Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

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Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Postby revereche » Sat Jun 01, 2013 1:45 am

(Figured I'd share a short horror story I wrote some time back.)

---
Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Fibrous and brown and marshy, the land stretched up to the pale swathe of sky, out to the misty expanse of ocean. For many years, this place had been cut off from the rest of the world. As it was caught in the grips of one civil war after another, the inhabitants of other lands had thought to keep their distance - those few who had made the journey into the clutches of those fierce wars came back reporting tales of strange and horrible things: rites too blasphemous to speak of, and creatures with no right to exist.

Now that peace had reigned over the country for a few years, trade gradually opened again with the outside world.

When the foreigners' ship dropped anchor, its crew looked out on the small port town and was stricken at once by feelings of both dread and underwhelming. The docks and the buildings were skeletal assemblages of wood planking, all melting into one another lopsidedly, the impressiveness of the foreign architecture overcome by their shoddy make.

In spite of the impoverished look, a very decent selection of fruits, fish, and pearls was up for trade. Despite the lavish selection the sailors themselves bore, the townspeople seemed interested in only the most basic and useful of items.

While these first ventures into trading were made, one shiphand remained in the bowels of the ship. He burrowed his face into the stained burlap covering his cot and groaned painfully, the slurry in his stomach lurching with the movements of the seawater outside. He was a young man, overlong and lean in all of his aspect, with wide, drooping eyes and a drawn-out candle drip of a nose. His condition had improved slightly with the ship anchored, but waves still lapped at the prow, and besides that he could hear noises that sickened him to his core. They were nothing he could place - a faint series of sounds, wet and popping. He wondered if they might pose a danger to the ship's integrity, and thought to tell someone; but sleep overtook him, and he drifted off instead.

When he was shoved roughly awake by a fellow crewsman to haul crates offdeck, he had forgotten the noises entirely. Blistered hands and aching muscles and joints effectively shut out any further thoughts back to it, and when the long shift was done he went with the rest of the crew to explore the town.

The townspeople were amazingly hospitable. Though few of them spoke the sailors' language, their expressiveness and vivacity did wonders to overcome the language barrier, and the men found no trouble at all in taking part in what delights the town had to offer.

But while his fellows plied themselves with exotic drink and participated in local betting games, the shiphand found himself familiarly at unease in such situations. As was his way, he wandered out again to the docks, watching the slow ebb of the brackish water - the only thing he truly appreciated about the sea.

Something dark moved beneath the surface. He thought nothing of it, at first, assuming some kind of fish. Another figure moving past brought him more into the mind of a large crab. Then another, and another, and it struck him supremely odd that so many large crabs should live in the shallows directly below the town. Curiosity waking him from reverie, he tracked their movements, hoping for a better look.

He'd vaguely noticed them moving out toward the sea, but it wasn't until he watched that he realized they were headed directly for a ship - his ship. The dark forms amassed about it, and there remained for quite some time. He leaned over the dock as far as he dared. One form in his line of sight rose up and broke the surface, some purply, unidentifiable thing. He studied it, trying to imagine what beast of the sea could have such a heavy, ovaloid body atop a spindly support - then it turned. The bloated face of a drowned man looked back at him, creased lengthwise and widthwise as though it had been sliced in four and swollen back together. It bulging eyes swiveled at him lazily, deformed lips pursing and sucking at a barnacle it had pried off the hull.

Vomit and a scream vied for precedence in his throat. Choking, he felt himself fall backward, and the world around him vanished into black.

--

He came to in unfamiliar surroundings. Slatted wooden walls encapsulated him, adorned with seashells and the meandering tunnels of shipworms. Slowly, it came to him that he must be in one of the slipshod houses of the town.

He was getting up as a young woman descended from an upper level via a removable ramp. When she saw him awake, she smiled warmly and ascended again, returning with two bowls of frothy, fish-smelling brew. Both hungrier and thirstier than he'd realized, the shiphand quickly drank down the one she set before him. On the last sip, he remembered what had sent him into unconsciousness, and tried desperately to articulate it. She listened and nodded serenely all the while, and at the end of it she took him by the hand and led him back down to the docks.

Her grandfather had been fluent in the lingua franca of the known world before the war-induced seclusion, the shiphand would learn, and she had picked it up from him. Her grasp of the language was unpracticed, the wording archaic; but it was understandable, and she was able to calm the shiphand for what followed.

As he watched, the townswoman called out in her own tongue. One of the dark shapes, now milling aimlessly beneath the water, began to move shoreward. It mounted the sandy beach and made its way for the ramp leading up into the town, unveiling not only its ghastly visage, but its terrible body as well - a fleshy rope of twisted sinew four feet long where a neck should have been, fraying out into three "feet" at the base. Seeing the dead-eyed thing with its tripod form bobbing unsteadily toward him, the shiphand screamed and started to run - but the townswoman took hold of his arm and spoke soft assurances to him, and he was able to keep himself rooted.

Closer the abomination came; then it stopped, and the townswoman laid a cool, calloused hand on its cheek.

"This is my papa," she told him.

--

They were ancestor spirits. During the years of war, they had helped their living descendants against one another. Now, in this time of peace, they helped in other ways. Here, that primarily amounted to keeping seafaring vessels clear of barnacles.

The other crewmembers were well-traveled and more experienced than the shiphand, and familiar with the practice of summoning ancestors. Though their own customs forbade it, and they regarded this particular version with more than a little revulsion, they laughed when they heard of the shiphand's reaction. A more socially graceful man would have laughed at himself along with them, but the shiphand only smiled weakly and retired to his bunk. His last waking thoughts were queasy ones, of things not quite dead, and his ineptitude in dealing with them; but when slept, he saw only the townswoman.

The next day he went to see her again. She greeted him as though she had been waiting - she'd made enough of her breakfast gruel to share (gritty, but palatable), and when they were done she brightly led him out to see the sights. The bartender he knew already in passing, but she introduced him to others - merchants, fishermen and their families. He'd never had a way with people, but her presence relaxed him. This combined with the affability of most all the townsfolk opened him up, and he found himself enjoying these interactions, the townswoman acting as interpreter where necessary.

When she'd introduced him to the people, guided him through the slopes and twists of the multi-leveled place, she took him to the outskirts. There the soil was marshy and rank, choked up with plants entirely alien to him, where insects and birds and other creatures called down from above, and yet other things slithered below. What would have been frightening proved exhilarating, even beautiful, with his guide there.

Toward the end of the day they found themselves again down at the docks, dunking their ankles in the coolness of the water. He jumped once when he thought he felt something brush against his sole, but otherwise felt he handled himself admirably. For a while they sat together in blissful, lazy silence.

Then a crowd of children pounded past them out onto the pier, shrieking delightedly. One of the spirits lifted its head up out of the murk to stare at the children, and the shiphand felt his stomach turn to ice.

To his surprise, one of the children dove out into the brine with a splash, and paddled his way out to the creature. From a satchel at his side, the boy withdrew a food item of some kind: an offering.

The spirit ate it from his hand.

The townswoman looked on with an adoring smile, as though this were exactly as things should be. Trying not to betray how much the sight unsettled - and confused - him, the shiphand locked his own gaze on his knees. Noticing this, the townswoman prodded him, and he reluctantly voiced his concerns. She was not insulted by this reaction; only puzzled.

"Family cares for family," she explained. "Isn't it natural?"

He had no response for this. Until the moon rose, they passed the time in silence.

--

But the question kept him up for a long time that night. Wasn't it? He stared up into the darkness above his bunk, and thought of his own ancestors.

He thought of his father's patchy hair and unsteady smile, and the candle drip nose above it, like his own; he thought of his mother, with the same wide, drooping eyes. He thought of his father, sending him out into brisk weather to work; his mother, welcoming him back in. He thought of his grandfather in those waning years, soaking up the fire's heat with an unmoving grimace; and the boisterous red man who was his uncle, the few times he'd seen him. The shiphand sifted through these memories and many more, into deepening hours of the night, until sleep finally won out.

--

He met her that morning, as well. He also met with her the morning after that, and after that, and that, for a good time on.

Of course, not all days could be spent in nothing but the other's presence. She was often called upon to help keep house for other women of the town, particularly her brother's wife. The shiphand would come to see her, in spite of this, but often felt awkward and went to see about work of his own.

They could sometimes find things for him to do on the ship - cleaning, helping haul crates back and forth as trading progressed - but more often than that he came to do odd jobs for the townsfolk, shucking the scales off fish after hoisting the burgeoning nets wherever they needed to go. In this manner, he came to be very familiar with the people there. As their faces became more ingrained in his mind, he found that he was able to pin relations among the barnacle-eating ancestor spirits - here, with the wide forehead and jutting cheekbones, surely that was a forebear of the man he'd helped with the salmon just this morning? And that one, with the everpresent smirk - wasn't that the same smirk of the man who'd paid him extra for his help patching the hull? As his time spent there turned to a full month, the shiphand came to feel closer to this place, the people, and even the spirits than he would have thought possible.

It was one balmy evening, as he was chewing into the core of a local fruit and reflecting on this, that the townswoman slipped her arms around him and kissed the dip in his collarbone.

He did not return to the ship that night.

--

It was into the middle of the next month that relations went sour.

It was to be expected - the townspeople were naive to the value of things in the outside world, and the sailors had taken full advantage of this. They hadn't expected the people to notice the cheat, if at all, at least until they were gone.

Belongings were hauled aboard, preparations made to set sail again quickly. Torn by emotions, the shiphand only nodded when the captain cursed in sudden frustration and told him to get something left behind.

It was a crate of liquor, tucked under the bar in the tavern. It was after hours, and the shiphand hadn't expected to see the tavern owner there. He was always poor at interactions, poor at explanation. The tavern owner wouldn't part with the crate. He lunged for it - there was struggling - how did the shiphand's knife end up in the man's stomach, warmth oozing over his fist?

In a numb haze, he got the crate back to the ship. The anchor was reeled back up, oars were put to use - but the ship wouldn't go. The oarsmen struggled to make it go, but the paddles lodged in place. They pushed and pushed, and still were unmoving - then, in one violent movement, the oars were ripped out of their arms and into the depths.

There was quiet; then a scrabbling at the ship's outside. Fear was suddenly palpable in the air.

Mouths that had gently plucked off barnacles now tore the ship in pieces. Any who tried to knock away the sucking maws found himself stripped away at in turn - flesh to arm-bones to ribs to raw glistening organs in only seconds. The remaining men fled to the deck as the ship sank quickly beneath them, trying to think of some way to escape without being devoured by the things that made the water froth and boil on all sides.

The ocean poured over in foaming waves, lapped at their ankles. The spirits were in no rush, and let the living fret themselves into still greater panic. Only when the saltwater swallowed to their waists did the spirits move in again - clambering across sunken wood on pulpy feet, bobbing on their wasted stalks, peeling split lips over black teeth in horrible grins.

Then they closed in. Deafened by screams, the shiphand watched as the thing bore on him. Its face was familiar - the shape of its mouth, the curve of the chin.

Didn't it look like the tavern owner?

As it tore into him, the shiphand wondered where his ancestors were.

--

The young boy looked out on waters that rippled in the dim light. His mother called to him in the distance, letting him know his dinner was ready. He called back into turn, withdrawing his toes from the gentle tongue of the bay, and studied the shapes that moved below. One rose up; the boy smiled to see it.

"I have to go now," he said. "Goodbye, Papa."

With wide, drooping eyes and a drawn-out candle drip nose, it watched him go.
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Re: Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Sat Jun 01, 2013 11:41 pm

This is really creepy and at the same time bitter-sweet. I really, really like it.
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Re: Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Sun Jun 02, 2013 3:54 am

...
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Re: Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Postby Peryite » Wed Jun 05, 2013 7:56 am

I really like the descriptions! I also think that the world this story is set in would be a great place to write other stories. I like that kind of thing, worlds where people are picking up the pieces. Usually in fantasy, either everything's okay, gone to hell, or building up to going to hell, and everyone's running around trying to save it. Hardly ever do you find a story where the world is healing.
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Re: Barnacle-Eater Ghosts

Postby DoglovingJim » Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:43 am

Attaboy, that was awesome.


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