Artwork © 2004 John Picacio

Ellis dreamt that night of the forest. He was treading through it in darkness, subtly aware of the conifers and the heather. His feet knew this territory well and he moved quickly, ignoring the sounds of the wildlife: the nightjar, the siskins, the snipes. He was trying to find something, or someone, but no matter how close he felt he was to capturing his quarry, some caprice of the dream would send it far away again. It made a creaking sound, this subject he tracked. Like old leather being twisted against itself, or of floorboards under continual stress. Now and again he thought he caught a glimpse of part of it through the crenellations of the ferns, or the splintered bole of a tree felled by lightning. But before his mind could apply itself to finishing off the picture, the scenery had moved and he was as blind as before.

He woke up, hungry, frustrated and afraid. It was that soft, uncertain time of morning when night and day argue over their own borders. Pale light hung in the sky like something too damp to ignite properly. Although it was late June, summer had failed to establish itself. The days were often a wash out, the nights cold enough for woollens. He sat trembling on the edge of his bed, blankets curled around his shoulders. The shower awaited him like torture. There had been no hot water in his flat for six days. At least after a cold wash his clothes felt so much warmer on his body. The colder you got, the less you felt it. The dead don’t shiver.

Through a window looking out on to the communal garden, he watched as a female blackbird chirped incessantly, playing a wild hopscotch upon the cracked flagstones of the porch, pausing a moment to shit what looked like the kind of electric white found only on artists’ palettes. He had never felt easy around birds since he read about how closely related they were to dinosaurs. He felt uncomfortable about their lack of weight, their thin, hollow bones. He disliked the way they moved so nervously, so spastically. How cold and alien their eyes. They seemed propelled by nothing more than instinct, and that vexed him, in a vague way that made him feel queasy.

His unease followed him to the kitchen where, despite his hunger, he was unable to eat one spoonful of the cereal he prepared for himself. Barely a sip of coffee made it past his lips without causing him to retch. He couldn’t remember the last meal he had consumed, yet he must have eaten within the last few days. Had he not, he wouldn’t have had the strength to turn the taps in the bathroom. He dressed without thinking, grateful for a job that didn’t demand a suit and tie. Then he went out, trying to avoid the bookcases lining the walls as he approached the door. But, as always, he had to look. The narrow space between them forced him to leave his flat sideways. The spines demanded his attention.

Birds of the Welsh Coast, The Red Kite in Wales, The Raptors of Europe and the Middle East, Birding in Snohomish County, Skuas and Jaegers, Chickadees, Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers.

There were so many books. He felt ill thinking how many he had, how much money he had spent on them. On the drive to work he wondered again if he might not be mad. That was the thing about insanity. You didn’t notice it yourself, only the people closest to you grew aware. But there was nobody who shared his life from day to day. What did being mad mean? Storing your own faeces? Posting letters to people long dead? Collecting books about birds when they scared you to the core? But you had to know about them, you had to have the knowledge. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.

At the gas works, he checked in with Reynolds, the site foreman, and Hinchcliff, the independent chemist who was to be attached to the demolition crew for as long as it took for the defunct purifying tanks to be dismantled. Ellis pulled on his overalls and checked the air line on his breathing apparatus. It was hot work, and while he was standing in the reinforced concrete tanks removing the spent iron oxide, he was grateful that summer was in abeyance. Hinchcliff had explained at the outset that six thousand tonnes of toxic waste had once filled these tanks – now transported to a secret, secure landfill site in north Wales – and the residue they were cleaning away might contain upwards of eight per cent cyanide.

At times within his mask, his breath amplified and alien to him, he imagined pulling off his protective headgear and sucking in a single, pure lungful of death.

*

—Death is painless, she said.

—Don’t talk wet, I said. —I seen them pictures of German tanks on fire, and the driver trying to get out, but his foot was stuck, or shot off or melted into the metal or whatever. He wasn’t whistling when he went, I can tell you.

—Well, I think it’s painless. The actual moment of it. Maybe not the lead up, but the moment you bow out? The body sheds all of its endorphins. Massive headrush. Absolute pleasure.

I laughed. She had this way of talking sometimes that was like poetry. Funny poetry. She had a killer line, Karen. It didn’t work with everyone, but she hit my spot and that was all I was bothered about.

She said —You never see birds dead, do you?

—Tell my mum that, next time she nips into the village for a chicken.

She rolled her eyes, thumped me. She was trying to get the ringpull off a can of cider but it was rusted or something, and wouldn’t budge. —I don’t mean like that. I mean you never see birds lying about on the road, dead.

—I suppose you’re right, I said. I was getting bored of this talk. I wanted some of that cider in me before I had to get back home for tea. The gorge rose up around us like a big green throat. I loved it down here. It was only just behind the row of shops on the main street in Lymm village, but it could have been some Amazonian ravine. It had everything, this place. Cool shadows. A heron that came to fish in the weir. Secrecy. You never had any grown-ups come down this way, either because it was quicker to take the village path, or they were scared of us yoofs, or they didn’t even know it was here, I don’t know. I snatched the can off her and used my penknife to ease the ringpull off. I had a big drink and passed it back, offering her a huge belch to accompany the ceremony. Karen drank too, tilting her head way back. Her shape changed. I found myself staring at her.

She said — Can you smell me? I’m bleeding.

*

Ellis did not join the others for a drink after the shift was completed. He drove through the centre of Warrington, trying to avoid the construction crews that were tearing through the heart of the town, slotting new department stores into the gaps left by failed developments. It all seemed like an affront to the faces of the old shops that clung jealously to the main streets. There was always a new generation of town planner, no doubt living far away from the place being redesigned, eager to leave a mark in history. Ellis was happy to leave it behind, but even though he pushed the Jeep hard until the soulless urban spread became rural patchwork, he did not find himself relaxing. So much green was a shock to him, even though he made this journey every weekend. It was as pervasive, as smothering as the threat of poison gas. But he could not understand how staying at home in his cloying flat could be any better for him. He turned on some loud music, but nothing could reclaim him from the slow panic filling his chest. It became so bad he had to pull over shortly after he passed the Ruthin signpost on the A494. His breath seemed to fail in his chest; he could not expel it properly. He felt as though he were recycling something old and stale, that any hope he had for a fresh start was stillborn.

Crumpled in his pocket, the letter from Pippa postmarked a few days previously helped him to refocus. Cav reckons he saw a lynx coming down across the scarp near the caravan late last night. He’d had a few though. Ha ha. The only lynx he’s seen lately is in the can he sprays his armpits with.

There had been several lynx sightings reported in the Clocaenog forest over the years. It was also one of the last bastions of the red squirrel. There were other animals too that benefited from the area, forty square miles or so of natural, native woodland. Deer, black grouse, pine martins, Welsh mountain ponies, polecats. Others that he could not bring himself to think about. But having begun a list that he daren’t finish drew the fear from the shadows into the real meat of him. It lay against his skin like sweat. He put the letter back in his pocket and felt his hunger deepen. He crutinized his eyes in the rear view mirror while his hands played against the corrugation of his ribs. His breathing steadied. The sky over Wales was bruising, as if siphoning the resentment from the earth and describing its colour. A flurry of birds blurred the edge of his vision and were gone before he’d had chance to identify them. He started the engine and got back on the road. His hunger was so keen it wouldn’t allow him to envisage any kind of meal that might assuage it.

*

The caravan was empty when he arrived, just under half an hour later. Pippa and Cavan must have gone to the local pub, a mile or so further along the main road. He felt slighted, as if his arrival was nothing for them to get worked up about. Maybe it wasn’t. But they were the nearest he had to friends and it pricked him that they hadn’t waited; they could all be sinking pints now. What did they want to talk about that was so important it couldn’t wait? He thought about catching them up, but he didn’t want to be seen behaving like an eager puppy. He could give as good as he got, they’d see.

Quickly, he unpacked – he hadn’t brought much, just a change of clothes and a couple of books, his old Nikon, a long lens and some fast film, a pair of binoculars – and checked the small cupboards, but every tin he picked up made his stomach roll. He drank some water and paused, bent over the sink, waiting for it to come back with interest, but this time it didn’t. He washed his face, and tried to swab the angry red nubs on his shoulder blades with cotton balls soaked in witch hazel; he would have to have a word with Reynolds about the ill-fitting protective gear they were issued with. He switched on the radio and settled down with one of the guide books from his holdall.

Ellis saw straight away, from the uneven blocking of its pages, that the book had been damaged. He turned to the section that had been torn out, a few pages between the Orioles and the Corvidae. It was not immediately clear from the contents list which birds had been removed; only a general heading – Family and Species Descriptions – was provided. He had to trawl through the weighty index before he spotted the relevant page numbers. And then he closed the book carefully, almost reverentially, and placed it back in his bag, deep enough so that he could not see its cover.

Someone was trying to tell him something. He thought about who might have had access to his bag, his books, but nobody ever visited him at his flat. He had ignored the opportunities to stop at service stations along the way; he shied away from hitchhikers. He stared at the bag as if it alone was responsible for the vandalism. He would mention it to Cavan and Pip when he saw them; they were the only ones who knew of his passion, and his fear. Yet even as he gave credence to his suspicion, he was questioning it. They respected his love of books, and shared it to some extent. He had seen them handling volumes in the secondhand bookshops they occasionally visited, and approved of the care they displayed. Cavan had even warmed up a brand new hardback by gently opening the book at various points to prevent the kind of immediate stresses that can damage the spine.

Ellis tried to read about the grasshopper warbler but hunger worked on the words, sucking them back into the cream paper. Music was of some comfort now as he lay back on his bunk, but he found before too long that it distracted him as he strained for the sound of his friends returning. He turned the radio down to a level where there was really no point in leaving it on, but it meant the illusion of company remained. Wildlife inched around the caravan, its sound as natural as weather: the miniature crash of mammals in bushes, things taking flight, or coming home to roost. Something cried out, as he trembled at sleep’s door. He tried to identify it but it was beyond him. For a dreadful second before he sank, he thought its author must be human. The screams went with him, lifting out of the confusion to find a clarity in the night of his own mind. Fear puddled out of Ellis. He was weak. The caravan had melted away and he was in a clearing with trees rearing up before him as if startled. He felt light, weightless. The pain in his shoulder blades was gone, he felt free and easy there, somehow disburdened; his hunger had been sated. The screams were coming from his own throat, a dry, desperate sound that seemed to make the uppermost leaves shiver. Something lay ahead of him, beyond that line of trees. Something waited.

*

Ellis showered, wincing as he knocked his sore back against the walls of the tiny plastic cubicle. He wondered if his anger at not being woken by his friends when they had returned from the pub was misplaced. Was it fair that he should react to them for what, on their part, must have been an act of charity? God knew he needed his sleep. But he craved some company too. Already the weekend seemed chewed away. Tomorrow he would have to return to Warrington and the skeleton of the gas works. Nevertheless, pride would not allow him to go to them now. He crashed around the kitchen preparing a phantom breakfast, and noisily exited. He wondered if Pippa and Cavan were fucking, and why it didn’t bother him if they were. Hunger prevented him from remembering if he and Pip had ever been involved – he dimly recalled a long embrace, hair in his face, a heartbeat within her warm breast filling his hands – but it might have been several lifetimes ago. A different woman, even.

Good luck to them, he thought, glancing once at the curtained window of the bedroom. This weekend was about fauna, not fornication. He laughed bitterly, a blast of air through gritted teeth, and plunged into the forest.

*

The light changed down here. It became green. I couldn’t back that kind of claim up in the physics lab at school, but I swear that was how it looked to me. It was dappled light, and it lay around your feet like coins furred with verdigris. The air was different too. It stuck in your chest, but in a good way. It was as if it were heavier air, cleaner, and your lungs didn’t want to give it up. The spaces beneath the trees seemed to fizz with darkness; you could see it moving around, and I was sure that if the trees were to suddenly leap away, exposing it all to hard sunshine, it would remain, squat and earthy, like the ghost of a giant toad.

The red in the green, the red against the milky square of Karen’s exposed thigh, was some contrast.

— Fucking hell, I said. — Doesn’t it hurt?

— No, she replied. — Some people get period pains but I’ve had none of that.

— What does it feel like? Is it like having a nose bleed? Do you feel it trickling out of you?

— Don’t be a mentoid. There’s hardly any flow. Enough for a dessertspoon, my mum says.

— Mmm, yum. Raspberry Angel Delight. So there’s no danger you’ll bleed to death?

— The worst case scenario is that I’ll leave a tammy up there, forget it and die from TSS.

— TSS?

— Toxic Shock Syndrome. Not a nice way to go.

— Well no, but, as you said, death’s a top pastime.

— I didn’t say that. I don’t have a death wish.

— Me and you, suicide pact? What do you say?

— I say have some Angel Delight.

And so on. We spent all summer like this, every summer I can remember, ribbing and teasing and flirting, although we didn’t know it, couldn’t have put that word to it at the time. But that day was different. Suddenly I was aware of Karen as being someone with an inside as well as an outside. She was a girl-shaped blood bag, barely contained. Walking home for tea after that weird, green-red evening, I couldn’t pass anybody by without thinking of them as taut balloons, ready to explode. Something had turned, maybe just the world, maybe some switch in my mind that had never been touched before, but things were irrevocably new now, and I couldn’t understand why.

That night, I thought of Karen, the way she had filled out as she stretched, her body dipping and curving. I thought too of that slick of blood on her thigh, her fingers smearing it to show me how dense it was, and the way her knickers were eased to one side, the material tight against her bottom. I ejaculated in my sleep – my first wet dream – and I woke to feel my own thighs sticky and warm, and things, I felt, were set now. My life had been propelled in one direction. One only. There was to be no divergence. No turning back.

*

He lost all sense of who he was after a while. He kept thinking about his name, Ryan Ellis, how ridiculous it sounded the more he repeated it to himself. The sun’s intensity was lost beneath the tightly meshed canopy. It might have started raining; it would be hours before any of the water broke through. He felt protected. He felt utterly at home. In this bubble he slowly became more than he believed he was, an incremental adding or improvement. Doing physical activity in such raw surroundings pumped you full of hormones. It created a sense of the self as immortal. He felt he could achieve anything. It was seductive to deem this euphoria a result of the fresh air, or the overload of natural green, or the plain, animal sounds concerned with territory or sex. He felt a part of it, his reptilian brain itching with lost or distant connections. He was a member of that natural order, one of billions of everyday miracles. The knowledge that his existence was a fluke, the odds stacked heavily against him, was an inspiring and exhilarating epiphany. He mattered, in his own small way, and what he brought to the proceedings was as relevant as that from anybody else. He was real, and his name was something like rya nellis.

The trees seemed to solidify ahead, yet whenever he reached a point where they must crowd him out, there was the same strange sense of space. A visual anomaly, he thought, but once he’d witnessed it, it was difficult to shake off quite so easily. The ground underfoot was becoming more spongy. He guessed there must be some kind of stream, or that the water table passed close to the surface here. Beyond that thick mesh of shrubs and branches, Ellis thought he saw movement. It was desperate, trapped movement, the spasm of something that knows death might be the only release it will see. He wondered if a deer had been caught in a poacher’s trap, perhaps, or a person, shocked to silence by the pain and the outrage. He fought through the weave but the clearing beyond it moved only with occasional ferns or tall grasses. Dizziness piled through his head, as if someone were bending his mind. He saw a spiral of patterns: the trees, the star-shaped tunnel of sky above them, the ground as it met him coming the other way. He tried to get up but the vertigo relocated itself each time. After three attempts he gave up and let himself be cradled by the earth. The cool, cushioning moss and the comfort of a deep blue sky fringed with cloud helped to right his thoughts. He thought of the hide at Foel Frech where he had observed birds in the past. He had seen an owl take a grasshopper warbler in mid-air there last December. He remembered the sudden release of the smaller bird’s cloaca as the talons raked through its body. Blood was a black rip in the silver sky. It had dropped like something solid, and he had exited the hide, convinced the blood had frozen as it fell to the ground. He had failed to find the blood, but had searched for it until the light diminished and the other birdwatchers had gone home. He found something else that night, though. He was about to give up, feeling foolish at his mad conviction, and had turned at just the moment that the moon eased out from behind a bank of high cloud.

Something had gleamed.

He closed his eyes now, and remembered the fragility, the lightness of the skull. It was like holding folded paper, like holding nothing at all. Every shred of flesh had been picked clean from the boss, the orbits, the maxilla: the bird grinned at him, the shadows of its ghost eyes so black it was if the memory of blood and the method of killing was still fresh within it. The beak, the sharpness of it, the colour of ash, emerging from the bone like a creeping stain. It was its own whetstone. The shredding of bodies, the atrocities it had committed. How many? So much blood had gushed through those calcium chambers that the bone itself was tinged mahogany.

He still had it, that skull, secreted away in a little wooden box at the back of a drawer. Sometimes at night, when loneliness curled itself around his shoulders, he took it out of its box and inhaled whatever breath lingered in the fossae of its nasal cavities. He had never believed that something so dead could smell so alive.

*

He caught sight of his eyes in the mirror when he returned. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but it was late, it was dark all over the sky, no pallid edges to suggest that the evening had just left or that dawn was close. For a moment he believed his eyes contained some inner luminescence, as if the humours of his eye had ignited like paraffin. They reflected orange; he resembled something startled, something unnatural. An image came to him, of his body pushed into clothes and then into a metal box. Keys turning, an engine leaping into life. At the end of that routine was another called work. Another set of clothes. Another metal box. The sweat and steam and stink of decayed tanks. Chemical salt extruding through concrete. The heat of it through his protective suit. It all seemed a dream, an illusion. He looked down at his naked body, bathed in a diffuse glow from the moon. His life was so many layers of the same thing but at this moment, his blood up, he couldn’t ecognize who he was or what he did. There didn’t seem to be any room for ritual. Instinct crowded him like a smell you couldn’t escape from. All he wanted to do was run through the tall grass and feel the cold mud suck at his feet. He sensed the warm bodies in the undergrowth frozen at his approach, watching him go by with perfectly round eyes, perfectly black. Heartbeats filled the air like rain.

He slept hard and deep and wakened to a light drizzle. He moved through it to the Jeep, feeling it misting his skin. He sat in the driver’s seat waiting for knowledge. Eventually it came to him and he turned the key, pushed the gearstick to D.

He didn’t remember the journey back. Too often his eyes strayed to the rearview mirror; the forest filled it all the way home.

*

In the gorge. She showed me how dark the blood was as she poured it from the warm body.

— Venal blood, she said. It’s almost the colour of chocolate.

The wood pigeon had been trapped in the crook of a tree, its mangled foot – injured in some previous accident – stuck fast in the fork of a branch. The harder the bird fought to get away, the more it twisted its leg into the crevice. By the time we got to it, following the sounds of flapping, the strangled sob that sounded almost human, it had broken the leg so badly that it was close to wrenching it off completely. A nictitating membrane was a momentary film of milk across the brilliant black bead of its eye. Nothing could be read in that speck. It looked the same alive as it would dead. Black, bleak code filing through the lens one way or the other.

Karen gently pulled the bird free and, holding it upside down, threaded its thin neck through her fingers, pulled and twisted it away from her body. The sound of bones powdering drew my skin into pimples. She coughed and spat, wiped her lips, the dead bird hanging limp from her fingers like a thin bag. Her eyes were bright, filled with a fluke light that had snaked its way through the green and sat fatly in her eyes.

I slept that night and the wood pigeon came back to life, spreading its wings. The pattern of Karen’s irises was woven into the soft grey span. The bird, stretching out against the sky, was more like Karen than its own species. It opened its beak to sing and blood drizzled from it, freezing in the air like a necklace of rubies that has been snapped.

I found myself back on New Road and I couldn’t remember how I had got there. Karen had kissed me. Her tongue had moved against my own, her eyes open, locked with mine. We didn’t hold each other. The bird hung between us, emptying itself on to my shoes. My hands were similarly useless, growing cold as she moved her face into me. I tasted blood in her mouth. I felt the dark at the very centre of her eyes seeping out to join with the shadows of the gorge.

I remember walking home, having to look back every few steps because I was sure the depths of the gorge were somehow rising, plateauing, sweeping into the streets to pursue me. When I got back I avoided the tea that had been laid out for me and went straight up to the bathroom. I vomited about a gallon of what looked like mulligatawny soup into the toilet. The smell and taste of copper was all over the place. She was in my mouth, she was in the crevices of my fingerprints though I couldn’t remember touching her. The flutter of her heart in her breast. The fragility of her bones. She unfolded like a flower, like a chick fighting against the membrane of an egg.

The colours around me were dull, despite the sunshine. Life existed in the shadows. Everything you needed was there. True meaning was in the word undergrowth. It was no coincidence.

Her finger in the bird’s crop. The elegance of something without life to prop it up.

*

The heat was so great that small puddles of sweat were forming at the base of his goggles. He had not eaten for so long he felt he was in danger of forgetting how to. His hands held the tools that scraped at the walls of the redundant gas chambers and he could almost believe that the work would never be done, that his hands would never be turned to any other task. His landscapes were filled with tars, nitrates, sludges and phenolics. He lived in toxicity. An hour later and he was pulled away from the face by Hinchcliff, who wanted to give him a spot check. He traipsed back through the rubble, the ceramic retort fragments, the clinker and scurf, broken bricks and ash. Hinchcliff tested his blood and his breathing. They talked about his diet and his exercise regime. Ellis lied steadily. At the end of the shift he bundled his clothes into the sealed laundry skip and took a hot shower. Hinchcliff waved a sensor over him in the changing rooms and he was given a green pass. The day was over. Ellis felt as though he were wearing contact lenses fashioned from lead. He drifted home and the colours of his work followed him down into sleep. Lampblack. The glitter of ash. Spent lime was known as blue billy. Cyanide trembled in the waste as Prussian blue.

The green of Slitten Gorge moved like scarves of weed caught in deep current. Sometimes its colour grew so concentrated that it was indivisible from black. You could survive a nuclear winter down here, she said. This is a place forgotten by time. The mapmakers keep missing it. Die here and your body would turn to dust before you were ever found.

Her thighs in his hands had shivered as he lowered his face to her cunt. She blooded him. Her hands fluttered at the apex of his shoulder blades, the bird turning in her fingers; he felt its dead weight flop against his back. He thought she was losing control, but she was performing magic.

Faces grew out of those forbidden colours. Hard-bitten profiles of his grandfather. He unbuttoned his shirt and swept it open; his skin came away with it. His lungs glowed in the pit of his chest, the pleural cavity thickened by plaques. His grandfather had contracted misothelioma, a rare, insidious cancer, the result of a decade of unprotected demolition. Ellis had seen photographs of him dismantling a factory during a blizzard, but the snow had been black asbestos.

Wanna bang on this? his grandfather had asked him, lying in his hospital bed, pulling off his oxygen mask and offering it to him. The mask had been stippled with bloody sputum. His breath came and went in staggered clouts, like an assault.

He had not seen her again after the end of that sultry, fractious day. He remembered a storm had climbed the sky that night as he lay in bed with his metallic flavours and erased the heat from the land. He didn’t know where she lived, but even if he had he wouldn’t have gone knocking. He understood that there were reasons, there were patterns. The storm might well have swept her away too. He had nothing tangible of hers to fasten her to reality. As the years went by, he started to question his reading of those events, and of the gorge itself.

An instinctive twitch of the steering wheel. He sent the Jeep on to Kingsway. At the swing bridge over the Manchester Ship Canal he turned left and followed the road into Thelwall. Memory scraped at the walls of his mind, trying to make itself known. He remembered these streets, although he hadn’t set foot on them for the best part of two decades. They had cadged drinks off the locals in Grappenhall village. They fished for perch in the Bridgewater canal. They sucked and blew on mouthfuls of hot, greasy chips from the fish bar by the Dog and Dart. Summer nights when the gorge waited for him and the sky contained a pale, soft grain that prevented complete darkness. The sodium lamps bleached the street of colour. Her lips were grey when he kissed her. It’s all right, because so are mine. She tasted of red and green. He dreamed of flight after she left his life.

He parked the Jeep outside the stationer’s at the point where the road sweeps left into Lymm village. Behind the rank of shops – the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, a hair salon, an estate agent – the land forgot how to be level and plunged into black. People had been hurt here over the years. The sound of the weir was a subdued roar. Ellis gathered himself at the rails. He felt his hair move although there was no breeze. It felt as though the gorge was sucking his flavour into its depths, tasting him, remembering him after so long away.

He thought of Clocaenog, and the way its trees seemed compressed. Running through them, he had never tripped or jarred a shoulder against a trunk. He seemed to know their patterns, he understood the physicality of the forest. What he couldn’t work out was why he was running, or what he was running from. He felt the same paradox here; he knew Slitten Gorge as intimately as he knew himself yet he had not been as close as this in twenty years. He had loved this place, but associated it with decay, and an end to things.

He knew he would slip through the gateway and descend those treacherous stone steps furred with moss and moisture, as if they were sweating at their proximity to the place. He gripped the rails more tightly, looking down into the area where he had once observed a heron frozen as it waited for something to swim past. And then he was sinking into the strata of greys and blues and greens, his hands still clenched as if in an attempt to fool himself into thinking he was still at street level.

Someone else had appropriated this sacred space. Beer bottles and polystyrene cartons littered the floor; graffiti referred to Helen smoking cocks, and doing anybody who happened to be here next Monday night. Ellis looked around for something that might bolt him to a sultry evening in 1987, but only the colours remained. He felt the cool air move in his chest and wondered if his grandfather might have benefited from some time down here.

There was a shock of movement in one of the trees. Ellis turned to see a hand snatched up, or snatch itself up, into the higher branches; the leaves in its wake glistened with a colour darker than the shadows within which they shivered. He watched the tree, his heart beating hard, unsure of what he had just witnessed. Kids larking about. Some bruised fibre of memory. He didn’t know. He called out, but nothing responded.

He walked deeper, until the shadow of the slitting mill rose out of the darkness. The sun struggled to illuminate it, the dark ivy and moss growing on its stone absorbing the light. Nails had been produced here, and then the cutting of steel bands for the cooperage in Thelwall during Victorian times. The windows were scarred with dust that no amount of polishing could now hope to remove.

Hunks of Wilmslow sandstone peeked out from the greenery. Ellis pressed himself back against some; it was cold against his palms. She had led him into that place and scratched the end of a nail, a six-inch piece of iron perhaps as old as the village itself, into the hard curves of his shoulder blades.

If you had wings, she said, this is where they’d be.

She withdrew his prick and he felt it both trying to shrivel in the cold and thicken in her tight grasp. He felt his own blood trace lines across his back.

I want to show you blood that isn’t dark. I want to show you blood so bright that it lights up a room.

She had leaned close to him, her thighs bracketing his own. The nail in her fist traced a line along his throat. Fear had him at the point of vomiting, but before he could protest, she slid his penis inside her. Her eyes seemed to reduce somehow, as if she had a contrast button that had been turned right down. She fucked him hard and fast, hard enough that he thought she was going to damage him if he slipped out. Her movements were so violent that he missed the winding up of his orgasm. He was climaxing almost without realising. He cried out and she yelled his name.

Spread your wings, she said, and buried the nail into the side of her own neck.

*

Time jagged around like vicious pieces of broken glass. It was too dangerous to stop and try to pick them up. Ellis was in the Jeep. He might or might not have tried to call Pip and Cavan on his mobile phone. He might or might not have charged the battery before leaving work. He might or might not even own one.

He said, ‘As Ralph Hoffmann suggested, in Birds of the Pacific States, from 1927, “One cannot have too many good bird books.”’ He said it once, maybe one hundred times. By the time the eastern shoulder of the forest was muscling up against his car, it was dark. Breathing was becoming difficult. He thought of himself tearing pages from his books, trying not to focus on the photographs of Lanius excubitor. Death was easy around him. People dropped as if they were born to it. He wished he had been able to help his grandfather to spread his wings.

He found Pip and Cavan an hour later, once the forest had settled coolly in his thoughts. His hunger was something animal in him, turning his pupils black, filling his mouth with juices. Other animals had visited this place, this shrike’s larder, but had been put off by the stink of their survival. He stood before them and flexed his shoulder muscles. Shadows leapt away from them, into the shocked heights of the trees. They were trying to reason with him, clinging on to hope. Ancient nails rammed through their wrists and ankles had become encrusted with blood and sap. Their lips were white and cracked. Ripe tongues swelled in their mouths.

I fly, he might have said. Karen’s blood was orange behind his eyes. He could smell her, like something forged in a foundry.

He reached out and tore off some wet strips of meat for his belly, even though the bodies providing it begged him, haltingly through welling throats, not to. The screaming was so close to that of his own voice, and so loud, that he was not aware until much later of what had arrived, and was amassing on the branches.

The post Slitten Gorge appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Cover Art © Scott Altmann

I.

Stars wheeling at his back, Captain Low comes on like bad weather, like something separated from Nature, a different kind of force, one driven by rum and pain and vengeance. Steel in his teeth. Blood on his hand. His own? He’s not sure. He doesn’t really care. No time to stop and think about injuries, men felled, kills made. Two weeks out of Liverpool on The Pride o’ The Mersey. The stink of gunpowder raking his nostrils, the sour taste of fear in his throat. Madness rising.

Fetter’s in his brain, scouring it out with smoke and shadow like a smithy’s iron. Jacob Fetter, the ocean’s bowel, the bottom-feeder, the shitehole. One month previous, on a rain-sodden November night, some dark harbour south of a moon they couldn’t see, north of wherever, hell most probably, Jake Fetter and his crew slithered in and butchered Captain Low’s men. All good men. All hard, mahogany men, weathertan and muscleknot, able to take their grog, maybe they’d have taken a keelhauling with barely a grunt.

Seven and thirty of us… now we are but one.

That harbour ground, that battlefield… ice chased off by hot blood, turned to brown syrup by morning. Barrowloads of sawdust wheeled in. The corpses wheeled out, some of them in pieces. Fetter had stolen every man’s tongue, and done for every eye with a wooden fid. He’d whistled a merry tune while he did it. A tune Low didn’t know, but that remained in his thoughts like one’s first encounter with death.

Low had chased Fetter’s shadows from Plymouth to Portugal, from Brest to the Bering Sea. His new crew, a ragbag of scurfy rats handpicked from the dregs of humanity, fallen from a brothel half-cut, eager for work, know his name. Know his past. He has that pull. No strong men left. So he has to invite wraiths on board his ship.

Seven and thirty of us… still we are but one.

The crew talks and he drifts among them, learning, understanding, finding out. First Mate, Mr. Gray, makes his introductions while Low tries—and fails—to avoid the noxious blasts of air that shoot from between his teeth.

“See Mr. Kidney there, Captain, with the ulcerated leg that will not heal? He won’t have it taken off. He might be on his way out but he throws himself into every battle, first man up, first man in, a red flag wrapped around those weeping sores. “Shoot me,” he cries. “Shoot me and have done.” He wants his gold from you for that leg off, see. Amputation means no pay. Anything else, death for example, would be a bonus. This man has a great debt of pain to his past. And mark my words, Captain. He’ll never fall. He’s weak, but he’ll fight till his seams part. That dog’s drenched in bad luck. His leg will rot with him still using it before he gives up the ghost.

“Mr. Tamsin next, Sir, at the quarterdeck, folding the colours. Made of tar and wood and salt. Cut him, he’ll bleed seawater. Been a brother to these waves since he were a nipper. Survived a fall into shark-infested waters, once. Big one bit him in the chest, ripped his breathers open. He was so close to death he could have touched the ragged hem of Its cloak. Came back though, somehow. Came back and now you know whenever he’s near, for there’s the sound of the ocean as he pulls in another breath. Some round here won’t have it. They steer clear of him. Reckon he’s a ghost, or a warning.”

“This is all fascinating, Mr. Gray,” Low says, closing his eyes. “All fascinating and of great help to a man who likes a bit of character. But, see, and don’t take this the wrong way, Mr. Gray, but, see, only man I care about, asleep, awake, only man I think about is Jacob Fetter.”

And Mr. Gray slinks back, bowing his head, as they all do. He knows how they mutter behind his back; the deep corners of the ship’s waist contain a fug of gossip and concern.

He’s obsessed, he is. It’ll be his undoin’. Fetter’s won afore a vengeful blow’s been aimed.

He doesn’t mind the chatter. No crew of his have ever dreamt of mutiny. As long as they keep the decks swabbed, keep their eyes on the horizon and their hearts cold. Low claps his hands. Heads turn. Tired, soulless eyes, dogs’ eyes. Sharks’ eyes. Tired pirates. Ruined men.

“Word has it you lot are worthless,” Low says. “Word has it your best days were ten years back. A shambling crew, you lot, now. Sleepwalking. Readying for your final bed. Well I’m not having any of that. You come work for me, there must be some steel left in your blood. Youth? Muscle? Means nought to me if there’s no fire to fuel it. And I know all about fire. I can see it in you. You might be tired, ready to drop even, but I know rage when I see it. I won’t ask you to do anything I’m not ready to take on myself. I’ll wash with you, eat with you, fight with you. And when we fight… Oh Lord, men. When we fight, it’ll be with the force of the Atlantic at our backs. I promise you ten gold doubloons each and a lifetime of rum, a ship to rival Queen Anne’s Revenge, if you help me run Jacob Fetter to ground. One last, great task. A defining time. History is upon you men, each and every one of you. What say you to that?”

He turns on his heels as the cheers pile against the sails, yet as swiftly as a mask torn from a face, his smile is gone. His heart has a fathomless chill.

The water, at night. Might be oil. Might be black ice. Might be blood. A gruel of dreams. A froth of souls, of brave men too afeared of showing the truth of their feelings. Men who died hard and did not cry. Did not scream for their mothers. As you will, Jacob Fetter. As you will.

II.

33˚09’N, 24˚06’W

We hit glass. Sea becalmed. I can see the reflection of the gleam in my eyes when I lean over the side and look into it. I give the order for the powder room to be cleaned and the sails to be taken down for repairs. These men might be damaged, but I’ll not need to talk to them again; they don’t need me telling them where to put their noses when there’s no foam at the bow.

“Those sails down, Cap’n, there’s going to be a lot of hot necks in an hour or two.”

I stare at the man addressing me. I don’t remember where I dragged this one from. Some cobbled street running with wine and blood in Lisbon? A beach filled with nets and bodies on the toe of Italy? His skin is like stewed tea. His voice marks him out from one of the ports of the southwest of England. Plymouth, perhaps. Or Bristol. His eyes will not fasten on me.

“What’s your name?”

“Robert, sir. Robert Greenhalgh.”

“Mr. Greenhalgh, I’m grateful to you for your concern. At midday, the crew can go below decks for two hours. You, on the other hand, will stay here with me, monitoring the weather and watching for raiders. Do you understand?”

“Clear as this water we’re sitting in, Cap’n,” he said, though again I couldn’t shake the feeling that his pronunciation of the word was muddied with sarcasm or disdain.

I was about to take my leave of him when he shifted his stance. He squared up to me. I felt the hairs prickling at my neck; my wrist brushed the handle of my cutlass. He was unarmed. He wore a curious smile, though that might in part be helped by the scar that wormed up from his jaw across his left cheek.

“The men are with you,” Mr. Greenhalgh said. “For now. But already there’s talk.

“How’s he know, this Captain Low, where Fetter is? How’s he know which way to turn?”

“I’m captain of this ship,” I said. “That’s all you need, by way of an answer.”

Mr. Greenhalgh closed his eyes deferentially. I was unnerved by the sight of open eyes sinking into their position. A tattoo, not uncommon among pirates. I had seen it before. A reassurance, that they might continue to keep watch, even as they slept. Greenhalgh nodded, backed away.

“Mr. Gray!” I shouted. I was angered by the nervousness this man had unearthed in my gut. I did not like him. “Mr. Gray!”

It turned out Greenhalgh was not a direct acquisition of mine. I tried to keep my temper in check as Mr. Gray explained how he had come to be on board at the time of our casting off from Liverpool. None of the men knew him. He’d been asleep in the crew’s quarters and gained favour by handing out pieces of dried mango.

“He sailed with Captain Rainer out of Hull a dozen times,” said Mr. Gray. “He’s brought back heads from the Barbary Coast and some say he has a fortune in Chinese silver. He’s an experienced salt. He could be of help to us.”

“He’s a stowaway,” I said. I stared at the horizon, flatter than the underside of the rulers I used on my waggoners. I imagined Jacob Fetter out there, smoothing the water with his hands. “Watch him.”

Do I fear Jacob Fetter? I sense him sniffing the waves at some dark prow, all the light from the stars hurtling into his eyes, giving him the vision of angels. And no matter how many miles divide us, he can see me. He can see the loose threads on the scarf at my throat, the beard, the long hair and the tricorn. He can see the tremor in my left hand, where the ligaments and nerves never quite healed after the brawl in Sour Heart’s Hollow. He can see the sweat in every pore. He can see the cloud over my eyes. He can see deep into the chambers of my heart where the blood moves cold and sluggish as slob ice in Antarctica. He sees me better than I see myself.

Still waters persist.

The turtles we brought on board have all been devoured. We’re having to eat hard tack in the dark of the hold so as not to see the weevils in our food. Mr. Tamsin caught an old porpoise. He argued that it wasn’t bad luck because it had risen to the surface to die anyway. He boiled it in the cauldron but it was bad eating. All other attempts at fishing have been in vain.

I cornered Mr. Greenhalgh and asked him if he had any of his mango strips left. “No sir,” he said. He offered me a piece of coconut.

“Quite the larder, aren’t you, sir?” I said.

I challenged him about his illicit boarding of my ship. He apologised fulsomely and said that it had been an ambition of his to sail with me. “You are gaining a reputation throughout Europe,” he said. “A fair man, a good captain. A brother in a fight.”

“You served under Captain Rainer?”

“Yes sir. For eight years.”

“And did you make good hauls in that time?”

“Yes sir. In 1794 we overwhelmed a crew of seventy-five belonging to The East Wind, a schooner from Baltimore returning from the Orient. Spices. Silks. Ivory. Wine and olive oil. There were twenty of us in Captain Rainer’s sloop.”

“Red Freedom, no?”

Greenhalgh smiled. “Yes sir. You know your history.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “And flattered. Where is Captain Rainer now?”

Greenhalgh smiled again. I was irked by it. The man was able to convey his emotions without making them explicit in the things he said. He was patronizing  me. “I can’t tell you that, sir. Captain Rainer swore us all to silence.”

“Of course,” I said. “And anyway, it’s Fetter I’m interested in. No clues there, I expect?”

A shake of his head. “The last I heard regarding Captain Fetter, he was alternating between the Mediterranean and the northwest coast of Africa. He works hard, sir.”

I nodded. “I work harder.”

I was about to take leave of him when he touched me gently on the elbow. I swallowed the urge to lash out at him.

“Pardon my tongue, sir. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, nor to sow a seed, but Jacob Fetter captains a warship, the like of which has not been seen since Blackbeard’s day. He has a crew of one hundred and fifty. Young, hungry men. Fit men. You might well be obsessed with catching Fetter’s tail, but I suspect you occupy merely a tiny portion of his brain.” He sucked his teeth. “You’re a memory. Not a concern.”

His heavy-lidded eyes. Eyes on eyes. Scar or no, the maddening suggestion of a smirk at his lips. I leaned in close. “Be careful, Mr. Greenhalgh. As a stowaway, you’ve contravened the law. And I might, at any moment, decide to punish you for that.”

“I am here to serve you, sir,” he said. “If I have spoken out of turn, then I apologise. My words, always, are intended as an aid, nothing more.”

I sent him with Mr. Horrocks to the cannon. “Prepare the ship for battle,” I told them.

End of the fifth day in sleeping water, Captain Low, alone on the poop deck, watching the stars, remembering a day on a bluff overlooking Port Kincaid. His father teaching him how to find the Pole Star. How to navigate across oceans using only those points of light in the sky. They had built a fire together, Low impressing his father with his knowledge of tinder, of siting. He had knelt close to a knot of dry grass, sheep’s wool and down. Breathed gently upon the centre of the heat he had driven into the wood with his whittled stick. The barest tremor from his lips, a ghost’s kiss: the smoke thickened, its core a sudden yolk.

He feels that tremor now. Low opens his eyes to the fingers of air touching his face. The stars in the water turn suddenly indistinct, like chalk marks softened by a thumb.

“Mr. Gray!” he calls, pulling off his shirt and unlashing the great halyard of the mainsail. “All hands on deck!”

They left us for dead, and Death had His fill. He took His time and picked the harbour clean. But some of us He missed. The ones you’d have thought were first on His list: the crippled, the diseased, they slipped through His fingers. Fetter had six days on us. Six days before we got the sloop repaired and making a wake. We buried many dead. We swabbed the decks of a lot of blood. We put our brothers in the water. We drank ourselves to oblivion singing their names under a storm.

48˚18’N, 29˚47’W

The ship plunges on. The wind in our faces. A mist of spray in the air. Getting colder. The sweat of the lads on the ratlines. The occasional hit of tar, of strong wood, of spanked sails beating out our intent across the sea. Dolphins glint like bodkins sewing our route into the water. Hunger has sharpened our minds. No cloud. No land. Five days adrift, as still as corpses, a long time to lose yourself, to let him get away. But I was on to him. I knew we were heading the right way. North. Always north. He had no other direction in him. I saw his face in the powder of the stars and the strange rash of light in the deeps. Even as my hands and feet grew numb, my breath shocked to white, I could sense how he would feel as I crumbled him under my fingers. There was nothing to him. He was akin to these icebergs muscling up against my ship. He had an intimidating air, but he was drifting. And if I chipped away at him, bit by bit, one day he would collapse, reveal his cold, blue heart.

A noise from up in the nest. All eyes turned to the northwest. From the horizon, after a minute or so, a pale red colour bled into the night.

“Mr. Gray! A change of course if you please. Thirty degrees port.”

The light was dying by the time we were able to identify it. A ship on fire, its bow blasted into burned, black fingers. It was leaning hard on its starboard side, the keel lifting out of the water and all I could think about was an old, diseased whore I had visited in Rangoon when I was a young man, hauling herself out of a stinking bath. I sent out a party of six to investigate, led by Mr. Gray.

They returned just after the sun slipped the horizon. Mr. Gray was standing at the prow, his hands cupping his mouth. No survivors. No survivors. A report of what he had seen. A prediction for all of us on board The Pride. I don’t know.

All of the heads had been emptied of tongues, their eyes dashed out. I imagined a man in a room unfolding a sopping, crimson handkerchief.

In the dark and the rain. The swell and bottoming out of the ship. The fists of iced wind. Nothing to do but huddle and think. Sup the ladles of rum and gunpowder. You piss where you sit to keep yourself warm. You wonder how life might have gone had you made another turn as a boy on the shadow-line. The fingers of your hands are task-hardened, so calloused you can slice the ball of your thumb with a blade and you will not bleed. No chance of such luck with the heart. Still tender as a lamb’s. No great love arcs to strengthen it. No matrimonial blows. A novice in romance. You never married. You never had sons. Well, not that you knew of. Down in the bilges, away from the crew. Through the maggot-infested seams of the ship. Into the stench-black pits of wood and saline. Here you feel it is almost safe to cry.

Morning emerges. An albatross keeping pace off starboard. Stiff breezes from the southeast. Mist. A bone-coloured sun. Clean air. Mr. Tamsin cooks one of the turtles rescued from The Clarion. We convene beneath the mainmast. I thank the men for their efforts. For their trust. I tell them the weather will not hold and that conditions will deteriorate. Some of the men are smiling at me as I speak, with genuine affection. I know these lads will follow me to the waterfalls at the edge of the Earth if I were to ask. Some are expressionless, determined. Others cannot meet my gaze, but they nod their heads. They know me. They believe in me. Their belief in me props up the sagging belief I have in myself. Was it ever there? Was it ever there?

The ship turns. The soft shadows realign themselves on deck. A black hand skids elongated over the devil’s seam, fingers splayed, unGodly, as if reaching for something it never deserved. A cry. A surge of bodies. Men grappling at the broken remains of Mr. Lerner tied against the bowsprit.

“Cut him down,” I call out, needlessly.

He spills to the deck. Somebody says, Mosey’s Law. Mr. Lerner’s eyes are squint-tight shut. The tan in him has turned the grey of whaleskin. His teeth are clenched, protruding from the peelback lips as if making an attempt to escape. Perhaps it is a scream behind them that has created the shape. You might almost lever the ivories open, reach in and pluck it from the tongue. A glassy, fragile thing cast from the branches of the lungs: the outline of terror.

“Turn him over.” Your voice, but you’d swear you never opened your mouth. Mr. Greenhalgh scoops his bare foot under the cadaver and flips him on to his guts. You bite down hard on a rebuke at the man’s insensitivity, because here’s madness. Mr. Lerner’s back has been so thrashed by the cat that his spine shows through his swollen, lacerated flesh.

“This was done after he died,” Mr. Greenhalgh says, picking at his teeth with a bent nail.

“I’d have thought God the only being who might divine that knowledge, Mr. Greenhalgh. Or are you keeping secrets from us? Do you want to tell us something? Do you want to confess?”

“Dead men don’t sing songs,” Mr. Greenhalgh said, then turned his back on me, began scooping rope into his thick arms. “We’d have heard him squeal like a harpooned humpback. We’d have been able to do something.”

“Then how did he die?”

Mr. Greenhalgh turned around, that maddening ghost of a smile. The slow unblink of his eyes. The pale, staring tattoos. “I’m not the ship’s sawbones,” he said.

“Mr. Lievesley!” I did not take my eyes off the insubordinate rat.

The ship’s doctor assessed the body, and, nervously twiddling with his pincenez, told me there were flecks of pink, bloody froth around Mr. Lerner’s mouth, consistent with death by drowning. “I can’t confirm whether it’s salt water or drinking water.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I called the men together. I told them that the person responsible for this murder would escape the death sentence if they came forward immediately. Nobody did.

“In that case, my trust has been abused, as has that of the rest of the crew. Mr. Gray, organise a watch. On deck and in the sleeping quarters. When the culprit is unearthed, it will be Davy Jones’ Locker for him.”

Did my voice break, a little? As I was standing there, my hand shaking like some old man with the palsy, as I voiced my hard threats, was part of me trying to tell me that the murderer would never be exposed? That it was Fetter who had somehow transported his evil, by way of a storm cloud, perhaps, on to The Pride, and walked among my men without being detected. Perhaps the crew felt a prickle of cold as he passed, or a jag of pain behind the eyes. Perhaps they found they could not focus on his shadow as he moved. Their gaze slid away, repelled by his monstrousness. I had never set eyes on him. But he filled my mind like some inoperable canker. Sometimes I imagined him beneath the sea; its surface nothing but the vast acres of a billowing black cloak. When the storms began to blow, he would rise and, at some awful moment, he’d swing around and show me how the features sat on his face. And I believed upon seeing him, my eyes would simply turn to dust and trickle from my head.

Two days since we buried Mr. Lerner at sea. The food is all but gone, save a stinking batch of coconut husks already gnawed to the quick. I gave the order to bring down any seabirds, but the skies are emptying, this far north. When the albatross returned, none of the crew were prepared to aim their muskets at it. Myown misfired in the cold. I was barely strong enough to lift the weapon in my hand. Another two bodies were found in the evening by Mr. Greenhalgh and Mr. Rees. Rees told me that he had spent the whole day with Greenhalgh, making nets to see if they could catch some fish. Mr. Rees is a good man, too thick for deviousness. I believe him, which lets Greenhalgh off the hook for Mr. Lievesley timed the death at some point that afternoon. The dead men, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Lucy, were naked, their ribs gleaming through the mess of their chests like pieces of ivory buried in rubies. They had frozen to the cannon they had been draped over. Mr. Horrocks had to use an axe to release them.

63˚28’N, 29˚47’W

While I was discussing weather systems and charts with Mr. Carver, Mr. Gray sidled up to me, in that way he has. He drew me to one side. I covered my mouth and nose, pretending to be disgusted by the grisly show. I smelled Mr. Gray’s carious words, regardless.

“Mr. Low. Sir. We’ve drifted a little. Down to this hard patch of weather I suspect. But we’re still on course. Give or take.”

I nod. Look at him. “All very good, Mr. Gray. But there’s something else stuck in your throat. And it’s not ship’s biscuit, I’ll warrant.”

“No sir.” He appeared nervous, embarrassed even. “This Fetter, sir. Jacob Fetter. I don’t know him. I wondered if you might tell me a little about him.”

“No reason why you should know him, Mr. Gray. He’s my rogue, not yours.”

“With respect, sir, we’re on this ship chasing his shadow. All for you. He’s as much a part of our nightmares as yours now. We deserve to know the shape of our quarry.

I chewed on this for a while. But I could not disagree with him. “Jacob Fetter was born at sea. His mother was a shark. His father was a raft of dead coral. Some January night, in that unreserved glacial darkness that smothers the Earth perhaps once a year, the coral gave up its unHoly seed and the shark drifted through it. By the time she emerged from the fog, she was dead, and Fetter was fully formed in her belly. His mother, the shark, did not give birth. Fetter devoured her inside out. He has gills, Mr. Gray. He is cartilaginous. His eyes roll back into his head when he takes a bite of his supper. If you get close enough to him, while he sleeps, and look into his black throat, you’ll see row upon row of serrated teeth reaching back into his gullet. He cannot eat anything that is dead. At the first hint of night, he must slip into the water. He must constantly be on the move. If he stops, he sinks to the sea bed and dies of suffocation.”

“Mr. Low…”

“When he makes love, he rips his women open with a razored penis and slakes his thirst on their blood. When he prays, the moon turns red. If you see his shape in the clouds at midnight, you will go to sleep in fever and wake up blind. His breath is carrion. The wake of The Iron Mantis churns so mightily that typhoons emerge from the sea. I have it on good authority that when Fetter relieves himself overboard, the steam of his piss turns into phantoms that can dissolve the skin.”

“Mr. Low…” Whispered now.

“I don’t know, William,” I snapped, and he seemed more shocked by my use of his Christian name than anything previously uttered.

He stepped in closer to me, as if we were spies conspiring on a street corner. “The men, they are with you,” he said. “But I don’t know how strong your credit with them will prove. They… we are pirates. We live for the chase, for the fight, for the silk and the sovereigns. We want to get drunk, and not on this watered-down piss. We want to fornicate and eat fresh food. We want to sun ourselves in a sandy cove. We’re not stupid, Mr. Low. We know this life, it’s either feast or it’s famine. But our pockets are deep. And there’s nothing at the foot of them. And you telling me you don’t know this man. You don’t know his size or his colour. His creed or his needs. It doesn’t put steel in my heart.”

“He is where we are going,” I said. “The burning ship must convince you of that.”

“There are more pressing matters, sir. In my opinion. We have a killer on board. Where are the investigations? Where are the suspects?”

“We are all suspects, Mr. Gray,” I said, staring into his sun-blasted face. “At least the body proved to me that at least one of us has some bite, some animal in him.”

“Murder?” said Mr. Gray. “You condone it? Among our own?”

“Not at all,” I said. “But this is no treasure hunt. This isn’t a year of festivities, all mates together drinking and whoring all the ports of the western seas. This is a blood hunt. This is vengeance.”

He was about to protest, but this time it was I to duck into his space, to drive the point home. “What would you have me do, William? Spend a day or two rooting out the bad apple? Mete out some justice? And then back on to a cold trail, the men more resentful, more hungry? You say they’re with me, for now. Then let me strike while I have a backing. We can dig through the muck after the deed’s been done.”

“A backing, you say?” Mr. Gray’s voice was suddenly tired, breathy. “How many of us will be left once our bow is chopping at Fetter’s foam?”

“Three bodies, Mr. Gray. Three murders. There is no guarantee there’ll be more killing.”

“And, Captain, there is no guarantee there won’t be.”

He comes for me, but not at night, not when I am alone, struggling to sleep. He comes when I’m in the middle of my toilet, or pinching my nose to drink down the slime of our water in the galley’s barrels. He comes when I’m sharing out the hard tack or stepping in to halt a squabble between shipmates. I see his shadow slide across the wall of my quarters like tar drawn into spiderish lengths. His breath is scentless; the cold has burned out all traces of his interior. He touches the skin of my throat and I feel every shred of me become the chill sludge of every dead thing found on the ocean bed. I can’t wake up screaming. No such relief. I have to bite on the panic. I have to force the smile. The men see one speck of this madness in me and we are all done for.

We go on. We must go on.

Mr. Gray is up aft with the “bring ’em near.” He’s convinced land is less than a day away. Clouds on the horizon. I’m too weak to get off my bunk. I can no longer tell which of my hands is the damaged one; both shake like fury. Another body this morning. Mr. Tamsin, frozen so hard to the deck that even Mr. Horrocks’ axe would not shift him. Red splinters flew out at every blow. I saw Mr. Kidney drooling.

Mr. Dendy, in the crow’s nest, calls out. There is a clamour for the port side. Mr. Gray points a confirmation. A little while later, a white line trembles above the horizon. Land. I’m barely able to hold myself upright, but now I’m cheering with the other lads. Where there’s land there’s food. Where there’s food, there’s scavengers. And where there’s scavengers, there’s Fetter.

It takes an agony of time to reach that solid, icy bluff, and another hour or two to find an access point where we can drop anchor. I order the armoury to be opened. Muskets for everyone. I doubt any will work in this cold, but the men deserve to have their courage bolstered. I feel only the slightest pang of doubt when I realize a gun is being passed to our secret killer. But events have overtaken us. Gun or no, the bodies will pile up.

I choose a landing party. Myself, Mr. Greenhalgh, Mr. Dendy, Mr. Burbidge, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Horrocks. I am tempted to take Mr. Lievesley with us, but again I must think of those left on board. I pull Mr. Gray to one side.

“William, I apologise. I know you would want to come with us, and God be my witness I wish you were at my shoulder, but the truth of the matter is that I need you to be my eyes and ears back on The Pride. I trust you with my life. And it vexes me to say that you’re the only person I do trust right now.”

“Then if that’s the case, we ought to turn around and sail back to Liverpool. Forget all this. Forget about Fetter. We are dead men, Captain.”

“If I go back without facing him, death would be the least of my worries.”

“Sir…”

“My decision is made, Mr. Gray. You have command of The Pride. If we are not back within a single arc of the moon, you may cast off.”

I do not look back. Mr. Greenhalgh and Mr. Taylor take up the oars and row us into a cathedral of ice. The hollows of the bergs flicker with the palest blues and greens. A pirate’s eye is well-trained for prettiness; yet all the treasures he has plundered over a lifetime of robbery and violence cannot prime him for these sights. The bluster and blague of the ship has been shed; we drift in awed silence. I wonder about Fetter, about his eyes trawling these same lofted ceilings and glittering buttresses. I wonder if his soul might have lifted. If he might have felt the cold spike of his own mortality.

Is he running away or drawing me in?

The colours change. Blood frozen into the snow as we clamber on to the ice shelf.

Something has been ripped apart here: blood has hosed in lines over twelve feet away. Surely no man was the author of this atrocity. We fan out.

Mr. Burbidge finds what remains of the corpse a little while later. The dead man’s tarred petticoat breeches had been torn open. A blue and white checked shirt was similarly ravaged; a few feet away, a woollen cap and some shoes contained a mush of blood and fat and bone. Mr. Horrocks is copiously sick. I order the men to follow me.

I feel panic that we might have arrived too late. I don’t want my confrontation with Fetter to be nothing more than my feet scuffing through his remains. But some glint in the clean knife of the air tells me he lives on. Two hours of tramping through snow, the cold numbing our edges, and we find his ship. We stand in shocked silence. There is a hole in the hull and the mainmast has been downed. The ship leans against the ice shelf as if pausing for breath.

“Careful, lads,” I advise. We watch the ship for some time, but there is no movement. A hundred and fifty men. Nobody on board? I can’t swallow that, yet I bid my companions follow me and approach that crippled vessel.

Once we find a way on to the listing deck, we quickly search for food. There might be crew below decks, but the smell of fresh meat and bread is too great to resist. The doors are hanging off their hinges, there is blood on the ropes; if any crew are on ship, they are no longer alive.

A wet, growling sound rises into the torn sails.

“Bear,” says Mr. Greenhalgh, as if he were casually describing something passing along the harbour in Hull.

I follow his gaze down to the ice. Two large polar bears circling, wagging their heads this way and that whenever they rear up on to their hind legs. Their muzzles are sopping and pink.

We eat quickly, but sensibly. Too much and we’d suffer stomach cramps which would be the death of us out here. We pack as much as we can carry for our mates on The Pride. And then, as we prepare to leave, Mr. Burbidge touches me on the arm.

“Begging pardon, Captain. I thought I heard something below.”

With the food inside me, I feel my daring return. I bid Mr. Taylor accompany me. He unsheathes his musket. My instinct is to examine the captain’s cabin first, to see if any trace of Fetter remains. I want to inhale his stink, top up the hatred, but the cabin is empty of anything to damn the man. It has the air of a room seldom used; perhaps Fetter’s disdain for the British Navy runs to a refusal to inhabit the quarters of any officers he has usurped. In that, I feel a grudging admiration.

“Captain Low!”

It is Mr. Horrocks, although I didn’t recognise his voice: it is broadsided with shock. We find him leaning over the officer’s padlocked water barrel, trying to keep his gorge in check. The cold has prevented the bodies from decay, but the carnage here is worse because it appears stylised, rehearsed, even. It does not possess the randomness, the savage fingerprint of nature. There must be a dozen men entangled. I can’t work out where they begin or end.

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Horrocks,” I tell him. “What did you expect to find down here? Tea and cake?”

Mr. Greenhalgh on the stairs, calmly picking his teeth. “No polar bear did this,” he says. “And those outside have been planted. Bite marks post-mortem. Not the cause of death.”

“Mainsail mast was taken down with an axe, sir,” calls Mr. Dendy from amidships.

“And that hole was blown from the inside out,” Mr. Horrocks observes, rising palely from the belly of the vessel. He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief. “No cannon was fired upon this ship.”

“This is a trap,” says Mr. Dendy.

“No,” I say. “This is a diversion.” I gaze at the bodies before me. The ship’s hauls are scattered about them, coins, pearls and emeralds densely coated with the eructation of the dead. It was like some ghastly confection, something one might be served in the dining rooms of palaces in Vienna or Versailles.

“I for one,” says Mr. Horrocks, “would be happy to be diverted. Can we go back to The Pride now?”

“Not yet,” I say. And, suspecting that his body will not be here: “We must find Fetter’s remains.”

I don’t know why I passed this profane, unactionable order. I have no more idea of what Fetter looks like than the others. But I reassured them that I will identify his corpse, should the others’ doughty redistribution of the bodies unearth him.

We work hard and fast, unknotting limbs, stacking the dead like firewood. We none of us touch the loot; it seems unreal, unimportant, although there is enough wealth here to see the crew of The Pride, and their families, into dotage and beyond.

We move through the ship. The gold and the gore is strewn with equal abandon.

By the end of it, Mr. Greenhalgh is whistling a merry little tune.

“Fetter did this,” I say. “He did all of it.”

“Why?” asks Greenhalgh, his cool little smile suggesting he knows the answer.

“He’s afraid,” I say. “He’s been looking over his shoulder for so long he’s got a crick in his neck.”

“Afraid of you?” asks Greenhalgh.

“He’d be wise to be,” I tell him.

“Our time’s almost up,” Greenhalgh says. He blinks slowly. Time turns into something ice-coated. The tattoo becomes his gaze becomes the tattoo. I no longer register which is which. Maybe he has eyes in the back of his head. He can watch me at all times.

“I’m sending the crew back to The Pride,” I say.

“What about you?”

“Us,” I correct him.

“Us? I don’t follow.”

“That’s right, Mr. Greenhalgh. I’ll be following you. We go on alone. Until Mr. Fetter turns up.”

I sense the others staring at us.

Despite the cold, the breath from our throats furring the air, the temperature in that cabin feels tropical.

“Sir?” Mr. Dendyburbidgehorrockstaylor says. I don’t know who. I don’t care.

There is just me and Greenhalgh and his butterfly eyelids.

“Go back to the ship,” I say.

The light might have faded. The others might have gone. We might have frozen to death and what I’m looking at is the last thing the back of my eyes ever registered. But then…

“After you, Captain.”

“No, Mr. Greenhalgh. I insist.” I wave him to the door with my cutlass.

Once upon the ice, he hesitates. He does not look at me when he asks: “Which way, Captain? I see no footprints to tell us Mr. Fetter passed this way.”

In his shadow, I stare down at the snow. “Oh, but I do, Mr. Greenhalgh,” I said, and prod him.

North.

The post 68˚ 07’ 15”N, 31˚ 36’ 44”W appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.