“ ‘Some’ll tell ye they’re devils, Jacky boy,’ Sam told me once, ’an’ some’ll tell ye they’re a-meant for the scarin’ away of devils—but they ain’t. The devils in hell are jest fairy tales. Mebbe these are the Elder Gods, and mebbe they’re the Others, but either way they’re older by far than any Christian devil.’ He would never tell me exactly what he meant, though, so I always figured that he was teasing me. It was the same with the chapels. All along that coast there are little chapels on the cliff, where whole villages would go to pray when their menfolk were caught at sea by a storm. Even in Swanage the rumor was that it wasn’t just for the safe return of fishermen that Rockaby’s folk prayed, for they were wreckers even before they were smugglers, but Sam sneered at that kind of calumny.
“ ‘They rearranged the stones to build the chapels,’ he told me, ’An’ threw away the ones that scared ’em—but the stone knows what it was before your Christ was born, an’ fer what its eyes were set to watch. The Elders were first, but their watchin’ did no good. The Others came anyway, an’ printed their own faces in the stone.’ He was always a little bit crazy—but harmless, I thought, until the fire got him.
“Rockaby’s father and mine sailed together once or twice. So far as I know, they got on well enough with Dan Pye and each other. When I first signed on the Goshen Sam’s dad was still on the sailing ships, and I reckon Sam would have followed him if the age of sail wasn’t so obviously done. Sam never liked steam, but you can’t hold back the tide, and if you want to work you have to go where the work is. He was a seaman through and through, and if going under steam was the price of going to sea, he’d pay it. I don’t think he was resentful of my having got my mate’s papers by the time he joined the Goshen, even though he was older by a year or two, because he didn’t have an ounce of ambition. He was a good seaman—and the most powerful swimmer I ever saw—but he wasn’t in the least interested in command. I always wanted to be master of my own ship, but he never wanted to be master of anything, not even his own soul.
“I can’t put my finger on any one incident that first set Rockaby and Captain Pye at odds. It’s in the nature of seamen to grumble, and they always find a scapegoat on the bridge. I wasn’t aware that anything new had crept into the scuttlebutt when the Goshen set out, although the talk grew dark soon enough when the weather wouldn’t let up. Landlubbers think that steam’s made seafaring easy, but they don’t know what the ocean’s like. A steamship may not need the wind for power, but she’s just as vulnerable to its whims. Sometimes, I could swear that the wind tries twice as hard to send a steamship down, purely out of pique. We had a rough ride out, I can tell you. I never saw the Mediterranean so angry, and no sooner were we through the canal and into the Red Sea than the storms picked us up again. Rockaby was the only man in the crew who wasn’t as sick as a pig—and that, I suppose, might be why things between him and Dan Pye began to get worse. Rockaby said he was being picked on, given more than his fair share of work—and so he was, because he was sometimes the only man capable of carrying out the orders. The captain did more than his own share, too, and I tried, but there were times when we were all laid low.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being sick at sea. They say Nelson took days to find his sea legs. But the ordinary kind of seasickness was only the beginning—laudanum got us through the fevers and the aches, until we were far enough east to buy hashish and raw opium. You might disapprove of that, Mr. Mycroft, but it’s the way things work out east, at least among seafaring men. You have bad dreams, but at least you can bear to be awake. Or so it usually goes. But this time was different; the ocean seemed to have it in for us. We were carrying mail for the company, so we had to make a dozen stops on the Indian mainland and the islands, and somewhere along the way we picked up the fire. St. Anthony’s fire, that is.
“Dr. Watson told that he’d encountered similar cases while he was in India—I first met him in Goa thirteen years ago, while I was an able seaman on the Serendip—and that the cause was bad bread, contaminated with ergot. Maybe he’s right, but that’s not what seamen believe. To them, the fire is something out of hell. The men who took it worse said they felt as if crabs and snakes were crawling under their skin, and they had blinding visions of devils and monsters. This time, Rockaby was affected just as badly as anyone else, and he took it very bad indeed. He began blaming Dan Pye, saying that the captain had ridden him too hard, and brought the affliction on the ship by the insult to his blood.
“We lost two more men before we made port in Padang and laid in fresh supplies. That was when Rockaby disappeared—overboard, we thought, though he was too strong a swimmer to drown so close to shore, raving or not. We nearly shipped out without him, but he got back to the ship just in time, unfortunately. He was over the fire, didn’t seem any worse for wear than the rest of us, physically speaking—quite the reverse, in fact—but we soon found out that his mind hadn’t made the same recovery as his body. No sooner were we under way that he began twitching and jabbering away, sometimes mumbling away as if in a foreign language, stranger than any I’d ever heard. He did his work, mind—there was no lack of strength in him—but he was a changed man, and not for the better. Captain Pye said that his mumbling was nonsense, but it really did sound to me like a language, though maybe one designed for other tongues than human. There were names that kept cropping up: Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, Azathoth. When he did speak English, Rockaby told anyone who would listen that we didn’t understand and couldn’t understand what the world was really like, and what it will become when the Others return to claim it.
“Captain Pye could see that Sam was ill, and didn’t want to come down hard on him, but ships’ crew are direly superstitious. That kind of ill-wishing can make any trouble that comes along a thousand times worse. No one likes to be part of a jittery company even at the best of times, and when a ship’s already taken a battering and there are typhoons to be faced and fought . . . well, a captain has no alternative but to try to shut a Jonah up. Dan tried, but it only made things worse. I tried to talk some sense into Sam myself, but nothing anyone could say had any effect but to make him crazier. Perhaps we should have dropped him off in Madras or Aden, but he was a Purbeck man when all was said and done, and it was our responsibility to see him safely home. And we did, though I surely wish we hadn’t.
“By the time we came back into Southampton Water, Rockaby seemed a good deal better, though we’d dosed him with opium enough to keep an elephant quiet and maybe taken any unhealthy amount ourselves. I thought he might make a full recovery once he was back home, and I traveled with him on the train to Swanage to make sure that he got back safely. He was calm enough, but he wasn’t making much sense. ‘Ye’re a fool, Jacky,’ he said to me, before we parted. ‘Y’ think you can make it right but y’ can’t. The price has to be paid, the sacrifice made. The Others never went away, y’ know, when they’d seen off the Elder Gods. They may be sleeping, but they’re dreaming, too, and the steam filters into their dreams the way sails never did, stirrin’ an’ simmerin’ an’ seethin’. Ain’t no good hopin’ that they’ll let us all alone while there’s tides in the sea an’ the crawlin’ chaos in our blood. Y’ can throw away the faces but y’ can’t blind the eyes or keep the ears from hearin’. I know where the curses are, Jacky. I know how Dan Pye’ll die, an’ how it has to be done. Cleave to him an ye’re doomed, Jacky. List to me. I know. I’ve the old blood in me.’