A signal was about to be given and the ship alerted that this scheme was underway, Matthew thought. He felt Berry shiver beside him, and he put his arm and part of the gray blanket around her.
Lights from the two lanterns held by Croydon and Squibbs wandered over Berry’s body. A bad sign, Matthew thought. “Where are we going?” he asked them, if just to divert their minds from their present—and highly disturbing—destination.
“Somewhere warmer than this,” said Croydon. “Thank Christ.”
“A three weeks voyage? To a warmer clime?” Matthew considered the geography; he put a map of the Atlantic in his mind and sought a harbor. “Not the Florida territory, I’m betting. Not into Spanish country. So…” Outward bound, Sirki had said. “The Bermuda islands,” Matthew announced. “Is that right?”
“You are a pretty thing,” said Squibbs, putting his light on Berry’s face. “Take off that cap and let your hair loose.”
“No,” Matthew answered. “She won’t.”
“Here, now!” Croydon stepped forward and fairly sizzled Matthew’s eyebrows by putting the lamp’s hot glass right up in his face. “No one’s talkin’ to you, are they? Squibbs is just askin’ her to be friendly, is all. A cold night and such…what’s the harm of being a little friendly?” He turned the light upon Berry, who couldn’t help but shrink back a step, for she realized these two were not so well-controlled without the East Indian giant giving them orders.
“Let your hair loose,” Squibbs repeated. His mouth sounded thick and wet.
“Sirki will be back any minute,” said Matthew. His body was a tense mass of bruised pain; in his present state he could neither deliver a blow nor take one.
“Any minute ain’t now,” was Squibbs’ reply. He reached out, grasped Berry’s cap and pulled it off, and her coppery-red tresses flowed free down her shoulders. “Pretty hair,” Squibbs said after a moment of deliberation. “Bet it smells nice.”
“Long time,” said Croydon, “since I smelled me a woman’s hair.”
Matthew took a position between the two men and Berry. He thrust his chin forward, daring a strike. “Sirki won’t like this. We’re supposed to be guests.” He spoke the word with dripping sarcasm.
“Ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” Squibbs answered, his eyes narrowed and his gaze focused beyond Matthew on the true object of his attention. “Just wantin’ to smell. Step aside.”
Matthew balled up his fists, for all the good that would do. His arms were leaden lengths of ache. “I’ll call him,” he promised. “He won’t—”
“Hear you,” said Croydon. “Be a good little shit and step aside.”
“I’m not moving.”
“Oh yes, you are,” said Squibbs, and with a quick powerful motion he grasped the front of Matthew’s coat and flung him aside. Matthew stumbled over his own legs and went down amid the weeds and brush, and once out of the way and out of the light he was a forgotten man.
Squibbs and Croydon pushed forward, and though Berry retreated another step she realized there was nowhere else to go, and perhaps she ought to stand perfectly still and get this over with for surely the giant would be back at any minute. But, as the one man had said, one minute wasn’t now.
They got on either side of her. Matthew said, “Stop it!” and tried to struggle out of what felt like a cluster of thorns. His legs would not obey. The two men got their faces up against Berry’s hair, and as they drew in draughts of woman-perfume she smelled their unwashed odor of dried sweat, salt and old fish.
“Nice,” Croydon breathed, and his free hand came up to stroke Berry’s cheek. “Real fuckin’ nice.”
Matthew tried to get up. His legs betrayed him yet again. “Stop it!” he repeated, but he might have been speaking to the hard stones on the ground beneath him. Squibbs was starting to draw his unshaven face slowly down along Berry’s throat. She made a noise of disgust with a frantic edge in it, and she pushed against Squibbs’ shoulder but he was going nowhere, and now Croydon’s gray-coated tongue flicked out and darted here and there amid the freckles on Berry’s left cheek.
Matthew could bear no more of this. He desperately searched about in the dark for a small rock, a stick, whatever he could get his hands on to throw at the two ruffians. He struggled to stand, and in further desperation he opened his mouth to shout for help from the East Indian giant.
Before he could deliver that shout, Matthew was yanked backward through the brush by a hand that closed on his coat’s collar.
At the same time, another hand that felt as rough as treebark clamped over his mouth, sealing shut all proposed shouts. He was dragged back and further back, the weeds and sawgrass and thorns tearing at his clothes, and then he was tossed unceremoniously aside, more like a beatup sack that needed to be gotten out of the way. A finger pressed hard to his mouth. The message was: Silence.
And Matthew knew, even in his state of brain-blasted befuddlement.
Here was the phantom of Oyster Island.
“What in bleedin’ hell was that noise?” Squibbs directed his light into the underbrush. “Hey now! Where’d that boy go to?”
“Shit!” Croydon had almost hollered it. His attention had left Berry’s freckles and was fixed on the empty place where Matthew Corbett had been a few seconds before. “He’s fuckin’ gone!”
“I know he’s fuckin’ gone!” Squibbs sounded near crying. “You don’t have to tell me he’s fuckin’ gone!”
“Run off! God blast it! That ape’ll have your head for this!”
“My head? You was supposed to be watchin’ him!”
“I was watchin’ him, ’til you started this shit with the girl!” Croydon backed away from Berry, sensing a terrible streak of bad luck coming his way. “Get in there and find that damned boy! He couldn’t have gone far!”
Squibbs surveyed the dark and forbidding expanse of forest. “In there?”
“Go on, man! You owe me for that last mess in London!”
Berry saw Squibbs give a little shrug of resignation, as if that last mess in London had forever enslaved him to his partner. Then the hideous man whose breath smelled like spoiled onions and horse dung—and she would always unfortunately remember that odor—followed his lantern’s light into the woods.
A few seconds of silence followed. “You got him, Squibbs?” Croydon called.
There was a smack.
A quick but brutal sound. Berry thought it sounded like a fist plowing into a bucket of mud. Maybe there was the crunch of a bone breaking in there, as well. She winced and tears burned her eyes, for she knew that Matthew could hardly survive a blow like that.
A body came flying out of the woods like dirty laundry being thrown from a hamper.
It landed nearly at Croydon’s slime-crusted boots. “Jesus!” Croydon yelled, for his light fell upon Squibbs’ face and the knot that was already turning purple at the center of the forehead. Squibbs’ eyes had rolled back and showed the whites; he was not dead, for his chest heaved in ragged inhalations of troubled air, but his life-candle had nearly been knocked cold.
And then the phantom of Oyster Island, followed closely by Matthew Corbett, stepped out of the darkness into the quivering orbit of Croydon’s lamp.
The massive freed slave Zed wore a ragged black coat over the same baggy brown breeches he’d worn when he’d leaped off a pier into the water back in November, and had last been seen swimming in the direction of Africa. He wore no shoes. A slice of bare chest showed between the straining buttons of his too-small coat. In the light from Croydon’s lantern, Zed was even more fearsome a figure than three months before. Though he had lost some muscle in his hulking shoulders, he had gained a wild black beard. His skull was still perfectly bald, having been scraped clean with perhaps a sharpened shell, and across his broad ebony face—imprinted upon cheeks, forehead and chin—were tribal scars that lay upraised on the flesh, and in these were the stylized Z, E, and D by which Ashton McCaggers had named him.