Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “A terrible business,” the captain said. “We’ll never know for sure what happened there. When we reach port there’ll be a formal investigation. But even then… who can say?”

  Fabrini giggled dryly. “Who can say? What kind of bullshit is that?” he wanted to know. “We saw him. We all saw him. The guy was covered in blood screaming that something had him, something was inside him.”

  Saks’s heavy brow furrowed. “Shut the hell up, Fabrini. You saw a guy with blood on him. A guy totally out of his mind for chrissake. If he said Jesus and Mary were chasing him down the hallway with chainsaws would you believe that too?”

  Fabrini shook his head slowly from side to side. “You know, Saks, you’re really starting to piss me off here. What’s with you? What’s with all you guys?” He looked around at them with accusing eyes. “You know something’s totally fucked up here. This fog ain’t right. The captain here is serving up the bullshit on a platter and expecting us to chew and swallow and Saks? Saks is pretending nothing has happened. Well, I ain’t fucking buying it. No way. And neither are any of you.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Saks said in disgust.

  Soltz just shook his head. “He’s right. Something’s wrong here.”

  Cook and Menhaus kept silent, but their minds were going full tilt. Cook was the sort of guy who rarely said anything. Menhaus didn’t like confrontation; he would wait and see what the majority thought and then adopt this thinking himself.

  The next one to speak was George Ryan. What he had to say was simple and to the point. “What is it you think is happening, Fabrini?”

  Cushing nodded, smiling thinly, seeming to enjoy the anarchy. “Yes, tell us.”

  All eyes were on Fabrini now. His dark face was somehow flushed, a vein at his temple throbbing. “I don’t know what happened. But it sure as hell wasn’t just some guy going nuts and jumping overboard. There’s more to it than that. Christ, look at that fog. I’ve seen fog before and it doesn’t fucking glow. And it doesn’t suck away the air.”

  Captain Morse just stared, then cleared his throat. “I’ll be the first to admit we’ve experienced some strange phenomena here, but nothing that has happened is what I would call supernatural, gentlemen. I’ve been sailing the Atlantic for over thirty-five years and it still never fails to surprise me.”

  “What is it you think happened, then?” Cushing said, amused by it all.

  “I don’t know really. My guess is that we experienced some bizarre atmospheric anomaly. The fog is just the result of some strange weather pattern, maybe the sun acting on a cold sea. The lack of air and those gases that nearly suffocated us all, those could have came from a mile down… a bubble of methane, maybe. It’s happened before.”

  “That’s right,” Saks said. “A day or so and we’ll be out of this, so all of you knock it off with the spooky stories here.”

  Cushing and George looked at each other. Like Fabrini, they knew bullshit when they heard it. They knew when somebody was telling them something just to shut them up and that’s exactly what was going on here. The real ugly, unpleasant part of it all, they knew, was that nobody knew what was going on. And that was scary.

  “This is pointless,” Fabrini said and stomped off.

  Soltz followed suit.

  There was nothing more to say.

  18

  Gosling wasn’t present at the session between Morse and Saks’s crew. But the captain filled him in on it. Morse wasn’t a guy who enjoyed lying. He would’ve liked to have told the others the truth. The only problem being he didn’t know what the truth was. No one did. Yes, something was wrong, but what? They were sailing blind here. No navigational aids. No radio contact. Even the radar was acting screwy. The thick fog made visual navigation impossible… there were no stars that could be seen. It was all very disturbing.

  Gosling had never been in a situation like this.

  It was insane.

  He assumed they were somewhere between Norfolk and South America, which was pretty much saying they were a needle in the biggest haystack in creation. Somewhere between Norfolk and French Guiana.

  That was slick. Like telling someone the contact lens they’d dropped was somewhere between Milwaukee and Buffalo.

  But where else could we be? he asked himself. Sure, the fog and everything else is goddamn strange, but it doesn’t mean much in itself. We’re caught in some freakish weather pattern here and like Morse said, it’ll blow over sooner or later. So what is it I’m worried about?

  He had no answer to that.

  What you’re worried about, a low, menacing voice in his head said, is that Morse is wrong. And down deep, you know he’s wrong. This is no fucking weather pattern, freak or otherwise. Weather patterns might screw with the radio or the RDF, but they couldn’t touch the GPS and sure as hell not the radar. And if that isn’t enough, then why don’t you tell me about the compasses? Why are they spinning counterclockwise? Why the hell can’t they zero in on magnetic north? You’ve never seen one act like that and you know it. Even the feel of the sea is wrong. The water’s too calm and that smell is just not right. You have no explanation for any of this and if you did, you wouldn’t want to admit it.

  Licking his lips, Gosling left his cabin.

  He would not think anymore.

  That was the way it would have to be from now on. No thinking, no theorizing, no wild guesses. Whatever was happening here would have to take care of itself. The wheels were spinning now and he’d just have to wait and see where they took him. Took all of them.

  But, again, that damn voice, sharp and cutting in his head: You know very well what you’re avoiding here, Paul. You know very well. You’ve heard about things like this from sailors too drunk to know better. In books. On TV. You’ve heard about strange seas like this. Places where compasses spin and technologies die a hard death. Where nothing is right. Where everything is wrong.

  Dead Sea.

  “Dead Sea” not as in the Dead Sea itself, but as in a phenomena which has been reported since men began sailing the seas. Strange becalmed bodies of water where everything suddenly goes insane. Where men kill themselves rather than face the reality of what has happened to them. The Bermuda Triangle. The Devil’s Sea. The Sargasso Sea. Ship’s graveyards. Maritime dead zones few return from.

  He shook his head. No. Absolutely not.

  I will not accept this.

  He started walking again. Moving blindly, not seeing anything. The gears of his brain were revolving madly now and it was all going so fast he could make no sense of any of it. And he didn’t want to. He didn’t plan on touring the ship, but this is what he did. He walked the decks from the stern to the bow, visited the boat decks and checked the equipment stowed on the spar deck. He checked hatch covers and derricks. He went up to the pilothouse, made sure Iverson was steering the ship with his hands and not his feet, staying true on course. Then down into the lounge and messrooms, crew’s hall and forward cargo holds. He walked aimlessly, lost in thought. He hadn’t planned on making the galley his ultimate destination, yet, somehow, he knew that’s exactly where he was going.

  The night kitchen.

  It was kept running even in the wee hours, for there was always someone on duty or out on watch that needed a meal or a hot cup of coffee. Gosling walked in there, found Bobby Smalls, the second cook and one of the new porters on duty. They nodded to him and Gosling nodded back. The porter was filling Tupperware containers with cold cuts, pickles, cheeses, and veggies for late-night sandwiches for the dog watch crew.

  The chief steward was the head cook, but the second cook did all the baking and prep work. The porters handled clean-up and serving.

  “Fog thinning any?” Smalls asked, as he kneaded a huge glob of dough with his fists.

  “Not yet,” Gosling told him.

  The porter arranged condiments on a serving platter and headed off to the crew’s mess with them.

  Gosling walked around the kitchen. The stainless steel counters gleamed a
nd the tiled floors smelled of pine cleaners. He examined the rows of shining stoves, peaked aft into the pantry, ran a hand along the cool steel door of the immense walk-in freezers. He rummaged through cupboards, scrutinized foodstuffs, stared into drawers of cutlery.

  “You need something, First,” Smalls said, without looking away from his dough, “ya’ll let me know.”

  Gosling smiled. “I don’t need anything, Bobby. Just restless.”

  Smalls was in his fifties, thickset with a graying crewcut and shaggy sideburns that angled up to his cheeks. Almost muttonchops, but not quite. Gave him the look of a Victorian London cop, but his West Texas twang quickly erased that.

  “Sure, we’re all restless here, we’re all thinking things,” Smalls said.

  “You knew Stokes, didn’t you, Bobby?” Gosling said, trying to sound like he was just making conversation. “The kid who-”

  “Sure, I knew him. He was a good boy. This was only his second run. But, yeah, I knew him.”

  “He ever seem… well, funny to you?”

  “Funny? You mean could he tell a good joke? Yes, sir, that kid had some mouth on him.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Gosling said.

  Smalls nodded. He still had not looked up from his dough. “You mean, do I think he was crazy? Prone to nervous breakdowns? The heebie-jeebies? No, Mr. Gosling, I do not. He was as balanced as any other, I figure”

  “Yeah, I figured that, too”

  Smalls began pressing out his dough on the floured stainless steel table. “Funny that fog out there. Thick like that, shiny like that. Haven’t seen anything like it in years.” That gave Gosling pause. “You’ve seen this before?”

  Smalls did look up now. His eyes were gray as puddles on concrete. “You telling me you’ve spent a lifetime sailing the Atlantic and you never came across anything funny out this way?”

  Gosling wetted his lips. “Maybe once or twice. Minor things. Bad compass deviation… things like that. Atmospheric problems, you’d call them.”

  Smalls didn’t look like he believed that. He went back to his dough, rolled it out with firm strokes of the rolling pin which was almost as big as a baseball bat. “I been on these waters going on thirty years now. Years ago, I was a deckhand on a bulk freighter. The Chester R. We were bringing a belly full of grain out to Bermuda from Charleston. About an hour out, we made radio with Hamilton. Same old, same old. Then we sailed into this fog… a lot like we got out there. It was a real mother, that fog. Thick, smelled funny, had a weird sort of shine to it.”

  Gosling’s throat was dry. The comparison was pretty accurate so far. “What happened?”

  “The sort of things that happen in these waters when some of that yellow fog swallows up your vessel – you know, our compass began to spin, we couldn’t find our heading. RDF went toes-up, LORAN was all tittywonkle,” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Yeah, we were spooked pretty bad. The lot of us. Radio was shit, nothing but dead air on VHF and side-band. Radar kept showing us things that were there, then gone. This was the days before GPS, but I don’t think it would have mattered. You think so?”

  Gosling said he thought probably not. “How long were you in it?”

  Smalls shrugged. “About an hour, according to the chrono. We were sailing blind all that time. We missed Bermuda even though we hadn’t changed our heading. A few degrees could have made us miss it, you know, could have put us on this side of the Azores we kept it up. But that’s not where we ended up. When the fog died out, we weren’t anywhere near Bermuda and we sure as hell weren’t out in the middle of the Atlantic steaming across the pond like you might think. No sir, we were due north of the Leeward Islands down in the Caribbean.”

  Gosling said, “You telling me you were running east and ended up a thousand miles south of your last position? And within an hour?”

  “That’s what happened, all right.” Smalls began cutting biscuits out of the dough with an aluminum cutter. “Hard to believe, ain’t it? Well, ya’ll imagine our poor captain trying to explain a navigational tanglefuck like that to the ship’s owners. Wasn’t pretty. Guess what I’m saying here, First, is that you start playing out in the Sargasso like we are and the stars are right, conditions favorable for funny business, and you run into what we’re running into. Folks these days, they call it the Bermuda Triangle and what not. But I’m old school. Sargasso to me. The Sargasso Sea. That triangle they bullshit about just touches the southern edge of the Sargasso, but most of those ships and planes that have trouble are really in the Sargasso. I should know, on account I was on one of them.”

  Gosling knew Smalls too well to think that the man was spinning tales here. But the Sargasso Sea was no true mystery. It existed, all right. It was an oval region of the western North Atlantic, roughly between the east coast of the U.S., the West Indies and the Azores. Unlike other seas that were bordered by land, the Sargasso was bordered by ocean currents – the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic, Canary, and North Equatorial – which flowed in a clockwise pattern around it, creating a deadly calm within its boundaries. Because of the calm, the Sargasso was a great floating desert of sargassum seaweed. In the old days of sail, it had been called the Sea of Lost Ships because of the many craft that had been becalmed or trapped in its vast weed banks. And in the realm of maritime folklore, it had a centuries-old reputation of disappearing vessels and derelict ships, ghost ships and sea-monsters and bizarre phenomena.

  But Gosling knew those tales were just bullshit.

  They couldn’t be anything else.

  Modern tankers and freighters could plow through the Sargasso without hesitating. It was only smaller boats that got their props tangled with weed. And as for the rest… well, sailors liked to tell stories and you could leave it at that.

  “Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” Gosling said.

  “You do that,” Smalls said to him. “We’re bound to come out of it sooner or later. Maybe we’ll be on course and maybe we’ll be down by the Bahamas… or maybe we’ll be somewhere else entirely.”

  Somewhere else entirely.

  That last bit was loaded with allusions Gosling wasn’t about to let himself think about. Not yet. He told Smalls they’d get together and discuss it all in more depth later on and Smalls said that his calendar was wide open for the foreseeable future.

  And again, Gosling didn’t care for what that implied.

  19

  Gosling thought: What the hell is it I’m looking for?

  But he didn’t know, couldn’t know. Not yet. He was down in engineering, near the stern of the ship, making his way down the port side companionway to the steering flat. On the metal steps which were painted an abysmal off-yellow that reminded Gosling of the color of vomit, he was seeing the darker splotches and stains of Stokes’ blood. You could maybe write it off in your mind as worn-in grime or grease, but if you knew what happened… could see in your mind Stokes stumbling up the companionway, spilling blood and screaming, his face hooked into a rictus of terror and agony… it wasn’t quite so easy.

  It was blood.

  Probably take lacquer thinner to get the dried stains out.

  Gosling moved down the steps, studying the bloodstains, keeping his boots from making contact with them the same way a kid avoided sidewalk cracks. He wasn’t even aware he was doing so. At the bottom of the companionway, he could gauge Stokes’ mad flight up to the spar deck. Yes, Gosling could gauge it… but he could never understand the depths of stark madness that had peeled the kid’s mind free.

  There were a few flecks on the bulkheads that hadn’t been mopped away.

  Below, in the steering flat, Gosling paused.

  Still, he was not sure what he was looking for. Stokes had lost his mind here and maybe Gosling thought he might find it, laying about somewhere like a cast-off rag. The steering flat was a huge room in which the massive gear quadrant that moved the rudder was located. Just off it, was the shop with its assorted lathes and drill presses, grinders and milling machines.r />
  Gosling went forward to the main engine room, feeling the hum and vibration of the gigantic plant. Boilers produced steam which was fed to the high and low pressure turbines which were connected to the propeller shaft by reduction gears. This room – if room it could be called – was cavernous, you could have dropped a three-story house in there and had plenty of elbow space. Everywhere, the engine room was webbed in piping, ducts, and armored hoses. One of the assistant engineers was studying a bank of overhead gauges.

  Gosling breezed past him and went down the companionway to the pump deck, closed the hatch to get the thrum of the engines out of his ears. They weren’t as loud below, but you could feel them just fine. Here, on the pump deck, was a veritable maze of manifolds, ballast pumps, distribution piping, and valves. The tanks themselves held well over three million gallons of water at any one time.

  Gosling stood before the aft starboard tank, studying the hatch.

  Here, too, the blood had been mopped away, but you could still see signs of it where the bulkhead met the deck. Other than that, there was nothing really to suggest a tragedy here.

  Yet, Gosling could almost feel something buzzing silently in the air.

  But he knew it was just the silence. Even with the throb of the turbines above, it was complete and thick and somehow chilling in its total lack of life. It reminded him of someone holding their breath, waiting, waiting. A nameless hush. The sort of empty silence you would hear in a tomb.

  What happened here, Stokes? What drove you mad?

  Finding any evidence in this arterial labyrinth of conduits and pipes, tangled hoses and jutting equipment would be no easy feat. Yet, Gosling felt compelled to look and keep looking. It would have taken thirty men all day to canvas the pump deck minutely, and even then the margin of missing something was high. Gosling turned on all the lights and began searching, moving in what he thought would have been Stokes’ general path.

  And it didn’t take him as long as he thought.