Swords v. Cthulhu

The Argonaut Carlos Orsi

How I became a stowaway in the cargo hold of Beldur Reis’ corsair ship, sleeping on the old, rotting shelves once used to transport slaves, eating rats raw, and drinking rainwater that passed through cracks in the deck above, has no bearing on what follows. Suffice it to say that I was there when they attacked a Maltese vessel, which needs must remain nameless. The battle occurred at night, in the rain, by the blaze of torches and flashes of lightning. I don’t know why cunning old Captain Beldur decided to engage under such conditions. Perhaps he was compelled by what I found later.

The blasts, the clangs, the screams — all that I heard, as expected. I smelled smoke and gunpowder, scorched flesh and fresh blood, all the scents of battle any man with naval experience might anticipate. What I had not expected was what came after the fighting died down — silence. Deep, disturbing human silence. I could hear the rain pelting the deck. I even imagined I could listen to the spilt blood running, slowly mixing with raindrops in rivulets. I heard some small fires crackling.

But there were no voices. No cries or shouts or cheers, no songs, no roars. Not even footsteps. I waited, keeping myself awake all through the night. First, the rain stopped, and the thunder. Then the thin moonbeams that filtered through knotholes in the planks above started to fade, replaced by caustic, razor-sharp slivers of sunlight. It was time for breakfast, the first rat of the day, but I didn’t know what to do. There was no perceptible sign of human life on the deck over my head.

The ship started to heel. Ever so gently at first.

Beldur’s vessel had been a slave ship before circumstances forced the captain to become a corsair for the Pasha in Tripoli, so the upper shelf of the cargo hold where I hid was poorly insulated and leaky — human cargo has a higher tolerance for unwholesome humidity than spices and wine casks. And things trickled down, of course, so there was always one or two feet of black, stinking water pooled at the very bottom of the hold. Now, as the ship moved in the ominous silence of the morning, I heard its splash. It unnerved me, that small, dark pond. It seemed almost pregnant.

I climbed down from the old slaves’ compartment, dropping into the hold proper. I landed close to the pond, my unshod feet slipping on the slimy planks. From there I moved among the crates, peeking inside them to see assorted pieces of iron, silver, and bronze, exquisite pottery, jars of scented oil sealed with wax — one of them cracked, exhaling an enticing perfume — and a few smaller boxes containing jewels and gold. For a moment, the silence of the ship felt welcome — if everybody else was dead, everything here would be mine. The thought produced a taut smile, but the pleasure did not last. In my heart I knew that until I found myself free of the ship and whatever had befallen her, I was no better off than before, with but torn breeches and an ancient cutlass to my name.

I climbed the stairs out of the hold, quietly as I could, and took a deep breath. Maybe I should wait longer? A full day, perhaps two, before I risked exposing myself? Old Beldur knew me from long ago, and if he still lived, I was sure I would be even less welcome on his ship than a random stowaway. But the silence, insistent, stubborn, was too much to bear…

I opened the trapdoor, slowly at first, but what I saw made me throw caution to the four winds, and I jumped up onto the deck.

It was empty. And clean. I don’t know if the word “clean” conveys the whole truth. No, it obviously doesn’t. There wasn’t anything above the deck, on the deck, even lodged between the planks — no smirch of blood or oil caught in the wood. Nothing. The rough, dull planks had become polished, and ground as smooth as the lens of a spyglass. I could see a shadowy reflection of myself slither on the deck’s surface as I moved upon the strangely flattened, glazed boards. There was no one in sight, and no barrels nor baskets nor any of the other countless objects that clutter a working vessel, nor any part of the ship itself much above the height of a man — incredibly, the ropes, the sails, and even the masts themselves were all gone, leaving only short, planed stumps where they had stood. What bits of metal remained, like some cleats, were smoothed and sanded so finely that it was painful to look at them in broad daylight.

I went to the aftcastle, for unlike the masts, it remained. The cabin’s door was missing from its hinges and nowhere to be seen, and there was nothing inside the quarters. No maps. Not the captain’s table. Not even the captain’s bunk. The bulkheads had become wooden mirrors, weirdly reflecting and distorting my image, just like the deck. I recalled words quoted by some Christian I’d met years before —“things dimly seen, as in a glass, darkly”— and shuddered. The distortion made the image ripple and crimp. For a moment it seemed that there was someone else behind me. I turned quickly, but there was nobody.

Leaving the cabin, I finally directed my attention to the other ship — a massive, shadowy presence that loomed by our side. I recognized the design and the pennons. It was a vessel of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, probably on its way to Spain. Grappling hooks kept both ships tied to one another. This explained the heeling, a movement that was getting more noticeable at every minute, despite the empty, becalmed sea.

The hooks and chains keeping the vessels moored together were highly polished, shining like sterling silver. There was not a soul in sight, but the Maltese ship still had its masts, sails, and ropes. Perhaps there were people there, too, despite the silence — always the silence, broken only by the creaking of the wood and the rustling of something I thought was the wind — but the air wasn’t moving.

Whatever force had cleansed the corsair’s deck had also removed the ropes and nets the pirates must have used to board the Maltese vessel, so I had no choice but to cross over by dangling from the thickest of the taut chains and pulling myself along, hand over hand. It was a nauseating experience, every link of the chain a burnished mirror that disfigured my reflection and lanced my eyes with shards of sunlight as I tried to keep my gaze off the dizzying drop to the sea below.

Having sails and masts, the other ship also had shadow and shade on its deck. It was only when I hauled myself over the rail and found myself cooling under a flapping sail that I noticed how the intense morning sun had stung me during my investigation of Beldur’s ship. It had been my first exposure after too many dark days in the slaves’ hold.

I also realized how thirsty I was. And hungry. These sudden, mundane concerns got the better of me, and I started scouting the vessel in search of food and fresh water, ignoring much of everything else: I hardly took notice of the corpses sprawled across the deck, the blood caked on every surface. Whatever strange event had cleansed Beldur’s ship hadn’t worked on this vessel of the Christian Knights of Saint John.

Stepping into the dim coolness of the aftcastle’s cabin, I discovered a jug of wine and a large bowl of grapes and pomegranates, most of them still fresh. The officers of the Order had lived well, I surmised, peering out the door at their hacked bodies… bodies that begin to stir as I drooled pomegranate juice and redder wine. As I gawped in the doorway, two of the mutilated corpses, for dead men they surely were, began to rise and move… shambling… walking… away.

The unholy scene left me numb. It was as if an icy fist had closed over my entire body. For a moment I felt an absurd, trite relief that the pair of dead knights hadn’t come after me but instead moved away down the deck. Not for a moment did I doubt that they were dead. My stomach had clamped. I couldn’t eat any more, pomegranate seeds spilling from my slack mouth. There were more corpses on the deck, but as I watched them closely, they didn’t move.

Should I race for the chains and try to climb back to Beldur’s ship before I was seen? What if the dead men changed course and saw me? Or others began to move? Should I hide? Where? Questions flew like arrows through my mind, but my only palpable physical reaction was to draw my cutlass from my rope belt, gripping it so hard my knuckles went as white as the dead men’s flesh. When I heard a woman scream, I jumped.

At the far end of the deck, the revived knights, in their shredded black cassocks and ripped chain mail, were looming over a slight figure I hadn’t seen before… and as I watched the pair descend upon her, I heard the unmistakable wet thud of steel cleaving flesh.

Intent as they were on their quarry, the knights did not hear me approach. The tip of my cutlass slid into the back of the closest knight’s neck, gliding through a rip in his mail. There was no spurt of blood, but the head fell forward, now attached to the body by nothing more than leather-like skin and a strip of tendon. He collapsed.

I had a quick glimpse of the woman, white-skinned, bloodied, splayed on the deck, and then the other knight was right on top of me.

There was a grayish-green tint to his skin, and he moved with unnerving precision and silence. He held a longsword and knew how to make good work of it. My situation was dire: you cannot safely parry a longsword with a cutlass, so I ducked once, stepping back, and ducked again as he pressed his attack, the sword whipping over my head. As he raised the heavy weapon for another swing, I darted under his raised arm, driving the cutlass into his midsection with all my might.

My blade scraped along the edge of his mail instead of pushing through, and he did not even grunt… but the force knocked him backward, and I jumped right in. He tried to bring the sword down on me, but he was still off balance and I got hold of his wrist. Pulling myself forward, I pressed the cutlass into his face and used my full weight to punch the steel through his cheek. The skull broke and split like a rotten pomegranate. For an instant, I thought that the battle was surely mine — but then darkness shot out of the ruined face.

The darkness was a tangle of tentacles and tendrils, all black and viscous, fluid but nonetheless solid… or was it? As it brushed my skin, I felt the darkness for what it was: the absence of light, pure and simple, a devouring emptiness that could never be satisfied. It clung to me, strips of nothingness around my arms, grabbing my head, covering my mouth just as I locked my jaw tight, trying to force itself in past my pursed lips. It immobilized the arm that held the cutlass, and all I could do was to roll on the deck, wrestling impotently against the spreading darkness that stretched up toward my nose, ears, and eyes…

I felt dozens of pinpricks across my limbs and face, as if the oozing pitch were growing thorns as we fought; thorns, or teeth. And then eyes were staring back at me, rounded, darker patches of midnight, coalescing like blisters on its mass, moving, rolling, dissolving, and reforming. My breath had turned sour in my chest, the pressure of the thing prying my lips apart. I felt dizzy and tired. A mass of tendrils on my face smothered me even as they tried to squirm inside my mouth, while others encircled my neck, crawling up toward my ears. Then I felt chill, a heart-numbing cold that I believed was the touch of death… and was free.

The darkness had recoiled, and melting quickly into a gray haze, dissipated in the still air. The corpse remained motionless, its face open in halves as some carnivorous flower, a yellow mist flowing slowly from the gap. The pale girl was standing in front of me. “Shoggoths cannot stand a virgin’s touch, that’s why they need the corpses,” she told me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You did a good job bringing that one out. Now get up. I’ll need you to get to my husband.”

She was tall, with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes, and wore nothing but a loincloth and a seashell anklet. In other circumstances I might’ve considered her beautiful, desirable, but at that moment all I could think about was her sweetly familiar smell — I knew that scent, but from where? This sudden preoccupation drove away even my puzzlement as to the fact that she seemed quite unharmed, despite the longswords I had seen bite bloody gashes into her milk white skin before I could reach her attackers.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

“You may call me Alia, and I was a prisoner in that other ship,” she said, pointing to Beldur’s vessel, “and he is still a prisoner here. Will you help me to get to him?”

I felt strangely detached, as if I were two people, one living through the events of the last few hours, the other watching everything from afar, aghast and fascinated. Her nonchalant manner brought these two together, making the horror and insanity of it all seem very present and very real, and I grabbed her by the shoulders, burning for answers. “Were you in the corsair ship last night? Do you know what happened there?”

She shrugged, and realizing how firmly I had seized her, I released the woman, but she just echoed my question: “What happened there?”

“Didn’t you see? The deck, like a mirror… ”

Silence. Then I recalled the emptiness, the vacuity I’d felt as the hungry darkness that had hid in the knight had slowly consumed me. Perhaps the same devilish thing had been set loose on Beldur’s ship, gulped in everything down to the lowest speck of dust, turning the ship into a shining desert?

“Were these demons, these… shoggoths… there?”

She looked at me, seeming a little puzzled, her head cocked to the side. “Why… yes, of course.”

I picked up my cutlass and one of the longswords. “Your husband is near, you said. Let’s find him.”

I am not usually keen on meeting strangers aboard ghost ships, but the thought of having another able-bodied man around was reassuring. Supposing he was indeed hale, and not a mangled, tortured husk, but I chose not to focus on that possibility.

“I know where he is.” She pointed toward the forecastle. “They were trying to keep me from going there.”

We walked slowly up the deck. I was apprehensive, watching the scattered corpses closely: the lack of blood in the two knights I’d fought and her mention of the dark devils “using corpses” left me with little option but to imagine that any of the dead bodies around, sailor, warrior monk, or corsair, could spring to its feet and attack. At any moment I expected more shoggoths to come slithering from the shadows.

She stopped abruptly, some three steps behind me. “I cannot go on. There is a barrier here.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, looking nervously around the stained, sunlit deck. “There’s nothing here.”

She pointed to a line etched on the planks at my feet, an almost imperceptible curve that went all the way from starboard to port. “I cannot cross these, not while the book remains open.”

It was too much. Fighting real monsters was bad enough. Having to deal with what I thought were imaginary barriers and silly taboos was unbearable. I was almost frantic, and screamed: “What are you talking about?”

“I am a consecrated virgin and wife. I cannot cross this… this… line. Not with the book open. My husband, he… you must close the book.”

This made no more sense than anything else she had told me, but I also saw that there would be no use arguing: there was sweat on her brow, and her eyes were wide, staring ahead at something only she could see.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go for your husband, you just wait here.”

The words had barely left my lips when I was struck by an intense feeling of foreboding. Was this a trap? Was she sending me toward… what? Should I dare to turn my back on her?

Alia shook her head.

“No. None should wake him up but me. He looks for me at night, in his dreams. His dreams are powerful, but we can only touch after the closing of the book and the undoing of the barrier.”

“You are Christian, yes? I respect your religion,” I said, even if I knew very little about the exact beliefs of Christianity, or how they lived in Christian countries. But I’d heard something about married virgins, or virgins married to the Christian God, or giving birth to God or to proxies of the God, or whatever, and I thought I understood part of her misgivings. “But whatever your beliefs, we are wasting precious time. If your faith won’t let you walk over lines on a ship, I’ll go there myself and free him, and you can pray this thing out later… ”

There was a flash in her eyes — was it fear? hatred? — and I imagined her spitting, casting a curse on me. Instead her emotion seemed to pass, and Alia said, “You shouldn’t go alone. What if there are more shoggoths? They can hurt you, but remember they cannot stand my touch.”

Yes, the virgin touch. I hadn’t forgotten that. I felt the ship lurch under my feet — the heeling was getting worse; I got the impression that the vessels might crash into each other at any moment — and it added to my already intense unease.

“I guess we should close this ‘book,’ then. Do you know where it is?”

“I believe I can feel it… ” She stared past me. “It is also out of my reach, sorry.”

She pointed toward a dark space in the forecastle’s shade, under an ugly wooden-sculpted falcon that supported one of the ends of the balustrade above. It was some fifteen paces to the right of the brig’s door.

I walked nervously toward it, shivering as I stepped over the line scratched into the deck. As I approached, something rustled in the dark place; there was a tent in the shadow. My heart quickened, but it wasn’t another walking corpse or a shoggoth, just an old man, wearing heavy purple robes and a matching skullcap. He stepped into the sunlight and addressed me in Greek. I signaled that my understanding of the language was poor, and he switched to Arabic.

“I cannot let you come any closer, son. You are under her spell.”

“I’m with the woman because we were the only two living people here,” I answered, not at all liking his use of the word “spell.” “Now there are three of us, and I don’t see why I should prefer one to another.”

“But you will let her go to her husband?”

“That was the idea,” I said, glancing nervously back at Alia and considering: am I bewitched? Then I remembered my recent exasperation, and I thought it unlikely. “I’m not one to stand between a husband and wife.”

“So, I cannot allow you to pass.”

My patience was wearing thin. Any moment I expected another shoggoth to erupt out of the darkness behind him. I wondered if the strange old man was a wizard, perhaps the demons’ conjurer. I felt the weight of the sword in my hand, the cutlass in the other.

“I don’t see how you would stop me,” I said warily.

His lips twisted in a melancholic smile. “There is a curse on my bones, seaman.”

I stepped past him, ready to shoulder him out of the way if necessary. As I did, he drew a dagger from the sleeve of his robe and jumped me.

Alia cried a warning, and I was already half expecting an attack. I whirled as his arm descended, the dagger glittering like a white tooth. My cutlass caught him on the wrist, and his hand, still clenched around the hilt, spun away in a spray of blood. Sending the sword point into his heart was a matter of moments.

He teetered, then toppled, but before his body hit the deck came the sound of a tree splintered by lightning, and a rending of flesh, and then I had before me a monstrous thing. It was not unlike a giant insect, but built, somehow, around the old man’s corpse.

His bones had been cursed, all right: the legs of the creature were made from his suddenly overgrown ribs, and the space where his right hand had been was now occupied by a hooked stinger of contorted ivory, the two bones of the forearm entwined into a single hooked point. His skull was bursting out from the skin, dull teeth falling out to make room for needle-sharp fangs, the neck elongating, coiling, crawling.

I attacked, but the bone hook parried. The obscenely wide jaw lunged at me, and I dodged the bite, clipping it aside with my elbow. The impact hurt. Then the hooked stinger came in low, and I had to jump aside, falling back. Falling back wasn’t good, the thing quick on its rib-legs, and vicious.

The head bobbed menacingly at the tip of the neck, which obscenely stretched further and further from its disgusting body. I got the impression that it might soon be long enough to coil around me, and when next it darted in, I tried to sever it with the longsword. It deflected the blow with the thick chitin of its forehead, the skull as heavy as any shield. My arms were aching, and the stinger constantly menaced me. The monster creaked like an old wheel in need of oil, but its movements were quick and eerily elegant.

I threw my cutlass at it, and the monster easily twisted its head to follow the whirling blade, ready to use its skull-shield to deflect it if necessary. In doing so, however, it took its eyes off me for a moment, and a moment was all I needed. Now gripping the longsword in both hands, I lunged forward and slashed at the exposed vertebrae. I managed to cut clean through the neck, decapitating the fiend, but even as its head fell to the deck, that terrible stinger arced down to impale me. I threw myself out of the way, my feet slipping out from under me as I narrowly avoided the attack. As I landed on the deck beside the grotesque severed head, I saw new bone pushing upward from the fleshy stump of its neck.

Yet this horrific development did not distract me for long, since I was now between its jagged rib-legs. They danced frantically around my body, trying to impale me. Without much alternative, I thrust the sword up into the belly of the old man, which had become the nucleus of the creature. The pointed legs went wild, jabbing at me as I wriggled beneath them and kept cutting. Thick, oily innards began falling from the wound I had carved, gelatinous blood raining upon me, and suddenly the whole mass collapsed, folding inward on itself like a dying insect, and I rolled away to avoid being crushed.

I rose shaking to my feet, exhausted but alive. The stench was unbelievable, an acrid rot, more vegetable than animal, that made me cough.

“The book,” Alia called plaintively from her vigil on the far side of the so-called barrier. “Go to the book. Close it.”

Thinking dark thoughts about her lack of concern for her savior, I moved toward the shadow of the falcon-carved balustrade. Now that my eyes were out of the sun I saw more distinctly the small tent of purple cloth erected in the falcon’s shadow, and ducked inside. There was barely room to stand, and the only furnishing was a small bronze tripod supporting an open book. It wasn’t very impressive: quite small, just a little bigger than the palm of my hand, with wooden covers. The pages were of thick paper, covered with geometric drawings and a text that employed some Arabic characters but was not actually that language at all.

Never one to waste time, I reached out with the tip of my sword and flipped it closed, and was immediately assaulted by a perfume — a sweet scent that drowned even my own foulness. It was the same musky bouquet that I had noticed on Alia, and now I remembered where else I had smelled it — it was the same perfume that had leaked from the broken jar in Beldur’s ship.

I didn’t want to have anything else to do with that book. I stepped out of the tent and saw Alia striding toward the brig, no longer bound by the barrier that had kept her away. The already heeling ship lurched starboard with an ominous creak. I nearly went tumbling, but Alia didn’t stumble. I called to her, but she didn’t slow, looking back at me with a rapturous expression and calling out, “I think it best that you leave now.”

I had the same impression, but after all I had witnessed, I was too curious to just flee without some answers, so I followed after her. She raised her eyebrows, doubtful, but said nothing more. Her fingers brushed the heavy door of the cabin and it flew open. Instead of darkness, a green-gray light shimmered within the doorway.

The perfume that came from her hair, her body, was now overpowering. I had the strange idea that the scent was not upon her, but of her — that she was naught but perfume herself, imprisoned in the jar like a jinn until the clay had cracked, freeing her.

As I imagined this, the nature of the perfume seemed to change. Before, its sweetness had been enticing, relaxing, but now it made my skin creep and my hair stand on end. It was not that the scent had changed into something unsavory, for it was still quite a pleasant smell, but rather that its power touched a chord in my brain. This chord reverberated with ultimate dread, with unlimited fear. All around me, the ship was groaning and trembling like a hurt animal.

And just like that, I ran to the railing and jumped into the sea. My desperate flight hardly seemed of my own volition, but more as if a puppeteer of horror had taken control of my soul’s strings with an irresistible hand.

My weary arms and legs churned the deep blue water, swimming frantically away from both the cursed Maltese ship and the polished wreck of Beldur’s. Then I heard a terrible crash and crackle, and unable to resist, looked back the way I had swum. As I watched, eyes stinging from the brine, both vessels burst open like rotten fruit. And then… and then I believe I saw Alia’s husband. The word that occurred me, the only word that still comes to mind when I think of it, is Argos — not the mythical ship of the Greeks, but the other one: the dragon with one thousand eyes.

“He looks for me in his dreams,” Alia had told me, and it was to dreams that I fled then, my mind rejecting any world that would allow such horror. I had assumed that the demons, those “shoggoths,” had eaten up everything on the deck of Beldur’s ship, but as I took sanctuary in the realm of nightmares, my fevered brain provided other explanations…

There is now very little to add. I awoke on a beach, upon a small island, and the curious people I found there and how I ultimately escaped them is the subject of another tale. But there is one final detail: when I came to on the sand, there beside me was the little book, and it was once again open — a dagger shot through its pages and spine, keeping the covers apart, an amputated, skeletal human hand firmly clasped around the hilt. I stared at the book, remembering my fight with the purple-robed wizard, and his words... then I clambered to my knees, then my feet, and walked away, leaving book, knife, and hand to be reclaimed by the hungry surf, to rejoin the accursed skeleton in the deep.