The Monster Man of Horror House (13 page)

This
was only partially true: for while I hadn’t seen him in years, my father rarely
left me.

The
same could not be said of Freddy though. It was well past midnight and he’d not
yet returned to his bunk. I found my clothes, then the door handle and decided
to go looking for him in case he’d found a bottle he needed a hand with.

The
Folly
by night was a different place
to the
Folly
by day. It consisted of
the same corridors, the same decks and the same stairwells, but everything looked
tighter by night; even the corridors that never saw natural daylight. It was
obviously in my head, but it felt as if the
Folly
tensed up each night to guard herself and her crew from the dangers that lurked
beyond her lights.

Perhaps
this was because I was young and still had an imagination. Others on board, I
was about to discover, had lost their innocence many moons ago.

Freddy
wasn’t at his post outside the Infirmary. Neither was Ahmed. Their absence
stopped me in my tracks when I saw the unguarded door and I wondered if I
should alert the Watch. But as boyishly naïve as I was, I didn’t subscribe to Freddy’s
own theory that every bucket out of place was the work of sea monsters so
before I went blabbing to the Captain I figured I’d better make sure of my
facts.

Steeling
myself with a deep breath and a fire-paddle, I crept forward stopped to listen
outside the Infirmary door. What I’d been hoping to hear was nothing; or at the
very least, drunken platitudes and cockleshell karaoke. What I actually heard
was grunting; heated, gruff, animalistic grunting.

I
should’ve run, gone to see the Captain via the armoury and leapt off the back
of the boat firing two handguns in all directions. That’s what I thought I
would’ve done in light of what had happened on the
Wind
, but you never act the way you think you’re going to in
situations like these. My father, if nothing else, had taught me that.

So
slowly I turned the handle and cracked the door ajar just enough to take a peak
inside.

What
I saw behind the door, my imagination simply couldn’t have prepared me for.

Khan
was bent double over the infirmary gurney, forced into this unnatural position
by Ahmed who had him by both wrists. Khan obviously didn’t like this and was pleading
with Ahmed to let him go, but Ahmed was oblivious to any protest, helped
somewhat by the rolls of bandages that had been tied around Khan’s mouth to
muffle his cries. Still, if Khan didn’t like this, he was probably hating what Freddy
was doing at the other end of the gurney.

With
socks, trousers and shorts floundering around his ankles, Freddy leaning into
Khan with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, again and again, as if trying
to nudge him off the gurney using only his hips. Of course, he was raping poor
Khan, but at the time I could make no sense of what I was seeing because I had
no idea blokes did this to other blokes. It simply wasn’t in my encyclopaedia. I
mean, why would they? It seemed akin to stuffing bread up one's nose.

Still,
as wiltingly stupid as I was back then, I had just enough about me to realize that
this sort of thing wasn’t quite cricket, so I quietly closed the Infirmary door
and took the first few steps back to bed – only to crash face first into the
Boatswain, who’d materialised behind me without so much as a sound.

“What’s
going on here?” the Boatswain demanded.

Here?
Here? I liked that. Here there wasn’t much going on but behind the door Freddy
and Ahmed were twinning the Infirmary with Sodom and Gomorrah.

The
Boatswain pushed me aside and threw back the door, just in time to see Freddy
rolling about on the floor trying to pull his slacks back up while Ahmed was asking
Khan if he was “okay”, remembering just in time to pull down his gag to hear the
answer.

“Back
with you, you dogs!” the Boatswain roared, lashing out at the Entertainments
Committee with hands, feet and my fire paddle. He even aimed a kick at me,
presumably because he assumed I was a part of this welcoming committee, before
snatching Freddy’s gun belt away and whipping out his pistol. “You dogs, you
filthy pigs of dogs,” the Boatswain spat. I guessed he wasn’t a dog person. “You
have been warned of this before. The Captain will hear of this. You will all
forfeit your shares!”

The
Boatswain cocked the hammer to demonstrate he meant business and lashed the
butt at Ahmed’s head as he dashed for the door. Freddy too was soon tumbling
out, crashing into me to send us all into a heap in the corridor outside the
Infirmary.

“Fuck’s
sake. This is the exact same prejudice that got me kicked me out of Sandhurst!”
Freddy complained miserably.

v

Now, as sorry as I felt for poor Khan (obviously not that sorry it could be argued),
I felt utterly devastated at my own piss pot of misfortune at having lost my
shares and in all likelihood my place in the crew simply by being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. But then that’s so often the case with misfortune, as
we were all about to find out. For I was just scrambling to free myself from Freddy’s
coital interruptus
irritations when
the door reopened and the Boatswain hollered at us to get Upendra.

“Bring
him here quick, you’ve bloody killed him, he’s dying!” he screamed, ruining
what was left of my night – if not my life. See, even out here, the
authorities took a dim view of piracy on the high seas, particularly Freddy’s specialist
brand of piracy. Kangaroo courts had been called for less.

With
that thought burning in my brain, I leapt to my feet and sprinted for the next
deck without waiting for the others, only too aware of the fact that he who brought
the news so often got to write the headlines. So I banged on Upendra’s berth, then
raced around looking for him in the Mess, Radio Room and Passenger Suite, eventually
finding him sailing fags at the new moon on the horizon.

“Doctor
Doctor, Freddy and Ahmed have killed the dink.” I might’ve been sexually naïve,
but I was well up on my casual racism at this age.

“What!”
coughed Upendra, throwing his last butt overboard and haring back through the
hatches until we found a cluster of concerned rubberneckers standing by the
Infirmary door.

“Get
in here now!” the Boatswain shouted, but Upendra just froze when he saw the
mess awaiting him and turned to the Boatswain in despair. And I can’t say I
really blamed him. Khan looked to have deteriorated a hundred-fold in the last few
minutes and was now almost grey in colour, dripping with sweat and shaking from
head to foot as seizures ripped through his battered and buggered body. He
reached out a hand towards Upendra, as if appealing for release from the agonies,
but Upendra was a merchantman hack, not a relative of the Almighty’s and he
just guppied with indecision.

“Morphine!”
the Boatswain prompted, so Upendra pushed his way towards the medicine
cupboard, dug a key out of his pocket and poked it about in the lock until the
doors swung open. Syringe met bottle met needle met arse but Khan’s condition
didn’t improve one jot, reeling from the needle and arching his back to cut a
blood-curdling scream at the ceiling.

“Grab
his arms,” the Boatswain yell, summoning us in to take a limb and pin Khan down
as he thrashed about on the gurney and shook the last few vestiges of life from
his frail frame. The Boatswain stuffed a splint between Khan’s teeth to stop
him from biting his tongue off while the rest of us urged Khan to “let go”,
“stop fighting” or in Ahmed’s case “run towards the light”, but Khan wasn’t going
anywhere – especially not with Ahmed again – and if anything, seemed
to grow in strength.

“Fuck
me!” Freddy swore without any trace of irony when he got a whack in the nose,
and after only a few seconds, I noticed all five of us had our feet off the
deck in our efforts to pin Khan down.

“Er…
does anyone else…” I started, but I’m not sure if anyone did, because at that
moment Khan bit his splint clean in half and roared like a lion into the
Boatswain’s face.

If
I hadn’t tumbled back in fear at this point I would’ve no doubt ended up like Freddy,
flat on his back against the corridor wall with Khan’s footprint colouring his
face. But Freddy got off lightly next to Upendra and Ahmed, both of whom were
hurled across the Infirmary and into the medicine cabinet as if they were no
more than sacks of silk.

The
Boatswain was already running for the door when Khan rolled off the gurney and blocked
his path, a fete I’d not have thought possible earlier that evening but Khan
had found an extra three feet from somewhere and now towered over the
panic-stricken Boatswain like a baying cobra.

Before
our very eyes, Khan’s girth burst out to match his new-found height, ripping
muscles from malnutrition and sinew from scrawn. His skin turned near jet-black
and bubbled beneath the surface as coarse black bristles broke out the length
and breadth of his body.

The
Boatswain made one last desperate dart for freedom but he was dead before he
knew it, splashed across four walls by a set of claws that sliced through bone
and cartilage as if they were blancmange.

“Fuck’s
sake, come on!” Freddy screamed, grabbing me by the collar and dragging me back
up the corridor as a black and bloody paw the size of a pitchfork fizzed past our
eyes to slice the air before us. Ahmed and Upendra’s screams chased us through
the ship as Khan tore them to chum and a shot rang out to silence the horrors,
if not Khan’s roars, making me wonder if the shooter had scoffed the bullet
himself.

Inevitably,
doors began opening along the corridors and ruddy-eyed shipmates barked at us
to explain ourselves, but we had neither the time nor the inclination and
simply urged them to do likewise and run for their souls.

We
burst out into the night and sprinted for the stern before discovering, much to
our dismay that we’d run out of boat. It was either the breaststroke for a
couple of hundred miles then up and away again when we hit the Philippines or an
urgent rethink.

“The
Captain,” I wheezed.

“Guns!”
Freddy sort of agreed.

We
legged it to the Wheel House and found the Captain ordering the intercom to
tell him what was going on. Alas, the intercom could only respond with agonised
screams as Khan rampaged through the lower decks.

“Guns
Captain, we need guns!” Freddy demanded, winning startled looks from the
Captain, the First Mate and Erik at the wheel.

“What’s
happening down there?” Captain Schmitt repeated, this time directing his
question at us.

“No
time to lose. It’s coming!” I gasped, barely able to catch a breath. “Guns.”

“What’s
coming?” the First Mate insisted, failing to appreciate the urgency of the
situation.

“Khan!”
Freddy hollered, as if this somehow qualified as an explanation, but there was
simply no time to explain. “Guns now!”

As
intriguing as this all was, Captain Schmitt was saline enough to know that
there was a time for explanations and a time to start shooting, so he whipped
out and cocked his Luger and barked at the First Mate to break out the rifles.

Me
and Freddy went with the First Mate to the Radio Room where Kaluu almost blew
our heads off when we opened the door.

“What’s
going on? What’s happening?” Kaluu implored, a popular question of the night but
none of us answered, probably because none of us could. Instead we weighed
ourselves down with enough guns and ammunition to stop a thunderstorm in its
track and left Kaluu to send out an SOS to anyone who might be listening.

“Lock
this door and don’t open it for anything,” the First Mate told him. “Good luck.”

I
still didn’t know how to use a Lee-Enfield rifle but I figured I’d rather face
Khan with a weapon I didn’t know how to use than a box of plasters I did, so Freddy
gave me a quick tutorial and showed me where to stick the bullets and which end
made the bang, and that was enough for now.

Back
at the Wheel House, the Captain had been joined by half a dozen others and they
all had stories like mine, if not Freddy, who it could be said was closer to
Khan than most.

“It’s
an animal!”

“It’s
a monster!”

“It
came at us like the devil!”

“We
didn’t stand a chance!”

“What
was it?” someone asked, so I repeated my assertion that it was Khan.

“He
turned into that thing before our very eyes.”

The
crew turned to us. Silence.

But
only for a second.

vi

Intercom screams filled the Bridge as Khan plundered the remnants of the
sleeping quarters below, until the Captain snapped at us that it didn’t matter
what it was, all that mattered was getting it off the ship.

“Get
to the Wheel House,” the Captain shouted into the intercom. “We have guns and
ammunition and we can protect you. Get to the Wheel House now!”

The
Captain turned and told us to take up positions overlooking the decks and shoot
anything that emerged from below we didn’t recognise as a friend.