CHAPTER 21

“The Log of the Melindia”

From the Files of the United States Coast Guard, Kingsport March 1928

March 7

As is traditional, I have bought myself a new logbook to mark the beginning of a new adventure, one that will finally take me home. Oh, how I have missed the verdant and welcoming hills of Massachusetts. It has been six years since I graduated from Miskatonic and joined that ill-fated expedition to Africa in search of Kor. We never even made it out of Zamunda, and it was only through the kindness of the royal family that we weren’t thrown into prison for our debts. If you had told me that my engineering degree would have proven useless, and instead my time spent working as a surveyor would lead me first to being a ship’s navigator, and then eventually to a helmsman plying the routes between Europe and North Africa, I would have called you mad. Life takes us strange places, and who would have thought that a dead-end trip to Britain’s Yorkshire would have led me to an opportunity to travel home.

Whitby, where I came into yesterday via the Atlas, is a strange little town, quaint enough, I suppose. It was once a whaling village, and apparently was the source of much of the mourning jewelry fashioned from the nearby deposits of jet. These days it seems to be resting on its laurels and trying to make a go of it as a seaside resort, at least that’s what I have discerned as I tried to find decent lodgings. Thankfully, a local firm of solicitors, S. F. Billington and Son, were advertising for a crew for a cargo vessel by name of the Melindia. The regular crew and captain had all been discharged a week earlier for gross insubordination and dereliction of duty. Looking at the ship, which is in a right awful state, I can understand why they were discharged. The Melindia may be seaworthy, but she shan’t win any prizes for looks or cleanliness. I applied for a job as a navigator, and was surprised when they came back and offered me a berth as the first mate. This was apparently because, barring the captain, the rest of the crew were Scots and the captain, being a local man, could barely understand a word of what they said.

That the ship was sailing from Whitby to Kingsport surprised me, for it seemed an odd destination. Billington, the son—the father having passed away some time ago—informed me that the ship had been specifically chartered for such a run by the voyage’s sole passenger, a stoic woman by the name of Eliza Hoag, who was also apparently the financial backer as well, and for whom Billington himself worked. She was, it seemed, returning home, not to Kingsport but to Arkham. She had been living in Europe for many years, and had accumulated a significant volume of possessions which she sought to take back to the States with her. Half the hold was full of her accumulation of antiques and oddities, and the other half had been taken up with local carvings and jewelry all comprised of the aforementioned jet. Some young entrepreneur had gotten it into his head that such dreary stuff would be the rage in New England and New York, and had bought crates of it to sell amongst the tycoons of Wall Street, or more specifically their mistresses.

It may be a strange, roundabout way of doing it, but Raclaw Schablotski is finally going home.

March 8

Met the captain today, a surly warthog of a man named Barrows who epitomizes everything one thinks of when it comes to captains of garbage scows and tramps. I could smell the liquor on his breath. It is clear to me now that this voyage will be more challenging than I first thought. We leave tomorrow at first light.

March 9

Mrs. Hoag is an odd sort. She is, I suppose, what some people call beautiful, tall and willowy with hair that captures and dances in the sea wind. As we left port, steaming east, she was standing on the bow; the light from the morning sun made her into a kind of angel, a silhouetted figurehead come to life. For as beautiful as she is, she is just as melancholy. There is a great sadness about her, the way she looks out into the sea. I’ve seen that look before amongst men who go to sea and never reach their destination, and I told her so.

“Suicide, Mr. Schablotski?” She looked at me with those large doe eyes. “No, I’m not considering taking my own life, I’ve seen too much death, lived with too much death.” She turned back to the sea. “In my experience death doesn’t solve anything, it merely makes things more . . . complicated.”

I left her after that, and didn’t see her again until the cook rang the bell for supper. When she didn’t turn up the captain sent me to look for her. I caught her coming up from the hold. Her hair was out of place and she was cinching the belt on her dress. She was obviously flustered. If we had been on land I would say that I had just caught her leaving a man, but that cannot be: everyone was in the galley or attending to duties above deck. Odd, most odd; if she wasn’t meeting a man, what was she doing down there in the hold?

March 10

MacLean is missing. He was supposed to relieve me at the helm this morning but he never showed. His bunk hadn’t been slept in and no one had seen him since dinner the night before. We searched the whole ship from bow to stern and found nothing, not a trace, not a thing out of place. Well, except for a few crates in the hold that had shifted, but that was to be expected given the rough weather we’ve encountered. Barrows blames the weather for MacLean’s loss, says the man probably fell overboard. It would be more convincing if Barrows wasn’t drunk. I’ve never seen someone drink so much; the farther out to sea we get, the more he drinks. I’ve tried to find where he hides his bottles but to no avail, not that I think it matters. I suspect that Barrows would be useless even if sober.

March 11

The cook has complained that some of his stores have gone missing. Barrows has locked himself in his cabin. Mrs. Hoag has said that this is my concern, and that I am in charge now. I’ve talked to the crew, tried to make things plain. I think they understood. Five days. By my calculations we’ll be in Kingsport in five days. It doesn’t seem that long, but out here, on the open ocean, far from land, surrounded by nothing but the rolling gray desert that is the North Atlantic, days seem to stretch to weeks. This far out, even the birds have abandoned us. I hope that God has not.

March 12

Barrows is still locked in his cabin, and has been for the last two days. There is a horrible stench leaking out from the vent to his room. The crew is nervous. McNeely says that he saw Mrs. Hoag go into the hold and when he followed a minute later there was no trace of her. He says she must be a ghost. Mrs. Hoag denies this, of course, and accuses McNeely of being as drunk as Barrows. Not unexpectedly, the rest of the crew has sided with McNeely. I’ve told them to stay away from her, and reminded them that she is paying their wages. I need them to focus on their jobs. We are two men short and from the look of that sky there is a storm on the way.

March 13

The storm came up on us just before dawn with sustained winds of at least thirty knots whipping through the wires. I’ve tried to keep her pointed into the wind, but even so the waves are breaking over the bow and we are being driven east. Barrows is out of his cabin, but not of his own accord. Someone forced the door and dragged him out, I know that much at least. We can’t find him. Not that we’ve been able to conduct a thorough search, the storm has made sure of that. He’ll turn up when he gets hungry, when the danger has passed and the work is all done and he’s sobered up. Drunks have a habit of doing that.

March 14

McIntyre is missing. He was on duty early this morning, but when we went to relieve him he simply wasn’t there. Both Barrows and MacLean are still missing. We’ve searched through the whole ship twice and can’t find a trace of any of them. The storm has weakened, but it’s still pushing us east. We haven’t seen the sun, let alone the sky, in days, no telling where we are. As far as I know we could be dead, and this, this could be hell.

March 15

The Morning

I found Barrows’s head. It was in the meat locker behind a slab of salted pork. The back of the skull had been cracked open and the contents fished out. The edges of the hole looked gnawed on. I didn’t show it to the others; I threw it overboard and watched it sink into the dark abyss of the sea.

The Afternoon

Besides myself, there’s only two of the crew left. The rest, I assume, are dead victims of whatever force has possessed this ship. I thought perhaps Mrs. Hoag would be immune, but even she has vanished. I don’t understand, where are they? Where have they all gone? What is happening here?

The Evening

The crew is gone. I’m alone in the wheel room. There’s a flock of seagulls off the portside. We can’t be far from shore. The storm has broken, but it must have pushed us miles off course. The sun is setting in the west, beyond the bow. Mrs. Hoag is there, out on the pulpit. On the deck there are dozens of shadows moving about, kneeling beneath her. Worshipping her. I can hear them, they sound as if they are in pain. There’s so many of them. The way they move, it’s unnatural. They’re coming up the stairs . . . coming for me.

Guess I won’t be getting home after all.