Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  Cook said it was like a soap opera what happened next. During the week that was unreadable, just about everything had happened and he could only put it together from bits and pieces. They were caught in that fog and the crew either mutinied or came damn close to it. Captain Worley refused to listen to the engineer that the engines were in rough shape. Worley kept the ship at full steam, running her right into a gigantic island of weed that fouled up her props. By that time, there was no getting out. The port engine was pretty much toast. The starboard was completely seized-up. The Cyclops was marooned in the weeds – same weed mass it still sat in, Cook figured – and the crew was coming unglued. Worley, from what Cook could tell, sounded violent and irrational, a shitty navigator on the best of days. He was drunk more often than not and spent most of his time verbally and physically abusing the crew.

  “Sounds like he wasn’t fit for duty even before they sailed,” Cook explained, mulling it all over. “Somewhere during that lost week, shit hit the fan. Worley, completely out of his head and tired of the men and their ‘superstitious terror’ and ‘lack of fortitude’, as he put it, decided to flex his muscles a little. He took those six prisoners out of the brig and marched them up on deck. In full view of the crew, he shot them all down. Right in the heads with a. 45.”

  “Quite a guy,” Fabrini said. “Sounds like Saks.”

  “After that, the crew overpowered Worley and locked him in his cabin, they freed Forbes, the Exec. Apparently, he’d been locked up by Worley for standing up to the captain after a sailor died violently. Sounds like it was Worley’s fault, but nobody but Forbes had the balls to tell him so.”

  Forbes was popular, it seemed, he managed to hold the crew together, but the engines were beyond repair. There was no hope. During the night, or what passed for night in this place, a number of lifeboats were lowered and much of the crew and passengers set off into the fog. That was the last anyone ever heard of them.

  “Read this,” Cook said. “This is important.”

  Fabrini sighed, not too happy about the history lesson he was getting here. Leaning over the chart table, he began to read in that oily light:

  15 March 1918 (position unknown)

  Matters grow worse. Been in this damnable fog for nearly eight days now. Trapped in this seaweed bed with no avenue of escape open to us. Some of the men have suggested, and understandably, that we abandon the Cyclops as she is a death ship now, a derelict, a great tomb for us all unless we abandon her. But abandon to what? Into that awful, congested mist and steaming seaweed sea?

  Though I dare not admit it to the crew, I fear there is no earthly deliverance from this place.

  For this is not home. This is not the Atlantic. This is no sea one can locate on any chart. I cannot say where we are. As I was under incarceration when we sailed into the fog, I witnessed not a speck of it. What my officers and Dr. Asper have told me of it is grim indeed. Asper has alluded that he believes that we have transported to some unknown world or sphere of existence, through some unguessable conduit that may have to do with distortions of time and space. Although my knowledge of physics is limited, Asper tells me that we can liken this distortion to a crack in a wall, a hole through which we have fallen. Although it sounds fantastic, I concur. I have no choice. I recall a story by H.G. Wells in which a laboratory explosion hurdles a chemist into another, terrible dimension. Our fate is similar.

  I wonder into what nightmares the crews of those purloined lifeboats have sailed…

  16 March, 1918 (position unknown)

  Although it sounds mad at the very least or a lurid chapter pulled from an equally lurid novel, I must record the horrors we have seen or sensed out in the fog. We have caught sight on two different occasions of some immense and luminous beast haunting the weed. It appears able to make itself glow at will. I cannot ascertain its shape, as I only caught a single glimpse of it. But it is immense in size. The men on watch claim to have seen long-necked things rising from the weeds and great brown worms the size of pythons. They also tell of odd patches of weed that move independently of the mass. It’s incredible, to be sure, but I myself have seen some bat-like beast swooping out of the fog over the decks that I first took to be some gigantic moth.

  I know we must leave the ship, but I wonder how long we would last in that haunted, primeval sea. For there is life out there, obscene and shadowy life…

  17 March, 1918 (position unknown)

  Captain Worley is completely insane now. I spoke with him earlier and that blustering, intolerant man I had known so well is forever gone now. What is left is but a shell. A mad, trembling thing that whimpers and screams, given to wild bouts of mania in which he points at things I cannot (and will not) see. In his calmer moments, all he speaks of is taking his own life before “them from out there get to me

  … for it will not be good.” He is convinced that there is some arcane, hideous intelligence out in the fog, one that toys with us. He claims it comes through the bulkheads like a ghost when he is alone. That it “has eyes that watch and burn” and that its touch is like “a burning, poisoned ice.”

  I dearly wish it were only Worley that has been so plagued by dementia. But the remaining crew and passengers are like demented to varying degrees. The fog that enshrouds us is no common fog. Something about it gets inside men’s minds and turns their thoughts black, turns their brains to rot. Yes, I have felt it, too, and do not dispute the terrible influence it wields.

  The morale of the ship is positively decayed. I have not abandoned hope, yet I fear it has abandoned me.

  The next few entries were blotted out with mildew. Fabrini wanted to stop right there, but Cook wouldn’t have it. He wanted Fabrini to know the rest. To know what he now knew. So, swearing under his breath, Fabrini skipped to the next legible entry that Cook had his finger on:

  20 March 1918 (position unknown)

  I have not slept in days now. I dare not. Reading through my entries of the past two days, it seems that I have been near-hysterical. They read like the ravings of a madman. But who can claim not to be mad in this hellish place? I will not go into the things that crawl up the sides of the ship or the loss of the lifeboat and crew to that repellent octopoid monstrosity in plain view of us on the main deck. The less said of such nightmares, the better. Just let me put down here that events have taken a decidedly dark turn. There has been a rash of suicides amongst the crew and passengers. Men have vanished on watch and others right out of their staterooms. Worley is gone now, too. We discovered a hole in the bulkhead of his cabin as if something had chewed its way through steel to get at him. Insane or not, Worley was right about one thing: there is something intelligent in the fog. Some haunter of the dark, some creeping bogey that has slithered up from the pits of primal fear all men carry within their souls. I have felt its influence. It is a cold and deranged intellect, a lunatic shadow out of space and time that watches from the fog and picks clean the minds of men as of a vulture with carrion. Yes, it is driving everyone mad and I with them. The men claim it calls to them out of the fog in the voices of dead loved ones, that it shows them things that are destroying their minds. I will not speak of what it has shown me. God help us all. For each night it gets closer and plucks more men into that noisome mist…

  21 March 1918 (position unknown)

  Trapped in the weed we are and trapped in the weed we shall remain. Out of frustration more than anything else, I ordered a motorized whaleboat be dropped. The beasts in the weed have been quiet of late, but not that other thing out there. That ghost or whatever it might be called. I ordered the whaleboat lowered, so that I and a select crew including the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Asper, might reconnoiter our position in hopes of finding some possibility of salvation. The mental strain on the crew and passengers is such now, that command has nearly broken down and they have formed into little groups or enclaves which violently oppose one another. There have been several instances now of barbarity. I fear that, given time, the crew and passengers remaining will
descend into savagery. Something has to be done. For the sake of our lives and souls, we must take action.

  (later)

  We rowed through the weeds and once clear, motored our way through the clear channels of the sea. Although “clear” is a bit subjective, considering where we are. The water is pinkish and heavy, scummed with a trembling slime that reminds me of gelatin. Clumps of weeds and rotting debris of all sorts drift through it. Dr. Asper commented that this unknown sea is akin to an organic soup.

  An hour out, we sighted a steamship languishing in another mass of weeds. We decided to board her and I wish to God we had not. We used a grappling ladder to climb over the bulwarks. According to the trailboard on the bridge, she is… or was… the Korsund out of Copenhagen. Though slimed with a weird fungus and great growing patches of moss, she was a fine-looking steamer. Straight up-and-down bow and graceful stern. The superstructure was a maze of derricks and booms, spiderwebbed by a profusion of cables and overhead supports. She had tall twin stacks and high ventilators, a fine long deckhouse. Yes, she was a proud and hardy-looking vessel.

  But she was derelict… though not, we discovered, empty.

  We found great blackened sections on the main deck. Some of the bulkheads crumbled at our touch. I would guess that some intense, mysterious heat had been directed selectively against her. Inside the deckhouse, we found dozens of dead men. Many had killed themselves with razors or by hanging themselves. It was a ghoulish, awful sight. The ship itself had the atmosphere of a morgue, one of violated tombs and dissection rooms. We all felt it. We discovered men in their berths that had been burned to a crisp, oxidized into flaking mummies by a consuming, directed heat that did not so much as char the bedsheets or bolsters! Some of the men immediately began whispering of witchcraft and the like, though Dr. Asper and I do not believe any of this has such a pat, though disturbing explanation.

  We found the captain in his cabin. In his chair, he had slit his wrists with a straight razor and was still gripping it. But his face. .. a mask of utter horror, those eyes staring at something we could not see. I got the mad impression that he killed himself before whatever it was he saw got to him.

  In the wheelhouse, there were more cadavers. But these were not burnt or in any other way molested, save for numerous contusions. Dr. Asper examined them, telling me that they looked to have died of some horrendous seizures, that their bones were broken, limbs dislocated, abdominal muscles strained and ruptured. Most had bitten through their own tongues. They all bore the same looks of contorted horror as the captain – lips shriveled back from teeth, mouths locked in screams, faces pulled into psychotic masks, eyes bulging. And their eyes, dear Christ, I have never seen such a thing. They were completely white, though not glazed as from putrefaction, but as if the color had been leeched from them or what they had looked upon had been so harrowing and frightful that it had bleached the pigment free.

  Later, Dr. Asper attempted a crude autopsy on one of these cadavers in the Korsund’s meager surgery. He told me that its nervous tissue in general was actually reduced to a sort of pulp. That its brain was nothing more than a sort of runny slime as if said brain was boiled to a soup in its own skull. And what, we wondered, could cause such awful seizures and violent contractions? Could literally melt a man’s brain in his own skull and bleach his eyeballs white?

  Examination of several others showed the same degree of damage. Also, Dr. Asper discovered that their internal organs had been dissolved down to a sort of white jelly that burned his hands when he touched it. We found similar globs of this burning jelly in various parts of the ship. It has an unusual sort of shine to it. Even Dr. Asper, with his scientific leanings, cannot explain this jelly.

  After some three hours aboard the Korsund, that malign and shadowy death ship, we departed. Some of the men were nearly hysterical with the horrors they saw and those they sensed, but could not see. What appalling tragedy has befallen her? And when, I wonder, will it come for the Cyclops?

  24 March 1918

  Several days now since last entry. I have no good news, nothing which will save those that look to me for answers which are far beyond my grasp. Dr. Asper fears that the crew I put aboard the Danish ship has been contaminated with some nameless pestilence. They bear terrible burns on the exposed flesh of their hands and arms as if they came into contact with some intense heat. Dr. Asper says the burns are quite similar to radium burns. The men are plagued by fatigue and melancholy, terrible weakness and severe vomiting. Asper is doing his best, but the men grow steadily worse. Dr. Asper, too, I fear is contaminated, but will not admit as such.

  Though I exhibit no outward signs of the unknown malady, I find myself increasingly nauseous and listless, unable to eat. My mind is given to dream and I do not trust my own judgement.

  Whatever terrifying specter circles us out in the fog, it grows nearer by the day and several times now I have been certain I saw something huge and unspeakable slipping through the mists. Perhaps it is only my fevered imagination, but I do not think so. It has placed a curse over this undead sea and the Cyclops in particular. I cannot say what this haunter is or even guess at its nature, but that it is an evil, hungering taint I have no doubt. It has cocooned the ship up now with invisible threads and slowly, patiently, it is sucking our blood dry drop by terrible drop.

  I pray for death.

  29? March 1918

  There is death now, a grim and covetous death that haunts the ship. Day by day by night more men disappear. Some have escaped into the mist by taking lifeboats. I wish them godspeed. Others have been liberated as well, but not of their own free will. This morning, I believe it was this morning, we discovered the cadavers of three men who vanished several days ago. How can I describe their remains to you? They were leathery, empty husks, their faces like crumbling Autumn leaves, webbed up in some wiry silk that is so sharp it slips through fingers if you merely brush or touch it. The cadavers were wound in this like flies in a spider’s web and hung from the aft coaling booms. We found them dangling there like corpses from a gallows. With some ingenuity, Holmes, the boatswain, managed to cut them down by climbing up there and sawing through the wire filaments that held them with a hacksaw. Dr. Asper is too sick now to examine the bodies. I tried, but even prodding one of them with a knife caused it to shatter as if it were made out of some fragile glass. The bodies have been drained dry of liquid and crystallized. Frozen? I do not know and cannot guess.

  I am in poor shape. I move now and exist through sheer force of will. I have not eaten in days and my flesh is sore to the touch as if rubbed raw with rocksalt. I vomit blood regularly. There are less than two dozen of us now.

  April 1918?

  Very weak now. See omens and portents everywhere. Have seen no one in days now or is it weeks? Sounds coming from the mist as of a million shrieking birds or a buzzing as of bees or wasps. I do not listen to that which scratches at the door, those terrible puckered white faces which peer through the portholes. A huge, globular moon has risen above the mist now and it is the color of fresh blood that paints the decks and superstructure with a red fire. Feel a kinship with the beasts of the haunted sea and fog. For though alien, they are living, are flesh and blood. That which buzzes and shrieks above and below is not corporeal in my understanding of the word. It is a disembodied appetite, a malignant sentience that hungers and hungers stuffs itself with the bones and souls of men grows fat like a spider on human suffering and horror. I must finish this entry must before I hide myself away

  Not sure now but I must be alone alone I shut my ears tight against that which haunts the ship that which screams and laughs and calls to me that ravening faceless nightmare cursed iam cursed imust be cursed it comes now and i feel its heat and cold that which slithers and hisses and fills my brain with fever oh the cold burning light frozen crystalline eyes of cosmic fire the buzzing buzzing

  The log of the Cyclops ended here and for Fabrini and Cook, by God, it was enough. It was more than enough. For the things
they had guessed, had sensed, had been alluded to by Crycek’s lunacy, were sketched out in frenzied, baleful detail by Lieutenant Forbes, the executive officer of the Cyclops, a man who had been dead ninety years. What they were reading was a dire history, the thoughts of a man reaching out to them from the grave.

  Fabrini slammed the book shut so forcefully it made Cook jump. “I don’t need this shit, okay?” he said, his face pallid and his voice rusty and scraping. “I can’t take this shit, Cook. And don’t fucking tell me that sailor was just crazy, because I know better. You do, too. Oh Jesus Christ, Cook, I’m coming apart here, okay? Something’s breaking up inside me and I don’t know what to do…”

  He was practically sobbing now.

  Cook put an arm around him and the physical contact of another living, breathing human being seemed to steady him a bit.

  Cook said, “Just take it easy. That shit happened in 1918.”

  Fabrini was breathing hard. “And it’s going to happen again.”

  “Fabrini, listen to me-”

  But Fabrini did not want to listen. “It’s out there now, Cook, whatever got them. You’ve felt it and so have I.” Fabrini’s face looked almost ghoulish in the flickering lantern light. “And we’re going to feel it again real soon. And you know what?”

  Cook just shook his head.

  Fabrini licked his lips, tried to swallow. “I’m scared shitless and so are you.”

  4

  During the hour or so while Fabrini and Cook were gone, Saks tried every argument he could think of to get Crycek to turn him loose. But it was no good. Menhaus had fallen asleep in the bow, which left him alone with Crycek. And Crycek just stared at him, listening, but never speaking, seeming to find Saks’s plight amusing.

  Thirty minutes into it Saks began to threaten them, telling them how he was going to kill them when he finally got his hands free. Forty-five minutes into it he had lapsed into a glum, stony silence. Crycek kept watching him, burning holes through him with those crazy eyes of his. Menhaus ignored him. The graveyard stillness was what was eating away at Saks. Now and then there would be a slopping, sliding sound from off in the weed or a muted splash from out in the mist, but that was about it. Other than a mysterious droning sound that seemed to come from far off now and again, there was nothing.