The Immaculate Conception Read online

abysmally dark stairwell leading to the hold.

  “They went mad,” Phillip added, “thrashing and yanking at the restraints, biting themselves to tear free of their shackles. I watched one gnaw his own foot off!”

  His voice had taken on a childish quality that sent ripples of fear through Eric’s soul.

  Phillip seized a fistful of Eric’s shirt. “I shot one of them, sir. I had to! I couldn’t take the sounds … the screaming … Please, sir, I need a priest. I have to confess.”

  Before Eric could respond, the man’s eyes rolled white and he slumped into a heap.

  “We need to get him to the cabin,” Eric shouted.

  “Leave him.”

  Eric looked to see Hollis pocketing a powder flask. In his other hand he held the pistol he’d used to murder Captain Forester, having reloaded the spent barrel with battle-honed speed.

  Hollis pointed at Marcus, Stooky, and Lorris. “You three join my men. Everyone else stay here and watch the stairs. We’re going below.” He cocked the pistol’s twin hammers. “Mister Townsend? Lead the way, if you will.”

  Eric laid Phillip on the deck and got to his feet. He gazed at Hollis’s weapon, then into the stairwell, one hand touching his empty scabbard. The others edged up beside him, passing a lantern forward.

  They started down.

  Unlike the other staircases on the ship, the steps leading to the slave hold had been encased with timbers. A switchback at the bottom of the first flight bypassed the gun deck, thus preventing any unauthorized access to the rest of the ship.

  Eric’s heart rate doubled as he neared the first landing. Ventilation was minimal here, and each downward step delivered him deeper into an invisible pool of odors: tar from the hull; the damp wood of packing crates; the lingering smell of cooked yams that comprised the slaves’ diet. But under that pungent mélange came the stench of something worse, something stewed in the stale air of a hundred sweaty bodies and spiced with the tang of freshly spilled blood.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth, feeling his wife’s embroidered initials press against his lips.

  Eric stopped at the landing. Phillip’s broken lantern lay on the floor, beyond the iron-barred gate the man had left open.

  Below waited a darkness blacker than Death’s cloak.

  Hollis prodded him in the back, spurring him down the second staircase with the barrels of his gun.

  At the bottom of the steps, Eric held the lantern ahead of him and entered the hold. Orange light grappled with the darkness on all sides, illuminating only enough of the immediate area to reveal several empty leg irons on the floor. Each sat in a small pool of blood with shredded strips of skin clinging to the metal.

  The men uttered whispers of shock.

  Eric ignored them and peered into the impenetrable murk. He walked several paces into the hold, his boots sucking at the wet floorboards with each step. He passed Phillip’s discarded pistol, only giving it a sideways glance while watching for movement among the forest of shadows thrown off by the ceiling support posts.

  “Jergen was right,” O’Neil said, gazing at the blood. “They all went mad and killed themselves.”

  Eric panned his light around. “Where are the bodies, then?”

  Though the vast main chamber remained enshrouded by darkness, even the weak glow of his lantern should’ve discovered one of the Ashanti tribesmen by now. Stowing the slaves had been a precise process. In order to maximize the usage of available space, each man had been laid on his back, his head in the lap of the individual behind him. Two tiers of shelves provided extra sleeping areas, and what free space remained had been used for the stowage of water casks and tar barrels. Given the cramped conditions, even if every last slave grouped together at either end of the hold, they still would’ve filled half the room.

  “Impossible,” Hollis growled. “There’s no way out of here other than the steps.”

  “Perhaps not,” Eric replied. “Look here.”

  Gooseflesh rose on his skin once the men joined him, the light of their lanterns coming together to fully reveal his discovery.

  “Heathen hoodoo,” Marcus whispered, crossing himself.

  There, in the farthest depths of the hold, hidden by a wall of cargo, a crude double-ringed circle had been carved into the floor. Eric estimated its width to be ten paces across. Strange humanoid caricatures decorated its entire circumference, etchings cut into the wood to resemble nimble-bodied creatures with huge claws and arsenals of teeth. Despite the eerie detail of the carvings, it was the black splinter-rimmed hole hacked out of the floorboards that drew Eric’s interest.

  “They cut through to the ballast hold,” he said, peering into the murk.

  “With what?” Hollis demanded.

  Eric shook his head, eyes locked on the shattered timbers lining the hole. Liquid sloshed in the shallow chambers below, splashing on the gravel piles that balanced the ship.

  Squinting in the dim light, he squatted down for a closer inspection, his gaze flicking to the sinister inscriptions etched into the floor. The cuts appeared deeper than he’d first seen, darker. One hand touched the boards when he leaned forward, and he snapped it back as if he’d laid his palm on the hot skin of an infected wound. He pressed a finger to the wood once again, grimacing at the way it yielded under pressure like—

  The thought broke off when light from his lantern spilled into the nearby hole, exposing a red lake of blood rather than the expected accumulation of sea water.

  “Good, God,” Lorris cried.

  Nausea stirred Eric’s guts into a whirlpool. He slapped a hand to his mouth but resisted the impulse to flee while he digested the sight, noting how the crimson liquid left thick tentacles of sludge on the gravel heaps and hull ribs, clotted masses that seemed to twitch and flex with the motion of the waves.

  He opened his mouth to voice an unfathomable thought when something thumped deeper in the hold.

  Everyone spun toward the noise.

  “What was that?” Stooky whispered, glancing about.

  The sound repeated, pulsing out of the darkness like a disembodied heartbeat. The men huddled together. Their pistols came up with nothing to target.

  Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump!

  Eric looked to the ceiling joists.

  “Footsteps,” he said. “They’re above us, on the gun deck.”

  “They must’ve come up behind the wall and used the supply room ladder,” Marcus added.

  Stooky gasped. “There are twenty kegs of gunpowder up there. They’ll destroy the ship!”

  “That’d be suicide,” Sisk countered.

  “Silence!” Hollis ordered.

  The thumping continued, now scores of muffled sounds passing overhead.

  Eric’s stare remained focused on the ceiling. “They’re headed for the stern hatch. They’ll get topside and take the others by surprise.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Hollis replied. “Everybody double up. One man shoots, one man loads—”

  Something splashed in the bloody water.

  The group twisted around to see a snarling tribesman burst from the ballast hold, leaping forth among an explosion of red. Warm drops sprayed Eric’s face, sprinkling his lips with coppery kisses. He stumbled away, retreating out of reach before the blackamoor seized his leg.

  The whole crowd fled backward in unison.

  Eric scrambled after them.

  The slave climbed out of the hole, his visage all the more gruesome at the edge of the lantern light. Multiple rivulets of blood trickled down the tribesman’s forehead, squiggling around splinters that bristled from his skin and dripping from a set of flat, oversized teeth that jutted from his mouth. His hands came up, both wrists ringed with bunched-up sleeves of shredded skin and tipped with black claws.

  The group stood in a portrait of horror, eyes wide, mouths agape. Urine darkened the front of Lorris’s trousers.

  The tribesman clambered forward, advancing with the rickety mov
ements of a horse cart traveling on two broken wheels. His toes looked horribly enlarged, like plums about to burst. Without warning, the middle of his feet stretched to twice their normal length, pushing his ankles backwards with the sound of cracking bone. But still the man limped on, glaring at the group with bloody eyes that swelled out of their sockets.

  “Shoot!” Hollis yelled.

  Their pistols thundered in the confines of the hold. Each muzzle expelled a storm cloud of smoke and a hail of lead, but the creature clambered on undeterred, pressing forward while the shots tore through his chest.

  Eric gazed in disbelief.

  The thing plunged into the crowd, its hooked fingers reaching for Marcus’s flesh. The old man screamed. He flinched backward in an attempt to escape but only managed one step before colliding against a support post.

  The slave seized his arms and plunged its two front teeth into his chest. They stabbed through his shirt with the sound of a dagger blade rammed through an apple.

  “No!” Eric hollered.

  He pushed to his feet, searching for a weapon while the rest of the crew stood in a petrified stupor.

  Marcus’s cry melted into a gurgle. The slave yanked its head backward, filling the room with a terrible cracking sound as its teeth pried up three of Marcus’s ribs.

  Eric lunged at O’Neil. The man had frozen in mid-reload of his pistol, and Eric seized up his cutlass, drawing the blade from its scabbard in a huge swinging arc that—Shlop!—lopped the slave’s head off.

  It hit the floor and rolled into the shadows.

  The decapitated body collapsed, falling away to reveal Marcus clutching a wound that