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“three sheets to the wind” – To be extremely drunk and out of control, as any unsecured sheets may cause a ship to be out of control.

THE RUM WAS good, so he tried to focus on that. When Benjamin was a boy, his mother taught him to focus on the good things. Even when the plantation failed to prosper two seasons in a row, and it looked as if Father mightn’t return from his voyage to Tortuga, Mother had insisted they smile and focus on good food and playing games. But there was trouble on the plantation that year Father was gone so long, and that trouble was in the form of a black boy, a slave boy, named Toby. Presently, while he sat in the drinking hall sipping his rum, trying not to focus on the storm raging outside or the certain demise of a man he now realized he loved more than anything else, Benjamin remembered Toby, and the bitter, unnecessary rivalry that nearly caused Father’s plantation to burn to the ground.

Benjamin reckoned it had started because of jealously. Here was Toby, born to slaves on an island far from the Vhingfrith plantation, taken from them when he was fifteen, and sold to Mr. Ottley, a business associate of Arthur Vhingfrith. Toby was gifted to Arthur as part of a deal between the two men—the specifics of which Benjamin had long forgotten—but he recalled the day the boy, who was the same age as him at the time, was brought home.

Toby arrived with two other slaves on the back of a cart pulled by a mule and driven by a farmhand named Yorick, who also worked for Arthur. Ben had come outside to see if there was any mail, which Yorick often picked up for the Vhingfriths and delivered to their home every Sunday. When he saw the boy on the back of the cart, with skin blacker than night, sitting slumped and in naught but tattered tunic and breeches, Ben had at first smiled at him. But something happened that hurt even to think about to this day. Toby had looked up in astonishment, almost horrified, to see another dark-skinned boy standing there in freshly washed linens, with shoes and all, with all his teeth and looking washed and well tailored.

Unless Ben misremembered, the boy had visibly recoiled from him. He barely even noticed the other two slaves, which had been two women of about thirty years. Ben and Toby simply stared at one another the way a housecat and a wildcat might wonder if the other is a separate species entirely.

Meanwhile, Arthur and Yorick shook hands, and discussed what to do about the haywain, which was late to deliver, and which crops they ought to consider planting first in the season. They continued their long debate over whether to transition the north field from cotton and allow for more sugarcane. Almost as an afterthought, Arthur asked Yorick where he intended to put the three new slaves. “In the barn, I reckon, sir,” was Yorick’s response.

In the drinking hall, men laughed and sang louder, competing with the storm outside.

Benjamin sipped his rum, and tried to concentrate on the flavour. Tried to forget the vision of John Laurier swinging from a gallows. But for all its suppressive powers, rum only amplified the memory of Toby, and that first rainy, storm-filled month when he and Ben had crossed one another’s paths in silence, giving each other sidelong glances. Each of us was wondering about the experience of the other, I suppose. The more he drank, the more he realized he had never stopped thinking about this subject. Indeed, much of his life was likely decided because of what happened next.

Toby struck him.

No, wait, before that, Toby had approached the steps of the house, the first time he had done so since he arrived, and spoke to Godfrey, another of the farmhands. He said, “Mr. Yorick say I have to ask to come inside. He say I need to see about going into town. I been sick, me. He say no doctor come out this way, so I must go to town.”

Benjamin could not recall the precise words he said next, but Godfrey argued with the boy before allowing him to come inside and speak to Ben’s mother about arranging a wagon to take him into town. And while Toby had stood in the parlour and explained his symptoms, which were problems with his bowels being liquid, he kept glancing across the room at Benjamin, who had been ordered by his mother to attend his arithmetic studies.

When Toby had been dismissed by Mother, he walked past Benjamin’s desk, and said, “How come you read?”

Benjamin had never been spoken to by anyone his own age. Excited to reply, he opened his mouth.

Mother had shouted, “You don’t speak to him! You understand? You go now! Out, out.” She shooed Toby out of the house and he skittered away like a racoon off the porch, and once he was gone, Mother scolded Benjamin as if he had done something wrong. “Never let them be familiar. You are not the same as them. I’ve told you that. You cannot let them think you are familiar. You speak to whites, and only to whites. Only coloured person you speak to is me, but even that you must never do in polite company. Understand?”

Benjamin had been confused. “Polite company?”

“Yes. When your father returns, he will have larger business partners. Much more important than the old ones. And you mustn’t speak to me in front of them. Don’t let them see you seeing me. Understand?”

“No.”

“Then just do as I say.”

Mother had not wanted him giving anyone any reason to see him as anything other than his father’s son. That, she would later tell him, was the key to his survival once she was gone. Both she and Arthur had conspired ways of keeping their boy alive when they were both dead, including contingency plans of fleeing to the northern part of the Colonies and finding Arthur’s family there, that they might honour Benjamin’s connection to their bloodline.

Presently, lightning struck. It was a strange, twisting shape. Looked almost like a noose.

At the time, when he’d gone about the plantation determinedly not speaking to Toby, Benjamin had thought he was only doing what he was told. He hadn’t seen the vitriol building in the other boy. Only in retrospect did he realize that when he ignored Toby calling to him from the fields that one time, he should’ve seen the rock coming. It came arcing over the sugarcane, and cracked Benjamin in his left temple. His head rang and blood went down his face. When he went to his mother, almost in tears, her face became a storm, and she ran out into the fields and demanded to know who flung the stone. At first, no one came forward as witness, until Charles, one of the oldest and most loyal of the plantation’s slaves, came to the house in secret that night and ratted on Toby.

It was Yorick who whipped the boy bloody. Benjamin’s mother made him watch. Made all the slaves and farmhands watch as Toby was tied to the old oak tree in the back yard, where the swing hung from a long branch—the same swing his mother pushed him on when he was small. The hempen rope bit into Toby’s wrists. Each crack of the whip made Ben jerk inwardly. The boy’s cries seemed to silence the crickets. One of Yorick’s strikes was so hard that the air filled with a bloody mist, which floated in the noon sun and Benjamin caught the coppery smell and almost became sick.

Toby’s ropes were untied, and the boy was hauled away by the other slaves, some of whom were trying, and failing, to hide their tears.

That night, Benjamin sat reading a book by candlelight. The window was open and a summer breeze floated in. He thought he smelled Toby’s blood in the air still. His mother was knitting on the sofa. He asked her, “Mother, why does Father treat you and I differently?”

She stopped knitting a moment and looked at him flatly. “Pardon?”

“Why am I not as Toby? Why—”

“You ask that question again, and I will strike you. Do you understand me? The thought must not enter your mind that you are one of them. There is no why. There is only who you are. Your father treats you and I with grace and love that he doesn’t share with most others, not even his friends and business partners. Be grateful for that. Be grateful to God.”

No emotion could be read on her granite features. She returned to her knitting.

Presently, thunder rolled. Ben looked out the window, beads of rain streaking down. He took another sip of his rum. It was not Kill Devil Rum, it had something else that gave it a twist, some tree bark that gave it tang. He tried not to think of Toby anymore, but the memory, like the storm, would not abate.

Early next morning, with clouds gathered thick in the sky, Mother had sent Benjamin out to the barn to fetch a rake. She wanted him to help two of the farmhands gather dead leaves in the back yard and burn them. Benjamin was whistling one of his mother’s hymns when he stepped inside the barn, which had never seemed so dark to him. He heard a creaking sound, like light feet on wooden steps. The morning was still and quiet but for that noise. And he couldn’t place the source. He gathered the rake from a musty corner, piled next to the shovels and hoes, when the clouds chose that moment to disperse and let a large shaft of sunlight come through the wooden slats. Still, he heard that creaking, but could not find the source. Like wood straining under someone’s considerable weight. Benjamin felt eyes on him, and started out of the barn quickly, until he saw a shadow up in the rafters. A body, about as big as his, swinging lightly. He gasped. Toby appeared to be hanging by one hand, gazing down at him. Had he been waiting there all night, waiting to drop down on Ben in ambush? How had he known that Ben would be sent out this early?

Benjamin held the rake up in defence.

But then more clouds dispersed, more sunlight poured in through the barn door, enough light to see that Toby wasn’t hanging from the rafter by his arm. He was swinging by a rope, his neck pulled so tight that his face had turned blue and looked ready to pop off. His neck looked stretched. Far too long for his body. Far longer than it had been in life.

Benjamin ran from the barn screaming, and cried to his mother about what he saw.

The slaves mourned Toby. The two women that had come to the plantation with Toby wept, even though they weren’t related to him. They held a funeral service. Mother did not attend, and neither would she allow Benjamin.

The next day, Benjamin became aware of just how outnumbered they were by slaves, and just how powerful his father’s absence was, because three slaves, who hitherto had been obedient and never caused a problem, threw torches through their windows and entered the home with shovels and pitchforks. If it had not been for Yorick coming in with his rifle and shooting one of them, and forcing the other two to flee, Benjamin believed he and his mother would have died that night.

He still smelled the smoke. Even now, sipping rum and watching the storm, he smelled the smoke. And heard the sound of breaking glass in the night, the flames licking up the curtains, up the walls, all the farmhands rallying to douse the flames with buckets of water taken from the horse troughs.

And all the while, half the slaves on the plantation slept in their beds and pretended not to hear any of the commotion. And those that did turn up to help, did so with baleful glances in Benjamin’s direction. It was as though his very existence was a bane, a violation of the natural order. He knew, with the instincts of a young man becoming aware of the importance of reputation, that they blamed him for Toby’s death—whether Toby died by suicide or some kind of retribution murder by the farmhands, did not matter to them. He was never more afraid in all his life. He and his mother slept in the same bed, with candles lit, five rifles loaded and ready on the floor within arm’s reach.

The next day, by God’s grace, his father returned, and reestablished order by selling certain slaves and punishing others for doing nothing while the house burned.

God, how close we came. He still remembered vividly the morning he found Toby swinging from the rafter, that sound of wood made, creaking lightly from his weight. The boy had still been swinging a little, which meant he’d done the deed not too long before Benjamin walked in, or else whoever murdered him had just left. And he remembered Toby’s eyes looking down at something. At him—

Presently, he felt a tickling on his hand. Benjamin wiped away the ants. The uninvited guests had found a way up through a crack in the floor, and now formed a thickening line up one of the table’s legs. He brushed them away from the parchment, upon which he’d started to write parts of his account of what happened while they traversed the firmament. Like the rum, it was meant to be something to stay his grief.

John…

Just thinking his name forced Benjamin to clench his fists.

In his last moments, did he think I had betrayed him? Did he think—

Someone bumped into him on their way across the drinking hall. Ben shifted in his seat and looked at the window beside him, at the rain streaking down the glass. Odd colour for lightning, he thought. A purple bolt moved crookedly across the sky, momentarily flashing red before it forked.

“Looking for some good brave men, Captain? Because if you’re writing a treatise on summin, you could find a quieter spot, is all I’m saying.”

Vhingfrith stirred. Looked around to see Otis coming over with a refill. “Eh?”

The Golden Goose’s one-eyed owner smiled as he handed off the new mug and scooped up the empty one. “When the storm’s a-rumblin, yeh know where to find the men whiling away the night. Naught else to do in a storm round here. Thought you’d come to find some rebel sorts to sail with.”

“Most of the men here are only rebels because they lack fathers, Otis. I believe it was you who told me that.”

Otis chortled, and pointed at the parchment. “What yeh writin’?”

“Only my thoughts,” Ben sighed. “Nothing special.”

“Man’s thoughts are always special. Is it a book?”

Vhingfrith shook his head. “No, I shouldn’t think so. Not a book.”

“What is it, then? Poetry? I remember your father used to say he told yeh not to write poetry, but was secretly glad when he later found out your mother’d forced yeh. Said it made yeh look like a regular Man of Letters—”

“Please walk away from my table, Otis. I am most distraught. In fact, I think I have never been so distraught in all my life.”

Otis’s smile fell behind a cloud. “A’right then, Captain. Good night to yeh. Let Sarah know if yeh need anything. But that’s your third drink, and I know how yeh’ve never been able to hold your liquor. So, see that you’re not three sheets to the wind by sunrise.”

Vhingfrith started to apologize, but he hadn’t the energy to be humble. Not on this night. When he closed his eyes he saw John’s neck stretched as long as Toby’s, and whenever someone walked behind him and he heard the floorboards creak, he could not but recall the look in Toby’s dead eyes. Or had he only imagined it?

I told him to let it go. I told him that whatever he was planning, to just let it go. I told him Rogers and the others were never going to stop until they found a way to get him alone, surrounded, without his loyal men in Port Royal helping. I told him. I told him that a day of reckoning was coming for all pirates in Royal. I told him. I told him and the stupid man did not listen—

Another arc of red lightning split the sky, and for a moment, just at his periphery, Benjamin thought he glimpsed a large figure moving in the distance. A man-shaped shadow, towering over the buildings of Lime Street. He leaned forward, straining his eyes. He thought it a curious distortion of light and shadow, and, of course, his own dark thoughts had likely made the shadow form the silhouette of a giant, the same way you could look at clouds and find shapes in them. Father always told him that whatever you saw in the clouds bespoke whatever you were thinking about or feeling inside.

A looming threat, then. A hangman with broad shoulders walking up the steps to the gallows, having just doublechecked the trapdoors to make sure they’ll open.

He downed the rum in three gulps, then stood up and flung the mug across the bar, where it crashed against a wall. A dozen pirates, privateers, and officers turned as one to look at the Devil’s Son.

Then, calmly, he rolled the pen up in his parchment, tucked them both inside his coat, dusted ants off his boots, and stepped out into the rain. But as soon as he stepped through the batwing doors, a woman, soaked in blood and water, slammed into him, clinging to his neck so tightly that her fingernails raked him. Benjamin’s reflexes, always alert for an attack, snatched her by the throat and flung her to the ground. Men playing fanorona at a table nearby leapt to their feet.

“Madam, watch who you grab! You act as—” He stopped shouting when he saw that half her scalp was missing, and a long slab of flesh hung from her head, covering the pit of an eye that looked partially gouged out. The woman rolled onto her stomach, and started crawling away.

Two men playing a fiddle and flute in a corner stopped. Others halted mid-conversation. Otis came walking over with a machete in hand, looking like he wanted to find the one in his hall that did this. Otis looked at Vhingfrith, and Vhingfrith looked back at him, and then they looked down at the woman.

Otis knelt by her side. “Luv, who did this? Yeh tell ol’ Otis! God be merciful, look at you! Who’s the one—”

“A m-m-m-m…m-m-m…”

Vhingfrith stood in the doorway. He looked down at the trail of blood leading across the threshold. The woman had left a red streak from two legs that looked as though a jaguar had slashed at them.

“A m-m-m…muh mon…monsterrrrr…” she wept. One trembling finger pointed at the door. At Vhingfrith. “M-Monster…it killed him…it k-killed m-my Danny! Dannyyyyy!” she shrieked.

“Anybody know what the bloody hell she’s talkin’ about? Anybody see anything?” Otis said.

Everyone shook their heads and shrugged.

Vhingfrith had the same feeling of suspicion as he had that morning before he found Toby. The reason he had slipped a pocketknife under his belt before going out into the barn. He had not known what was going to happen, only that something would. Eventually. And that it was close.

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About town he wore only a single pistol in his belt, not his usual brace of pistols. He drew it now, cocked it, and stepped out into the rain, keeping it close to his side so that the fuse didn’t get damp. The night was as plainly dark as any he’d ever seen it, but his cat’s-eye pierced that veil, and only the rain obscured the street. All he could hear was the rain, and the sound of hurried footsteps splashing through puddles. They were getting closer. He pointed his pistol at the blurry forms coming at him, and two men ran past him, one with blood running down his face. “What is it?” Ben called after them. “What did you see?”

They yelled something back, but he couldn’t make it out above the thunder and roaring downpour. More hurried footsteps. A galloping animal. The riderless horse nearly knocked him over. Would have, if not for his cat’s-eye. Benjamin gazed in the direction it came from, east along Lime Street, towards the Fish Market, and began walking that way.

The lamplighters had at least done some work tonight, the lanterns at that end of the street were still lit. Outside the Fish Market, just on the steps of a milliner’s shop that was closed this hour, was a hunched form. Folk ran right by it, and never saw it. But Benjamin saw it. It was on all fours, like a dog, only too big to be a dog. Its head was bobbing up and down the way a chicken’s will, when picking up feed off the ground. Feeling like a moth drawn to flame, Benjamin kept his weapon raised and walked towards that hunched form.

Someone else ran past him, a bearded man in ripped pants and tunic, bleeding from a gash in his left arm. He shouted, “They’re here! O God, they’re here!”

Benjamin ignored him, and kept walking.

When he came upon the hunched creature, Benjamin slowly orbited it, fascinated, allowing the thing to remain in its feeding trance. And a trance it must’ve been, for it was heedless of Benjamin and his weapon. Yet it was a man. At least his senses told him so. A naked man, flesh peeling off his hunched back, as his spine broke free in an array of spikes. A snake shedding its skin. An elongated snout with an overbite. Fangs that varied in size. Four nostrils. A hole like a whale’s blowhole on its forehead, constantly snorting.

“My God,” he whispered.

The corpse it was hunched over, he presumed, had been Danny. Danny was disemboweled, his guts spilled out onto the street in bloody sacks, while the creature’s taloned hands burrowed deeper, rooting around for something else. It plunged its elongated muzzle into the maw of Danny’s split abdomen and sniffed.

Benjamin was past being horrified. Stunned, surely, but unable to blink, unable to look away. Having faced fourteen days without sunlight, and knowing John Laurier was surely dead or soon to be, he was struck by a clinical detachment, thinking on the stories of shetani and bogros and other vile spirits his mother had warned him about. Had Danny been alive, had there been a chance at saving him, Benjamin would’ve pulled the trigger. But Danny was dead, his body moving only when the creature pawed at it. It pulled Danny’s pants down, sniffed his prick, licked it, then turned him over to examine his buttocks, then his neck. It began gnawing at his scalp.

“What—in—God’s—name!” someone shouted. Sounded like Otis. He came up behind Ben with a torch. “Vhingfrith! What’re yeh waitin’ for? Shoot it!”

As though sensing danger, the creature suddenly looked around the street, and fixed eight glossy black orbs (eyes?) on Benjamin. Then its face split open into eight parts like a flower blooming at a hundred times normal speed, and a pair of pulsating buds emerged from its throat. When it pulsed with purple light, a voice said, in a child’s voice, “Mother, why does Father treat you and I differently?”

Recognizing his own voice, Benjamin jolted and squeezed the trigger and the round exploded the pulsating sack and the creature fell over into the mud. Then, fast as lightning, the creature shot back to its four legs, then rose onto two feet and ran away from him. It tried running up a wall but slipped and fell back into the mud, wriggled while making a squealing sound like a pig, then whipped back onto all fours. Its head looked around. There was a grotesque crunching sound, and its head reassembled itself and swiveled around like an owl’s.

Benjamin drew his cutlass, and walked towards it.

The monster’s eight eyes stared at him. Then its legs appeared to give out, and it collapsed onto its belly. It began to slither forward like a snake, one of its hind legs twitching like it was trying to remember how to walk.

And then it stopped, let out a single, final squeal, and went silent.

Almost immediately, Benjamin felt such heat he had only ever felt on the hottest summer day, and the creature’s body began emitting steam, and a smell that caused him to gag. He backed away and put his sleeve to his nose, and witnessed its flesh sloughing off in huge, festering slabs. Pus-filled blisters all across the thing’s flesh burst, and wherever the pus touched it caused the water in the street to sizzle like bacon. Where it touched Danny it did the same.

Lightning struck again, bloodred and bright. Up and down Lime Street, people screamed. When Benjamin thought to look around, he saw the same gigantic silhouette as before, this time closer, coming up from the sea and looming over the rooftops. And his cat’s-eye allowed him to see more than most. The monster’s midsection was split open like a mouth. Its flesh writhed, as though it was made out of worms, and some of those writhing pieces sloughed off its body and fell, presumably, into the sea.

People were running up the street, up the hill, away from the shore. It seemed to him like the ocean was coming inland, because foaming white water came rushing up to his shoes before receding or being soaked into the earth.

Benjamin turned and walked over to Otis, who stood in the street gaping up at the sky. He grabbed the man by the collar and shouted above the thunder, “Go back to the Goose! Otis! Tell every officer there what you saw! Then fetch me a horse from your stable! And a sturdy rope! Do you understand? On your life, fetch me a horse and rope! Otis!”

Otis hadn’t heard.

Benjamin slapped him, and repeated the order.

Otis nodded. “Wh-what do yeh need the horse and rope for?”

“To ride to the Governor’s Mansion. I’m going to haul this bloody beast up to Lord Hamilton’s doorstep and show him a devil. I have a feeling we may be in for another long night.”

Otis looked at him. “Y-yeh mean—”

“Yes!”

“—like the one you went through…out there?”

“Just go, Otis. And bring out your rifles and pistols, if you’ve got them ready to go. Hand them out to every able-bodied man in your hall. And tell any lamplighters in your hall that we’ll need torches. Tell them all to assemble here—are you bloody listening, Otis?! Tell them to assemble here, at the Fish Market! Whatever this is, we fight it. Understood.”

“Yes…yes, we fight it.”

____

The Long Night set upon the land like no other darkness ever seen before by Man. Gunshots were heard all over Port Royal, as random mobs gathered and fell apart and then came back together and forged new mobs. Lamplighters rode ahorse with torches, trying to rally militiamen, who were themselves trying to coordinate. The Royal Marines were brought up from the docks and down from the Admiralty Office to fan out through the streets. Here and there they encountered Captain Benjamin Vhingfrith and his mob, asking what all they’d seen.

Seven more creatures like the one Vhingfrith had encountered were shot and killed, then hauled to the Fish Market and burned. There was infighting. A Royal Marine mistook a child in an alley for one of the creatures and shot him, and a mob attacked him for it. Vhingfrith arrived on the scene on horseback and talked both sides down, using a lie to do it—he told them that he’d just spotted one of the creatures a quarter-mile back, and almost everyone deployed there, for word had long ago spread of his ability to see in the dark. They trusted him to see what they could not.

Soon, Vhingfrith was leading groups of hunters up and down the streets.

Port Royal’s resistance fell apart and came back together like this all night, until at last it seemed to have agglutinated into something approaching a unified front. The night stretched on. The rain petered off but the sun never came up. Three hours past when sunrise was meant to be, it became obvious something had changed, the natural order had been altered. But the people of Port Royal had heard rumours of such phenomena out at sea. “This same thing happened to the men aboard the Lively,” they whispered. “Yes,” said others, “and it was the Devil’s Son that got all them poor sailors through it.”

And though it took them a while, they finally fastened themselves to the idea that it was here. It was happening to them. The long night had come, and only Vhingfrith had experience in it.

Three more of the creatures were shot. Then an innocent man was shot running after one of the creatures. Bodies ripped open by the beasts were much like Danny’s had been, the stomach emptied and the innards being sniffed by the creatures like they were looking for something else, something more enticing, inside each body.

The large, lumbering monster in the shallows of the shore vanished. People claimed to have seen the giant with arms, hands, and possibly three or four legs, all made out of fleshless human bodies stitched together in grotesque and blasphemous fashion. And while the tides were a little erratic, they no longer encroached on the inner city. Whatever the Behemoth had been, it was gone now.

Five houses were set on fire by panicking families, either the patriarchs or the matriarchs thinking this was the End of Days. Folk gathered by the hundreds at the Old Church. Women and children were invited to huddle inside, listening to fading thunder and the reports of gunshots all over the city. Vhingfrith’s cat’s-eye led the mobs through the streets, shooting four more of the beasts, and chasing two others back into the sea, where they swam and disappeared.

The captains of two ships, the Haley and the Bethany, weighed anchor and set sail from the North Docks, making haste to flee the city. Both of them claimed Port Royal was damned, that the Catholics were right and that the port city was the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. They said the city was abandoned by God and left to Satan to do plundering.

Woodes Rogers and a Royal Marine, Major Halleck, were put in charge of building makeshift fortifications at the mouth of each road and at every junction. They went to the sawmill to get wood, and built Frisian horses and posted them at the beach, just like in wartime to prevent horses from charging across a battlefield. It was as though they expected an invasion.

And perhaps they did. Perhaps they should.

The talk was that this evil lived in the sea, but only during a Long Night. That’s what they were all calling it now, just as some referred to all of this as “the work o’ the firmament,” for Vhingfrith’s words were now circulating, and as many of his crew were talking about how he’d possibly brought this curse on Port Royal, just as many were telling how he’d served bravely during that first Long Night.

Captain Vhingfrith remained loosely in charge of his pack of sailors, fiddlers, lamplighters, and dockworkers, who patrolled from Lime Street to York Street until well past when the next noontime should have arrived. And when the clouds parted and a full, pale, white-and-green moon appeared in the sky alongside a crescent red one, Vhingfrith assured his flock that this would pass, that he and the men of the Lively had survived such a Long Night once and emerged from it. When some of the people asked why he’d called those of his crew liars when they claimed to have passed through the Hellmouth, he ignored them, and focused only on the facts as he saw them.

It was a strange nightmare in which the people of Port Royal lived. People kept inside their homes at almost all hours, and only ever came out to visit the general supply store and get food. It was like the stories of the Plague, Vhingfrith thought, when the eighth straight day of the Long Night was upon them, where people feared going out of doors and some of them even feared their neighbours, especially if they supported a different religion. Catholics, Lutherans, Protestants—they all had a different belief in what had caused this Long Night. A common theme was that the Long Night was a curse of some kind, but none could agree on who had laid it upon them.

Crops began to fail. As far away as Kingston, it was said. People had traveled from Kingston to see if things were any better in Port Royal. It was all failing. Coconut, cocoa, sugarcane, bananas, sugar, citrus—all of it was collapsing.

And the tides started getting high. One of the docks was washed away in a particularly violent surge of waves that lasted for almost eight hours. Four feluccas and two xebecs were sunk before the tides settled again.

A group of Protestant priests held prayers each day at the Old Church at what should’ve been noon. The local Lutheran, a Scandinavian fellow name of Olaf, held prayers on the beach near Fort Morgan, facing east, promising the sun’s return soon. Someone found Olaf while he was sleeping, dragged him from his bed, and tried to hang him from a tree. If not for his knife-fighting skills, which apparently played at least a part in his fleeing his home country, the priest would not have bought himself time enough to call for help. The kidnapper fled, and Protestants claimed to know nothing about it.

The soldiers at Fort Morgan, Fort James, and Fort Carlisle were all put on constant alert. Cannons were aimed out to sea and manned at all hours as if at any moment they expected the giant, fleshless colossus to rise up out of the depths. Woodes Rogers, Governor Hamilton, and the Admiralty never officially stated the reason for the state of alert, they never uttered the words, “Watch out for a demon from the depths” or anything like that. Only, “Be on alert.” That was all the orders the soldiers were given.

Woodes Rogers’s own ship, the Duke, was put to sea along with her sister ship the Duchess, and together they performed constant patrols around the island. Again, searching for an unknown menace, and under the watchful white-and-green alien moon.

Word came down from the Governor’s Mansion. Lord Hamilton himself decreed that he had spoken to many naturalists, and that he was assured this phenomena was merely “some trick of clouds and strange, ephemeral gases that occasionally come up from the sea.” This mollified no one, and most of Port Royal remained indoors. Food became scarce, everyone was holed up, waiting for the sun to return, and occasionally there were bloody fights between houses, desperate fathers and starving mothers trying to steal food from other houses to feed their families.

After several more days of this Long Night, the Lively joined the Duke, and Captain Vhingfrith soon became known as a privateer among privateers, so much so that a few of the Brethren, who’d come down from Nassau and reported the Long Night was taking place there, too, joined him and even seemed to defer to him as their leader during patrols of the island. It was the combination of his ability to see through darkness, his previous experience with a Long Night, and his prowess and leadership that first night when rounding up all the beasts.

By the time the alien moons disappeared and the sun returned, and all the island came out into the streets—furtively at first—and then in joyous celebration, Captain Benjamin Vhingfrith, the Devil’s Son, had a song being sung about him in The Golden Goose and every other drinking hall in Port Royal.

O, there’s a man with a cat-eye stare, don’t you know?

Aye, tell us his name, ye laddie!

There is no shadow where he won’t go!

But will he fight with ye, laddie?

O aye, O aye, the fella won’t be leaving you high and dry!

So why not tell us his name, yeh laddie?

’Cause he’s marked those monsters as fit to die!

O, surely ye mean the Devil’s Son, yeh laddie?

____

It’s a good thing no one killed the Scandinavian, Vhingfrith thought as he observed the careful dissection. Olaf Gustaffsson wasn’t only a Lutheran, not only a Man of Letters, not only a skilled knife-fighter, but also a trained doctor during the last war and a naturalist of surpassing skill. Woodes Rogers had ordered all but two of the Beasts’ bodies burned, and those two were brought here, to the shack on the outskirts of Port Royal where Gustaffsson had done some work on cattle the season before, when several farmers’ cows had died suddenly and without symptoms. It had been Gustaffsson who diagnosed them with Cattle Plague and recommended separate feeding pens until the disease had passed.

Vhingfrith orbited the crowd that was gathered around the priest’s table, perfumed cloths covering their noses and mouths to fend off the ammonia-and-feces stench. Vhingfrith had gotten to know Olaf in the last two weeks, as they each shared a love for the Dutch naturalist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek and his search for microscopic causes of disease, as well as the English naturalist Edward Topsell’s Book on Bestiary and A Scholarly History of Four-footed Beasts & Serpents. A dozen other scholars were present, drawn from the Admiralty and from the only school in Port Royal.

Benjamin believed, without ego, that he was likely the only person in the room who understood everything the priest was saying.

“—the sort of dewlap one might see on the throat of a dog,” Olaf was saying, tugging at the elastic flesh on the creature’s neck, a moment before cutting into it. Vhingfrith had already warned him about the acidic nature of some of the Beast’s fluids, but those seemed to have dissipated after death, and the corpse had gone shockingly dry on the inside, almost like leather. “It hasn’t the withers of a quadruped, which is unusual. There is a—my God,” he breathed.

Everyone leaned in as he peeled back a slab of flesh.

“The shoulders are interlocking in crisscrossing structures I’ve never seen before. Several notches here…yes…where the joints can…look here! The joints can dislocate and fit perfectly into other joints around it! Almost like a puzzle! To create locomotion—to change direction specifically—I believe it unhooks one of its own joints, shifting around the connection ligaments accordingly, and then locks them into place somewhere else! Like…like…” He searched for the right words.

“Like a schooner putting out a sail to catch wind, and then extending its oars when there is no wind, perhaps?” Vhingfrith provided from the edge of the room.

They all turned and looked at him.

“Yes!” said Olaf. “Precisely! It alternates the method of its travel.”

“Yes, I personally saw it maneuver in many different ways. First like a man, then like a dog, and finally a serpent.”

Olaf nodded and returned to his dissection. “And its head. Completely capable of breaking apart into several interlocking parts, separating and clicking together at a joint here, much like the joints around an ant’s, eh…the eh…”

“Labial palp?”

“Yes, yes! The palp! And these mandibles…stretching out from a labrum-like structure, though these pockets here…like bags of gas and liquid. Don’t know what they are for—”

“It spoke,” Vhingfrith said. “Others said they heard the same. It spoke like…like someone I once knew.” It had, in fact, spoken like Vhingfrith, only much younger. So much younger he almost hadn’t recognized his own voice.

Again, everyone looked at him. The stories had been going around of people hearing the dead speak through the mouths of the Beasts. Some people hadn’t run away from them because of an attack, they’d fled because they heard the voice of an old enemy, or a grieving spouse, or a disappointed family member, emanating from the mouth of the unearthly creatures.

“I have so far seen no vocal cords. None at all,” said Olaf.

“As you said when you dissected the other one. You’re absolutely certain, Olaf?”

“I am. And they also have no organs I recognize as lungs. If the Beasts can speak, they must do so by some method other than expelling air.” He scratched his head. “And it makes me wonder how they breathe. Or if they do.”

____

Over the next three weeks, more ships arrived from England and other parts of the Caribbean. They had all experienced the Long Night. Some spoke about major cities and towns burning as people panicked, trying to bring light back into the world any way they could. There were suicides. People flung themselves from bridges or into the rivers. Bodies floated down the Thames and the Tagus and the Rhine. And there was talk of some Disease, spoken about in hushed tones, and that the dead were sent away from London on ships because their bodies were melting into pools, made up of some ghastly liquid no naturalists or learned man could recognize.

But, just as in the days following the many vanishings of so many in Port Royal, the sun kept rising and falling, and people did what they had always done. They adapted. Not quite forgetting, but moving on. They adjusted to the fact of a new threat that could return any day. Iron bars were added to many windows, extra locks were put on doors, and dockworkers did not go near the docks without being armed.

But work continued. Life continued. These phenomena drove Benjamin to draw the Beasts, along with Olaf’s help, and create for the Admiralty a kind of report on the anatomy and behaviours he observed during that Long Night. Those papers began to spread. A few privateers took copies from the Admiralty and carried them back to England, where Benjamin Vhingfrith’s name became synonymous with other explorers and adventurer-naturalists, and not many who spoke his name knew he was half-Negro.

He wasn’t aware of this yet, because all of that was a world away, and he was dealing with the reports that many men had been found dead at Raymond Smith’s plantation the night of the Cataclysm, as it was being called in England, when the Long Night fell over the whole world. Raymond Smith’s family was slaughtered, his slaves escaped, many pirates and Royal Marines were found dead, some of them washing down the overflowing Rio Grande.

There was no report of John Laurier’s body being found. No report about where his Hazard might be now. And then, one night while a storm raged outside, Vhingfrith was roused by a knock at his door. He approached with pistol ready. His own footsteps caused the floorboards to creak and he thought briefly of Toby swinging from the rafters in the barn—

Upon opening the door, he found Woodes Rogers standing there with Major Halleck. “We believe we’ve located the León Coronado,” Rogers said. “She’s still wounded, and lurking around Dog Island. We think she’s been terribly injured by the events of the Long Night, half her crew gone mad and leapt into the water.

“But there is another matter, of even greater import. Two Spanish naos are heading towards Port Royal—a packet ship came in last night, and her captain narrowly escaped the Spaniards, and he warned us: they are coming.”

Vhingfrith blinked. “We’re to be invaded?”

“Looks as if, Captain. The Spanish will no doubt have experienced the Long Night, as well, and will have predicted how vulnerable that makes us, how panicked and disorganized our people will have been. The Admiralty’s guess is, the Spaniards probably suspect our militia is spread too thin. I’ve only one question. Will you sail with us, as we offered you before—me in my Duke, and you in your Lively—first to defend Port Royal, and then to find the Coronado?”

Benjamin blinked. “I’m…I’m sorry, this all so sudden, I’ve barely woken up.”

“We’re sailing to find the Coronado,” Rogers laughed. “Is this not what you wanted, old friend?”

Ben licked his lips. Scratched his neck. His neck had gotten scraggly, he had not shaved since the Long Night ended, and he had had many sleepless nights thinking of John. “Of course, it’s what I wanted. But…Port Royal…”

“What about her?”

“She’s still in shambles. The people are still—”

“Which is why we must sail out and meet them before they can get within cannon range of the harbor. The people are still getting over the Long Night. Putting it all behind them like a terrible dream. What I’m offering you is reality. The León Coronado, Captain. Yes or no?”

Benjamin sighed. And paced. Then he said, “I’ll need to ready a crew. But I shall likely have a hard time finding one to sail with me.”

Rogers smiled. “I think you underestimate your new reputation in Port Royal, sir.”