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Too late did Smith remember the Colt revolver strapped to his side. By the time he’d freed it from the holster, she had ripped two bars from their heavy bolts, snapping the reinforced boards “as easily as a man snaps a toothpick,” the same two bars directly beneath Wilson’s lifeless body; his arm was free finally, but too late, and he tumbled into that noisome void to the hold below, where her companion, roused by the bedlam and, no doubt, the acrid smell of fresh blood, waited for him.
Smith fired wildly as she, hanging by one claw, tore out two more bars with the other. Burns could not say if any of the shots found their target; he turned and ran. The boards shuddered beneath his feet. The passage reverberated with the roar of gunfire and Smith’s hysterical screams. As Burns scampered up the narrow stairs to the quarterdeck, the gunfire abruptly ended: Either Smith had run out of ammunition or she had heaved herself through the hole, and Smith, like Wilson, was a denizen of the living world no more.
In any case, when the Feronia was boarded by Union forces after her grounding, what was left of Smith could have fit, in Varner’s words, “into a gu
At this point in his grim narration Varner paused. All color had drained from his countenance, and his body shook beneath the sheets. Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years. He had begged Warthrop not to make him recall those events he could not forget, for some recollections, as I myself know all too well, remain fresh in the mind whole decades after they are born.
Yet when he fell silent, Warthrop did not press him to go on. Perhaps he understood-as I have come to, much to my regret-that once we set forth upon certain lanes of our memory, there is no turning aside or doubling back. They must be traversed unto their bitter terminuses. It is that same compulsion that forces us to look at the terrible accident or stare with shameful curiosity at the pitiful victim in a circus sideshow. The memories of those dreadful final days aboard the doomed Feronia possessed her captain; he did not possess them.
“We stole below, brought up all the food and water we could muster, and sealed off the lower decks,” the old man gasped finally. “Posted armed guards around the clock. The weather turned in our favor; with a leeward wind and fair skies, we made good time. The days were quiet, but ‘twas an eerie peace, a deceitful calm, for once the sun sank below the foredeck, the pounding began and that infernal, incessant screeching. We could hear them, you see, testing the very boards beneath our feet, knocking and scraping and probing as they searched for weaknesses in the wood. The men drew lots for the night watch, but the wi
At first the captain’s decision seemed wise, for the enforced truce, like the beneficent weather, held. For a week, then two, until the morning of the forty-first day at sea, when the Bermuda archipelago was sighted to the north. The winds, which had for days blown steadily from the east, abruptly shifted. The southern sky grew as black as coal, and the seas rose a foot in the next hour, then two feet, then four as the sun disappeared behind a shroud of swift-moving clouds; the Feronia pitched in the grip of the roiling sea while waves twenty feet high crashed over the rails. The wind began to gust to fifty knots, forcing the crew to lower the sails lest they be ripped from the masts. The rain fell in drenching sheets, a pitiless rain driven by the remorseless gale. For hours the men huddled on deck, exposed to the elements, while the man-eating beasts below stayed warm and dry, an irony not lost on the men, and the debate was born anew. Already a man had nearly been washed to sea by a breaching wave. With each passing hour the storm strengthened; lightning popped and spat around the mainmast; wind drove the rain sideways in blinding sheets, making even the smallest step an exercise fraught with peril; and, as the day aged and the temperature plummeted, there was the danger of hypothermia. All watches and patrols were abandoned. As night fell the crew of the Feronia huddled in a single mass of shivering humanity on the quarterdeck, their fear of nature’s wrath outweighed by their fear of her insatiable progeny.
“I know not who spied it first,” confessed Varner. “Our lamps would not stay lit; the lightning was the only respite we had from the storm’s black grip. ‘Something’s washed onto the deck!’ someone cried. We waited all of us with bated breath for the next stroke of lightning, but saw nothing when it came, just shadows stark and a pall of rain. A second flash, then a third, and someone else shouted, ‘There, see it there? By the mizzenmast!’ They raised their rifles, but I ordered them down-what but the luckiest shot could hit the mark in that maelstrom? In truth I swear to you, I did not think these leaping shadows could be the beasts that roamed below. The man had seen it come over the rail, and what successful passage could one of those things have made up the slick sides of the Feronia’s hull in a wind fifty knots or more? More than likely it was a fish washed from the bowels of the briny deep, a shark or a sailfish. It was impossible.”
“No,” said Warthrop quietly. “It is not.” He was leaning against the wall beside the headboard, arms folded across his chest, chin down, eyes closed, as he listened. I recalled his warning in the cemetery: Sharp eyes now, Will Henry. They are accomplished climbers.
“Through a porthole most likely,” ventured Varner. “And then up the side of the ship-but that is only my guess. I had seen a victim’s skull in Benin with a crescent-shaped pattern of holes where their nails had broken through the bone; as long as a sloth’s they are, Warthrop, and as hard as tungsten steel. Hard to believe now-impossible then-but up the side of the Feronia he must have climbed, punching hand-holds as he came, though why he chose to abandon shelter when the risk was greatest I do not know.”
“Perhaps hunger drove him forth,” said the doctor. “Though I doubt it. Fear, perhaps, either of those meteorological conditions utterly foreign to him… or, more likely, fear of his mate. They have that much in common with us: In moments of extreme stress, they have been known to turn upon each other.”
“Not that night, Warthrop,” groaned Varner. “That night he chose easier victims. Whether hunger or fear compelled him to strike, strike he did, quicker than the lightning itself, leaping forty feet from the deck below, landing square in our midst, and in the hellish racket that ensued-the screams and shouts of my startled crew, the snarls and roars of the attacking beast, the explosions on all sides of rifles and small arms, and the howl of the wind, the crash of the waves, the roar of the thunder-from that bloody bedlam I was shoved down the stairs and dragged to the door of my cabin.”
It was the navigator, Burns, the sole survivor of the first attack, who hurled the captain into his quarters and slammed the door, while the battle raged on above them. The captain, still befuddled and weak from his bout of tropic fever, collapsed upon the floor as Burns ripped the heavy wardrobe from the wall and heaved it against the door as a barricade. He returned to the captain’s side, whereupon, if he was expecting any thanks for his cool thinking and quick actions under fire, he was summarily disabused. The captain roundly cursed and berated him. He had lost his pistol in the forced retreat, and now they were trapped like rats- a bit drier than the poor rats above, but trapped nevertheless. Burns endured the abuse stoically and without remark, dragging his commander to the bedside and cautioning him to remain rooted to the spot. From this position they had a clear shot at the door and were hidden from sight should anything look through the windows behind the bed.