Dead in the Water

by Nancy Holder

  He could contain himself no longer. Better to die in a manner of his own choosing than in whatever way the monster intended.

  He opened his mouth to take a breath that he knew was not there—

  —and the creature crushed her mouth over his and spewed something into him, something horrible and cold and clotted. He knew that taste. It was blood; she was drowning his lungs in the blood of her body.

  Nei, he roared in his mind. He struggled in the cocoon of her body, whipping his head back and forth, demanding of the gods a chance to fight. A chance for Valhalla.

  The bottle flew at her, crashing across the back of her head. Her skull cracked and blood gushed up from the fragments, toward the surface. Going limp, her arms fell from around him. As soon as the tendrils loosened, he ripped them off himself. Grabbed his sword from her fingers, raised it back in the water, and cut off her head.

  Down, it tumbled in the water,

  down,

  down,

  down,

  At his feet, the head of Elise van Buren.

  Ramón screamed and leapt away from it. No, he had not—

  No.

  Fog rushed around him, gray, dirty, cold. It billowed toward him, an onrushing tide of wind and stink.

  He spun left, right. Dropped the sword. Ran through the cloud. About ten feet from him what looked like an old wooden mast pierced the sweaty clouds, and from it jittered a tattered Union Jack. The fog grappled with the top right corner like an animal worrying a bone.

  “Nahhh …”

  The fog swirled downward and scraped itself away, revealing the hulking wreck of an ancient sailing vessel. Pirate ship, Ramón thought, trying for an answer where there could be none. Schooner, clipper, part of a movie, part of a dream. An intricate sign above the companionway that led below decks read “Royal Grace.”

  Ramón staggered backward, directly into Elise’s head, and with a shout he fell, sprawling over a rotted deck.

  A stench rose from beneath his elbow. He crabbed on his backside and palms, put his hand into the warm guts of a rat whose head had been crushed and smeared against the splintered, pitted deck.

  The fog careened toward him. A face poked out from it, smirking, laughing, a sharp, cruel face with an eye patch, and the mouth opened and it was full of blood and meat, and it chewed so that he could see that it was—

  —it was—

  Ramón rolled over on his stomach and vomited.

  Someone stood in the distance, at a ship’s wheel. A tall, wiry figure with long, flowing blond hair.

  Kevin! Ramón crawled toward him, trying to call, unable to speak. He crabbed on his hands and knees, straining to outrun the fog and Captain Reade. Nails and splinters pierced his kneecaps and tore the skin in long, tortuous lines; he grunted, felt nothing, hurried toward Kevin.

  The fog slipped around him.

  “Kkkkk—”

  Reached him. Ramón reached him. He put out a hand—

  —and Kevin’s ruined body slumped over the wooden spokes, fell to one side, and splattered onto its back. His face was a motley of gray and purple. Large, crusted wounds covered each side of his face. Like a large, withered flower, his nose was crushed against his cheek, white shards like stamens stuck in the gore.

  As Ramón screamed and jumped away, he caught that something was wrong with Kevin’s eyes, something horribly wrong: they looked like cartoon eyes; they were nothing but outlines of navy-blue—

  —they were drawn on his lids. His eyes were closed and someone had drawn eyes on his eyelids.

  “Jesus!” Ramón shouted; somehow this was more horrible than—

  No. No, it wasn’t.

  Reade’s boots stood beside him. The man bent down and offered Ramón a hand. In his other hand he carried Elise’s head by the hair, like a handbag.

  “See how easy it is?”

  Ramón whimpered, shuffled away, and flung himself against the base of a wooden mast.

  The captain had a handkerchief over his mouth; he wiped daintily and drew it away. His lips were covered with blood.

  “Fresh, not rotted,” he said. The head dangled in his grasp. Her right cheek was missing; Ramón could see her teeth through the hole.

  The captain smacked his lips. Ramón looked from the head to him and back again. No. No.

  “Now we’ll render her.” He pointed above Ramón’s head.

  Elise’s corpse was strung upside down from a hook that dangled from the crow’s nest. The body was sopping with blood, which no longer ran, no longer dripped. The flesh from between her legs to her throat had been sliced open, and entrails hung like sausages.

  Ramón sobbed.

  The fog billowed down, broiling, roiling, wringing itself around him like wet sheets. Ramón sank to his knees and punched at it like an angry child, tears splashing over his cheeks and scattering like spittle with each futile jab.

  “And you wanted to be a big man,” Reade scoffed, stepping through the fog to stand before Ramón. “You thought to presume.”

  He still carried the head. In the other, he held a Viking longsword. He raised it up and scrutinized it, slashing the fog idly. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s a museum piece,” he said, showing his teeth as he smiled. “Your dreams are entertaining. Childish, but entertaining.”

  Ramón couldn’t speak. Nor could he stop crying. He couldn’t have cut off her head. He couldn’t have. He couldn’t …

  “Oh, do shut up, or I’ll cut off yours,” Reade snapped, brandishing the sword. Ramón flinched, and the captain shook his head in disgust.

  “You’re a poor piece of work, aren’t you? A peasant.” He jabbed the sword upward. “Render her. Now. Your mates will want their dinner.”

  Ramón sobbed harder. Reade exhaled. “What do you think, that I can keep you alive with my imagination?” He waited, as if Ramón could manage to answer. The only sound was Ramón’s gagging as Elise’s body dangled above him. Her fingertips grazed the crown of his head and the blood on them smeared his hair in a mockery of baptism.

  “I can kill you with it, though,” Reade continued. He made a lacy wave with the handkerchief. “My imagination. As they can attest.”

  The fog billowed down and swirled around Ramón. Desperately he gazed at the sword. If he could just get it away from him.

  The guy was loco. Ramón didn’t know what kind of chingada shit the guy was taking, and had probably given him as well, but it made you freak out bad, hombre. Very bad.

  Yeah. Wild hope rose inside him. That was it; he was drugged, and none of this was really happening. C’mon, man, a wreck of a sailing ship? And … and the lady, the señora, she wasn’t there. It was a bad trip, like LSD, yeah, that was all. It was …

  The fog thickened and unrolled like a hatch, and figures appeared in a vague haze, walked through the opening.

  Ramón wet his pants.

  Men with red scarves tied around their heads and gold hoops in their ears; men with dark blue uniforms and caps; men with doughboys; with tricornes:

  And their faces were black and yellow and green and purple, and dead ice-blue; and they had no faces;

  and their eyes were round slanted and cloudy; and they had no eyes;

  and their lips

  their lips dripped with blood that splashed

  down

  down

  down,

  their lips spoke words he couldn’t hear because he was screaming and vomiting and slipping in his own urine.

  They staggered and shambled toward him in a mass, like a single tentacled creature, and Ramón, despite the fact that his mind was drowning, skittered away from them.

  “No fear,” said a sad voice that penetrated the din. “I told you.”

  No fear. No fear. Fear is his Desire.

  And he saw a man with red hair, a living man, tied around the mast. His face was covered with bruises; his skin was bleached white; he had no teeth.

  “Cut her down, then cut her up,” the captain said to his crew.

&
nbsp; A sharp roll, crack, roll, crack accompanied their footfalls. Drugs, Ramón told himself, and hit him. Stop him. Kill him.

  Roll, crack, foul, walking death.

  Roll, crack, and a scrinch, scrinch, scrinch, as somewhere a windlass turned, and the body dropped lower toward the deck.

  Ramón got to his feet and ran. With his head turned toward the captain, and the dead men, and the—

  —the fog—

  He ran for all he was worth.

  And slammed into Captain Esposito. Hard, and solid, and Ramón threw his arms around him.

  “Help! Help!” he begged. “They’re … they … eat us, eat us,” he managed. “They—” He sagged against Esposito as the world started to go black.

  When he woke, he was tied upright to some kind of pole. Hard metal; that much he could tell though the area was lit a dim and sickly green. That much, and that the soles of his shoes were soaked.

  A dream, he thought muzzily. No sailing vessel wreck, no body, no fog, no death crew. No—

  He opened his eyes. His head was bound in place, and he was staring into some kind of hole, some—

  —a periscope. Periscope. His mind thrashed some more. Submarine?

  Water seeped through the sides of his shoes and reached his ankles. Sub, and sinking!

  “Help,” he murmured. His head wanted to fall back, but he was held tightly in place. The water sloshed as if something moved near him, and he blinked, his lashes brushed the eyepiece.

  And he saw:

  Captain Esposito, barefoot, with lines tied around his ankles and his wrists, crying and gesticulating to the figures around him, who held the ends of the lines in their fists. The death crew. No dream. No dream.

  Esposito stood on the bowsprit, just above the figurehead of a woman, and shook his head. The ropes dangled from him like a giant spiderweb. The crew stared at him impassively, as dead men would, and waited.

  Esposito stumbled and almost tumbled off. The crew waited, holding the other ends of the lines slack in their hands.

  Reade appeared and gestured with the sword. Esposito shouted something back.

  “Capitán,” Ramón groaned. “Nuestra Señora, ayúdale.” Help him, Our Lady. He blinked, could not look away.

  Reade moved the sword again. Again Esposito shook his head; again, nearly lost his balance.

  How could he be seeing this? Ramón wondered. How could—

  The figurehead moved. In a graceful gesture, it raised its arms above its head, and then its body grew long, long, like a snake’s, and while Esposito argued with Reade, it coiled around on itself and slithered toward him. It opened its arms—

  —Reade folded his arms, and the dead men stared—

  —and hurled Esposito into the water. It stood on its tail and watched as he splashed down, disappeared, his location betrayed by the tangle of lines that stretched as he sank.

  The men gathered the lines and began to walk on either side of the deck. The ropes draped over their shoulders, tautened, slackened. It didn’t make sense; the bowsprit was in the way of—

  It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t be happening.

  The men walked the length of the ship, the old sailing ship Royal Grace, while Ramón gasped, “No, no,” over and over and over.

  The figurehead slithered back below the bowsprit, and lowered her arms, and she became a half-naked woman once more.

  The men reached the bow, and Reade issued more orders, and they began to hoist whatever was left of Esposito.

  Which wasn’t much.

  And directly behind Ramón, a woman sang:

  Row, row, row your boat

  gently down the stream.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

  Life is but a dream.

  Reade danced a hornpipe, placing one arm over his stomach, one across his back, bobbing, weaving, jibing, and tacking.

  “Oh, God,” Ramón rasped. “Oh, no, please.”

  Soft laughter.

  Then nothing.

  Reade stopped and stared directly into the periscope’s crosshatches, walked closer, closer, until his face filled the sight.

  “They underestimated me. They should have killed me. How? How, you ask?” Reade cocked his head. “Does it matter?”

  Ramón wanted to faint. The water rose around his calves.

  “You wanted to be a big man?” Reade continued. “A captain? Only captains serve me.” He gestured with his thumb over the bits of meat and bone attached to the lines.

  “Only captains serve me, and I serve only the leftovers. The boneheads.”

  He turned around, addressing the men who now shuffled toward the carcass. “Did you see how he jumped into the stewpot? Phil van Buren, I mean? Did you see him boil with the fish bones? And the woman. Elise. Did you see her take the bottle, and attack herself? She thought it was me. She thought it was my cock.”

  A white bird schreed and landed on Reade’s shoulder. “That man had a dream of a steamboat, but he was really in the kitchen, walking over the burners. He thought he was belowdecks, but he dove into the stewpot like a swan.”

  Fresh bile urped into Ramón’s mouth. Phil van Buren, dead? Esposito?

  The chiquito, Matty?

  “Do you know who I am?” Reade demanded. “Do you know what I want from all of you? What I’ll have?”

  But Ramón could not answer.

  He could not do anything.

  “Don’t you wonder where you really are? What you’re really seeing?”

  Reade caressed the bird’s wing, its foot, its beak. “The Greeks, they knew that ghosts drink blood,” he said. “And my ghosts are always hungry. I am the Captain, Ramón Diaz. I will always be the Captain, and those who serve me are strong-willed men who hate me. Hatred is a kind of Spirit, and it is that which keeps them from ceasing. But those who are weak …” He jerked his head toward the remains of Esposito’s corpse.

  The bird flew over to it, settled on it, and launched into the air with part of a foot in its beak.

  “Do you know what, Diaz?” he said to the periscope. “The damndest thing is, Esposito was already dead. And my men didn’t kill him. The first time, I mean. They couldn’t. They can only harvest the dead, though I can lure the squirming belly timber into the nets for them. Only the living can kill the living. Like you and I, Ramón. You and I.”

  The captain put out his arms and whirled in a circle. The bird flew around his head, orbiting like a moon, and the captain sang the awful song the woman (what woman?) had crooned behind Ramón.

  “But now that he is dead, he’s mine,” Reade proclaimed. “Mine. And they can kill him again and again. Whenever I wish.

  Whenever I

  Desire.”

  And more fun, and more.

  “Of course, you want what’s best for your son,” Captain Reade said in a low voice.

  They sat together at the back of the bridge while the cruise director, a sprightly young woman with dark hair and brown eyes, amused Matt by moving a toy boat along a chart that hung on a bulkhead on the starboard side of the room. Matt laughed, but lines creased his forehead and his eyes were ringed with black. John thought miserably of the moon encircled by clouds: storm on its way. Bad weather. Bad days. Donna had been kind, but Matty looked like … death.

  “A boy like that is a prize worth fighting for,” Reade added, and John shifted in his chair. He didn’t appreciate the captain’s comment. His son wasn’t a “prize.”

  “Do you know that Dr. Hare used to do research on parasites?” Reade crossed his legs and nodded for emphasis. “He worked on sacculena.”

  John crooked his neck forward to hear better, although he didn’t particularly care to discuss medicine with the man. He’d simply requested that the captain allow him to radio Sydney and have a cancer team waiting by, and to contact his doctors back home. The phone in his room wasn’t working, nor was anyone else’s. Something to do with the satellite again, or so Reade claimed. John was beginning to think they had inferior phone equi
pment, and the staff had been instructed not to admit it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said distractedly. “I’ve never heard of that. What is it?”

  “A kind of barnacle. You haven’t read his papers?” Reade looked mildly disapproving. “Sacculena is a kind of barnacle that actually lives inside crabs”—he waved his fingers—“can’t remember which kind. At any rate, they extend a mass of rootlike fibers through the crab’s body, rather like tentacles. It grows saclike protuberances.” He shivered. “Castrates male crabs and makes them into females. Rather gruesome, don’t you think?”

  John made a face, though his gaze was focused on Matt. “Rather.”

  “But Dr. Hare made an interesting discovery. If you chilled the crab, you could kill the sacculena.”

  “And eat the crab,” John said dryly, managing a weak jest.

  Reade chuckled. “If you pleased. But what I meant was, the crab survived. You froze the … cancer, and the host lived on.”

  John’s gaze ticked toward him. “Captain, why are you telling me this?”

  Reade shrugged. “Of course you want what’s best for your son.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “What say we adjourn and tap the admiral, ey?” When John didn’t respond, he said, “That’s sea talk. Lord Nelson—our British naval hero? Horatio Nelson? His body was pickled in brandy for the voyage home. So we call having a brandy, tapping the admiral.” He pantomimed pounding something. Tapping a keg, John translated.

  “Matt,” he called.

  “He’ll be all right with her,” Reade assured him. “She’ll treat him like her own.”

  “I just want him with me.” For as long as possible. John’s hands shook and he clenched them hard.

  Captain Reade rose. “As you please. You know best. I, too, want what’s best for your son.” He faced John as John stood.

  “Have you been having dreams, Doctor?” Before John could answer, Reade turned his head and watched Matt with the woman.

  “Because dreams can come true, Doctor. Believe me, I know.” He looked back.

  “And perhaps there’s a little something I can do to help them come true.”

  John raised his brows, unsteady with the conversation. The atmosphere on the bridge had just transformed. It was charged, flickering with a new energy. Or was that a result of his own anxiety?