Robin D. Laws
As maddening as it is influential, Lovecraft’s essay shows the hazard of the writer turned critic. He takes his own vision and preoccupations and prescribes them as essential to his genre:
“A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
Lovecraft’s horror is invasive: it comes from the Outside, from the reaches of space, or from the long list of ethnicities he counts as the Other. When it comes from within us, we discover that we were the Other all along — an ape- or fish-man, not the mystic yet noble Northerner we thought we were all along.
An alternate conception of horror would find that the unknown force is within us. Not an entity from the outside, but what we decline to acknowledge about ourselves.
The essay’s influence arises from his establishment of a weird horror canon, and his practical writerly assessment of its members’ works. Among the writers who owe their current reputations to it is William Hope Hodgson. I thought of him, and of the opening of The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” as this story took shape.
I do not assume that either Lovecraft or Hodgson would have wanted to read this story.
♦
Contrary to what his uncle told the crimp, Will Dowland had never been to sea. For this reason it did not strike him as remarkable that nearly all of the Dido’s crew had sailed on her before. As a shipwright, Dowland knew the vessels but not the men upon them. Because Uncle Edward lied to get him added to the manifest, Will imagined it a difficult matter to gain admission to a ship’s crew. Only during the voyage, as he heard the men’s stories of press-gangings and fraudulent recruitments, did he discover otherwise. Most captains hungered for men, and left port shorthanded. It was not until months later, on the island, that Dowland came to fully realize why the Dido would be different, why so many who had crewed her previous mission, which left England three years prior, would so avidly arrange their affairs to do so again.
He did, however, detect a tension among the men even before they left the Portsmouth docks, reminding him of his drinking days. Specifically, of the pregnant interval when all could tell a fight brewed, before the first blow was struck.
Will asked his uncle about it.
“We expected our old captain,” Edward said. “The captain makes all the difference. This new one, this Codrington, who’s to say? Sailors resist uncertainty.”
Will watched the men, as they went about preparing the ship to haul anchor, watching Captain Codrington. Tall, thin, Roman-nosed, the captain stalked across the deck like a raven.
Though they stood well out of the captain’s earshot, inspecting the masts for signs of disrepair, Will spoke quietly. “The old captain, what was it they liked about him?”
“Clement,” Edward said, “showed flexibility.”
He ended the sentence with a finality that told Will to stop asking questions. They had to maintain the deception at least until the ship left port. Once underway, the Dido would not turn back to put off a carpenter’s mate who lacked experience.
The Dowlands had already checked the state of the vessel the day before, and the day before that. But when shipping out, it was well to look busy, if only as a show of respect for those who did have work to do. Overall the Dowlands had found the Dido in good order, though they’d referred several spots in the hull to the attention of the caulker. Their jobs would not begin in earnest until the ship hit its first squall. Until then, Edward, who as ship’s carpenter held the rank of warrant officer, superior even to the bosun, would project serene confidence in the condition of the ship. If Will stuck by his uncle’s side and did not embarrass him, he could by stages assimilate the details of shipboard life. He regarded himself a quick study, a judgment his uncle shared. By the time the Dido faced the treacheries of the Horn, he would be ready, not only in appearance, but in fact.
A muttonchopped man, his reddened, bulbous nose preceding him like a figurehead, spotted Edward and hastened beside him. Edward introduced him to Will as the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Lynas. Lynas assessed the younger Dowland with hazy disinterest.
“Any word on what went awry with Clement?” he asked Edward.
“Fell off a horse,” Edward said.
Lynas shook his head. “Damn fool.” He peered at Captain Codrington, a stray, rheumy tear gathering in his left eye. “What have you heard of him?”
“Very little. Jackson’s brother served with him briefly, on the Centaur, where he was a lieutenant. He made scant impression.”
“We’ll have to take his measure,” Lynas said.
“Naturally,” said Edward, declaring the subject closed.
Lynas turned to Will. “Your uncle has done you a great favor, shouldering aside that ox Hannan to install you as mate.”
“I thought he might benefit from distraction,” Edward said.
Will gazed back at the red roofs of Portsmouth. “I am a recent widower.”
Emotion came easily to Lynas’ voice. “So young. A terrible pity. Childbirth?”
Will nodded. “We were expecting our first.”
The doctor gripped Will’s shoulder. Up close, he reeked of rum. “Trust in Edward, dear boy. He does right by you.”
♦
Ever since his uncle announced his plan, Will had worried for his sea legs. If he fell too deeply into sickness he would reveal himself as a tyro. As the Dido hugged the African coast, others fell wretchedly ill, supposedly hardened tars included. Aside from the odd bout of dizziness, Will held steady.
For whole hours each day, he did not think of Elizabeth or of the baby. Then it would occur to him that he had forgotten his grief, and it would double back on him. In his solitude it did not occur to him that the crew did not seek his company, that he, like the captain, was held at an arm’s length of suspended trust.
One, other than his uncle and the doctor, took pains to befriend him. This was Wearn, youngest of the three hydrographic surveyors aboard the ship. He fixed on Will as being of similar age and station, master of a skill that put him above the common sailor. Soon Will learned more than he cared to of sounding lines and channel depths. Gradually he came to value the whey-faced surveyor’s gift for prattle. In its soothing dullness, it bore Will away from morbid thinking. In return, Will showed Wearn how to smack a biscuit on the side of the ship, dislodging its resident weevils. This trick he passed off as his own, although he had learned it from his uncle only days before.
At Cape Verde, the Dido left African shores for the open ocean. With nothing but water in all directions, and sky above, Will let himself fall into an automatic state. At night he might briefly be visited by the urge to sob, and, in dreams, Elizabeth once or twice came to him to remind him that she once had lived. But all in all, the spell the voyage was meant to have on him took hold. It blurred time for him as they reached South America, paralleling its coast from Brazil down south to the Horn. As they approached this place of fabled navigational peril, Edward, who as protocol demanded had been keeping company with his fellow warrant officers, resumed his presence in Will’s daily routines. Lazy days would end when they hit the storms. Booms would bend and shatter. Masts could fall. Lynas was the ship’s doctor, but the Dowlands, uncle and nephew, were doctors of the ship. On its health, the lives of all depended.
Yet the Horn, in its caprice, withheld all but the mildest of its assaults. The Dido sailed up South America’s western coast after only three days of repair work.
After the ship turned at Peru into the open Pacific, a shift in mood intruded on Will’s isolation. The tang of coming violence Will perceived at Portsmouth resurfaced. Throughout the voyage Codrington had conducted himself as any sailor could wish, neither cruelly punitive nor dangerously lax, yet the men regarded him with increasingly sullen apprehension. Crewmen whispered together, stopping when Will neared. He thought to go to his uncle, but needed greater grounds for it. As a warrant officer, Edward would be obliged to report the obscurest hint of mutiny.
Halfway between Peru and the islands, fever swept the ship. A third of the crew, the Dowlands luckily excluded, fell ill with it. Rumor spread that it was the plague; Dr. Lynas called all hands on deck to assure them otherwise. A landsman died and was buried at sea. The other victims were laid up for a week or so — except for Codrington, who could not shake it and remained abed, ceding command to the main master, a taciturn man named Tozey.
Lynas caught Will staring at the captain’s closed cabin door and startled him by sneaking up behind him and breathing a rum fog into his ear: “Worried, young Dowland?”
Will made an awkward spectacle of himself, turning toward the surgeon even as he backed away. “Hoping the captain recovers, doctor.”
“As am I, surely. It blots a surgeon’s résumé, to lose his captain, no matter how arbitrarily.”
“Could it be something in addition to the fever?”
“You’re a medical man now, Dowland?”
Will couldn’t understand why he was still talking, but he was. “Nothing was… for example, introduced into his food?”
“Are you asking me, young Dowland, if the captain has been poisoned?”
“Just a funny hunch. Maybe I have a touch of fever myself.”
“I’ll come round later to examine you,” said Lynas, as Will slipped away.
About an hour later, his uncle came to him, features stony. “The doctor tells me you think Codrington has been poisoned.”
“I have no cause to think that,” Will stammered.
“That is good. Because he hasn’t. Coincidentally. Simply lingering fever, nothing more. Which is as fine a sign that Providence smiles upon us as any I could foresee. For his sake, Will, hope he stays that way. For yours, wait and see. Soon you’ll receive the gift I brought you all this way for. And then you’ll understand. Until then, be smart and wait and watch.”
♦
Two weeks later, Codrington died in his sleep. During the funeral, Will could tell that his uncle and the doctor were both studying his attitude. Recalling pale Elizabeth in her coffin, he wept. If they took that in some unkind way, he did not care.
Tozey, now ranked as captain, ordered a quick sail to a place he only called “the island.” The others clearly knew what this meant. They sprang to action with a ferocious joy.
Three days after Codrington’s sea burial, an atoll hove into view. Palm trees densely covered all but a crescent-shaped sliver of beach. Tozey issued orders to drop anchor, but these were superfluous, the men complying before he gave them. The crew clambered into the boats. Edward shouted for Will, who stepped quickly to his side, as affected as any by the excitement running through the crew. Edward directed him to join him, Lynas, and half of the other warrant officers. Then he handpicked a group of strong rowers to take the oars. After some confusion and bustle their boat was lowered into the water and they were off for the island.
“It’s beautiful,” Will said, stepping onto the shore. Warm, fragrant air blew through his hair.
Some men threw themselves into the shallow water around the island, splashing and hooting. Others set themselves firmly on land, jumping up and down on it, delighted by its solidity. Still more rushed into the stand of palms, pressing themselves up against the trees’ smooth, green-barked trunks.
Scarlet fish, two hands long, teemed unsuspecting around the splashing men, who reached down to grab them up barehanded. Sailors produced baskets from the boats to hold the wildly flapping fish.
Midshipmen Enticott and Moore supervised the construction of a bonfire. Keech played on his flute; Rudge, on his drum.
Expectant gazes fell upon Dr. Lynas. He pointed to the sky. “We’re here ahead of schedule. The moon has to be right.”
“How far ahead of schedule?” demanded a black-bearded foretopman, who Will had never before heard speak.
Captain Tozey stepped up beside the doctor. “Two weeks or so. We made the cape faster than hoped.”
A discontented mutter rumbled through the crew.
“The moon will reach the necessary phase sooner than that,” Lynas said. “As long as it is waxing, we shall be set. So we can try in eight days.”
“Should we cut them now?” The foretopman again.
Lynas shook his head, waving his hands for further emphasis. “No, no, no. Leave them for now. They have to be fresh. We cut them the day of.”
Edward saw the question forming on Will’s face. The day of what? Edward clapped his poor, sad nephew on the back. “You’ll see soon enough.”
The rest of the crew shared in the amusement. Over the next eight days they made a special point of smirking at him, reveling in his ignorance, and the change that would come when it was lifted from him. Every time he sought to wring from one of them the secret of this inexplicable stop in this isolated place, their amusement grew. As they poked at him with their elbows and made references that meant to mystify him even further, they treated Will with a previously absent camaraderie. He had never sought it, but now welcomed, in this hidden paradise, the pleasure of their fellowship. For the first time, they invited him to smoke with them, in the custom of friendship that united all English sailors.
“I wish it was my first time,” he heard Keech say to Rudge, clearly about him. “Can’t wait to see his expression.”
The days passed in a sort of suspension, both elongated and without time. Again Will detached from his sorrows, now with bliss in place of numbed dullness. He swam. He ate fire-roasted fish till his stomach bloated. He drank deep from a heretofore unrevealed rum reserve. As never before, he broke free of his reserve, joining the men in the bawdy songs of his youth.
Will awoke one morning to a series of not-so-hesitant prods from a naked big toe. Wearn towered over him, grinning. “The doctor says it’s time to start.” Will tottered to the shore, discreetly relieved himself, then loped on bare feet to the doctor and his uncle, who stood at the treeline’s edge. Edward patted the trunk of a palm, which they surveyed with admiration. “We picked a fine one for you.”
Lynas crouched down to draw an invisible line with his finger, near the base of the trunk. “You must be careful to cut above the root line, but not too far. Make the cut as even as you can, all the way around.”
“An even cut renders the pleasure all the more sublime.” Edward handed him an axe.
“But why?” Will asked.
“You’ll see,” said Wearn.
“Do you know what this is?” Will asked him.
He nodded.
“The senior surveyors let it slip,” Lynas tut-tutted. “You’re the only one left to surprise.”
“So I cut down the tree, and then what?” Will saw that the other men were ready to cut their own trees, one apiece. Each had an axe of his own.
“Every man must take his own tree,” said Lynas. “Or that’s how it was taught to me.”
“What are you on about? Taught by who?”
“A native fellow, from the islands hereabouts, who we saved from his people. A sorcerer, they called him.”
Trees began to fall. At Edward’s urging, Will got to work. The wood’s green softness made an even cut difficult, but as a capable carpenter he did better than most.
“Now,” said Lynas, “you must with ever more perfect care cut the tree’s hair.” He led Will to the leafy top of his felled palm. “Pare away each frond as tightly as you can. For this, it is better to use a knife.”
Will did as instructed, whittling down the stubs where the fronds radiated out from the treetop. Lynas produced a stone bowl, decorated by a circular pattern from which swirled a stem of snake-like forms. In the vessel a hot paste steamed, giving off a heady odor of sweat and rotting flowers.
“You paint this on the cuts, both at the base and at the top. Thickly, as you would applying a healing salve.”
“Never have I been party to such an elaborate jape,” said Will.
“Do it,” said Edward, and he did.
“Now take one of the fronds to the fire and set it alight. Then bring it back here,” the doctor said.
When he had done so, Lynas directed Will to set the paste alight. A choking black smoke arose from the gluey spots where the cuts had been made. The flame consumed the paste but not the wood. “Like cauterizing a wound,” said Lynas. “Now, the step on which all else turns. Do this well, and you’ll thank yourself for it. Using the knife, bore one hole about this wide…” With thumb and forefinger, he made a circle just under the diameter of a crown coin. “About six to seven inches deep, let’s say. But be careful not to drill all the way through, because after you’re done, you’ll turn the trunk over and do the same on the other side.”
Will flushed and threw down the knife. It landed point first in the sand. “This is a joke. And a filthy one, at that.”
The doctor uncorked a rum bottle, took a swig, and wiped his mouth. “It’s anything but, dear boy. So you’ll do it, and do it right.”
“That’s what they’re all so excited about? Knocking down trees and carving them into dirty statues?”
Edward pulled him aside. “Will, you have trusted me this far. Humor me for just a few hours, and do as the doctor asks.”
Will crossed his arms. “All of you have entered into a conspiracy against my dignity.”
Edward pointed to the rest of the crew, knives already boring into their tree trunks. “You think I could impel all of those layabouts, and the officers and captain too, to such extraordinary lengths, merely to play a prank on you? What effort does it cost you to play along? A little carving? And who do you think these old tars are, that any immodesty on your part could possibly strike them as worthy of a second glance?”
“Explain your purpose, uncle, and I’ll gladly obey.”
Edward moved closer to him. “They’ve only now come to like you, boy. Show some fellowship. Or you’ll learn what it’s like to be confined to a ship for month upon month with forty nail-hard men who think you a prig and have little to occupy their idle time.”
The hot sensation in Will’s neck and cheeks had only intensified. “Pretend to be amused by this then?”
“Put on whatever show you like but do as the doctor says. Or you’ll force me to turn my back on you.”
Will knelt and began to carve. The wood gave way easily to his blade.
“At more of an angle,” said the doctor.
When Will had finished with the two holes, Edward leaned down to inspect his work. “We are all men here,” he said. What this statement explained, Will did not deign to ask. Edward’s shrug suggested that Will’s work, if not his best, would prove sufficient. “Now lie down next to it,” Edward said.
Will began to compose an objection, but saw that others of the men were already doing so — embracing their trees from a prone position.
“It is for purposes of measurement,” Edward said. He turned to Wearn. “You’d best start on yours, boy.” Bobbling his head in compliance, Wearn bounded off. “I also do not have all day to supervise you, Will.”
Suppressing a sigh, Will laid alongside the tree trunk. With the tip of his own axe, Edward cut a mark into the bark, at about the level of Will’s mouth.
“Now cut another hole here,” Edward instructed.
This too Will did, at which point Edward and Dr. Lynas went off toward other trees.
“What now?” Will called after them.
“Patience, boy,” Edward replied.
♦
As the sun fell, turning the western sky a golden orange, the doctor called for the men to drag their trunks together onto the beach. They arranged them in a circular pattern, with the top ends pointing inward around the fire. Lynas had doffed all clothing save for his breeches, which he had retied into a loincloth arrangement, and also his hat. In other circumstances, Will might have considered the result comical.
The men heaped the bonfire with the slats of empty barrels. Burrows, the surgeon’s mate, stripped as Lynas was, held a squirming burlap bag. He reached in, hand trembling, and snatched out a rat — undoubtedly taken from the ship. It reared and flailed, trying to bite him. Burrows stabbed it with his pocket blade. When it had completed its death throes, he slit the creature’s throat and handed it to Lynas, who let the blood dribble onto his back, his shoulders, and down his torso. The doctor flung the dead rat aside; Enticott kicked its body into the sea.
Lynas threw back his head and cried up to the new moon. He spoke in a lilting tongue Will did not recognize, its rhythm, however hoarse and shouted, recalling the lapping of the waves. The others stared up at the moon along with him. Across its bright surface a dark shape briefly pulsed. The men hollered and clapped. Lynas silenced them with a snap of his fingers and continued his invocation. Only when he reached a note of crescendo did he step back, bow his head, and signal to the crew that they could now disperse.
The men pulled their felled trees from the circle, dragging them to various points throughout the isle. They reassembled for more drinking and singing, accompanied by Keech’s flute, and sometimes Rudge’s drum.
Gradually each stumbled away to lie beside his tree.
Will, who had left his tree by the fire, remained busy of mind and fell asleep on the shore only as dawn glimmered in the east.
By the time he woke noon had nearly arrived. A quiet had settled on the men. Even those who were catching fish did so with a settled determination, the only sound they made the plashing of water as they waded through it.
Will wished to unburden himself. Thinking better of approaching either Lynas or his uncle, he found Wearn, still sprawled beside his tree.
“The surgeon has called the devil down on us,” Will said.
Wearn smacked the glue of sleep from his lips. “What are you blurting at me, Dowland?”
Will crouched over him, “What would you call that, last night, but the worship of Satan?”
Wearn sat up, forcing Will to inch back. “It’s nothing of the kind. The doctor explained it all to me.”
“Blood sacrifice?”
Wearn waved dismissively. “Of a rat? We’re up to our neck in them.”
“Chanting in an indecipherable tongue?”
Wearn eased himself to his feet. “It’s the native tongue, from around here.” He ambled for the shore, Will dogging his heels. “Nothing to do with the devil. Ask the doctor, he can explain it better than I. Out here, the laws of God and Satan don’t apply, as they would on Christian shores. Here we are ruled by moon and sky and water. All Lynas did was ask a gift of the moon.” Wearn reached the water’s edge, dropped his drawers, and loosed a healthy stream of piss. “I look forward to collecting that gift. Let yourself enjoy this, this… period of exemption. Who deserves that more than you? Your sorrows will still be waiting for you on the pier at Portsmouth.”
As he stalked away from Wearn, Will thought he saw twin whorls forming over the slitted mouth carved into Burrows’ tree trunk.
Will found a place of privacy at the island’s northern tip, a jut of unstable sand surrounded by placid water. He went back to the fire only to cook his fish. The men hewed to their new silence. If they took note of his worried demeanor, they did not see fit to approach him about it.
That night, Will considered sleeping on the sand jut, but abandoned the idea for fear of rolling off it into the sea. For want of a more favorable spot, he wandered back to sleep beside his crude joke of a native idol.
He jolted awake while it was still dark. Low grunts and exclamations sounded all around him. His vision adjusted to the faint light cast by the coals of the dying fire. All around him the sailors of the Dido had mounted their fallen trees. They thrusted into the holes they had carved, bared arses convulsing in the tropical air. Will blinked, thinking himself dreaming, but this did not dismiss what he saw and heard. He flattened himself into the sandy soil and tried to ignore the obscene exclamations.
When morning finally arrived, he headed for the sand spit, where he intended to pray. Strewn in his path lay snoring men, trousers at their ankles, wrapped around the tree trunk idols.
These had changed in the night.
The idols had ill-formed faces now: round swirls for eyes, slight protrusions of the bark where noses ought to be. Raised, bumpy lips surrounded the mouth slits. Further down a pair of nipples manifested itself at approximate breast height. The shapes of the trunks themselves had altered, narrowing to form a waist then swelling again into a pair of hips around their carven cunnies.
Will turned back to look at his own trunk. It too had undergone the changes, though to lesser extent. The eyes had only begun to take definite shape. The nipples were but dots, the widening of the hips barely detectable.
Will lurched for the nearest axe. Raising it above his head, he rushed for his idol. A powerful force intersected with his jaw. He went flying onto the sand, landing on his tailbone. The axe lay a yard from his landing point. It was the black-bearded foretopman who had laid him low, and stood over him, ready to pummel him further.
“Fool!”
Edward and Wearn ran to intervene. The foretopman held off. Not wanting to provoke him, Will stayed down. His jaw throbbed; never in his life had he been hit that hard. This man could beat him to death with a few well-placed blows.
“We’ll see he doesn’t distress them,” Edward told the foretopman.
“I’ll not give him no second chance,” the tar growled, moving away.
Wearn pulled Will to his feet. Edward jabbed him in the chest. “Take this blessing or leave it alone, but do no harm to your woman.”
“Woman?” Will managed.
“The magic links them. When harm is visited on one, the others become distressed, and lose receptivity.”
“Receptivity?”
“Don’t ask any more questions,” Edward said. “Fit in.”
Will looked past his uncle to see that the entire crew had gathered to observe them. He could not mistake their presence for anything other than a threat. “I am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t expect this. If I understood more…”
Edward raised his voice for all to hear. “You’re not to harm your woman, and especially not the property of any other man in this crew. Your lapse was borne of sudden shock, and will not be repeated. Correct?”
“Yes sir,” answered Will, also projecting his words.
The group of men broke up, but, underlining the point, the foretopman and three others remained in threatening conference. Glances shot his way communicated what would happen if Edward failed to control him.
“I misjudged you,” said Edward. “I did not think you the sort to recoil when presented with man’s earthly heaven.”
This island was rather the opposite of heaven, Will thought, but did not say.
“I never loved a woman as you did Elizabeth,” said Edward, “I admit to finding greater peace among whores than in the sitting rooms of respectable ladies. Always have done. So seeing you so dreadfully pained, I put myself in your position and asked what I would want. I reckoned you would see the magic of this place as I did. No whore is as pliant and yielding as these girls here. Now it is plain: I could not have been more mistaken. I am not asking you to forgive me, because I meant well. Many a shit deed is performed with good intention. I beg you, though, don’t let my mistake lead to the shedding of your blood. That I couldn’t bear. Take your gift or leave it alone, but don’t interfere.”
“I promise,” Will said.
With the so-called women to consort with, the sailors no longer drank quite so much rum. Nor did they keep so careful a note of each man’s share. Will could thus sneak more than was his due, and keep himself soused throughout the day. This retreat into drunkenness, as far as he could tell, dulled the concerns of his watchers.
By the afternoon some of the ordinary sailors allowed themselves to copulate with their idols in the day’s full light. Some concentrated purposefully on a single hole, while others athletically made the rounds. Will saw that the others had a way of looking through them when they did this — a privacy based entirely on pretense. Aping their discretion, he sank down next to his tree and hoped that sleep would take him early.
On the next day, his idol had transformed by degrees. Its face had gained detail; its outline had shifted further toward the feminine. Those belonging to the other men, who had been so assiduously fucking their tree trunks, displayed pronounced alterations. Wood and bark had fallen away from their faces, giving them dimensioned features. With blank, staring eyes they beheld the heavens. Their mouths opened and gaped. The beginnings of hands appeared at the sides of the trunks. Lines of separation, suggesting legs, ran down from their clefts of Venus.
Will went straight to the rum barrel.
The foretopman lay nearby, his member hanging limp from his unbuttoned trousers, his arm wrapped around his tree’s plump wooden breasts.
“Get too drunk and you can’t perform,” he said. “Don’t want to disappoint her.”
Will lifted the barrel lid to skim its contents into his tin mug. “I have forgot your name.”
“Veasey.”
“Well, Mr. Veasey, do you care what I do or don’t do with that thing, if I don’t get in your or anyone’s way?”
Veasey patted his idol. “Lucy don’t like to be called a thing.”
Will, afraid he would make a face at this, drank from the mug. “Lucy, is she?”
“It’s more like loving if you give ’er a name.” It might have been a trick of the light, but it seemed Lucy’s face shifted from one unreadable look to another.
“I will consider that, Mr. Veasey,” Will said, tottering.
Despite himself, he overheard enough to learn the names of other men’s trees. Wearn called his Marie; his uncle, Charlotte. The doctor’s was Rachel, which Will gathered was the same name he had given his idol the last time the crew of the Dido anchored on the island. That gave rise to other questions, which he both did and did not want the answers to. He drank more.
Three more nights passed, and three more days, in which the trees steadily took on more of the outward aspects of women. They might have been easier to take if their expressions showed any softness or accommodation. Instead they retained their original blind, gaping stares.
“How can you do it?” he asked Wearn.
Wearn laughed, as if they discussed nothing more than a preference for sherry over ale. “How can you not?”
“This is madness.”
“You haven’t tried yours yet, have you?”
“Of course not!”
“Try her, you’ll understand. Never with a woman back home will you feel such perfect ecstasy.”
“How can that possibly be?”
Wearn caressed the trunk of his idol, which they sat by. “Your wood girl, she exists because of you. And for you. Only for you. You feel that when you’re, you know, inside of her. Her each and every movement, it is exactly right for you, at the moment she does it, so fine and so exquisite.”
“They move?”
“Yes, they move, you dolt. That’s why until you have her, you cannot understand.”
Will studied Wearn’s statue, wondering if it could tell what they were saying. “How can you, Wearn? Such grotesque visages!”
Wearn regarded his tree nervously. “Sssh. Don’t say that.”
“See? You’re afraid of them. They’re not girls. Not women. They’re monsters. They’re waiting until our… activities have completely transformed them, given them enough shape to get up and walk about the island. And then slaughter us.”
Wearn clamped a hand over Will’s mouth. “If you say that again around Marie, I’ll have to do you as Veasey did.”
♦
Late that night, as the men on either side of him pumped into their wooden girls, Will heard a soft voice in his head.
Why haven’t you named me?
He hit himself on the back of his head, to stir himself from the nightmare.
The voice kept on: My sisters all have names.
Shut up, he thought.
What have I done to offend you?
I’m going mad.
What about Elizabeth? You could call me Elizabeth.
There was a rock in his hand, ready to smash its face, before he remembered the danger of such an act and let it drop into the sand.
Please love me so I can be like my sisters.
He ran to the shoreline and dunked his head in the water. When he came back, his tree’s face had gained delineation. Or it was his mind tricking him. With hardly any light, it was free to invent.
I won’t call you Elizabeth, he thought at it. To stop you from calling yourself that, I’ll dub you Nancy.
He heard nothing more from the voice, so he immediately marked it as a drunken hallucination.
In the morning he awoke naked from the waist down. Milky issue spilled across the idol’s hips. Shame came over him like a nausea. He wobbled to the shoreline to throw up, but couldn’t, even after sticking his finger down his throat.
He had, after all his resistance, done the terrible deed. He’d been drunk and perhaps acting in his sleep but it didn’t matter. The same crime the others had committed was now his, too. He imagined himself with a pistol at his temple, pulling the trigger. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” he said. Then he recalled his nakedness and rushed to put his trousers on.
The next night he lay next to Nancy, heart thumping. He had already done it. He could not now be further damned. He should at least then understand what he had done to himself. He waited until the sailors around him fell quiet and silently climbed onto his idol. He would not redouble his sin by using the mouth or arse.
As soon as he entered her, a jolt coursed through him. He came without stopping. He tried not to cry out, but it was useless to suppress it.
He pulsed until he ached. An unthinking peace washed through him. He would not let it take him, as it was a falsehood, and he, a weakling and a coward, whose promises to himself held neither substance nor value. He rolled off of Nancy and soundlessly wept.
♦
The bosun’s mate clanged a bell. He shouted for the men to rouse themselves and ready for departure. They had already overstayed. Any longer and the bad weather would start. It was time to say goodbyes.
Veasey, among others, shouted in protest. The doctor settled them down. If they made trouble now, they wouldn’t be allowed back the next time.
The men took their idols and again dragged them to the beach. Numbly, unnoticed tears wetting his cheeks, Will followed suit. Not until the torches came out did he apprehend what saying goodbye entailed.
“Now form a tight circle,” Dr. Lynas, himself a touch weepy, declared. “This is where it went bad, the last time.”
“What are we doing?” Will heard himself asking.
Veasey stood beside him. “You can’t want your Nan to die slow and painful.”
“Nan? How do you know that?”
“They talk to each other,” he said. “Now show some respect.” He tossed Lucy into the central pile of tree trunks. Cracks had appeared in her drying bark.
Edward put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Steady now.”
“How can we do this?”
“What do you mean?” his uncle asked.
“We’ve been calling them women. And now we’re… we’re to do this?”
Unlike many of the others Edward maintained a stolid composure. “They’re not women. They’re trees.”
Veasey gestured to Will’s trunk. “Want me to?”
Will couldn’t answer, which Veasey took as a request for help. He easily lifted the idol and threw it onto the growing pile.
The last of the trees to join the pyre was Wearn’s. Sobs wracked him; snot trickled from his nostrils into his mouth.
This time there was no ritual. “Thank you, girls,” Lynas said. He threw the first torch onto the pyre of carven trunks.
The idols screamed. Before, Will had heard only whispers in his mind. This though was a real sound, keening and angry. With a whoosh flames enveloped the stacked trunks. Their shrieks reached a crescendo. Most of the idols burnt where they were. But in a handful of instances, wooden arms and legs cracked forth to separate themselves from the wooden trunks. These trees, perhaps the most loved, crawled toward the circle of men, waving flaming appendages. Veasey and others stepped up with axes, chopping them apart. Will did not see a man who wasn’t yelling or wailing. Even his uncle had dropped to his knees and cried out some unintelligible apology.
Yellow flames wreathed Will’s idol, Nancy. Her mouth worked up and down as she howled to him for rescue. He stood paralyzed, watching as she burned. Her trunk toppled from the rest and rolled toward the water. Now Will regained his volition and ran to her. He picked up the log, searing the skin of his hands. Vaguely aware of a chorus of shouts, he cried out her name. His fingers blackened. “Nancy,” he said, and hurled her back into the fire. “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it.”
Lynas pulled him from the circle to treat his hands. His rashness would cost him a month in bandages.
When all of the logs had been reduced to ashes and charcoal, the group turned for the boats. Dazed, Will followed his uncle.
“They weren’t persons,” Edward said, not to Will but to himself. “Not persons.”
The rest of the voyage gave Will ample time to imagine punishments for what they had done, all of them imminent. In every creak of the ship, he heard the coming vengeance of the wood spirits. Or whatever those beings were. At any moment the Dido might come to life and choose to shake itself apart. Or merely steer itself for a shoal, so that all would drown at sea.
North of Australia, his stomach began to bother him, and he understood that the girls had all placed seeds inside each of them. When they finished germinating, they would burst forth in a shower of viscera and torn flesh, the bodies of the transgressing men their food and soil. From their too-deserving carcasses, a breed of bark-clad demon would emerge.
Then his gut ailment cleared up.
Whenever the surveyors left the ship for shore, Will feared that they would not return. The women, migrated into fresh wooden bodies, would be there as ambushing sirens, ready to kill as they had been killed.
Twenty-three months after its original departure, the Dido docked safely in Portsmouth. Unusually for such a lengthy voyage, only two who left did not come back — both taken by fever long before the island and the sins performed there.
Will now realized that the wood nymphs had waited till they reached England. The crew would go their separate ways, and then, one night, a letter would arrive telling him that Dr. Lynas had died coughing up leaves, or been found as a patch of viscera in a forest, surrounded by fresh roots. He would contact Wearn, but he would be dead too, and race to find Edward, only to arrive too late. It would start happening at the next new moon. Equally likely, the terror would come for them years later, a decade hence or even more. All that was certain was that the men of the Dido had cursed themselves on that nameless isle, and that a price would sooner or later be exacted from them.
But none of that ever happened.