The Monster Man of Horror House (15 page)

“Wait,
I know where there’s food, lots of food!” I tried again, “all you can eat,” but
Khan clearly wasn’t a fan of sweet corn either and simply flexed his claws, as
if sharpening a collection of carving knives over a prime cut.

“Wait,
please…” I tried one last time, knowing that this was my last throw of the dice.
“I… I
love you
!”

The
things we say when we’re about to die don’t have to make sense and more often
than not they don’t, they’re usually just noises for our own comfort, but for the
merest fraction of a second Khan faltered, possibly out of sheer confusion. He
looked at me and blinked, so I seized this lifeline and went with it all the
way, holding out a hand towards Khan and drenching him with my sincerest smile.
Khan continued to glare with a sadistic bemusement and I wondered if I’d made a
break-through, like Daniel in the lion’s den, that by reaching out to Khan in
such a way I’d somehow tamed the savage hunger that drove him on his murderous
rampages. Of course, this all happened in the blink of an eye, but it happened
all the same and I was just wondering how best I should stave in the little
fucker’s head when he was human again when Khan took a swing at me.

That
was the moment – that was when I knew I was dead. It was a terrifying
feeling, but if life has taught me one thing it’s that even the final half a
second of your life is still life.

And
in life, anything can happen.

Khan’s
hind suddenly blistered with gunshots knocking him sideways and into the stern,
though these weren’t one or two rounds from a Lee-Enfield, these were 600-rounds-per-minute
spat out at close quarters from a Thompson submachine gun. Captain Schmitt, who
was looking surprisingly peachy all things considered, had seen how ineffective
our
.303
s had been against the beast and
had dashed back to grab the heavy artillery. The Captain finished off the clip
in Khan’s back and side, then ejected the magazine and slammed home another and
begin hosing him down once more.

I
seized my chance and scrambled across the deck, dodging Khan’s flailing talons
and the Captain’s stray
.45
s until I
had a man with a machine gun between myself and certain death.

Despite
the Captain’s heroic efforts, I knew it was only a temporary reprieve and much
to my shame I’m afraid I didn’t stick around to help him, despite owing him my life.
I simply ran for it, legging it for all I was worth and kicking my shoes and
socks off as I went.

I
shouted back at the Captain to do the same, that he couldn’t kill Khan no
matter how much he shot him, but I didn’t linger to see how my advice had gone
down, I simply leapt at the aft mast and scurried up it until I almost knocked
Sushanta off his perch. He was roosting on the mast’s top mount, a small crossbar
onto which were coupled the ship’s antennae and the flaghoist lines. It was a
precarious perch with just one castaway up there; two were going to test its
strengths to the limits.

To
my relief (and to Sushanta’s immense credit), he held out a hand and pulled me
up, swivelling around to allow me to straddle the other side of the crossbar from
him.

“Use
your belt to strap yourself to the mast,” Sushanta suggested.

I
did as he suggested but my more immediate concerns were for Khan, not our wobbly
perch.

“What
if he climbs up here?” I asked.

“If
that happens, undo your belt again,” Sushanta replied, “and try to land on your
head.”

vii

From our vantage point we could see Captain Schmitt fighting it out with Khan. He
would sprint from cover to cover, ejecting magazines as he went, then turn and
unload the whole of the next clip into the shape tracking him across the decks.
A brilliant white muzzle flash would light up everything within twenty yards of
the Captain, including the bulging black outline of Khan, who seemed to get closer
with each passing strafe, before once again darkness would descend.

It
was a valiant effort, but one I knew to be doomed, simply because the Captain
couldn’t buy himself a yard of thinking time. He was running out of ship and
ammo. And he was running out of both fast.

“What
shall we do?” I asked Sushanta, my voice cracked with fear.

“What
would you like to do?” Sushanta replied, calm as you like as if this were a
sunny afternoon of shore leave and we had brothel brochures to peruse at our
leisure.

“I
don’t know… something… anything,” I struggled, as the Captain rattle sparks off
the containers directly below us.

Sushanta
put a hand on my shoulder and spoke in barely a whisper. “Each of us has a
destiny to fulfil; we have ours, and the Captain has his.”

I
think I knew what Sushanta was getting at; namely, keep your mouth shut in case
the monster hears us up here, and I found it hard to argue to with a man of such
strong convictions. I guess I was just feeling helpless at watching the Captain
thrash around in ever-decreasing circles after he’d offered up his life for
mine, but Sushanta was right; what could we do other than die alongside him?

Not
much.

And
so, to my undying shame, that’s exactly what we did.

Not
much.

“
Motherfucker
!” the Captain screamed as
he spat a final fireflame across the decks, before slinging the Tommy Gun for
his Luger.

Pitiful
individual cracks now rang out in place of the staccato drill that had ripped
the night apart, but this was not enough to keep Khan at bay and in the fog of gunsmoke
below the blackest of shadows now rushed at the Captain and swallowed him up in
an instant.

There
were no more sounds after that. No more gunshots. No more psychotic howls. And
no more Captain Schmitt. Sushanta and I were all that stood between Khan and
another ghost ship.

Neither
of us said anything for an age, we just stared out across the inky black seas
and held on to the mast while the screws took us wherever they felt so inclined.

As
I’d said before, Sushanta regarded himself as a man of faith. I don’t know which
particular flavour he practiced – whichever forbid him from doing heavy
lifting in port the First Mate once reckoned – but Sushanta remained an
anchor of reason and tranquillity on our sometimes rocky voyages, no more so than
at this moment. I looked at his strong noble face and was glad it was he I was
to share this final ride with, rather than any of my other ex-crewmates, God
rest their wretched souls. Sushanta glanced back and nodded sadly, either
because he understood the solace his companionship was bringing or because he
was weighing up how best to dangle me should Khan make it this far north.

“He
is the wolf,” Sushanta finally whispered. “Part man, part beast, unleashed upon
this earth by the moon.”

I
glanced starboard and noted the full moon now a quarter of the way into the
sky.

“You
know this sort of thing then?” I asked. “From your folklore and stuff like, I
suppose”

“No,
but I saw that film with Lon Chaney and this seems to be the same sort of thing,”
Sushanta replied, forever confining my veneration of the orient to Leyton.

A
sudden growl somewhere beneath us caught both our attentions and we froze.
Slowly, very very slowly, I turned my eyes towards the deck and squinted into
the gloom.

Both
the sea and the
Folly
were bathed in
a silvery blue that reflected off every stack, rail and ripple. Beyond the
moonlight though, beneath the surface of the water or between the stacks, the
darkness was complete – blacker than death itself.

Somewhere
in amongst these shadows, Khan growled again. It was a low rattling howl of a
beast asserting his claim to lands fought for and won and it told us he knew we
were still within earshot, if not precisely where. The decks fell silent as
Khan snaffled and snuffled beneath our feet, but for the life of him he
couldn’t pick up our scent. I guess he had only himself to blame for this, as the
decks and more or less every surface were splattered with carnage to such an
extent that he’d lost us in the stench.

A
stack of drums tumbled over as Khan stepped up his search, then a steel
container was ripped apart, but Khan got no closer for all his ferocity, and
each time he howled it was angrier than the last.

And
yet we ploughed on through the waves, our turbines turning far below with no
sign of a reprieve until they must’ve glown red against their labours. The
Folly
couldn’t continue slogging its
guts out indefinitely, but what could we do? Neither me nor Sushanta could make
it to the Wheel House to ease her engines, and Khan couldn’t care less either
way. Like Sushanta and I, our beloved ship was at Khan’s mercy.

I
wondered what would happen if we came upon a reef or outcrop of rocks. We’d crash
obviously, maybe even capsize, but what would happen to us? Khan wouldn’t suffer
so much as a scratch, not even if we went through a supertanker’s screws, but
me and Sushanta would be unseated and left to his mercy. I tried not to think
about it but decided, should disaster appear on the horizon, to unhook my belt,
wrap it around my neck and step off to join my father.

Yet
still we ploughed through the waters unmolested.

I
lost all track of time after an hour or so and to my disbelief, even somehow fell
asleep despite Khan’s screams below. It wasn’t a physical sleep of rest and
recuperation, because every muscle remained clenched against the terrors of
what might be, but a trance-like hibernation of a mind doing all it could to
protect itself from insanity.

I
don’t know how many hours passed, but pass they did and eventually it was left
to Sushanta to yank me back to the awful reality I’d fought so hard to leave. I
blinked a few times to get my bearings, before focussing on Sushanta.

He
was smiling.

Why
was Sushanta smiling?

Had
he gone mad or something? Or had he just remembered Lou Costello smacking Lon
Chaney over the head with a mop?

Sushanta
pointed behind me and his smile broadened. I turned to scan the horizon, but could
see nothing. No ships, no islands, no clouds nor even stars. There was nothing there.
I was just about to ask Sushanta what he could see that I couldn’t – an
invisible rabbit with a tray of drinks perhaps – when all of a sudden I
realised what he was smiling at.

The
horizon.

We
could see it.

After
a night as black as pitch, we could make out the line of the horizon because
the sun was just beyond it and it was colouring the skies in the east.

Our
night, all long and horrifying and eternal as it was, was almost at an end.

“Will
Khan turn back into a man again?” I whispered, barely daring to hope.

“We
shall see,” Sushanta replied, casting an eye down at Khan as he stood by the
portside bow and staring out at the approaching day himself. Khan snorted his
distain then let out one final roar, before slinking off into the ship to
prepare for the day ahead.

Sushanta
unbuckled his belt from the mast and slipped it around his waist.

“And
so now it is our turn,” he said.

viii

We gave it an hour or two and only climbed down once the sun was on our necks.
The first thing we killed was the
Folly
’s
speed, easing her engines until she slowed to a gently chug.

I
watched over Sushanta with a Lee Enfield while he wiped what was left of the
First Mate from the dials and checked to make sure we weren’t about to explode.
My faith in guns was less than wholehearted after the night’s events, but the
rifle’s weight gave me a much-needed boost nevertheless. Still, if Khan were to
emerge from below, and by that I mean the big hairy Khan that nobody liked, I’d
be up that mast again before Sushanta heard the clank of stock hitting deck.

Most
of the dials had been smashed, so it was hard to gauge where abouts we were,
but Sushanta calculated we’d probably covered 50 miles the night before, in a
north-easterly direction, putting us somewhere between a hundred to two hundred
miles off the coast of Vietnam.
 

“North
or South?” I asked.

“Why,
are you choosy where we land?” he replied. It was a fair point.

The
radio room had not been spared either, the door having been smashed off its
hinges and the valves and bones that had sheltered within shredded with a wanton
fury. I wondered how much Kaluu had managed to get out before Khan had silenced
him. I wondered if anyone out there had heard him. And if they had, what they
were doing about it. Tearing out their pages from their communications books
and throwing them overboard if they had any sense.

“This
is deliberate,” Sushanta reasoned. “Intentional. He did this to silence us. This
beast is more than just an animal.”

Sushanta
brushed the loose fingers from Kaluu’s Webley and motioned me back down the
corridor.

“Now
let us go below.”

The
bowels of the ship were quiet but for the hum of the engines. By day there’d be
a hustle and bustle of bodies rushing backwards and forwards down here, and by
night, there’d be the distant echo of snoring and the occasional clatter of
glass on tin – but this morning, the morning after the night before,
there was nothing.