The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(43)
“‘My name,’ said he, ‘is Winston Carson. I hail from America, as you can no doubt tell from my speech. I came over on a ship called the Bountiful Harvest, but I won’t be going back on that queer vessel! In fact, I feel that I have just now thrown off an ill and monstrous fate having left it. My mam said never to have any truck with Innsmouth folk, and I should have listened.’”
Holmes paused. “When I asked him about the curiously swift travel over the Atlantic, Watson, he was most anxious to tell me the tale.”
“‘Being a new hand,’ said he, ‘they did not give me access to all the ship, and there were curious doings onboard, with many secrets that the captain, chaplain and mates kept to themselves. Most of these were centred on the lower decks, where I was absolutely forbidden to go. My first assumption was that they were engaged in transporting some sort of contraband, which did not bother me.
“‘Three days off the eastern coast of Massachusetts, the captain tells us to reef all the sails and batten down all the ports, as if to make ready for a storm. This was a cause for much curiosity, you see, as there was not a cloud in the sky. But Captain Waite was not the kind to tolerate questions, and we went about securing the ship as ordered. All while we members of the crew worked, the ship’s chaplain and mates held some kind of heathen ritual.
“‘I’d never seen the like. Certainly, it was no Christian ceremony, and the language – which the chaplain spoke and which all the mates and most of the crew answered in – was such an unintelligible and harsh warbling that it raised the hackles on me just to hear it. The chaplain, a broken-down, hunched-over fellow, with a great, misshapen head, wore a dirty fish-stained robe that I’d seen often enough, but also a striking golden tiara that I’d never seen before.’”
I was entranced at Holmes’s rendition of the sailor’s tale, but not so much that I failed to recognize a reference to my own strange experience, and I looked briefly across at the place where my coat was bundled around that same tiara, and wondered. Then Holmes continued.
“‘At the conclusion of this ritual, they brought four unsavoury bundles out. I was coiling rope at this time, only a few feet away, and so got a good look as the chaplain’s assistant heaved them over the port railing. The large and bulky bundles were wrapped in burlap, and coils and coils of cheap hemp rope. The first three seemed inert, lumpy things, and it was only their coffin-like shape that disturbed me, for no one had died during the voyage. But the last bundle clearly twitched, and a brief moan came from it, just before they flung it over the rail. I watched in horror as it disappeared beneath the ocean surface and fell back into our wake. The chaplain’s assistant oversaw this operation. He was an odious man, though he had once been a U.S. marshal, I understand, or so some of the others told me. I cannot imagine the kind of justice such a man would hand out. When he wiped his hands unconsciously on his dirty canvas pants, I could see the unmistakable smear of blood.
“‘“Cow carcasses,” he said to me, for I’m sure my horror was written plainly on my face. “What did you think they were… men?” The man wheezed and laughed from merriment when he saw the shock that this statement produced in me.
“‘Then four of the older hands, Innsmouth natives all of them, went down into the lowest part of the hold, where I was forbidden to go. A few minutes later, there was a strange racket, a curious metallic rattling that shook the entire deck. After a quarter of an hour of this, they came back up and the captain said that we were to wait. Well, that wait felt like hours, and the whole thing chilled me, even though I stood in the sun. At last, the ship lurched as if we’d just run aground. It near flung me overboard, but I could see from the expressions of the crew around me, and the easy way in which they all took grips in the rigging, that this was an expected event. This was what we’d been waiting for.
“‘I heard a story of a whale that bumped a ship once, and I thought of that story right off as the hull gave a massive groan. For a moment I thought some force from below had seized us. Certainly the sea was dark and turbulent underneath the Bountiful Harvest, though there was no weather to account for it.
“‘Then the ship lurched again, and the helmsman turned to bring the ship a bit to port. Spray pounded against the bow, dousing the deck while the ship bounced like a storm-tossed cork in the Atlantic rollers. I fair thought we were done for, then. The ship shuddered again, and we picked up speed as if entering a very strong current. Faster and faster we went as something unknown propelled our ship through the water at a frightening speed, faster than any ship I’d ever sailed on. The ship groaned and creaked under the strain, as if she would batter herself apart against the rising waves, but the Innsmouth hands have an uncanny way of the sea about them. Born fishermen, all of them, and they knew every trick there was to keep the ship afloat as we flew through the water.
“‘You will scarce credit it, sitting here in London as we are, but we kept this up, night and day, doing double and sometimes triple watch for four gruelling days and nights. What nights! I got seasick for the first time, and I lost at least a dozen pounds what with being unable to hold any food. That, only with constant work and a bone-wearying fatigue, turned me into a wreck of a man. My own mam wouldn’t recognize me now. That’s how much weight I’ve lost.
“‘At last, our navigator told us we were close to England. Four days to travel the whole Atlantic! Then the captain ordered most of the crew below. He thought at first to not include me, and there was an argument between him and the chaplain. There seemed to be some kind of problem with the numbers, and they would not have enough men to complete some mysterious task without me.