Outer Dark(42)

Holme splashed forward. There was no sound. Ho, he called. He could see nothing. He felt his way along the gunwale. Something reared up out of the dark before him with a strangled cry and he fell to the deck, scrabbling backwards as the hoofs sliced past him and burst against the planking. He clambered crabwise back along the deck, wet now and very cold. Ho there, he called. Nothing answered. It’s tied, he said. But it wasn’t tied. When he crossed to the other side he heard it go down the deck and whinny and crash and then he heard it coming back. His eyeballs ached. He dropped to the deck and crawled beneath the rail, up in the scuppers, and the horse pounded past and crashed in the bow. He pulled himself up and started for the rear of the barge and then he heard it coming again. He clawed at the darkness before him, cursing, throwing himself to the deck again while the horse went past with a sound like pistolfire. He waited, his cheek against the cold wood. The barge drifted, swung slowly about, trembling. A race of water wandered over the deck, ran coldly upon him, in his shirt and down his boots and receded again. He could not hear the horse. He could hear the sandy seething of the river beneath him. After a while he rose and started back up the deck. A black fog had set in and he could feel it needling on his face and against his blind eyeballs. When the horse came at him the third time he flattened himself half crazed against the forward bulkhead and howled at it. The horse reared before him black and screaming, the hoofs exploding on the planks. He could smell it. It yawned past him and crashed and screamed again and there was an enormous concussion of water and then nothing. As if all that fury had been swallowed up in the river traceless as fire. The barge rocked gently and ceased. Holme slid to the deck, gasping, his two fists together against his chest. He raised his head and listened to the silence. When he was sure it had gone he rose cautiously and made his way to the bow, unbalanced and staggering in such blackness. With his hands on the rails he leaned and looked down toward the water. The river mouthed the hull gently. After a minute he realized he was standing on something and he reached down to pick it up. It was a boot. He held it in his hands for a moment. Then he leaned and dropped it into the water. The boot tilted and filled and sank instantly as if a hand in the river had claimed it. He felt very cold.

He did not know what to do. He groped his way along to the benches and sat and hugged himself and rocked back and forth. He could hear the whisper of water going up and down over the deck. It sounded as if it were looking for him. After a while he cupped his hands and hallooed into the night. There was not even an echo. His voice fell from his mouth in a chopped bark and he did not call again. He wondered how far away the shore could be, and the dawn.

Once in the night they went through a shoal and he could hear the river going louder until it had risen to a babble and the ferry swung away in a sickening yaw and slid down some rocky flume, him sitting helpless and blind, clutching the bench, his stomach lapsing down black and ropy glides and the fog cold and wet upon him, praying silent and godless in his heart to the river to be easy. They came about in still water and went on. Much later the fog lifted. He rose and watched out over the river. He could see the face of it in sullen and threatful replication and after a while he could see a dark mullioned line of trees. He could not tell how fast they were going, he and this boat. He had not thought of them turning either, but now the gradied imprecision of the silhouetted trees swung slowly away into a colorless vapor and went behind him and crept forth again on the far side. And again. They had begun to move faster. When they swung a third time he began to think that they were closer to the trees and now too he could see the pale teeth of a rip in the river near the shore and he could hear it like the stammerings of the cloistered mad. Very soon after this he saw a light. It went away again before he could guess what kind of light it might be but he watched for it. The barge had swung twice more and now he was in eddy-water almost beneath the dark wall of trees. He could feel the slide and bump of debris on the hull, the dull grinding of a log sliding under. The light appeared again. A pin-flicker set in a glozed cup. He watched. It had begun to rain. He felt it very lightly on his arms and was surprised. He watched the light with his shoulderblades cocked against the chill and the rain falling upon him and soundlessly in the dark upon the peened and seething face of the river.

At first he thought it to be a cabin but it was not a cabin. It had no shape but what it took from breaking on the arch of trees above it and he knew that it was a campfire. The barge had slowed. Some trees passed across the front of the fire and he thought they were men and then a man did cross it, an upright shape that seemed to be convulsed there for a moment before going from sight like something that had incinerated itself. He was very close to the bank now but moving in a slick again and gaining speed.