Dead in the Water

by Nancy Holder

  “I’ll be gone just a few minutes.” His dad faced Dane and said, “I’m going for Cokes. Be right back.” Dane nodded. He hadn’t spoken a word, and Matt wasn’t sure he wanted him to. Sometimes things like that were awful—hearing people talk funny, looking at people with scars—just really embarrassing. He couldn’t explain what he meant, but he kind of wished the doctor hadn’t brought Dane by.

  “Do you know about the school bus,” Dane asked in a flat voice. It wasn’t too bad. He didn’t make his voice rise the way you do when you’re asking a question, but he didn’t sound like a retard, either.

  Matt shook his head.

  “It fell into Lake Tahoe. Sank. All the kids were still in it, and the driver, too. Nobody could find it. The lake is so deep no one’s ever found the bottom. We’re s’posed to have a monster, too.”

  “Cool,” Matt said. Dane nodded, and Matt was pleased that he’d understood him.

  “But every once in a while, the bus comes up. And you can see all the dead kids floating around inside. It’s so cold in the lake that the kids didn’t rot.”

  Behind the closet door, Nemo growled low in her throat.

  “You know what some people do with new kitties,” Dane asked. Still goggle-eyed from the bus story, Matt waited. “Tie ’em in a sack and drown ’em.”

  Matt made a face. “Uck! That’s gross.”

  “I saw some in the lake,” Dane went on, with an odd, satisfied grin on his face, like he’d shoplifted something and gotten away with it. He spoke at the cat as if he were taunting her. “They freeze in there, and they don’t rot. Just like the kids.”

  “Gee, Dane.” Matt rocked back on his heels.

  Dane lowered his head and giggled, a deep, naughty snigger. Maybe Dane wasn’t so cool after all. Maybe he was pretty weird.

  Dane reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of mittens, red with yellow reindeer on them. He moved forward and stuck them through the opening in the closet door, dangling them over Nemo’s box. Nemo flattened herself on the bottom of the box and her eyes spun around and around like marbles on a sidewalk. She hissed like a snake, a really pissed-off one. And suddenly Matt had a sense that all was not right in the stateroom; that something was

  cold

  and

  wet; no, make that freezing. That he was in a refrigerator, or some kind of long box filled with ice; that he was

  not rotting.

  Down in the water, and not rotting.

  He gripped the edge of the box hard. The room spun around and around; he was so cold; he was dizzy and he was going to faint. He was …

  “Nemo,” he said in a bright, unfrightened tone, groping through the vertigo to prove he was okay, “are you having more kittens?”

  The cat yowled.

  Cold and wet. Matt heard dripping. He heard people singing the way they did in church, slow, all together in a chorus. Something about being near to God. Nearer, my God, to Thee. Yes. He cocked his head. Someone must be practicing next door.

  A dog. Barking far, far away, as if it were playing inside a tunnel. Calling and woofing: come play. Come play with me. Woof, woof, aouuu.

  It sounded like his dead dog, Julie. Julie had crawled under the pool cover, his dad had told him. Couldn’t get out …

  He wiped sweat from his upper lip. Although he was freezing, the sweat was dripping off him. His skin was layers of ice and fire. He must be sick. Oh, no. No.

  Dane started laughing. He skipped over to the bed and plopped down on it, began bouncing.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked between bursts of laughter, and he wasn’t talking in that flat way anymore. He didn’t even sound like himself. His voice was deep and grown-up. “What’s wrong with you, Mattman?”

  Matt started. No one called him that but his dad.

  A few seconds passed. Dane forced himself to stop laughing. But his shoulders moved and his eyes twinkled, and his big, goofy ears turned red. He leaned back on the bed.

  “Mattman, Mattman, I know a way you can never be sick again. I know how to freeze the cancer, and it will never rot inside you again.”

  “Wh-what?” Matt managed, shocked and frightened. His heart thumped hard. “How do you kno—”

  Dane swung his legs. “It’s easy. It’s quick.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I was going to talk to her myself but I think it would be better if you told her what I said. And gave her these. More … imaginative.”

  He tossed his mittens to Matt, who automatically reached out and caught them. They were stiff with cold and sopping wet. They were—

  —dry as dust. Dry as a bone.

  Matt’s mouth dropped. He put a hand to his forehead to check for a fever. His skin was cool.

  But you could be very, very ill without a fever. You could be dying.

  Dane slid off the bed. He hummed to himself as he skipped toward the door, pausing to trail his hand across the closet door. Nemo growled. Then he went to the front door, wrapped his hand around the knob, and looked over his shoulder at Matt.

  “Tell her what I said.”

  “Wh-who?”

  “Why, Donna, of course. It’s definitely the boy she wants. The angel of forgiveness. A figurehead for the absolution of her monstrous sin. And he is lovely, is he not? He is beautiful.”

  He laughed, opened the door, and skipped out of the room.

  “Dad,” Matt whispered. He flung the mittens on the floor and wiped his hand furiously on the carpet. Then he rose and ran to the stateroom door. Tried to open it. It was locked.

  “Dad.” He knocked loudly. “Daddy, open the door!”

  There was no response. He knocked harder. “Daddy!”

  Across the room, Nemo poked her head out of the box. She sank back down, showing just her eyes, and watched Matt intently.

  “Nemo, help! Dad. Daddy!” He bashed the door with his fist. A bruising stinging shot through the heel of his hand. “Shit!”

  Matthew. Mattman. Someone spoke. Someone in his head. Matt looked around.

  In the distance, the barking of dogs. The laughter of a child.

  Of many children. And the singing. Nearer, my God, to Thee.

  Matty, you are getting sick again. You know you are. But you can stay here forever. You can keep from becoming ill.

  Forever.

  “Who’s saying that?” Matt shouted, pushing himself from the door, whirling around. “Who’s talking to me?”

  The stateroom doorbell rang. Matt cried out and stared at it, eyes wide, wider, widest. Some thing was on the other side, some (say it, yes, say it)

  some

  Some gho—

  “Matt? It’s me, Ruth. Ruth Hamilton.”

  Matt cried out again and ran to the door. He threw it open and flung himself into her arms, and they collided.

  “Help me!” he shouted. “Help me!”

  In the box, Nemo squalled and yowled and hissed. She thrashed wildly, her paws battering the sides of the box. She growled, then shrieked in a feline scream of pure agony, her cat voice hurtling toward the moon. She shrieked again.

  And then was silent.

  My darling, my precious small love.

  My bait.

  26

  Shattering

  Pleased with himself, the captain stood on the bridge with his hands behind his back. Mr. Creutz had the wheel, and the man was there, all of a piece, straining at the shackles of control the captain had placed on him; ha, brave Captain Creutz! Went down with his ship, and this was his reward; and his hatred was what made him so interesting, so alive, to Captain Reade.

  The beautiful little boy in the ski jacket had just returned from his visit to the other beautiful child, Matty. Now the boy put his hands on the captain’s thighs and smiled up at him. His baby-fat mouth glistened pink and promising. The captain remembered this one, from the frigid, bottomless lake; and Donna, of course: Grab, grab her! that comely ankle, that meaty calf, grab and pull! and how she had eluded him. Once, m’dear, but not twice.
>
  No one gets a second chance on the Sea of Death.

  “I shall love you always,” Reade said to the child, who smiled. Blessed was he, Thomas Reade, who made the deaf to hear, the dead to walk. But though he stroked the boy’s head and reached for him, in his mind’s eye he saw little Matty and sighed with longing. He would love him, too. Not for always, perhaps, but often, and well. Like his one true love, Nathaniel.

  “Full ahead, to the Sea of Death,” he sang out.

  “Aye, sir.”

  Creutz was more agitated than usual today, it seemed. Or was it his own nerves? Reade was so tired lately. He needed a rest; the Pandora was showing signs of … wear. The survivors were straining his reserves; or that damn slut Donna was, at any rate. Everyone else was climbing aboard Charon’s boat with charming ease. Thus far, her delicate ankles yet remained on deck, but what about that glorious break-through when she had seen Mrs. Reinstedt in the finery she had drowned in? The sweetness of that victory enlarged him, engorged him; he fed on that moment, and knew her surprise as a tasty morsel.

  And then he had feasted upon her, lain in wait and swallowed her up in her “stateroom,” poor Jonah-girl! Forcing her out and down, so far down. Sweet she was, sweet and mysterious, his sea-witch, his mer-girl. Though she refused to see the horrors he prepared for her—to the point of going blind, that early first attempt!—she’d moved awash in fear, swimming through her terror like one who sees the ship on the far, far horizon. And when she dared to believe she could reach safety, he had keelhauled her mind through the ice rivers of his power, and now—at last!—he knew the size and shape of the lure that would catch her: the boy was heaviest on her mind; he was her Desire.

  He knew he had succeeded with her once, when on the Morris he had made her think she had touched this little boy in Ruth Hamilton’s cabin. Absently he patted the child, who beamed at him. And later, in the lifeboat, she had dreamed of little deaf Dane.

  But the captain had assumed her truest desire lay elsewhere—with the man, Glenn—else, how could she have fought him off, though he spoke to her and called to her and ordered her to obey, and yet she did not respond? His siren call of the boy had been false … or so he had believed, until now.

  “Ah, child,” the captain said lovingly, and the boy fell to his knees,

  full fathoms deep.

  “Soon, soon.” And briefly, he reminded himself to tell Cha-cha to murder Captain Curry; and then he let it slide away as the little floater made him feel alive, alive, all, all alive, alive on a wine-dark sea.

  The ship flickered.

  White walls melted away, and a cold wind shrieked through the ribs of a dead ship; metal flaked and crusted and dead men lay in heaps, rotting. A torso, glowing with mold. A foot of bone and leathered skin; barnacles on the deck and crabs inside a wrist. Such death. Such waste.

  Curry stayed where he was, in the shadows, his hand laid over the smashed head of a Tiffany lamp. He had snuck for an hour through the death trap that was currently masquerading as Pandora, and had been many other vessels in his years of servitude; and icebergs and kelp beds and whatever else was required to destroy the captain’s prey.

  For three years he had slaved for that monster, and survived; but now, with the undreamed-of hope of escape before him, he began to lose heart. He would never find Donna Almond; he had no idea where she was. But he knew who she was. The captain was obsessed with her, and with trapping her into dying aboard the ship. It would not do well to stand between the captain and anyone he wanted, mutiny or no.

  Maybe he, Curry, didn’t need to find her. The flickering was happening more often; the bodies and the tatters and the rotten wood blurring into substance. Perhaps Reade was dying, or the mutiny had already begun. Why take the risk of being discovered? Of dying here?

  Because if he didn’t take that risk, and try to help, he knew he would be damned in another way. Damned if you do.

  Cursed by hell itself if you don’t.

  The ship blurred back into the lavish newness of the Pandora. Oriental cooks chopped vegetables where stinking heaps of bones were truly piled like prehistoric altars. The cooks believed themselves to have been there all along; it was only a few of the crew who had begun to realize they were … not real, not what they once had been. That they were dead, and reanimated in some way by that fiend. The mutineers had to be the ones who knew. But what a course to take, for what would happen if they failed?

  What would happen if they succeeded?

  Curry crawled over the kitchen floor, shielding himself with the maze of meat lockers and what he knew was in them—crewmen, passengers, some from his own ship. They had been feeding them to the survivors of the Morris … with a little fresh belly timber—their own crewmates—thrown in.

  “God help me,” he whispered, and inched on.

  The corridor stretched endlessly before John and Dr. Hare, bowing in the distance. Disoriented, John turned and walked a few steps backward, trying to pinpoint his stateroom door.

  “Doctor?” Dr. Hare queried with a raised eyebrow.

  John scratched his chin. “I thought the ice machine was right here.” He gestured to the right. “I don’t remember going this far before.”

  “Mmm.” The doctor kept walking. “I think it’s a ways ahead.”

  John moved his shoulders. “Ah, well. I never had much of a sense of direction.”

  “It seems to me you do,” Hare replied. He laid a hand on John’s arm and said, “Let’s talk, Dr. Fielder.”

  John waited. The doctor cleared his throat, assuming a professional air John recognized: the authority, the somber, almost expressionless face. The seriousness.

  “It cannot have escaped you,” Hare said, “that in the past few days, your son has gotten much, much worse.”

  John’s ulcer flared. He gasped behind his hand, lowered it to his side. Except for the fire pit in his gut, he went numb.

  “I … I thought so,” he said. Panic ripped through him. No, no, no. He wanted to scream. He couldn’t handle any more.

  Jesus, Jesus, get it together. Your kid needs you. Maintain.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” Fielder asked, halting. He cupped John’s shoulder.

  John nodded mutely. “I … I’m sorry. Please go on.”

  “I don’t know how to broach this,” Hare said. “It’s harder when dealing with a fellow professional. You know about all the processes taking place inside his body. What cancer cells look like, what he looks like inside. You can envision the prognosis, the outcome, step by step.”

  “Christ,” John breathed, wiping his forehead, pressing his fingertips against his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to cause you pain. No one here wants to hurt you. We want to help you.” Hare smiled kindly. “We want what’s best for Matt.”

  John lowered his arm. “I don’t understand.” The hallway was so damn long, he thought irritably, distractedly. Where was the goddamn ice machine?

  “I have to get back. Matt—”

  “Doctor. Doctor, listen.”

  “Look, if this is some bid for funding for your frozen barnacle shit …” But John knew it wasn’t. He was angry because he was scared. He didn’t want to talk about this with this man, with anybody. He wanted it to go away. He wanted it to stop.

  “By now you know Australia doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  “What?” John asked shrilly.

  “There is nothing on earth that can save Matt. You know that.”

  John stared at the doctor for a moment. Then he doubled his fist and raised it over his head. “Don’t be stupid!” he shouted. “Don’t you be so stupid!”

  The doctor stood unafraid, with his calm, sad smile, and his certainty. “The new age is so unfair. In the old days, you could put on animal skins and toss colored powders into a fire, and he might get well. Or you could pray to God, and he might get well. I know you have,” he added. “Prayed, I mean. But I doubt you seriously believe God will do anything. Or can do anythin
g. And science has told you that man can’t intervene on Matt’s behalf. There is nothing you can do to stop him from worsening and dying.”

  “Stop,” John whispered. Tears rolled down his cheeks. The numbness spread. His fists floated above his head, far away, far, like a cork on the surface of a lake. He couldn’t tell where he ended and the hallway began. He was dizzy, and sick, and he wasn’t sure he was speaking aloud.

  “But there is something we can do, we of the Pandora. He need not die.” The doctor grabbed John’s arms. “He need not die, if he stays here with us.”

  John stared at him. The doctor nodded. “Surely you accept that the Pandora’s not just a ship. You’ve felt it. You all have. John, we want you to come aboard. Both of you.”

  “What—?”

  “Look. I’ll show you.”

  “You’re fucking crazy!” John shouted, and pushed the doctor aside as he strode down the hall, back toward his stateroom, and crashed against a tall woman as she caught his shoulders. Her face was broad, friendly, big-boned. Her hair was a bubble-helmet and she had on a simple A-line dress of black and white geometric shapes. Rings of white beneath her eyes, and lips of dead-white. Purple and red teardrops dangled from her ears and she smelled of—no!—she smelled of patchouli oil, very big back then—

  Back when?

  “Easy, man,” she said, releasing him, grabbing his hands. She reeked of marijuana.

  “What?” He looked past her, beyond. They were on the Sausalito ferry, at night; the stars gleamed over San Francisco Bay, and there dozens of kids sprawled everywhere, with straight hair down to their butts, flared bell-bottom jeans, and shirts with paisley and African prints; a kid in velvet with a Carnaby Street hat.

  A radio blasted Jimi Hendrix, and the detonation of an electric riff blew up John’s backbone, straight up bashing and crashing; he staggered backward and knocked into someone, and whirled around like a drunk.

  “Easy, easy,” said the doctor.

  “Where the fuck …?”

  “We’re on the Pandora,” Hare assured him. His hand took in the ferry, the kids. “Do you see anyone you recognize?”

  He stared. Saw Hare’s nurse, who was lounging on some stairs with his orderlies, smoking a joint. A few people from the dining room, dressed in clothes of the time. Donna’s steward, Adalberto.