I had only been out this far twice. The first time in rebellion or curiosity, or some combination of both, shortly after my dad warned me not to. I remembered the feel of the sharp rocks beneath my toes, and how angry my dad had been when he realized I didn’t even have on shoes.
The second time, I stood on the edge of ragged rocks with shoes on, but my dad was gone. Really gone. I was stranded at the lighthouse for weeks, unable to give clearance without him for anyone to come get me. I’d contemplated jumping in. I stood still, with my arms crossed under my chest, and I ached to have him back. The wind pushed against my shoulders, urging me to make the dive, but the chaos hidden beneath the surface terrified me. I’d closed my eyes and counted, but I hadn’t jumped.
A deep voice said, “Where is the lightbox?”
Above us, the beacon swept in slow, steady circles, lighting the black surface of the waves in gleaming sweeps. What was down there, even now, lurking in those evil waters?
“I don’t know,” I rasped.
The softer voice said, “This really is your last chance.”
I nodded, scanning the water with the beacon, searching.
They pushed.
As soon as my arms were free, I dove. I brought my hands above my head and angled for a spot between the rocks jutting from the surface. My weighted legs flopped gracelessly behind me, pulling me upright and dragging me down.
Pitch black. The depths raced by as I plummeted. The salt felt harsh on my wounded wrists and stung my eyes, but I couldn’t close them. I searched the dark for danger.
A current brushed past me, heavy and distinct—the movement of something large passing. Again. Circling. Something immense.
I tried to swim up, but I was far too weak, the weights on my ankles too heavy. I continued to sink.
Something slick brushed my calf. Bubbles escaped me in a surprised burst.
Still I descended, almost slower now. I knew it couldn’t really be slower, but I was so far suspended in the deep that speed meant little.
A slow, intentional caress on my neck, as if a single long finger stroked me—or a flexible tongue.
With vague shock, I realized I could see. Not well, but gray outlines against the black. Silhouettes swam all around me, strange, surreal, distorted shapes large and small, darting in and out, circling me down, down, down. It seemed the water itself helped it, helped them all.
A sharp bite to the back of my arm. I flailed, fighting whatever latched onto me from behind.
The sudden motion twisted me, put me off kilter for a moment, and I saw light coming from below. Green. A perfect square of phosphorescent green up-lighting the hungry, eager things that swarmed me, closing in.
The closer I got, the farther they backed away. Were they afraid of the light? I needed to get to it faster. A long, thin, tentacle traced my ear. I blew out the last of my breath, releasing bubbles so I sank quicker. The feeler slipped away as I dropped the last body-length into the aura of green, feet hitting the ocean floor, squishy between my toes, knees collapsing beneath me.
Three feet from the weights around my ankles, a cigar-box-sized rectangle glowed. The lightbox.
This was the hiding place that no one would find?
Beside it, a few feet away but still inside its glow, pieces of a skeleton rested on the silty muck. My chest clenched, but I smiled. Dad hadn’t hidden it then killed himself; he’d died hiding it.
And, I was dying finding it. At least there was that. I was the last person to know, and the knowledge would die with me.
I dragged myself toward it. My head grew light with dizziness, with lack of air, but I managed to grasp it in my fingers, smooth and faintly warm.
I looked up.
All around me, monsters teemed, facing me with ghastly, beady eyes, with toothy, overhung grins, with gaping, yawning mouths, with reaching, greedy appendages. Inward they hovered, over and around me, just outside the brightest reaches of the lightbox’s glow.
It’s love, princess. As long as you believe in it, it will keep you safe.
I lay down, easing my back into the soft floor, grateful for the release from weariness, the release from effort. I looked once more at the remains of my dad.
Then I stared up at them all, clasping the lightbox over my heart.
PORT OF CALL
W.D. Gagliani
No one ever really challenged the official account of the events, which now force me to confess and relate my own role as unwitting accomplice. Perhaps instigator, my blurred memory sometimes nudges. Certainly victim, though it's much too late to care. An inquest was held, of course, but Harding's politician friends somehow smoothed the waters—ha!—even after all these years I see irony and humor in that phrase, and yet I weep for my soul even at the thought.
Harding, we learned, benefitted from highly placed connections I later suspected might have dated back to the War, and his somehow slightly soiled record as first mate aboard a frigate, which may or may not have carried questionable cargo on behalf of powers other than the Naval Secretariat. But such was the War, and men often dabbled in side projects of doubtful ethical natures, given the desperation and huge amounts of cash floating about. Any connections Harding had made in the War were safely left behind until this spot of trouble cropped up, and then the favor was repaid, and that put Closed on the whole deal for every one of us, as well, deserving of such mercy or not.
It is only because I feel the darkness coming that I bother to put to paper this account. I guarantee that it's no balm for my soul, and true sleep has evaded me all these years, so I write only to unburden and not to seek a forgiveness no one can provide.
When Harding stepped from his cabin with the bulbous Mauser pistol gripped in his claw-like hand and pointed at me, I nearly felt the 9mm Parabellum slugs tear through my flesh. His index finger seemed about to caress the trigger but for some modicum of spasm control, while his hand never wavered. I hoped there would be no spasm while the muzzle stared into my gaze like a one-eyed serpent.
"You and your men will stand down, return to your stations, and proceed with supervision of the loading, or I will deal with you myself—and worry about the Admiralty later."
The sweat that constant slick sheen of precious fluids leaving us every moment of the sweltering Indian day, the curry-flavored sweat was in his eyes and it must have stung, but he didn't even blink.
Looking into Harding's eyes, you knew he meant every word. There was little doubt in my mind that his pistol skills would account for a half dozen of us. He'd had the ringleaders pegged thanks to the traitorous Spaniard, Idalgo, who had served as Harding's eyes and ears amongst the crew for the duration of the journey, and whose gaunt frame now stepped from behind Harding's bulk to add another gun barrel aimed at us, his that of a tiny and womanish revolver—a strangely ineffectual weapon—held in a shaky, oily grip.
A cabin door opened behind us, and those who spun to gaze down the shadowy companionway found ourselves now facing the first mate, a Teutonic giant named Gunther, of course, locked in his best SS stance and gripping the black scorpion frame of a Schmeisser MP-40 machine pistol with left hand around the full magazine jutting from the bottom of the receiver.
I heard muttering among the crewmen and smelled their fear, leaking almost visibly from their pores along with the precious sweat. A crossfire would finish us, and the rest of our mates in the bowels of the ship. All the slick faces turned to me, their fear set aside in order to grant me the honor of leadership. I was their spokesman, and I cursed the lot of them for their cowardice and uselessness. I cursed myself for having dared to lead a group of what news accounts would surely call mutineers, when all I wanted to accomplish was the equitable treatment of human beings reduced to a state of mental and physical deterioration by the stalking ego of one man, Captain Voss Harding.
"Well, Second Officer Corelli," said the Captain. "The men await your oratory."
He kept his lip from curling, but only barely.
I summoned m
y voice.
"Sir, we have been in this port forty-nine days. The loading will take at least three more weeks to finish at this pace. We are down to a cup of water per man per day. The local water is contaminated, or so we are told. Our alcohol rations are running low, as is our food supply. The men have been warned to avoid leaving the ship due to the cholera epidemic. We have dead men in the cold room, and we now number nearly a dozen cases of dysentery in the infirmary. I speak only facts, sir, and I must insist that you cut short our stay and allow us to head for a friendly port where we can recover from the disaster that has been this voyage since we first set out. With all due respect, sir, we implore your humanity."
My ears heard the words, but it was as if someone else had spoken them. They could not have come from my lips, parched as they were, or my brain, mired as it was in the molasses of fear. I awaited the hail of bullets that would greet the end of my speech.
But there was no volley, no explosion of gunfire in that confined space.
For a moment, it seemed as if a cloud pregnant with rain were about to burst overhead. The lamps twitched as if tugged on a single chain pull. I felt the pressure of the heat build up in my head to the point where I thought my plugged ears would collapse outward, release some sort of bile stream, and spew away my life. I could see similar thoughts in the grim faces of the others, and I sensed that if the moment lasted any longer our space would implode and suck us through some sort of cosmic net strainer.
And through it all, Captain Harding's eyes, surveying the landscape of my soul.
* * *
Though a new coat of paint hid the majority of the rust staining the bow and hull, the S.S. Caritas was still an aging mid-size freighter, which had changed hands a dozen times during its life. Now owned by the C Corporation, we officers and men were also made to welcome the new commanding officer, Voss Harding, who carried an American passport but spoke in an accent I decided was either Dutch or German. Perhaps Afrikaans. All of which might have explained the curt superiority with which he treated his crew. Before long, we officers had mostly accepted the fact that he would rarely fraternize with us, taking his meals either alone or in the company of Gunther, a first mate also shipped from Corporation headquarters on Harding's request. Our own first mate was removed when Harding found him drinking with the crew in their mess, amidst much cheering and singing. From then on, we knew that our new captain would tolerate little by way of friendship and camaraderie, and we went about our business grimly and with only clear thoughts of the paychecks to motivate us.
We were a veritable Foreign Legion of a crew, mostly legitimate career men but with a few questionable former criminals or thugs who kept to themselves as much for anonymity as for anti-social tendencies. We numbered a half dozen Americans, several Irishmen, a German or two, some Italians such as I, and a couple each of Frenchies, Russians, Greeks, and Egyptians. On any given day, one could discern conversations in a dozen different tongues and dialects, but mostly everyone settled on English for orders and official communication. We spent two weeks getting to know each other and the ship, scraping off rust and slathering paint in its place, buffing floors and railings, smoothing iron and polishing fittings until the Caritas seemed almost presentable. Throughout, Captain Harding deigned to be seen in public only rarely, though the lights in his quarters shone at the most inconsistent times.
The journey had begun as routine as so many before, though the route was new to us, leaving Southampton with small electronics and industrial goods for various stops in the Mediterranean, taking on textiles in Genoa, olive oil in Naples, then off-loading portions of all those goods in Alexandria—especially a large number of sealed containers we all knew hid some sort of contraband labeled MACHINE PARTS—and then wending our way through the Suez Canal, newly widened a year before in 1963, and into the Red Sea. After refueling at Aden, we took a straight course across the Arabian Sea to Goa, a tiny state in India not long ago before a Portuguese protectorate, where our holds would be emptied of all goods and loaded again with silver ore chipped from the mines a day's drive inland. The ore would ride us low in the water throughout our return to Southampton, where the ship's belly would be flushed of its precious cargo and pay the company very well indeed.
This was a scenario well known by every one of us aboard, officers and crew, that our paychecks depended upon the safe and timely completion of the cycle. The monkey wrench could have snagged the works anywhere on the route, but it had chosen the hot Indian west coast—trapped in the hottest summer on record—to lay itself between the gears that had brought us there so smoothly.
Goa was a state of burgeoning importance, thanks to the iron and silver mines, but it had not yet begun to turn the riches into new facilities, and once at anchor in Panaji harbor, in view of the Old City, we learned that our empty holds were to be filled with silver not in crane-loads, but by a constant stream of hundreds of native porters filing onto the ship on foot, each carrying a huge wicker basket on his back and emptying its heavy contents into the yawning maws of the hold. When the process began after vigorous bargaining with the representatives of the mines, we watched in amazed silence. The waiting line of porters stretched as far as the eye could see on the crumbling stone quay, split in two as they came and went side by side, singing or chanting, weighed down by their awesome burdens in the heat of the Indian day and in the humid chill of the nights. It was a sight the likes of which we had never seen, and we spent the first few days gawking at the porters, as young as twelve and as old as my grandfather, who slowly snaked onto and off the deck as if they were the cogs of a living machine.
Captain Harding watched too, with obvious disgust, from the railing around the bridge. His smirk turned to frowns and eventually to a continuously angry set of his thin lips, his eyes radiating hatred of the place and of the porters. And, we soon realized, of us.
At night, the ancient pier and the shoreline were dotted with hundreds of cooking fires as a portion of the porters squatted on their haunches and cooked fragrant curries in tin pots, dipping balls of rice into the rich broth with their fingers and swallowing their dinner amidst the low-voiced chattering of their companions. We learned to make the curries ourselves, our cook stretching the meats in our cold lockers by imitating the locals, whose diet consisted of mostly of the bulk rice spiced with the brown sauces made pungent by spice and flavored with various meats—some of which we chose to avoid thinking about. Later, the porters chanted long into the night. Eventually we would come to despise the sound of it.
After a week or so, boredom had already set in.
"Hey, Corelli, play with us."
Cards had become the pastime of choice as little remained for us to do while the never-ending line of porters slowly, achingly slowly filled the bottom of the hold with ore.
Bentz, a German who boasted of moneyed relatives, sat in the saloon with Sullivan, the ex-IRA bomber with a price on his head, and with an American whose name I've since forgotten. They were playing some crazed version of poker I'd never seen, a dozen beer bottles already arranged in empty ranks between them.
"I'll pass," I said. "I wouldn't last two hands with you ruffians." Then I lectured. "Slow down on the beer. For one thing, the captain wouldn't like to know you're already drunk in the middle of the afternoon. For another thing, we're going to run out of beer—and everything else—if you don't slow down."
"What else is there to do, man?" said Sullivan. "This is the first time I been on a load, and I weren't needed."
The others nodded.
"There's gotta be a better harbor somewhere on this fuckin' coast," piped in the American. "Some place with cranes and modern equipment."
"Well, if there is we aren't there," I pointed out. "We're lucky we were able to dock at all—it's shallow here. Just remember what I said about the captain."
"He ain't likely to visit us, is he?" Sullivan got a laugh for that.
"No, but his goon Gunther might," I said, and they shut up because they k
new it was true.
Out on deck, the procession of stooped, sun-wizened old men and brown little boys and strapping lads continued like a life cycle in the heat of the summer sun. And the silver pile at the bottom of the hold climbed slowly, ever so slowly upward.
I opened the porthole in my airless closet of a cabin and wondered how much longer we would be here.
* * *
The third fight to break out in the month since we had first sighted the low-lying hills of inland Goa turned uglier than the others almost immediately. I was halfway through my afternoon's sleep when the shouting awoke me and, rushing to the deck, I saw that a Greek and one of the Frenchmen were circling each other, slowly, and then rushing closer together in a feint or a thrust, and I saw that they each held knives. The Greek, a long and slightly curved blade right out of the Iliad, and the Frenchman some sort of Bowie knife most likely contributed by one of the encouraging Americans in the throng of sailors who watched, excited. Behind all this, the porters ignored us and continued their life's work, adding ore to our hold in tiny increments.
As I rushed back to my cabin to strap on a sidearm with which I could break up the fight, I caught a glimpse of Harding and Gunther, watching almost approvingly from the bridge. Gunther leaned in to say something to the captain, and they both laughed. I had no time to be sickened, for I heard the men's shouts intensifying. I returned in time to see that blood had been drawn, as the Frenchman held his naked side, and blood streamed over his fingers. But they continued to taunt and challenge each other like children, so I went for my revolver—a burly old .455 Webley—and squeezed a shot off in the air. The hammer fell on an empty chamber, however, and I squeezed again. Again a click, and a sickening feeling spread through my guts as I realized that someone had emptied the cylinder of cartridges.
Suddenly there was one tortured scream, and all the men went silent, and I looked up just in time to see the Frenchman on his knees, his belly gaping where the Greek's cutlass had carved him open like a turkey. The skin and flesh were peeled back like sliced lard, and the grotesque mess of his intestines gushed out of him in a curtain of blood and bile. And then, he fell forward on his face, landing in the pool his life made as it left him for good.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 16