No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) Read Free Page B

woman upstairs cried out, long and hard and much too
much for show.
    “The
seals, ye see,” the old man tapped his temple knowingly. “They was too easy to
kill, so there weren’t no fun in it. Then no booze, and they’d played cards so
much, they knew every crease and crinkle in the deck so it weren’t no fun
neither.”
    He slid
his battered mug across the table, and it was left to me to pour the rum to
keep him talking.
    “Some
fella thought it’d be a grand idea to break out the guns. They made snowmen,
see?
    Dressed
‘em up in spare clothes; maybe imagined they was someone they didn’t like none.
Heh, problem was once the shootin’ started, weren’t no stoppin’ it.”
    A sailor,
one of the younger ones from the crew, stumbled into the common room still
doing his trousers up. His face practically glowed with warmth. Another quickly
sidestepped a couple more who were half up before realizing they weren’t going
to beat the other’s head start.
    The old
man continued, “They killed the seals first; shot ‘em all to pieces. Took ‘bout
thirty minutes or so, but they run out of fun in the end.” He looked down and
shuffled his feet. There was something genuine in the gesture, but practiced
storytellers know how to lure an audience in.
    “Back on
the boat, they was in the middle of givin’ the guns back to the master-at-arms,
when one bright spark lets his off at a friend. Just for a laugh, mind, but it
weren’t long before they was shootin’ at each other and laughin’ all the
while.” He presses a thumb and forefinger against the edges of his lips to
stretch his smile. “They was all froze up when they found ‘em, with smiles like
‘at splittin’ their faces.”
    Each of us
understood what he was saying.
    It wasn’t
madness that killed them, but boredom. It’s a far more insidious disease and
one which, as a doctor, I am unable to treat. Hence why we found ourselves in
such a place as this rickety and chilly rat-hole of a port, where only
terminally bored men come. With each man waiting his turn for a few moments of
warmth and something, anything, to take the drudgery away, even if only for a
little while before facing it again.
     
    Several
days later, we sighted a pod of whales breaching ahead of us to starboard. The
prospect of work, our work, filled the crew with renewed vigor.
    We no
longer took things quite so personally as before. We could tolerate a laugh or
bad joke because we could all taste the chance of action to take our minds off
it. Such a change brought on its own dangers; a kind of mania not easily
doused, even with drink. Indeed, it seemed as if some eye of madness settled
over the ship and crew, just waiting for us to blink and consume ourselves.
    I lost a
patient on the second day of our pursuit. The result of an infection I failed
to notice, once I treated the initial wound. A second died a day later, and I
am not able to say for sure what killed him.
    Shouts
from the deck on the third day drew me topside, along with most of the others.
Were the whales now within striking distance? I fancied I could almost hear the
boats being lowered.
    One was,
in fact, but for a wholly different reason.
     
    She was
perhaps twenty or twenty-five, but no more, I should say. We never learned her
name or age due to her being mute, though I could find no physical reason for
her affliction.
    We found
her adrift in a battered boat, with no markings and nothing on her person to
say where she might have come from. The Captain himself and two men he trusted
stood watch at the door as I treated her. I could feel the rest of the crew
pressing in through the walls and deck. She most definitely offered a
distraction from boredom, though of the kind that could destroy the ship and
the authority of the Captain.
     
    “What can
you say?” He loomed at my back, as unadmittedly eager to see her as the others,
I suspected.
    “Not much.
She’s not eaten in more than a day and about the same for drink, if