Trollheart

Dancing Round the Bonfire: Spooky Stories and Tales of Terror for the Scary Season

Submissions remain open; I'm just going to start posting my own work now. Feel free to drop a story in and I'll add it to the contents page.

CONTENTS


Homeward, or, Where's Ripley When You Need Her?
Marked
Gentlemen's Club
Coming Back to Life
Boss of Bosses
Support Group
Not One of Us
Star-crossed

A Grave Injustice: A Sherlock Holmes Story

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Homeward, or, Where's Ripley When You Need Her?

Beating hard against the wind, the ship's sails filled as the bark tacked to port. The storm screamed its fury at the vessel, the roiling sea doing its best to swamp the decks. Huge frothy white breakers came surging up over the sides, like the grasping, questing hands of some enormous sea beast beneath. The sky was hard and dark, the stars glittering like baleful staring eyes as the ship made its way nor-by-nor'west, the island dwindling to the size of a small rock in the distance. The remaining crew members shivered, and not only from the lashing rain which seemed to have decided that if the ship could not be drowned from below then it would be drowned from above. Carsten jerked a thumb back in the direction of the rapidly-receding atoll.

“Fucking dusky maidens, my arse!” he grumped to Deveraux, who was trying to splice the mainbrace, or some damn thing. “An island Paradise, that's what he promised us! And what did we get?”

The Frenchman ignored him. The question did not require an answer; they all knew what they had got. Those that had survived, that was. But he had his own problems, small and insignificant as they seemed now.
Deveraux had not the first idea how to be a seaman, much less splice a mainbrace, whatever that was. He had sneaked aboard the ship when it docked at Marseilles. After what they had all faced, he now wondered if he might have been better throwing himself on the tender mercies of Jacques Dupont. The man wasn't known as “The Guillotine” for nothing, of course, and he took a very dim view of those who could not pay, but at least it would have been quick.

It certainly had not been quick for those they had been forced to leave behind.
O'Donnell was, as usual, drunk in the hold, and of no use to anyone, but he was alive. A burden, yes, and one they could barely afford as they fled from that horror, but there was no way Captain Harrison was going to have left him back... he shuddered, a cold hand running down his spine ... there.

Nobody deserved that.

Of course, Harrison wasn't the captain, but the acting captain. The last he had seen of Captain Grayson, the man had been standing on the shore like some titan, holding them off as they approached like a black cloud. He had one of those new flintlocks, take down a maneater at fifty paces. But these maneaters were not to be stopped. The bullets seemed to have no effect on them as they pressed forward.

Mentally, he doffed his hat, though he wore none. Captains traditionally go down with their ships. Grayson had gone down, but not with his ship. The last glimpse Deveraux had had of him was forever now seared into his memory, the man surrounded by a black cloud of bodies, shots, and a scream that would haunt him to his dying days.

But the captain had bought their escape with his life, and the jolly boat was halfway to the ship before the creatures turned towards them. Thank the good Lord in Heaven, he thought, that they seemed afraid of the water and could not pursue them.

He thought of the men left behind. All dead now, of course.
Or at least, he fervently hoped so.

His thoughts returned to O'Donnell. The man had a good excuse to be off his face, though in fairness he seldom needed one. But this time he did. They all did. Matter of fact, Deveraux thought, it was a wonder they weren't all nine sheets to the wind after what they had gone through.

As soon as they reached port, he intended to remedy that situation. Alchohol would not block out the horrible things he had seen back there on that cursed island – nothing would: he would most likely live with those memories for the rest of his days. They would come screaming out of his dreams and reach for him in the night, and he, a man who did not scare easy and who had many enemies, though none of them alive, would cry like a newborn.
No, drink would not take away the events of the past three days. But it would help dull the horror.
Maybe.

He could never have believed such things existed.
Nobody could.

Down in the hold, O'Donnell could.

When they had shoved him down into the darkness to sober up, his head had felt like it was splitting.
That was no longer a metaphor.
The Irishman was no longer drunk, nor would he ever be.

But something was.

His cries, never audible above the shriek of the wind and the groaning of the ship's timbers anyway, went unheard, and now the only sound was a horrible crunching, slurping, sucking.

Red eyes gleamed malevolently in the darkness as the ship lurched towards home.
The snap of a human bone. Gnawing sounds.

Soon, they would all believe.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018