The darkness was a tangle of tentacles and tendrils, all black and viscous, fluid but nonetheless solid… or was it? As it brushed my skin, I felt the darkness for what it was: the absence of light, pure and simple, a devouring emptiness that could never be satisfied. It clung to me, strips of nothingness around my arms, grabbing my head, covering my mouth just as I locked my jaw tight, trying to force itself in past my pursed lips. It immobilized the arm that held the cutlass, and all I could do was to roll on the deck, wrestling impotently against the spreading darkness that stretched up toward my nose, ears, and eyes…
I felt dozens of pinpricks across my limbs and face, as if the oozing pitch were growing thorns as we fought; thorns, or teeth. And then eyes were staring back at me, rounded, darker patches of midnight, coalescing like blisters on its mass, moving, rolling, dissolving, and reforming. My breath had turned sour in my chest, the pressure of the thing prying my lips apart. I felt dizzy and tired. A mass of tendrils on my face smothered me even as they tried to squirm inside my mouth, while others encircled my neck, crawling up toward my ears. Then I felt chill, a heart-numbing cold that I believed was the touch of death… and was free.
The darkness had recoiled, and melting quickly into a gray haze, dissipated in the still air. The corpse remained motionless, its face open in halves as some carnivorous flower, a yellow mist flowing slowly from the gap. The pale girl was standing in front of me. “Shoggoths cannot stand a virgin’s touch, that’s why they need the corpses,” she told me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You did a good job bringing that one out. Now get up. I’ll need you to get to my husband.”
She was tall, with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes, and wore nothing but a loincloth and a seashell anklet. In other circumstances I might’ve considered her beautiful, desirable, but at that moment all I could think about was her sweetly familiar smell — I knew that scent, but from where? This sudden preoccupation drove away even my puzzlement as to the fact that she seemed quite unharmed, despite the longswords I had seen bite bloody gashes into her milk white skin before I could reach her attackers.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s happening?”
“You may call me Alia, and I was a prisoner in that other ship,” she said, pointing to Beldur’s vessel, “and he is still a prisoner here. Will you help me to get to him?”
I felt strangely detached, as if I were two people, one living through the events of the last few hours, the other watching everything from afar, aghast and fascinated. Her nonchalant manner brought these two together, making the horror and insanity of it all seem very present and very real, and I grabbed her by the shoulders, burning for answers. “Were you in the corsair ship last night? Do you know what happened there?”
She shrugged, and realizing how firmly I had seized her, I released the woman, but she just echoed my question: “What happened there?”
“Didn’t you see? The deck, like a mirror… ”
Silence. Then I recalled the emptiness, the vacuity I’d felt as the hungry darkness that had hid in the knight had slowly consumed me. Perhaps the same devilish thing had been set loose on Beldur’s ship, gulped in everything down to the lowest speck of dust, turning the ship into a shining desert?
“Were these demons, these… shoggoths… there?”
She looked at me, seeming a little puzzled, her head cocked to the side. “Why… yes, of course.”
I picked up my cutlass and one of the longswords. “Your husband is near, you said. Let’s find him.”
I am not usually keen on meeting strangers aboard ghost ships, but the thought of having another able-bodied man around was reassuring. Supposing he was indeed hale, and not a mangled, tortured husk, but I chose not to focus on that possibility.
“I know where he is.” She pointed toward the forecastle. “They were trying to keep me from going there.”
We walked slowly up the deck. I was apprehensive, watching the scattered corpses closely: the lack of blood in the two knights I’d fought and her mention of the dark devils “using corpses” left me with little option but to imagine that any of the dead bodies around, sailor, warrior monk, or corsair, could spring to its feet and attack. At any moment I expected more shoggoths to come slithering from the shadows.
She stopped abruptly, some three steps behind me. “I cannot go on. There is a barrier here.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, looking nervously around the stained, sunlit deck. “There’s nothing here.”
She pointed to a line etched on the planks at my feet, an almost imperceptible curve that went all the way from starboard to port. “I cannot cross these, not while the book remains open.”
It was too much. Fighting real monsters was bad enough. Having to deal with what I thought were imaginary barriers and silly taboos was unbearable. I was almost frantic, and screamed: “What are you talking about?”
“I am a consecrated virgin and wife. I cannot cross this… this… line. Not with the book open. My husband, he… you must close the book.”
This made no more sense than anything else she had told me, but I also saw that there would be no use arguing: there was sweat on her brow, and her eyes were wide, staring ahead at something only she could see.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go for your husband, you just wait here.”
The words had barely left my lips when I was struck by an intense feeling of foreboding. Was this a trap? Was she sending me toward… what? Should I dare to turn my back on her?
Alia shook her head.
“No. None should wake him up but me. He looks for me at night, in his dreams. His dreams are powerful, but we can only touch after the closing of the book and the undoing of the barrier.”
“You are Christian, yes? I respect your religion,” I said, even if I knew very little about the exact beliefs of Christianity, or how they lived in Christian countries. But I’d heard something about married virgins, or virgins married to the Christian God, or giving birth to God or to proxies of the God, or whatever, and I thought I understood part of her misgivings. “But whatever your beliefs, we are wasting precious time. If your faith won’t let you walk over lines on a ship, I’ll go there myself and free him, and you can pray this thing out later… ”
There was a flash in her eyes — was it fear? hatred? — and I imagined her spitting, casting a curse on me. Instead her emotion seemed to pass, and Alia said, “You shouldn’t go alone. What if there are more shoggoths? They can hurt you, but remember they cannot stand my touch.”
Yes, the virgin touch. I hadn’t forgotten that. I felt the ship lurch under my feet — the heeling was getting worse; I got the impression that the vessels might crash into each other at any moment — and it added to my already intense unease.
“I guess we should close this ‘book,’ then. Do you know where it is?”
“I believe I can feel it… ” She stared past me. “It is also out of my reach, sorry.”
She pointed toward a dark space in the forecastle’s shade, under an ugly wooden-sculpted falcon that supported one of the ends of the balustrade above. It was some fifteen paces to the right of the brig’s door.
I walked nervously toward it, shivering as I stepped over the line scratched into the deck. As I approached, something rustled in the dark place; there was a tent in the shadow. My heart quickened, but it wasn’t another walking corpse or a shoggoth, just an old man, wearing heavy purple robes and a matching skullcap. He stepped into the sunlight and addressed me in Greek. I signaled that my understanding of the language was poor, and he switched to Arabic.