in one of the cutters now trailing behind the Confidence. I had to get away.

But the Bride saw this. She must have called out, for Prescott and a pair of deckhands surrounded me. Phineas Grue was one, his breath still strong enough to curl a man’s toes. Before I found the King’s shilling in my ale, Sirs, the whoring life had taught me few things of value, but brawling was one of these. So when he came for me I treated him to a solid crack across the jawbone for his trouble, and so violated Article Twenty-Three.

We shuddered to a stop just as I made to dive overboard. I fell, knocking my crown on the deck. A deckhand pinned my arms from behind when I tried to stand. Prescott rounded on me.

Past his shoulder I glimpsed tendrils of seaweed and filth slithering over the bow. It should have been the last sight of my life.

But just as Prescott drew his sword to skewer me, Slade handed the captain a jar of grey slime.

I knew right then that Phineas’s secret drink hadn’t been rum after all. He’d been drinking Thomson’s pickling alcohol. But with those casks locked away in the hold, he’d been forced to sip from the sample jars, mayhap replacing the remainder with bilge water as he went. Whatever he’d done, it had ruined the Bride’s trophy, for Rogers’s heart had rotted away.

She yanked the jar from Captain Nares, smashing it to the deck. Her head tipped back, back, back, and the curtain of tendrils on her face fluttered as though in a vicious gale. Seamen and officers alike dropped to the deck, clutching bloodied ears.

The Bride speared Captain Nares square in the chest with a single tentacle. Then she unravelled, and smothered his screams under a putrid mass while she tore a new trophy, still beating, from his body.

The tendrils streaming over the bow took new forms, each like the Bride herself, and started feeding on the crew. I nearly became a meal myself, and had to wrest the sword from Lieutenant Prescott to fend them off. One by one they claimed the crew’s hearts. And just as in my dreams, I sensed the chanting, sensed it not with my ears but deep in the marrow of my bones. With every heart they took, that chanting grew more feverish.

Why? I do not know, Sirs. Perhaps they meant to feed their trophies to that thing stirring in the deep, as a mother suckles a newborn.

They swarmed around us, but I couldn’t dive for a cutter, for the very sea was alive with tentacles that whipped the water into a froth. The Confidence reared back, tossing me aft. Then she smashed the waves and I tumbled fore again. A cavernous maw emerged from the sea, half again the height of the mainmast.

I glimpsed that thing no more than a blink, but I’ll not forget it. Look at my sketch, Sirs, and you’ll know why.

Merely abandoning the Confidence would not save me. I had to kill as many of these beasts as I could if I wished to make my escape. And if I died in the attempt then at least I’d have died a proper mariner’s death, and not in some monster’s gullet.

I fought my way to the hatch, my goal the forward magazine. So many vines of seaweed did I slice that I felt like an explorer hacking his way through the jungles of darkest Africa. Prescott’s sword was black with slime by the time I got below deck.

The magazine sentries had abandoned their posts, and for this I was grateful. I had no wish to cut down my own crewmates. I smashed the magazine window with the hilt of Prescott’s sword, then flung the magazine lanthorn inside.

Again I’m guilty, Sirs, for I thus violated Article Twenty-Five and set fire to the magazine, and so did deliberate harm to a ship of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.

I dashed back to the deck with all haste as the Confidence shuddered under the weight of the thing that now consumed her up to the foremast. Tentacles lined with suckers, stingers, and hooks flailed at me as I made for the taffrail. They grasped my ankles and my wrist, but I’d not be here now had they gained my sword-arm, too.

The magazine blew before I could dive overboard, and the Confidence‘s bow erupted in smoke and fire.

The blast hurled me into the sea, battered and bleeding. Bits of stinking wrack and charred timber rained upon me while I gained the nearest cutter. I released the boat and started rowing.

I watched her sink, Sirs. The smoking ruins of the Confidence slid into the sea, ferrying the remains of that giant beast back to the depths. I rowed long after she disappeared beneath the waves, paying no mind to the lash wounds upon my back, so desperate was I to put the horizon between me and the last resting place of the Confidence.

Little crumbs of sargassum, debris from the explosion, swirled around the oars as I rowed. But they stayed abreast of the cutter even when the only sign of our frigate was a distant smear of black smoke on the blue sky, well outside the range of the blast. The sea behind the cutter turned green, then black, as more seaweed collected in my wake. And it kept pace with me, Sirs, no matter how hard I rowed.

I collapsed from exhaustion near sunset, and remember nothing more until I awoke aboard the Vigilant.

I tried to tell my tale, but the Vigilant‘s surgeon deemed me feverish, so he plied me with sleeping draughts as Wythe had done. Even so, I found no rest. Closing my eyes put me back in the abyss where still it echoed with that damnable chanting.

Though I had no fever, I feigned delirium when the surgeon made to move me. I could not bear to go up top, out of fear I’d find a message writ upon the waters. Only when we reached Portsmouth did I venture outside. And it was there, just as I knew it would be: a ribbon of black ooze stretching from the harbour to across the sea.

So I beg you, Sirs, and pray you will not deafen your ears to me. She lurks even now in the uncharted depths and will rise again when she has healed.

I, Samuel Frobisher, do hereby swear that events upon the Confidence transpired as I have stated.

God save the King.