Page 30 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

I wondered what kind of madness had enraptured me. Was I asleep in the hammock? Had I eaten the flesh of some hallucinogenic fish? I had no idea if such a thing existed. Or perhaps it was the herbs, the green leaves with which the stew was flavoured?

No, it couldn’t be. I could feel the spray on my cheeks and taste the salt on my lips. Whatever was happening had to be true. Simultaneously, I knew it could not be real.

We were nearly at the reef. Another silvery hand tried to reach up and take hold of the craft as it passed. An angry murmur went up from the ghastly passengers. One of the long-dead reached out a claw-like hand and beat the other away. It fell back into the water with a terrible moaning sound of renunciation and loss.

‘Why can the others not come aboard?’ I shouted.

The question was absurd. They were mirages, surely, a play of the moonlight upon the water. But I persisted.

‘If some can be transported to the afterlife, why not all?’

I saw his lips move but could not hear his voice.

‘Please, tell me,’ I cried.

His lips moved again and, this time, the tightly packed drowned turned towards him. In parody of some ghastly stage routine, they began to whisper together and turn. First those closest to him repeated his low words, then they passed the message to a neighbour who turned and passed it on again. In that way, the message travelled down the boat from gaping mouth to mangled ear, until all the appalling faces, blue and white and bloated, were hissing it at me in ragged unison, each it seemed in a separate language, but all of them comprehensible to me by some demonic alchemy.

‘They have not yet earned their deliverance. Might not ever do so . . .’

I fell back in the prow of the boat. It was true. He was the Ankou and I had embarked upon the Ship of the Dead.

There was a moment of silence followed by a faint cry of hollow triumph. We were through the reef and out in the open sea. The wind drove us on. We sat so low in the water that it rose in a wall of darkness to either side.

The dead souls became excited. They grimaced and turned to one another, mouthing incomprehensible words. Our pace slowed, the great wake subsided and the island became visible, at first just a black shadow on the night, then more and more distinct. I soon made out trees and a beach.

There we headed.

The drowned edged forward. Those closest to me wanted my place in the prow. They leaned in, almost touching my garments. Those further back shuffled forward too, pressing up against their fellows, until soon I was completely hemmed in by the foul and rotting bodies. They groped with their terrible hands past my face, scratching their bony claws through the night air, as if the gesture would make the island come more rapidly near.

Through the thicket of decomposing flesh, I saw the gaunt villager stand and raise his hand. There was the unmistakable grinding of hull on shore. We had arrived.

Immediately, they began to leave. Clambering over me in their haste to quit the boat and reach the land, I was trampled and buffeted by their vile remains. Ten then twenty then thirty and more, kicking and dragging themselves over the prow and splashing away through the shallows to the beach.

Speechless with horror, I covered my head with my hands and curled myself into a ball for fear of contamination or injury. The truth is, I felt no pain – their touch was insubstantial – but it left a nausea, a deep, disconcerting revulsion. I cursed myself for having come. In my need to prove myself better than the villagers and their ancient superstitions, I had brought this dreadful experience upon myself.

They staggered from the water, took a few steps upon the land before coming to a halt and raising their hands. I heard their joyful voices like the yelps of distant dogs, as they began to fade. I cannot say precisely when their substance disintegrated utterly into darkness.

Without the gaunt man even seeming to turn the boat around, we were all at once again riding the white crests. We got into trouble in a spiralling eddy from which our boat was flung. The prow swung violently round and, without any kind of wind, as if moved by some mysterious underwater force, the boat began to drive homeward towards the shore. The gaunt villager lay back against the timbers and the tiller swung wildly back and forth. Unburdened of our cargo, we seemed to skim across the waves.

We made straight for the centre of the reef where the rocks were sharpest and tallest. I felt sure we must be sundered by the teeth of stone. I believe I may have uttered some kind of imprecation. I don’t know to whom. Perhaps it was answered. More likely, the Ship of the Dead cannot be sunk by anything in our base world. In any case, we sailed right though the deadly rocks, dancing on the wild foam.

My fear made me oblivious to my surroundings. Only once we were in the quiet of the bay did I realise that the boat was becoming less and less distinct. The timbers beneath my hand were translucent as if they, too, like the long drowned, had finished with this world. The prow itself, though still substantial to my touch, appeared like paper, as if my hand could push through it into the cold black water beyond. The mast seemed no more than a blade of straw. The aft panels were quite invisible. At last, the beach approached. Now it was as if the two of us, the gaunt man and I, were hovering across the waves, so transparent had the boat become.

Just as it felt that my imagination could no longer sustain the image of the craft and I must drown, I felt myself thrown up onto the sand. I lay still for a moment, dazed with all I had seen. I was drenched from the spray. The waves lapped at my legs but I hadn’t the strength to pull myself upright. Then I noticed the gaunt man already trudging away up the beach. The sun was rising and a pale shaft of yellow light illuminated his sunken features.

I dragged myself to my feet and ran after him. ‘Why you?’ I cried.

He held my gaze for a moment then replied, in a voice thick with sorrow and resignation:

‘Because I was called.’

I let go of his arm and the man continued on his weary way. I watched him go. There was, in the awkward droop of his shoulders, a terrible lassitude – or at least so it seemed to me.

I thought again of the carved bones that dangled from the timbers of his roof – all the vile little faces. I pictured him in his lonely cabin, working away at some of that very evening’s passengers. He carved them as they must have been in life, but I could not have done the same. I wondered if he was the only man allowed to see the men they had been. As an interloper or a stowaway, I had perceived the desperate transformations that death had wrought.

I knew that I would be haunted for ever by what I had seen. But how much worse must it be for he whose role was forever to transport the drowned into the next life? And, in recompense for this task not of his own choosing, to be ostracised by family, neighbour and friend.

I sank back down onto the sand. The sun was not yet warm but I allowed its brightness to banish the visions of the night from my consciousness. The waves lapped closer, I shielded my eyes and looked out at the island.