Dead in the Water

by Nancy Holder

  No. He wanted to be imagining this. Because if it was real, it was too awful to handle.

  “C’mon!” someone shouted. “John! Matt! Curry! Over here!”

  In the distance, John saw a red glow swaying in the fog. Back and forth, very fast, a signal.

  “C’mon!” Now he recognized the voice. It was Donna.

  “Donna!” John cried. He shifted direction.

  “Daddy, Daddy,” Matt whimpered.

  They headed toward the figure. Wind whipped around them. They were outside, John guessed; and then, as if to confirm his suspicion, the air cleared for a moment, revealing a blue sky. Then the fog rolled over them again. Mortar fire blazed through the air like lightning.

  “Jesus!” he cried, ducking.

  “Daddy, Daddy,” Matt whimpered.

  Donna teetered on the edge of the deck, sopping wet. She looked like hell, and she had a flare in her left hand.

  “I’ve got a boat. You have to jump overboard,” she said through swollen lips. Her hair was thick with blood. “Right here. Do it. Do it.” She jabbed her hand, pointing to the dark water below.

  John paused. A trick? Hadn’t that been what the captain wanted? Jump overboard. Hadn’t he heard that somewhere in his mind?

  “No, no, please,” Curry whimpered, voicing John’s fear. He cringed. “It’s a trick, no, please.”

  Without warning, Donna grabbed Matt and pitched him overboard. His scream as he fell was agonized.

  “Go, John!” And John dove in after him,

  down

  down

  down

  And suddenly bodies leaped from the ship and fell around him, on fire; skeletons turned and saw him with no eyes, and swam through the air with their clawed fingers to catch him; hundreds of skeletons, all around him, a rain of bone. He couldn’t stop screaming. He heard Matt shouting in terror; and Donna, shouting, “No, Cha-cha! Stop yourself!” and then he hit the water and went under.

  Something grabbed his ankles and yanked him down into the frigid sea. He gulped in water; it rushed into his lungs as he kicked and struggled, thinking, I dreamed this, I dreamed of drowning, where’s Matty? He opened his mouth to shout, but there was so much water inside him, outside him, and whatever—

  —whoever—

  held him fast.

  Not like this! No! he thought, making fists and hitting blindly. He would not die like this.

  Something plunged into the water beside him, diving beneath him, and the grip around his ankles loosened enough for him to dart away. Someone swam beside him; oh, Lord. He turned his head long enough to register that it was Donna.

  “Get in the boat!” Donna shouted, hauling herself in, reaching for Matt. Curry crawled in on the other side.

  John looked up. The Pandora was no longer a cruise ship, and neither was it a warship. Her hull was a pastiche of metal vessels from which wooden masts and bowsprits extended helter-skelter like spears stuck in a carcass; a propeller at least a story tall; half a steamboat paddlewheel, the wheelhouse of a tug. Near the bow, the bulbous nose of a submarine extended toward the waterline. And the huge, unbelievable mass and weight of it was sinking.

  Panting, he dragged himself into the boat and scrabbled to his knees. The skeletons were everywhere, swam everywhere, rotten fabric draped around them; cutaway coats, bustles that flopped around pelvis bones; knuckles poking through gloves. A navy-blue officer’s coat and hat, and a slight stick figure beneath it. Khaki, Mexican ponchos, kimonos, the wolf’s head of the Nazis. Clacking and snapping. He heard scraping on the hull of the boat; he heard them hissing through their voiceless mouths. He thought he heard the words “belly timber,” and he thought he heard his name, in Cha-cha’s voice.

  No more fell from the ship. The top deck was deserted.

  “Don’t just sit there, John!” Donna shouted at him. She was punching at the skeletons, throwing things at them, smacking them with her fists and feet. They clattered, bone against bone, and Donna grunted as they came at her again. She was a tornado, and they kept coming, clack clack clack.

  Her courage snapped him out of it. The skeletons clicked their jaws as they surrounded the boat. In the distance, the screaming, rocket explosions, the Doors. He and the others faced outward in a circle, and finally he made himself push the nearest one away; bone only, nothing else. Bone that moved.

  The rock music aboard the ship. The bullets. Screaming. The cat, mewing and growling.

  “Ruth!” John cried. Donna turned.

  In a sopping nightgown, Ruth Hamilton ran along the top deck, hands outstretched, crying, “He’s not my husband! Help me, he’s not my husband!” Her hair was dripping wet; water ran from her slightly tanned fingers.

  “Jump, Ruth! Jump!” Donna shouted, standing with her legs spread wide apart. “We’ll get you!”

  Ruth hesitated. “Come on, damn it!” Donna motioned wildly.

  Ruth jumped. She fell end over end with a cry. Elise reached with the others to rescue her, as the skeletons converged—

  —and when she hit the water, she was nothing but a bloated corpse floating on the water. Like piranha, a pack of skeletons threw themselves upon her and dragged her beneath the water.

  The others renewed their assault on the lifeboat, thrashing in the water, lunging and grasping. One jumped out of the water and threw itself at Matt. He shrieked and Donna grabbed Matt around the waist, batting at the thing.

  Its finger sliced her cheek, aimed for her eye—

  “Cha-cha, damn you!” Donna bellowed, punching the thing away. “Damn you to hell, you liar! You’re worse than he was! You fucking nut! John, did you see anyone else? Is there anyone alive on there?”

  “No,” he said quickly, ashamed. Even if there were someone, he doubted he would tell her.

  “Ramón?” she said.

  “Dead!” Curry shouted. “I saw him!”

  “Then I want to kill this thing. This fucking thing!” She stood in the boat. For one alarming second, John thought she was going to jump into the water.

  She ripped off her shoe and flung it at the Pandora. It landed a few feet shy, and sank.

  “I’ll come back!” she shouted, nearly toppling over. Tears and blood streamed down her face. “I’ll come back and get you. I swear I will!”

  And then, without warning, the Pandora rolled sideways, away from them, and groaned long and low; the sound vibrated through the bottom of the boat. John heard it—

  COMEBACKCOMEBACKCOMEBACK

  —something insatiable; a horrible, soul-wrenching loneliness in the call. He grabbed his chest as his heart swelled in response;

  MOREMOREMOREMOREMOREMORE

  The fog roiled up, thick as a forest fire. A skeleton clicked its jaw at John and slid back into the water.

  One by one, the others did the same.

  COMEBACKCOMEBACKCOMEBACK

  White water churned and roiled, and the fog reverberated with keening. Donna sat visibly shaken. The tears rolled down her face.

  “If it’s not over, I will come back.”

  “It’s sinking,” John said.

  Cha-cha’s voice came to them in the tumult: “I’ll get better. Come back, come back. Please. I’m so … I’m alone.” Softer, softer, no more.

  A wave rocked them, teeter-totter, teeter-totter, for a few seconds.

  The fog clung to the lifeboat.

  In the sky, a gull cawed.

  And Cha-cha’s voice, so faint:

  Lonely.

  They drifted. It was warm, but the fog didn’t lift; it lay over them like a shroud.

  Donna tried to talk. She briefly told them about Reade and seeing his corpse in the lifeboat surrounded by ice, fog, and mist. And about Cha-cha, how he was taking over, but hadn’t quite yet, or something, because Reade’s memories were too strong to simply erase.

  She didn’t tell them about the singing. About how she had felt so … needed.

  “Everything was a mirage?” John asked. “None of it happened?”

&nb
sp; “No, a lot of it happened,” Curry said miserably.

  “But what were they?” John held Matty.

  “Figments of his imagination. The captain’s,” Donna murmured.

  “Reade?”

  “They weren’t just his. They were real,” Curry cut in.

  It was too much for her. Her mind was anesthetized, and she supposed she should be grateful for that.

  At the last, she had seen something. As what had once been the Pandora sank into the water she had seen the ship slip into a bottle, and a face, an evil, empty face—

  No. She had seen nothing. And she would never tell anyone about what she

  hadn’t

  seen.

  Her lips grew dry, and her stomach growled, and Donna wondered what the hell would happen next.

  They drifted through the purgatory fog like a quartet of damned souls.

  Made it.

  His baby and him.

  John nuzzled Matt, and Matt nuzzled him back. Would his boy be all right, after all he had seen?

  And what had he seen? With the passage of the hours, everything was fading. Those things couldn’t have happened. They must not have. It was the toxic waste from the Morris, as he and Donna had feared. Had to be.

  Had to be.

  “Donna, what was it?” he asked.

  She sat with her head on her knees. She had been silently sobbing for over an hour. He didn’t know why. He wanted to tell her not to cry, because she would dehydrate herself. But how on earth do you tell that to someone who’d just been through what they had?

  “A lonely woman,” she said in a muffled voice, hiding her face.

  John wanted to hold her. He wanted to make love to her. She seemed terribly vulnerable. If anyone knew the most there was to know about loneliness, he suspected it was Donna.

  “Check it out,” Curry said excitedly, and John leaned his head on Matty’s head as he stared tiredly out to sea. The fog sliced into his eyelids and—

  —he got what the other man was so excited about:

  The fog was lifting. Or they were moving beyond it.

  “Oh, my God,” he murmured, crossing himself. “Oh, thank you, God.”

  Donna reached over and hugged the three of them. Scratched Nemo’s head. “We’re gonna be okay,” she said. Her nose was stopped up. “We’ll get found.”

  John nodded. “Hear that, Mattman? We’re okay.”

  Matt scooted in his embrace. “You’re holding me too tight, Daddy.”

  “Sorry.” It took everything in him to loosen his grip.

  They drifted closer to the edge of the bank. It was uncanny the way it simply ceased to be, just as it had simply appeared in front of the Morris and they had sailed into it.

  He and Donna looked at each other at the same instant. “Maybe it was the fog,” she said and he nodded. “That made it happen. The fog came first. Like a force field.”

  He hesitated. He put a hand on her back. “When we get back …”

  She snaked a hand behind herself and gripped his. “You married?”

  “No.” He squeezed her hand. “But right now, after everything, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Don’t bet on that.”

  “Daddy, you’re still hurting me,” Matt whimpered.

  “Gosh, honey, I’m sorry.” John frowned and looked down—

  —and before he could react, Donna grabbed Matt—

  —what used to be Matt, oh, God! Oh, heavenly Jesus!

  The blackened remains of his child, kicking and snarling like an animal, showing teeth that were dripping with John’s own blood as he ripped the flesh from John’s forearm. One eye, it had only one eye, and in the other, something wiggled and burrowed—

  —and Matt raged, and Donna wrapped her arms around his legs and together, struggling to the side of the boat and—

  “Daddy! Daddy, help!”—

  —tossed him over, into the fog.

  Into the fog, where he became Matty again, his Matty, who splashed in the water, his head going down, fighting to the surface. In the fog, where he was Matty.

  And the lifeboat bobbed halfway out of the fog.

  “Daddy! Don’t leave me!” Matty wailed, holding out his arms. “Daddy!”

  And John knew it might not be his boy, but he knew it might. With one last silent prayer, and one last deal with God, he jumped out of the boat.

  “No!” Donna and Curry shouted.

  “John, it’s tricking you!” Donna screamed. “Get back in the boat!”

  But all that was behind him now. He knew it as he swam toward Matt, who was going under. He dove under the water and found his child, and held him, even as Matt clasped him hard and laid his soft cheek against his.

  All that was behind him, and he let himself sink with Matt, who was heavy as an anchor. The chains of fatherhood are unbreakable, and that was all right. He hadn’t lied; he really would do anything. That was okay. Cha-cha had a good heart, and in time, perhaps, he would marshal his forces and make a good captain—

  and they sank

  down,

  down,

  down,

  John struggling now and then, holding his breath, knowing that soon he must inhale. And though he couldn’t see Matt very well, as his glasses had blown off his face; he could feel Matt’s love around him. His arms around him, helping him to stay under.

  He looked up at the surface, where the fog covered the sun. Panic eddied through him once or twice, but he’d made his choice.

  Something bobbed against his hip. Matt reached for it and showed it to his father. The green bottle, with a blur of white inside. Yes. The invitation. Was Reade still in command, then?

  They hung suspended like space-walking astronauts while John’s lungs fought the good fight; his brain clouded over and fear took hold for a few last moments. What had he done? What was he doing?

  Was this Matt? And if so, how—

  No more questions, then, as an approaching shadow chilled the water above them. Hull-shaped. The Pandora, or whatever the hell it was.

  Perhaps someday Cha-cha would rename it the Good Ship Lollipop. The old guy thought like that. He thought, he thought … John lost track. He swirled into himself. This was it.

  He opened his mouth and sucked in the ocean.

  “Welcome aboard, Daddy,” Matt whispered in his ear.

  EPILOGUE:

  RSVP

  Alone, Donna and Curry alone, drifting endlessly on the hazy, nickel-plated ocean. Donna thought a lot about drowning; imagining how it would feel. First you would tread water, then you’d try to float. You’d tire. You’d start to go under …

  Curry kept whimpering, “It’s a trick. We’re still there. He’s making us think we’re safe. All that stuff about Cha-cha, that didn’t really happen. He made you think it.”

  Donna considered strangling him, just to shut him up. ’Cuz what if he was right?

  And who the hell was safe? The boat was starting to leak, and there was nothing to drink.

  God, they were all gone, all those people. The van Burens, once so hilarious in their yupster-squabbling. Ramón, the poor asshole—Curry told her all about it—who started it with his goddamn barrels of shit. No, of course he didn’t. Curry said in order to encounter the Pandora someone had to call to the captain; had to want something bad, and that would draw them to the ship. That had been Ruth. (Not my husband, not, and she had bloated in the water like a rotten rubber mannequin, and the others, diving at her …)

  Little Matty, lost anyway. He must have drowned after all while they were trying to revive him. Within the fog, the illusion of life could be maintained by whatever ruled aboard the Pandora now.

  John, his long-suffering father. Had she really believed it would ever be okay for them? They had seemed marked, those two. Or was it just that she had never believed in happy endings?

  Cha-cha. Dear God, what of Cha-cha? What was he now?

  Had she dreamed all of it?

  “Talk to me, Curry,” she said
. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything you know. How it—she—he captured you.” Make it real, hoss, or she was going to go out of her mind.

  “What did you see in there? In the hatch?” he asked her in return. “Tell me again.”

  “Sea monster,” Donna said curtly, again. And she heard that lonely song, that voice: Oh, baby, I am so lonely. Oh, baby.

  Her throat closed over. “How far away do you have to be from it, that it can’t influence you?”

  Curry shook his head. “I dunno. I’m so scared. I’m still so scared.”

  Drifting, drifting; the sky and the sea stretched into endless, heartless gray, bone-bleached and pitiless. If the boat went down, there was nowhere to swim to. And how long can you tread water?

  How long can you hold your breath?

  “Talk to me, Curry. Tell me how it controlled you,” she muttered through cracked, peeling lips.

  Curry made no reply. Then he said, “I don’t deserve to live. I’m evil.”

  And she had no answer for that.

  * * *

  Drifting, drifting; dreaming of water, water, everywhere, in buckets and bowls and in goblets and bottles. Fresh, clear as a mirror, as glass …

  And being pulled up, up, slowly, dangling in the air … oh, no, she must be out of her body, floating, dying …

  His voice. “Baby, oh, Donna, baby.”

  Glenn.

  She slept for hours, and the doctor stuck her and tested her; for a second she panicked, remembering the blood pressure cuff on the Pandora, and the thing that rattled in the cup … it had been drugs all along, yes, that was it …

  No …

  And you wouldn’t think she’d want to, you’d think she’d just lie there in the close, dim cabin and scream; but Glenn came into the cabin and sat beside her. Looking as perfect as ever, the beautiful, conceited bastard; and then he bent over and gently touched her swollen lips with his mouth.

  She gasped and he said, “It’s okay. Barb left me. It’s okay.” Which struck her funny, in a tragic way, it being okay. It being that anything in the universe was okay.

  But right then she wouldn’t have cared if Barb was in the cabin, pulling off his pants for him. The ointment dulled her sunburn and he was as careful as a burning man could be; he went right inside like he belonged there, sliding into home, oh, my God, my God, oh, Jesus; how could you drown in love? But you could, my man, I love him so; and it was too much, too happy, too relieving; she wept against his shoulder until she fell asleep.