Horror Short Stories

It was on the evening of her departure for a transatlantic voyage, that the quarter-deck of an English man-of-war,1 lying in the Tagus, was splendidly illuminated, in honor of a farewell entertainment given by the British officers to a favored selection of the residents of Lisbon.

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No scene of gaiety presents a more picturesque appearance than that exhibited by the festive decorations of a full-sized man-of-war; and, on the present occasion, the Invincible was not behind her sisters of the ocean in the arrangements of her marine festivities. Her quarter-dock2was covered by an awning of gay and party-colored flags, whose British admixture of red glowed richly and gaily in the light of the variegated lamps, which, suspended on strings, hung in long rows from the masts and rigging of the vessel.

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To a spectator, standing at the verge of her stern, the quarter-deck, with its awning, gay lights, and distinct groups of figures, might almost have resembled the rural and diversified scene of a village pleasure-fair; while behind, the faces of hundreds of sailors, peeping from comparative obscurity on the gaieties of their officers, formed a whimsical and not unpicturesque back-ground. Below, the tables of the ward-room3 were spread with the most delicate and even costly refreshments. All was mirth and apparently reckless gaiety; and it seemed as if the sons of Neptune, in exercising their proverbial fondness for the dance, and acknowledged gallantry to their partners, had forgotten that the revolution of twenty-four hours would place a world of waters between them and the fair objects of their devotion, and would give far other employment for their limbs than the fascinating measures to which they now lent them.

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There were, however, two beings in that assembly whose feelings of grief, extending from the heart to the countenance, communicated to the latter an expression which consorted ill with the gaiety of the surrounding scene. One of these countenances wore the aspect of an intense grief, which yet the mind of the possessor had strength sufficient to keep in a state of manly subjection; the other presented that appearance of unmixed, yet unutterable woe, which woman alone is capable either of feeling or meekly sustaining in silence. Christian Loëffle and Ernestine Fredeberg had been married but seven days, yet they were now passing their last evening together ere Loëffler sailed, a passenger in the Invincible, to the Brazils. Why circumstances thus severed those so recently united by the holiest ties, and why the devoted Ernestine was unable to accompany her husband, are queries that might be satisfactorily answered if our limits permitted. But the fact alone can here be stated.

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The husband and wife joined the dance but once that evening, and then—publish it not at Almack’s4—they danced together! Yet their hearts sickened ere the measure was ended; and retiring to the raised end of the stern, they sate apart from the mirthful crowd, their countenances averted from those faces of gladness, and their eyes directed towards the distant main, which showed dismal, dark, and waste, when contrasted with the bright scene within that gay floating-house of pleasure. Christian Loëffler united a somewhat exaggerated tone of sentiment with a certain moral firmness of mind, which is not unfrequently combined in the German character, and which, joining high-strung feelings with powers of soul sufficient to hold them in subjection, presents an exterior composed, and even phlegmatic, while the soul within glows like ignited matter beneath a surface of frigidity.

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The revels broke up; and ere the sun had set on the succeeding day, the so recent pleasure-vessel was ploughing her solitary way on the Atlantic; her festive decorations vanished like a dream, and even the shores that had witnessed them were no longer within sight.

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On the second day of the voyage, the attention of Loëffler was forcibly arrested by the livid and almost indescribable appearance of a young seaman, who was mounting the main-shrouds of the vessel. Christian called to him, inquired if he were ill, and, in the voice of humanity, counseled him to descend. The young man did not, however, appear to hear the humane caution; and ere the lapse of a few seconds, he loosed his hold on the main-yards which he had reached, and rushing, with falling violence, through sails and rigging, was quickly precipitated to the deck. Loëffler ran to raise him; but not only was life extinct, even its very traces had disappeared, and—unlike one so recently warm with vitality—the features of the youth had assumed the livid and straightened character of a corpse long deprived of its animating principle.

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The log-book, however, passed a verdict of “accidental death, occasioned by a fall from the main-yard,” on the youth’s case; and as such it went down in the marine record, amid notices of fair weather and foul, notwithstanding Loëffler’s repeated representations of the young seaman’s previous appearance. Christian’s testimony was fated ere long to obtain a fearful credence. On the succeeding day several of the crew sickened; and ere the lapse of another twenty-four hours, death as well as sickness began to show itself. The captain became alarmed, and a report was soon whispered through the vessel that the hand of some direful, base, or revengeful Portuguese had mingled poison with the festive viands5 which had been liberally distributed to the whole crew at the farewell entertainment of the Invincible. Loëffler, although a German, was no great believer in tales of mystery and dark vengeance. A more fearful idea than even that of poison once or twice half-insinuated itself into his mind, but was forced from it with horror.

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The wind, which had blown favorably for the first ten days of the voyage, now seemed totally to die away, and left the vessel becalmed in the midway ocean. But for the idle rocking occasioned by the under swell of the broad Atlantic waves, she might have seemed a fixture to those seas; for not even the minutest calculable fraction in her latitude and longitude could have been discovered, even by the nicest observer, for fourteen days. All this while a tropical sun sent its burning, searching rays on the vessel, whose increasing sick and dying gasped for air; and unable either to endure the suffocation below, or the fiery sunbeams above, choked the gangways in their restless passage to and from deck, or giving themselves up in despair, called on death for relief. The whole crew were in consternation; and they who had still health and strength left to manage or clear the ship, went about their usual duties with the feelings of men who might, at a moment’s warning, be summoned from them to death and eternal doom.

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Loëffler had shown much courage during these fearful scenes; but when he beheld sickness and death mysteriously extending their reign around him, and bearing away the best and the bravest of that gallant crew, he began to think that the avenging hand of God was upon her; and turning his eye towards the broad sheet of ocean waves which rolled between him and the north-eastern horizon, was heard to murmur, “Farewell!—farewell!”

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One night, after having for some time tended the beds of the sick and dying, Loëffler retired to his couch, and endeavored to gain in slumber a brief forgetfulness of all the thoughts that weighed down his spirit. But a death-like sickness came over him; his little cabin seemed to whirl round as if moving on a pivot, while his restless limbs found no space for their feverish evolutions in his confined berth. Christian began to think that his hour was coming, and he tried to raise his soul in prayer; but while he essayed to fix his thoughts on Heaven, he felt that his reason was fast yielding to the burning fever which seemed almost to be consuming his brain.

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He called for water, but none heard or answered his cries. He crawled on deck, and, as the sun had now set several hours, hoped for a breath of the fresh air of heaven. He threw himself down, and turned his face towards the dark sky. But the atmosphere was sultry, heavy, oppressive. It appeared to lie like an insupportable weight on his chest. He called for the surgeon, but he called in vain; the surgeon himself was no more, and his deputy found a larger demand on his professional exertions than his powers, cither physical or mental, were capable of encountering. A humane hand at length administered a cup of water. Even the very element was warm with the heat of the vessel. It produced, however, a temporary sensation of refreshment, and Loëffler partially slumbered. But who can describe that strange and pestilential sleep!

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A theatre seemed to be “lighted up within his brain,” which teemed with strange, hideous, and portentous scenes, or figures whose very splendor was appalling. All the ship seemed lit with varied lamps; then the lamps vanished, and, instead of a natural and earthly illumination, it seemed as if the rigging, yards, and sails of the vessel were all made of living phosphor, or some strange ignited matter, which far and wide sent a lurid glare on the waters. Loëffler looked up long masts of bright and living fire, shrouds whose minutest interlacing were all of the same vivid element, yet clear, distinct, and unmixed by any excrescent flame which might take from the regular appearance of the rigging; while the size of the vessel seemed increased to the most unnatural dimensions, and her glowing top-masts—up which Loëffler strained his vision—seemed to pierce the skies. A preternatural and almost palpable darkness succeeded this ruddy light; then the long and loud blast of a trumpet, and the words “Come to judgment, forgetters of your God!” sounded in Loëffler’s ear. He groaned, struggled, tried to thrust his arms violently from him, and awoke.

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He found his neck distended to torture by a hard and frightful swelling, which almost deprived his head of motion, and caused the most excruciating anguish, while similar indications on his side assured him that disease was collecting its angry venom. The thought he had often banished now rushed on Christian’s mind; and a fearful test, by which he might prove its reality, now suddenly occurred to him.

It seemed as if the delirium of his fever were sobered for a moment by the solemn trial he was about to make. He was lying near one of the ship-lights. He dragged himself, though with difficulty, towards it; he opened the breast of his shirt. All was decided. Three or four purple spots were clustered at his heart. Loëffler saw himself lost. Again he cast a languid and fevered glance toward the sullen waters which rolled onward to the Portuguese shore, and once more murmured, “Farewell! farewell! we meet not till the morning which wakes us to eternal doom.” He next earnestly called for the surgeon. With difficulty that halfvworn-out functionary was summoned to the prostrate German. “Know you,” said” Loëffler, as soon as he saw him, “know you what fearful foe now stalks in this doomed vessel?” He opened his breast, and said solemnly, “The Plague is amongst us!—warn your captain!”

The professional man stooped towards his pestilential patient, and whispered softly, “We know all—have known all from the beginning. Think you that all this fumigation—this smoking of pipes—this separation, as far as might be, of the whole from the sick, were remedies to arrest the spread of mortality from poisoned viands? But breathe not, for Heaven’s sake, your suspicions among this hapless crew. Fear is, in these cases, destruction. I have still hopes that the infection may be arrested.”6

But the surgeon’s words were wasted on air. His patient’s senses, roused only for an instant, had again wandered into the regions of delirious fancy, and the torture of his swollen members rendered that delirium almost frantic. The benevolent surgeon administered a nostrum, looked with compassion on a fellow-being whom he considered doomed to destruction, and secure (despite his superior’s fate) in what he had ever deemed professional exemption from infection, prepared to descend to the second-deck. He never reached it. A shivering fit was succeeded by deathly sickness. All the powers of nature seemed to be totally and instantaneously broken up; the poison had reached the vitals, as in a moment—and the last hope of the fast-sickening crew was no more! Those on deck rushed in overpowering consternation to the cabin of the captain. Death had been there, too! He was extended, not only lifeless, but in a state of actual putrescence!

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The scenes that followed arc of a nature almost too appalling, and even revolting, for description. Let the reader conceive (if he can without having witnessed such a spectacle) the condition of a set of wretched beings, pent within a scorched prison-house, without commander, without medical assistance; daily falling faster and faster, until there were not whole enough to tend the sick, nor living enough to bury the dead; while the malady became every hour more baleful and virulent, from the increasing heat of the atmosphere, the number of living without attendance, and dead without a grave.

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It was about five days after the portentous deaths of the surgeon and commander, that Loëffler awoke from a deep and lengthened, and, as all might well have deemed, a last slumber, which had succeeded the wild delirium of fever. He awoke like one returning to a world which he had for some time quitted. It was many minutes ere he could recollect his situation. He found himself still above deck, but placed on a mattress, and in a hammock. A portion of a cordial7 was near him. He drank it with the avidity, yet the difficulty, of exhaustion, and slightly partook of a sea-mess, which, from its appearance, might have been laid on his couch some days previously to the sleeper’s awakening. Life and sense now rapidly revived in the naturally strong constitution of our young German. But they brought with them the most fearful and appalling sensations.

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The sun was blazing in the midst of heaven, and seemed to be sending its noontide ardor on an atmosphere loaded with pestilential vapor. With returned strength, Loëffler called aloud; but no voice answered him. He began to listen with breathless attention; not a sound, either of feet or voices, met his ear. A thought of horror, that for a moment half-stilled the pulsation at his heart, rushed on Loëffler’s mind. He lay for a moment to recover himself, and collecting those powers of mind and body, over which a certain moral firmness of character, already noticed (joined, be it observed, with the better strength of good principles), had given him a master’s command—he quitted his couch, and stood on deck.

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God of mercy! what a sight met Loëffler’s eye! The whole deck was strewed with lifeless and pestilential corpses, presenting every variety of hue which could mark the greater or less progress of the hand of putrefaction, and every conceivable attitude which might indicate either the state of frantic anguish, or utter and hopeless exhaustion, in which the sufferers had expired. The hand, fast stiffening in its fixed clasp on the hair; the set teeth and starting eyeballs showed where death had come as the reliever of those insupportable torments which attend the plague when it bears down its victim by the accumulated mass of its indurated and baleful ulcerations. Others, who had succumbed to its milder, more insidious, yet still more fatal (because more sudden and utterly hopeless) attack, lay in the helpless and composed attitude which might have passed for sleep; but the livid and purple marks of these last corpses, scarce capable of being borne to their grave in the “integrity of their dimensions,” showed that the hand of corruption had been even more busy with them than with the fiercer and more tortured victims of the pestilence. The Invincible, once the proudest and most gallant vessel which ever rode out a storm, or defied an enemy, now floated like a vast pest-house on the waters; while the sun of that burning zone poured its merciless and unbroken beams on the still and pestiferous atmosphere.

Not a sound, not a breeze, awoke the silence of the sullen and baleful air; not a single sail broke the desolate uniformity of the horizon: sea and sky seemed to meet only to close in that hemisphere of poisonous exhalations. Christian sickened; he turned round with a feeling of despair, and burying his face in the couch he had just quitted, sought a moment’s refuge from the scene of horror. That moment was one of prayer; the next was that of stern resolution. He forced down his throat a potation,8 from which his long-confirmed habits of sobriety would formerly have shrunk with disgust; and, under the stimulus of this excitement, compelled himself to the revolting office of swallowing a food which he felt necessary to carry him through the task he contemplated. The task was twofold and tremendous.

First, he determined to descend to the lower-decks, and see whether any convalescent, or even expiring, victim yet survived to whom he could tender his assistance; and, secondly, if all had fallen, he would essay the revolting, perhaps the impracticable, office of performing their watery sepulture.

Loëffler made several attempts to descend into those close and corrupted regions ere he could summon strength of heart or nerve to enter them. A profound stillness reigned there. He passed through long rows of hammocks, either the receptacle of decaying humanity, or—as was more often the case—dispossessed of their former occupiers, who had chosen rather to breathe their last above deck. But a veil shall be drawn over this fearful scene. It is enough to say that not one living being was found amid the corrupted wrecks of mortality which tenanted the silent, heated, and pestiferous wards of the inner decks. Loëffler was Alone in the ship! His task was then decided. He could only consign his former companions to their wide and common grave. He essayed to lift a corpse; but—sick, gasping, and completely overcome—sank upon his very burden! It was evident he must wait until his strength were further restored; but to wait amid those heaps of decaying bodies seemed impossible.

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Night sank upon the waters. The German began to stir in the soul of Loëffler. He was alone—the stillness so unbroken as to be startling. Perhaps within a thousand miles there might be no living human being. He felt himself a solitary, vital thing among heaps of dead, whoee corpses, here and there, emitted the phosphoric light of putrescence. He started at every creak of the vessel, and sometimes fancied that he descried, through the darkness, the well-known and reanimate face of some departed shipmate. But Christian’s was not a mind to succumb to a terror which, it must be confessed, might—under similar circumstances—have overborne the stoutest heart. He felt that, under all these disadvantages, his strength was returning in a manner that appeared almost miraculous; and that same night saw many an appalling wreck of humanity consigned to decent oblivion.

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Sometimes the heart of Loëffler half sunk within him; sometimes he was more than tempted to relinquish his work in despair; yet on he toiled with that energy of body which as much results from mental power as from physical superiority.

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On the evening of the following day, but one human form tenanted that deserted ship. As he saw the last of her gallant crew sink beneath the waves, Christian fell on his kness, and—well acquainted with the mother tongue of his departed companions—he took the sacred ritual of their church in his hand. The sun was setting, and by its parting beams Loëffler, with a steady and solemn voice—as if there were those might hear the imposing service—read aloud the burial-rites of the church of England. Scarcely had he pronounced the concluding blessing ere the sun sank, and the instantaneous darkness of a tropical night succeeded. Loëffler cast a farewell glance on the dun waves, and then sighed, “Rest—rest, brave companions! until a voice shall sound stronger than your deep slumber—until the sea give up its dead, and you rise to meet your Judge!” The noise of the sharks dashing from, the waters, to see if yet more victims awaited their insatiable jaw, was the only response to the obsequies of that gallant crew, which had now disappeared forever.

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A few sails were still furled, and, uncertain whether they were the best or the worst that might be hoisted, Loëffler determined to leave them, preferring the chance that should waft him to any port, to the prolonged imprisonment of the Invincible.

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Christian sank down, as he concluded his strange and dismal office, completely overwhelmed by physical exertions and the intensity of his hitherto-stifled feelings. But there was no hand to wipe the dew from his pale forehead; no voice to speak a word of encouragement or sympathy.

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And where was it all to end! Loëffler was no seaman; and, therefore, even if one hand could have steered the noble vessel, his was not that hand. Doubtless, the plague had broken out in Portugal; and consequently the Invincible, who had so recently sailed from her capital, would (as in all similar cases) be avoided by her sisters of the ocean.

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These thoughts suggested themselves to Christian’s mind, as, gradually recovering from the senselessness of exhaustion, he lay stretched on deck, listening to the scarcely perceptible noise of the water as it faintly rolled against the side of the vessel, and as softly receded; while his soul, as it recalled the form of his best-beloved on earth, rose in prayer for her and for himself.

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Week after week passed away, and still the Solitary Man of the Sea was the lone occupant of the crewless and now partially dismantled Invincible. She had been the sport of many a varying wind, at whose caprice she had performed more than one short and useless voyage round the fatal spot where she had been so long becalmed; but still, as if that were the magical, and even malevolent centre of her movements, she seldom made much way beyond it; and light, deceitful breezes were constantly followed by renewed calms. A tropical equinox8 was, however, drawing near, though the lone seaman was not aware of its approach. The time which he had passed in the anguish of disease, and the aberrations of delirium, had appeared to him of much greater length than its actual duration; and as no tongue survived to correct his error, he had lost all calculations of the motions of time. He listened, therefore, with an ear half-fearful, half-hopeful, to the risings of the blast. At first it began to whistle shrilly through the shrouds and rigging; the whistle deepened into a thundering roar, and the idle rocking of the ship was changed into the boisterous motion of a storm-beaten vessel. Loëffler, however, threw himself as usual on deck for his night’s repose; and, wrapped in his sea-cloak, was rocked to slumber even by the stormy lullaby of the elements.

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Towards midnight the voice of the tempest began to deepen to atone of ominous and apparently-concentrating force, which might have startled the most reckless slumberer. Sheets of lightning—playing from one extremity of the sky to the other—showed the dense masses of rent and scattered clouds which blackened the face of heaven; while the peal of thunder that followed seemed to pour its full tide of fury immediately over the fated ship. The blast, when contrasted with the still atmosphere and oppressive heat which had preceded it, appeared to Loëffler piercing, and even wintry cold; while the fierce and unintermitant motion of the vessel rendered it almost difficult for him to preserve a footing on deck.

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By every fresh flash of lightning, he could see widespread and increasing sheets of surge running towards the ship with a fury that half suggested the idea of malevolent volition on their part; while they dashed against the sides with a violence which seemed to drive in her timbers, and swamped the deck with foam and billows. Whether any of these storm-tossed waves made their way below—or whether the ship, so long deprived of nautical examination, had sprung a leak in the first encounter of the tempest— Loëffler could not determine; but the conviction that she was filling with water forced itself on his mind. He again cast his eyes to the north-eastern horizon, and again uttered aloud—”Farewell! farewell!”

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The loneliness of his situation, to which time, though it had not reconciled, bad habituated him, came upon him with the renewed and appalling sensations of novelty. National and early-acquired feelings obtained a temporary triumph over individual strength of character. The torn and misshapen clouds, as their black forms were from time to time rendered visible by the blue light that darted through them, appeared to our young German like careering spirits of the tempest; and the rent sails, as they flapped backwards and forwards, or were driven like shattered pennons9 of the blast, seemed, as the momentary light cast their dark shadows athwart the deck, to be foul fiends of the ocean, engaged in the malign work of dismantling that gallant ship. To Loëffler’s temporarily excited imagination, even the tossing billows seemed, in that portentous light, to “surge up” by hundreds the faces of those who had found beneath them a dismal and untimely grave; and the lost mariners appeared to be crowding round the vessel they had so recently manned. But Christian authoritatively bade away these phantoms, and they speedily left a mind too strong to give them a long entertainment.

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The storm subsided, and the moon, rising over dense masses of cloud—which, dispersed from the mid-heaven, now cumbered the horizon—saw our young German lying, in the sleep of confidence and exhaustion, on the still humid deck. He slumbered on, unconscious that the main-deck was now almost level with the waves—unconscious of the dark gulf preparing to receive him! The very steadiness which the waters, accumulating within her, had given to the ship, protracted the fatal repose of the sleeper. He woke not until his senses were restored, too late, by the gushing of the waters over the deck.

Down, down, a thousand fathom deep, goes the gallant and ill-fated vessel; and with her—drawn into her dark vortex—sinks her lone and unphied inhabitant!

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It was in leas than a month after this event that Loëffler awoke in a spacious and beautiful apartment, the windows of which opened into a garden of orange and lime-trees, whose sweet scent filled the air, and whose bright verdure and golden fruit showed gay and cheerful in the sunshine. Christian believed that his awakening was in paradise; nor was the thought less easily harbored that the object he best loved in life stood by his couch, while his head rested on her arm. “And thou too,” he said, confusedly—”thou, too, hast reached the fair land of peace, the golden garden of God!”—

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“His senses are returning—he speaks—he knows me!” exclaimed Ernestine, clasping her hands in gratitude to Heaven.

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She had just received her husband from the hands of the stout captain of a Dutch galliot, whose crew had discovered and rescued the floating and senseless body of Christian on the very morning succeeding the catastrophe we have described. The humble galliot had a speedier and safer passage than the noble man of war; and, in an unusually short time, she made the harbor of Lisbon, to which port she was bound. It is needless to add that the German recovered both his health and intellects, and lived to increase the tender devotion of his bride, by a recital of the dangers and horrors of his Solitary Voyage.

 

 

1 War ship with cannons

2 Upper deck that usually houses officers of the ship

3 Mess room where officers usually eat

4 Reference to London Club called Almack’s Assembly Room that first allowed both men and women

5 Choice foods from stock supply

6 In foreign climates I have often heard the livid spots about the heart, above described, cited as the tokens of the plague.

7 Flavored liquor

8 Alcoholic drink from a keg

8 Year that is of slightly less duration than a year of a Gregorian calendar

9 Ancient flag

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