flickering over a twitching amorphous mass of body parts spread across the corridor. The remaining rats had been knocked flat.
Strength returned with a surge of hope. “This is our chance,” he said.
Hollis and O’Neil joined him. They scanned the wreckage, then clambered over a hill of destruction and bolted toward the stairs.
A flaming rat-creature arose from the heap of bodies, its fur burned down to the skin. It limped toward them, hunched over on its rodent legs and dragging a blistered and broken tail. Hollis shouldered past it without stopping, but O’Neil froze. Rather than follow, he whirled away and dashed into the portside corridor, unaware the entire passage had turned into the gullet of a monster.
Eric shuddered at the sight.
Bright pink flesh replaced the russet-colored timbers, streaked with purple blood vessels and ivory nubs of bone. Teeth erupted from the top and bottom of the doorframe. O’Neil tried to reverse course when he registered his surroundings but slipped in a gelatinous liquid coating the floor. He dropped to his back, and the whole corridor shifted, undulating up and down. The chomping jaws mashed him into paste almost instantly, snapping his bones like dry cordwood.
The whole ordeal clawed at Eric’s sanity, attempting to drag him into madness—and nearly succeeded when the walls constricted around O’Neil’s remains and swallowed them from view.
Eric ran up the steps.
Above deck, the nighttime sky gazed down with a billion silver eyes. There were no rats in sight. Ahead of him, Hollis dashed toward the lifeboat, sidestepping dismembered limbs and wet mounds of gore.
“Untie the cleat lines,” Eric shouted. “I’ll get the—”
Hollis stopped and spun. He snapped up his pistol and shot Eric in the head.
Pain exploded on his brow. Smoke stung his eyes.
He staggered.
Momentum carried him another three steps, then he collapsed to his knees. One hand came down on the edge of the cargo grate and sank between cross-thatched boards of furry meat and sinew. He raised the other to his head, feeling where Hollis’s shot had plowed a trench across the bone.
Hollis cocked the remaining percussion hammer and strode forward. “One more for good measure,” the man growled.
Eric looked up, too dazed to move.
He saw the malicious smirk on the man’s face, and a flood of despair filled his heart.
What other earthly creature would kill its own kind for spite while in mortal danger?
But rather than shoot, Hollis’s eyes went round with shock. The man dropped his pistol and glanced down to watch the tip of a sword erupt from the center of his breastbone.
Eric flinched.
Captain Forester stepped into view over Hollis’s shoulder. A terrible jester’s smile dominated the man’s face, a falsity created by the inhuman overbite that had torn through his lips. Eric cried out at the sight, unable to fathom his friend and mentor as one of the ghastly vermin summoned by the Ashantis’ sorcery. The man’s enormous ears twitched at the sound of Eric’s shout, but his engorged eyeballs showed no emotion as he gave the blade another shove.
Hollis coughed blood and both men fell forward.
Eric dodged out of the way, watching them crash through the cargo grate.
Below them, the cargo hold was gone. Whatever unholy ritual the Ashanti slaves performed had completed its transformation of the ship. Rather than an open wooden storage space, the Immaculate’s interior had become a massive churning stomach.
Steaming liquid poured in from puckered orifices scattered around the walls, filling the space with a seething yellow broth.
The two men disappeared in a huge, hissing splash.
Seconds later, Hollis resurfaced.
He exploded into view, thrashing his last in a swirling acidic Hell. His skin and clothes had already dissolved, leaving nothing but red muscle. He screamed from a lipless mouth, looking to Eric with one maddeningly bright eyeball that shined within the carnage of his face. Unlike Forester and the others he didn’t seem to have changed into one of the rats. Instead, his human remains sizzled away, slipping off his bones like overcooked meat. The flesh of his throat split open, silencing his shouts of agony as the burning fluid rushed in.
Eric turned away—
And found himself in the shadow of the slave girl Forester cut the baby from.
He recognized her immediately, swaying with nausea when he beheld the rope of afterbirth hanging from her abdominal wound. She gazed down with pure black eyes, but maintained a human form.
The other rat-creatures filled the deck.
Surrounded, Eric did the only thing he could. He spread his arms in a gesture of submission.
“Do what you will,” he croaked. “End this.”
The words were barely off his lips when she seized him by the throat and lifted him off his feet. He instinctively clutched her arm to take the weight off his neck, and the muscles beneath her skin felt like an anchor rope drawn taut. Her oily eyes gleamed.
“End it?” she hissed, speaking in broken English. “You the ones that brought this on yourselves. You the ones who made it possible! My child’s death gave us the power to bind the worlds, let us bargain with the Others that never was. You treated us like vermin, so we chose to live like this rather than die in shackles. We gave the Others one night each month, one night to take our bodies and taste the life in this world. So you see, this ain’t no end, Englishman. This just the beginning.”
The girl threw him into the lifeboat.
He collided with the cross-seat, wincing in agony. Consciousness flickered like a candle flame but refused to blow out. By the time he recovered, the others had lowered him to the water.
They untied the ropes and set him adrift.
The girl appeared at the rail.
“By morning the ship will be as it was again, and we’ll be free to go where we please. We’ll finish this voyage and start anew somewhere none of your kind would dare follow. But you be warned, Englishman: when the moon grows full the Others will have their time with us, taking whatever shape they desire. They’ll feast on the life they never got, and they’ll spread themselves when they can. I tell you this because of what you done for me and my baby, and I be let’n you live so you see the human heart can conceive compassion even in a barren sea of hatred. You remember that. And you tell your people how you came to know it.”
With that, the girl turned away.
Overhead, the Immaculate’s sails fanned out like huge leathery wings. They stretched and flexed, propelling the ship into the night.
Eric lay back, watching it go.
I will, he thought.
Darkest Hour
This story and eleven others can be found in Matt Hults’s latest collection, Darkest Hour.
Available now!
The Hoax * The Show Must Live On * Parasite Island * Evading Capture * Tempest * My Night in the Turret Room * On the Road to Golgotha * The Lingering Shadow * Carnivorous * The Inspector * The Immaculate Conception * Dwellers of the Dark
About the Author
Matt Hults lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of the horror novel HUSK and the short story collections, ANYTHING CAN BE DANGEROUS and DARKEST HOUR.
A Preview of HUSK