“I cannot let you come any closer, son. You are under her spell.”
“I’m with the woman because we were the only two living people here,” I answered, not at all liking his use of the word “spell.” “Now there are three of us, and I don’t see why I should prefer one to another.”
“But you will let her go to her husband?”
“That was the idea,” I said, glancing nervously back at Alia and considering: am I bewitched? Then I remembered my recent exasperation, and I thought it unlikely. “I’m not one to stand between a husband and wife.”
“So, I cannot allow you to pass.”
My patience was wearing thin. Any moment I expected another shoggoth to erupt out of the darkness behind him. I wondered if the strange old man was a wizard, perhaps the demons’ conjurer. I felt the weight of the sword in my hand, the cutlass in the other.
“I don’t see how you would stop me,” I said warily.
His lips twisted in a melancholic smile. “There is a curse on my bones, seaman.”
I stepped past him, ready to shoulder him out of the way if necessary. As I did, he drew a dagger from the sleeve of his robe and jumped me.
Alia cried a warning, and I was already half expecting an attack. I whirled as his arm descended, the dagger glittering like a white tooth. My cutlass caught him on the wrist, and his hand, still clenched around the hilt, spun away in a spray of blood. Sending the sword point into his heart was a matter of moments.
He teetered, then toppled, but before his body hit the deck came the sound of a tree splintered by lightning, and a rending of flesh, and then I had before me a monstrous thing. It was not unlike a giant insect, but built, somehow, around the old man’s corpse.
His bones had been cursed, all right: the legs of the creature were made from his suddenly overgrown ribs, and the space where his right hand had been was now occupied by a hooked stinger of contorted ivory, the two bones of the forearm entwined into a single hooked point. His skull was bursting out from the skin, dull teeth falling out to make room for needle-sharp fangs, the neck elongating, coiling, crawling.
I attacked, but the bone hook parried. The obscenely wide jaw lunged at me, and I dodged the bite, clipping it aside with my elbow. The impact hurt. Then the hooked stinger came in low, and I had to jump aside, falling back. Falling back wasn’t good, the thing quick on its rib-legs, and vicious.
The head bobbed menacingly at the tip of the neck, which obscenely stretched further and further from its disgusting body. I got the impression that it might soon be long enough to coil around me, and when next it darted in, I tried to sever it with the longsword. It deflected the blow with the thick chitin of its forehead, the skull as heavy as any shield. My arms were aching, and the stinger constantly menaced me. The monster creaked like an old wheel in need of oil, but its movements were quick and eerily elegant.
I threw my cutlass at it, and the monster easily twisted its head to follow the whirling blade, ready to use its skull-shield to deflect it if necessary. In doing so, however, it took its eyes off me for a moment, and a moment was all I needed. Now gripping the longsword in both hands, I lunged forward and slashed at the exposed vertebrae. I managed to cut clean through the neck, decapitating the fiend, but even as its head fell to the deck, that terrible stinger arced down to impale me. I threw myself out of the way, my feet slipping out from under me as I narrowly avoided the attack. As I landed on the deck beside the grotesque severed head, I saw new bone pushing upward from the fleshy stump of its neck.
Yet this horrific development did not distract me for long, since I was now between its jagged rib-legs. They danced frantically around my body, trying to impale me. Without much alternative, I thrust the sword up into the belly of the old man, which had become the nucleus of the creature. The pointed legs went wild, jabbing at me as I wriggled beneath them and kept cutting. Thick, oily innards began falling from the wound I had carved, gelatinous blood raining upon me, and suddenly the whole mass collapsed, folding inward on itself like a dying insect, and I rolled away to avoid being crushed.
I rose shaking to my feet, exhausted but alive. The stench was unbelievable, an acrid rot, more vegetable than animal, that made me cough.
“The book,” Alia called plaintively from her vigil on the far side of the so-called barrier. “Go to the book. Close it.”
Thinking dark thoughts about her lack of concern for her savior, I moved toward the shadow of the falcon-carved balustrade. Now that my eyes were out of the sun I saw more distinctly the small tent of purple cloth erected in the falcon’s shadow, and ducked inside. There was barely room to stand, and the only furnishing was a small bronze tripod supporting an open book. It wasn’t very impressive: quite small, just a little bigger than the palm of my hand, with wooden covers. The pages were of thick paper, covered with geometric drawings and a text that employed some Arabic characters but was not actually that language at all.
Never one to waste time, I reached out with the tip of my sword and flipped it closed, and was immediately assaulted by a perfume — a sweet scent that drowned even my own foulness. It was the same musky bouquet that I had noticed on Alia, and now I remembered where else I had smelled it — it was the same perfume that had leaked from the broken jar in Beldur’s ship.
I didn’t want to have anything else to do with that book. I stepped out of the tent and saw Alia striding toward the brig, no longer bound by the barrier that had kept her away. The already heeling ship lurched starboard with an ominous creak. I nearly went tumbling, but Alia didn’t stumble. I called to her, but she didn’t slow, looking back at me with a rapturous expression and calling out, “I think it best that you leave now.”
I had the same impression, but after all I had witnessed, I was too curious to just flee without some answers, so I followed after her. She raised her eyebrows, doubtful, but said nothing more. Her fingers brushed the heavy door of the cabin and it flew open. Instead of darkness, a green-gray light shimmered within the doorway.
The perfume that came from her hair, her body, was now overpowering. I had the strange idea that the scent was not upon her, but of her — that she was naught but perfume herself, imprisoned in the jar like a jinn until the clay had cracked, freeing her.
As I imagined this, the nature of the perfume seemed to change. Before, its sweetness had been enticing, relaxing, but now it made my skin creep and my hair stand on end. It was not that the scent had changed into something unsavory, for it was still quite a pleasant smell, but rather that its power touched a chord in my brain. This chord reverberated with ultimate dread, with unlimited fear. All around me, the ship was groaning and trembling like a hurt animal.
And just like that, I ran to the railing and jumped into the sea. My desperate flight hardly seemed of my own volition, but more as if a puppeteer of horror had taken control of my soul’s strings with an irresistible hand.
My weary arms and legs churned the deep blue water, swimming frantically away from both the cursed Maltese ship and the polished wreck of Beldur’s. Then I heard a terrible crash and crackle, and unable to resist, looked back the way I had swum. As I watched, eyes stinging from the brine, both vessels burst open like rotten fruit. And then… and then I believe I saw Alia’s husband. The word that occurred me, the only word that still comes to mind when I think of it, is Argos — not the mythical ship of the Greeks, but the other one: the dragon with one thousand eyes.