Darwinia (2 page)

Rafe Buckley, his young First Officer, gazed at the thing as it bumped
Oregon
at the prow and slowly drifted aft, turning widdershins in the cold, still water. “Sir,” he said, “what do you make of it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to make of it, Mr. Buckley.” He wished he hadn’t seen it ni the first place.

“It looks like — well, a sort of worm.”

It was segmented, annular, like a worm. But to call it a worm was to imagine a worm large enough to swallow one of the
Oregon
’s stacks. Surely no worm had ever sported the torn, lacy fronds — fins? a sort of gill? — that arose at intervals from the creature’s body. And there was its color, viscid pink and oily blue, like a drowned man’s thumb. And its head… if that vacuous, saw-toothed, eyeless maw could be called a head.

The worm rolled as it fell away aft, exposing a slick white belly that had been scavenged by sharks. Passengers mobbed the promenade deck, but the smell soon drove all but hardiest of them below.

Buckley stroked his moustache. “What in the name of Heaven will we tell them?”

Tell them it’s a sea monster
, Davies thought.
Tell them it’s a Kraken. It might even be true.
But Buckley wanted a serious answer.

Davies looked a long moment at his worried First Officer. “The less said,” he suggested, “the better.”

The sea was full of mysteries. That was why Davies hated it.

Oregon
was the first vessel to arrive at Cork Harbor, navigating in the cold sunrise without benefit of shore lights or channel markers. Captain Davies anchored well away from Great Island, where the docks and the busy port of Queenstown were — or should have been. And here was the unacceptable fact. There was no trace of the town. The harbor was unimproved. Where the streets of Queenstown should have been — should have teemed with exporters, cargo cranes, stevedores, emigrant Irishmen — there was only raw forest sweeping down to a rocky shore.

This was both inarguable and impossible, and even the thought of it gave Captain Davies a sensation of queasy vertigo. He wanted to believe the navigator had brought them by mistake to some wild inlet or even the wrong continent, but he could hardly deny the unmistakable outline of the island or the cloud-wracked coast of County Cork.

It was Queenstown and it was Cork Harbor and it was Ireland, except that every trace of human civilization had been obliterated and overgrown.

“But that’s not possible,” he told Buckley. “Not to belabor the obvious, but ships that left Queenstown only six days ago are at dock in Halifax. If there’d been an earthquake or a tidal wave — if we’d found the city in ruins — but this!”

Davies had spent the night with his First Officer on the bridge. The passengers, waking to the stillness of the engines, began to mob the rails again. They would be full of questions. But there was nothing to be done about it, no explanation or consolation Davies could offer or even imagine, not even a soothing lie. A wet wind had risen from the northeast. Cold would soon drive the curious to cover. Perhaps over dinner Davies could begin to calm them down. Somehow.

“And green,” he said, unable to avoid or suppress these thoughts. “Far too green for this time of year. What sort of weed springs up in March and swallows an Irish town?”

Buckley stammered, “It’s not
natural
.”

The two men looked at each other. The First Mate’s verdict was so obvious and so heartfelt that Davies fought an urge to laugh. He managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll send a landing party to scout the shoreline. Until then I think we ought not to speculate… since we’re not very good at it.”

Buckley returned his smile weakly. “There’ll be other ships arriving…”

“And then we’ll know we’re not mad?”

“Well, yes, sir. That’s one way of putting it.”

“Until then let’s be circumspect. Have the wireless operator be careful what he says. The world will know soon enough.”

They gazed a few moments into the cold gray of the morning. A steward brought steaming mugs of coffee.

“Sir,” Buckley ventured, “we aren’t carrying enough coal to take us back to New York.”

“Then some other port—”

“If there
is
another European port.”

Davies raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t considered that. He wondered if some ideas were simply too enormous to be contained by the human skull.

He squared his shoulders. “We’re a White Star ship, Mr. Buckley. Even if they have to send colliers from America, we won’t be abandoned.”

“Yes, sir.” Buckley, a young man who had once made the mistake of studying divinity, gave the captain a plaintive look. “Sir… is this a miracle?”

“More like a tragedy, I should say. At least for the Irish.”

Rafe Buckley believed in miracles. He was the son of a Methodist minister and had been raised on Moses and the burning bush, Lazarus bidden back from the grave, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Still, he had never expected to see a miracle. Miracles, like ghost stories, made him uneasy. He preferred his miracles confined between the boards of the King James Bible, a copy of which he kept (and left shamefully unconsulted) in his cabin.

To be
inside
a miracle, to have it surround him from horizon to horizon, made him feel as if the floor of the world had opened under his feet. He couldn’t sleep more than a pinch. He was red-eyed and pale in the shaving mirror the next morning, and the razor trembled in his hand. He had to steady himself with a mixture of black coffee and flask whiskey before he lowered a launch from the davits, per Captain Davies’ orders, and steered a party of nervous seamen toward the pebbly beach of what had once been Great Island. A wind was rising, the water was choppy, and rain clouds came raggedly from the north. Chill, nasty weather.

Captain Davies wanted to know whether it might be practical to bring passengers ashore if the necessity arose. Buckley had doubted it to begin with; today he doubted it more than ever. He helped secure the launch above the tide, then walked a few paces up the margin of the island, his feet wet, his topcoat, hair, and moustache rimed with saltwater spray. Five grim bearded White Line sailors trudged up the gravel behind him, all speechless. This might be the place where the port of Queenstown had once stood; but Buckley felt uncomfortably like Columbus or Pizarro, alone on a new continent, the forest primeval looming before him with all its immensity and lure and threat. He called halt well before he reached the trees.

The
sort-of
trees. Buckley called them trees in the privacy of his mind. But it had been obvious even from the bridge of the
Oregon
that they were like no trees he had ever imagined, enormous blue or rust-red stalks from which needles arose in dense, bushy clusters. Some of the trees curled at the top like folded ferns, or opened into cup-shapes or bulbous, fungal domes, like the crowns of Turkish churches. The space between these growths was as close and dark as a badger hole and thick with mist. The air smelled like pine, Buckley thought, but with an odd note, bitter and strange, like menthol or camphor.

It was not what a forest ought to look like or smell like, and — perhaps worse — it was not what a forest should
sound
like. A forest, he thought, a decent winter forest on a windy day — the Maine forests of his childhood — ought to sound of creaking branches, the whisper of rain on leaves, or some other homely noise. But not here. These trees must be hollow, Buckley thought — the few fallen timbers at the shore had looked empty as straws — because the wind played long, low, melancholy tones on them. And the clustered needles rattled faintly. Like wooden chimes. Like bones.

The sound, more than anything, made him want to turn back. But he had orders. He steeled himself and led his expedition some yards farther up the shingle, to the verge of the alien forest, where he picked his way between yellow reeds growing knee-high from a hard black soil. He felt as if he should plant a flag… but whose? Not the Stars and Stripes, probably not even the Union Jack. Perhaps the star-and-circle of the White Star Line. We claim these lands in the name of God and J. Pierpont Morgan.

“ ’Ware your feet, sir,” the seaman behind him warned.

Buckley jerked his head down in time to see something scuttle away from his left boot. Something pale, many-legged, and nearly as long as a coal shovel. It disappeared into the reeds with a whistling screech, startling Buckley and making his heart thump.

“Jesus God!” he exclaimed. “This is far enough! It would be insane to land passengers here. I’ll tell Captain Davies—”

But the seaman was still staring.

Reluctantly, Buckley looked at the ground again.

Here was another of the creatures. Like a centipede, he thought, but fat as an anaconda, and the same sickly yellow as the weeds. That would be camouflage. Common in nature. It was interesting, in a horrible sort of way. He took a halfstep backward, expecting the thing to bolt.

It did, but not the way he expected. It moved
toward
him, insanely fast, and coiled up his right leg in a single sudden twining motion, like the explosive release of a spring. Buckley felt a prickle of heat and pressure as the creature pierced the cloth of his trousers and then the skin above his knee with the point of its daggerlike muzzle.

It had
bit
him!

He screamed and kicked. He wanted a tool to pry the monster off himself, a stick, a knife, but there was nothing to hand except these brittle, useless weeds.

Then the creature abruptly uncoiled — as if, Buckley thought, it had tasted something unpleasant — and writhed away into the undergrowth.

Buckley regained his composure and turned to face the horrified sailors. The pain in his leg was not great. He took a series of deep, lung-filling breaths. He meant to say something reassuring, to tell the men not to be frightened. But he fainted before he could muster the words.

The seamen dragged him back to the launch and sailed for the
Oregon
. They were careful not to touch his leg, which had already begun to swell.

That afternoon five Second-Class passengers stormed the bridge demanding to be allowed to leave the ship. They were Irishmen and they recognized Cork Harbor even in this altered guise; they had families inland and meant to go searching for survivors.

Captain Davies had taken the landing party’s report. He doubted these men would get more than a few yards inland before fear and superstition, if not the wildlife, turned them back. He stared them down and persuaded them to go belowdecks, but it was a near thing and it worried him. He distributed pistols to his chief officers and asked the wireless operator how soon they might expect to see another ship.

“Not long, sir. There’s a Canadian Pacific freighter less than an hour away.”

“Very well. You might tell them we’re waiting… and give them some warning what to expect.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know how to say it, sir. It’s all so strange.”

Davies put his hand on the radioman’s shoulder. “No one understands it. I’ll write a message myself.”

Rafe Buckley was running a fever, but by dinner the swelling in his leg had gone down, he was ambulatory, and he insisted on accepting Davies’ offer to join him at the captain’s table for dinner.

Buckley ate sparingly, sweated profusely, and to Davies’ disappointment, spoke little. Davies had wanted to hear about what the ship’s officers were already calling “the New World.” Buckley had not only set foot on that alien soil, he had been sampled by the wildlife.

But Buckley had not finished his roast beef before he stood uncertainly and made his way back to the infirmary, where, to the Captain’s astonishment, he died abruptly at half past midnight. Damage to the liver, the ship’s surgeon speculated. Perhaps a new toxin. Difficult to say, prior to the autopsy.

It was like a dream, Davies thought, a strange and terrible dream. He cabled the ships that had begun to arrive at Queenstown, Liverpool, the French ports, with news of the death and a warning not to go ashore without, at least, hip boots and a sidearm.

White Star dispatched colliers and supply ships from Halifax and New York as the sheer enormity of what had happened began to emerge from the welter of cables and alarms. It was not just Queenstown that had gone missing; there was no Ireland, no England, no France or Germany or Italy… nothing but wilderness north from Cairo and west at least as far as the Russian steppes, as if the planet had been sliced apart and some foreign organism grafted into the wound.

Davies wrote a cable to Rafe Buckley’s father in Maine. A terrible thing to have to do, he thought, but the mourning would be far from singular. Before long, he thought, the whole world would be mourning.

Later — during the troubled times, when the numbers of the poor and the homeless rose so dramatically, when coal and oil grew so expensive, when there were bread riots in the Common and Guilford’s mother and sister left town to stay (who could say for how long?) with an aunt in Minnesota — Guilford often accompanied his father to the print shop. He couldn’t be left at home, and his school had closed during the general stroke, and his father couldn’t afford a woman to look after him. So Guilford went with his father to work and learned the rudiments of platemaking and lithography, and in the long interludes between paying jobs he re-read his radio magazines and wondered whether any of the grand wireless projects the writers envisioned would ever come to pass — whether America would ever manufacture another DeForrest tube, or whether the great age of invention had ended.

Often he listened as his father talked with the shop’s two remaining employees, a French-Canadian engraver named Ouillette and a dour Russian Jew called Kominski. Their talk was often hushed and usually gloomy. They spoke to one another as if Guilford weren’t present in the room.