A Foretaste of Damnation
WE FLED AFT, AND THE MADDENED CHARLEY lumbered after us. The stern of the boat was not quite a dead end, for the gangplank was available. It had been shipped for the night but we could have slid it out over the rail into position, had we had the time and leisure. In the event, our choices were to leap ashore, at the risk of breaking an ankle; consign ourselves to the Miskatonic and swim to safety; or make a stand.
I was all in favour of swimming. There was no telling whether Charley would pursue us into the water. Perhaps, in his deranged state, he no longer had the power of natation. He might baulk at diving in, or he might sink straight under and drown.
Nate – bravely, or perhaps rashly – elected to confront Charley. He snatched up a small barrel and hurled it at the marauding giant with some force. The barrel rebounded off Charley’s sternum, throwing him off balance. As he reeled, I spied an opening. I will say, in all modesty, that what I did then was the boldest thing I have ever done, and to this day I do not know what possessed me. In the heat of the moment my natural timorousness took flight. I may speculate that it was a combination of self-interest and altruism. Not only was I in mortal danger but Nate too. One often has more courage when defending others rather than just oneself.
At any rate, I charged at Charley, head down like a linebacker in the scrimmage. I struck him side-on. He lost all remaining equilibrium and went tumbling off the boat. As luck would have it, this happened on the side adjacent to the bank, so that he landed on solid ground, not in the river. He hit hard but was up on his feet in no time. He leapt for the rail, with the obvious intention of hauling himself back aboard, but tall though he was, its rim was just too high. He kept trying, hollering all the while in indignation, but his efforts were for naught.
I had won us a reprieve, and Nate did not waste it. He untied the mooring rope and cast the Innsmouth Belle adrift. The steamer began to draw away from the bank, borne by the Miskatonic’s slow but insistent current. Charley gave voice to a screech of outrage and began dogging us along the bank. It was not difficult for him to keep pace with the boat, and even when he came to rocks or overhanging trees he was not waylaid for long. Scrambling, wading, diverting around, he fell behind but soon caught up again once he came to an uninterrupted stretch of shoreline.
Simply by floating along, it seemed we would not outpace him. I feared Charley would keep harrying us indefinitely, tireless in his pursuit. And at present we had no control over the steamer. What if some quirk of the current rammed us into the bank, or stranded us in shallows?
I announced that we must get the Belle started and drive her. It was our only hope. Nate said that he had watched the skipper in the pilothouse. There was a rudder wheel and a lever that regulated the steamer’s speed and another lever that switched the paddle wheel between forward and reverse. Mastering these controls would surely not be much of a challenge, and the moon, which had just arisen, was on the wane but still shedding enough light to navigate by.
Accordingly, we went below decks to the engine room and set about firing up the boiler. Then I at last got to learn how arduous the life of a coal shoveller was – and it was arduous indeed. Stripped to my shirtsleeves, I was soon filthy, my skin caked in a paste made of coal dust and sweat. My arms ached. My back hurt. My lungs rasped. Nevertheless the furnace was raging and the Belle was moving under her own steam, with Nate as captain, manning the controls.
I thought we had done it. With the boat picking up speed, and the current assisting, we would soon be going fast enough to leave Charley far behind.
How foolish of me, how naïve, to believe that we could escape Nemesis so easily.
* * *
I reckon it was an hour, no more than that, before problems set in – an hour of plain sailing before the beleaguered engine began to sputter and groan. I wonder if we did something wrong, if we inadvertently mistreated the steamer in our eagerness to be under way. I do not know. All I know is that the Innsmouth Belle was voicing complaint. Every inch of her from stem to stern was creaking and shuddering. Whatever was amiss, it was acute and it was worsening. She had, it would seem, taken as much abuse as she could bear. Cumulatively, over days and weeks, she had been pushed to her limit of endurance, and we were forcing her past it.
I climbed the ladder to the deck and consulted with Nate. We must stop, I told him. Could he not hear how the boat was cavilling? Could he not feel it?
He could, of course, but there was a grim fixity of purpose about him that prevented him from admitting it. Charley was still coming for us. Even above the Belle’s calamitous rumblings, we could hear him hooting and howling some few hundred yards to our rear. We had not built up nearly as much of a lead as we would have liked. Nate ordered me to go back below and carry on shovelling. I did as bidden, albeit not without hesitation. The engine room was hellish, an inferno of heat and noise, clanking, thundering, hissing, smoke-choked, lit by the furnace’s red glare – a foretaste of damnation, one might say. I, poor suffering soul, bent to my task once more. Mentally I cursed Nate’s name with each shovel-load of fuel I heaved from the coal hopper into the furnace’s maw. I blamed him for our predicament, yet knew myself to be as much at fault. It was simply a question of whose hubris had been greater, mine or his. I reckoned him the more culpable of us twain, but only by a tiny margin.
Of the explosion, I have no memory whatsoever. I cannot even say definitively that it occurred at all, yet the evidence is incontrovertible. I need only look at my left hand, or rather where my left hand used to be. I need only glance in a mirror and behold the twisted ruin of one half of my face, my left eye just visible as it peers from its tight, puckered hollow. The scars I bear attest immutably to the violent detonation of which I was the proximal victim, but when I try to recollect it, I draw a blank. I do not remember a vast thunderclap of noise, or a sudden powerful concussion, or being hurled bodily across the engine room to fetch up against the bulkhead. I know all this must have happened, but a precise and unbreachable amnesia has set in, drawing a veil across the incident for ever. For that, I suppose I should be thankful.
This much I do recall: one moment I was diligently shovelling coal. The next, Nate was dragging me off the burning boat, down the gangplank, onto the bank. I was dazed. I was disorientated. Somehow I realised I was in terrific pain but I did not register it as such. I was disconnected from it. It seemed too huge for my mind to encompass.
I lay on the bank, watching through one eye – the other refused to open for some reason – as Nate scrambled back onto the Belle and hastened to his cabin. I remember asking myself why he would return to the boat when half of her was engulfed in flames and she was listing to starboard. It was madness even to contemplate boarding a vessel so evidently doomed. Yet Nate was on an errand of some urgency, and it was only when he emerged from the cabin with a bulky black book under his arm that comprehension dawned. The Necronomicon was, it appeared, too precious to be left behind.
I must have passed out briefly, for the next thing I recall is seeing the Belle, now aflame from end to end, heeling over. The river partially extinguished the conflagration, and steam billowed up in a great cloud, but the portion of the boat that remained above water continued to burn lustily. The roar and crackle of blazing timbers was tremendous. The incandescence, in the dark, was blinding.
There was another spell of insensibility, and then I was aware of Nate shaking me. His voice was fraught with panic. “Zach. Zach! You must wake up. You must get up. He is coming. He is near.”
I did not need to ask who “he” was. Charley. He had made up ground. He was, to judge by the hound-like baying coming through the trees, but a few hundred yards distant.
I strove to stand but failed. Even with Nate’s assistance it was useless. The pain that had seemed so far removed was beginning to permeate through to me, like a gas lamp being steadily brightened. I caught sight of my left hand and saw a bloodied, shredded mess. I screamed then, with everything I had in me. I screamed in agony and in loss and in fury and in horror. I screamed until my chest throbbed and my throat was raw.
When the screams subsided to sobs and I was more in control of my faculties, I looked up to find that Nate was gone. Without a word, without the least attempt to aid me further, he had abandoned me.
Then Charley came crashing through the undergrowth. Lit sidelong by the glow from the burning Belle, he was a figure of shadows and lambent orange, demonic in the darkness. I was certain then that my time had come. I could not rise. I could not run. I could not protect myself in any way. Charley stalked towards me, a great ghoulish grin on his face. At last I perceived what lurked within him. It was Junior Brenneman. I am sure of it. Junior was present in that gleeful leer, albeit a twisted, tormented version. He had been driven past sanity by the Intercranial Cognition Transference, his sense eroded until only a residue remained, the worst of him, all the hatred and truculence and prejudice, the dregs.
This was all my doing. Mine and Nate’s. I accepted this, and in my helpless, pain-wracked condition, as I watched Junior – it was definitely Junior – shamble closer and closer still, I almost welcomed what lay in store for me. Let him slay me with his bare hands. I deserved it.
Junior staggered. He looked down at his chest. All at once there was an arrow shaft sprouting from it. A second appeared alongside, embedded in his ribcage, its fletched end quivering. Then a third, a fourth…
Junior advanced a couple of steps further, then faltered. The mighty machine of Charley’s body, pierced deep by four arrows, was shutting down. A fifth arrow entered Junior’s skull through the eye socket. His head snapped back. He tottered and toppled. He fell mere inches away from me, crashing to earth like a redwood after the final blow from the lumberjack’s axe – quilled with arrows and quite dead.
