by Tim Curran
“No, his name was Asper,” Fabrini said.
They all looked at him.
“How do you know that?” Saks put to him. “How do you know what his name was?”
Cook stepped in. “We saw it up on the bridge when we first came aboard. There’s a crew list up there.”
Which seemed to satisfy Menhaus and Crycek, but you could see Saks didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Really?” he said. “A crew list? Isn’t that something? Fabrini’s got a good memory.”
Cook led them out of there and back into the corridor.
They found the captain’s quarters before long and although dusty and dirty, they had once been somewhat lavish. At least in comparison to the other cabins. There was nothing of note in there, save for some mildewed antiques – a naval campaign chest and a set of salon lamps. Fabrini found a nice scrimshaw-headed walking stick that he took with him. Overall, the captain’s cabin was in worse shape that the others. There was a gaping hole in the bulkhead, fingers of mist seeping in.
“I wonder what caused that?” Menhaus said.
Saks was examining it. “Doesn’t look like a shell punched through there. This room would be in shambles if it had. No… it almost looks burned.”
Cook had trouble swallowing when he saw the hole and even more trouble when Saks said that. Yes, it probably was burned, he figured. Forbes had written about something coming through the bulkhead after Captain Worley.
“What could burn through iron that thick?” Menhaus wanted to know. “A torch? A goddamn laser beam?”
Crycek grinned at the idea.
“Any ideas, Fabrini?” Saks said.
Fabrini twisted a bit, but covered himself. “Who knows? So long ago, who could say?” Cook started breathing again. Goddamn Fabrini.. . how did he let the doctor’s name slip?
Menhaus and Crycek were not interested in any of that, but Saks was. He knew he was on to something here. He had sensed some secret shared between Cook and Fabrini and he wasn’t going to let go of it. Like a tongue working a sore tooth, he was going to keep at it. As they walked down the corridors, slopping through those mats of fungi, the lanterns creating wild and sinister shapes around them, he kept suggesting places they could investigate, digging and probing, trying to find out something that Cook and Fabrini did not want him to know about.
“I’d like to take a look at the engine room,” he said, watching Fabrini for a sign of discomfort. “That sound good to you, Fabrini?”
Fabrini looked at Cook, looked away. “Don’t matter to me.”
“We were already down there,” Cook said. “Nothing to see but a lot of rusty machinery.”
“Old steam turbines, I bet,” Saks said. “You wanna check ‘em out, Menhaus?”
“Why not?”
There was no way to get out of it.
So down they went into that cavernous blackness, the lanterns peeling the darkness back layer by layer. They stood before the rusted, seized up turbines which were gigantic.
“Look at that piston,” Menhaus said, in awe, as always, of mechanical things. “Bigger than a pillar… and solid fucking brass. Jesus.”
There were a few inches of slimy gray water on the floor. They checked the machine shops and storerooms, found the pile of bones Cook and Fabrini had found… but the giant sea lice were gone. That was a good thing. Saks was trying to force a rusted hatch. With Menhaus’ help, it came open with a terrible groaning that seemed to shake the ship. There was a companionway beyond it, a set of black iron steps.
“The bilge must be down here,” Saks said. “Let’s take a look.”
There was no arguing with the guy. He felt that he was on to something and nobody could talk him out of it, even if he was light years away from the logbook that so disturbed Cook and Fabrini. Saks in the lead, they went down those creaking steps that were thick with slime and mold.
“Smells bad down here,” Menhaus said. “You smell that?”
They all did. A black, filthy odor of decay and stagnance. A stench of moist, dripping subcellars, closets threaded with wood rot, caskets plucked from muddy graves. Things buried or that should have been buried. It was a stink similar to the rest of the ship, but down here the volume had definitely been turned up. It was actually warm and yeasty, curiously alive with a sweet/sour tang of organic profusion like a hothouse filled with jungle orchids.
Not a good smell at all.
Cook had smelled something like that once before. When he was a boy, beneath his Uncle Bobby’s trailer home. Bobby’s old dog, Bobo, had disappeared the autumn before and come June, when the weather turned warm, they followed the stench under the trailer and found him. Down there amongst the cobwebs and spiders, mouse droppings and rotting cardboard boxes, old Bobo lay. He had sickened and crawled down there to die. Cook was the first to see him. He had literally rotted in half. A black fungus was growing out of his eye sockets and hindquarters, a slimy collection of toadstools sprouting from his belly. What Cook was smelling now reminded him of that – hot, moist germination.
The deck down there was flooded with about two feet of water. The hull was breached in half a dozen locations. Weeds had grown up through the holes and were threaded along the bulkheads. The bilge trough itself was thick with weeds and black, oozing water.
And that was bad.
“Jesus, lookit those holes,” Menhaus said. “This goddamn wreck could sink at any moment.”
But Cook said he didn’t think it would. It was actually marooned in the weeds. They must have been thick beneath the ship beyond belief.
“Watch that trough,” Saks told them, leading them on.
“What the hell do you expect to find down here?” Cook asked him.
But Saks didn’t answer. He stepped lightly, over tangles of weed that were green and thick and thriving. Cook wanted them to turn back. What they were smelling, it was more than the stink of the weed. It was something else. A growing, noxious odor and he did not like it. From time to time he thought he heard a sort of secretive rustling from up ahead.
They passed around an arch of riveted steel and Saks stopped.
He brought his light up so they could all see. See that forest of white, pulsating things that grew up through an immense rent in the hull of the ship. They looked at first like the stems of some weird plant, but as Saks held the light up, they could see that they were wormlike, about as thick as fence posts and hollow. Hundreds of them, slithering and rustling, black mouths set at their ends.
“What the fuck?” Menhaus said.
“Worms,” Cook told them, his skin crawling at the sight of them. “I think they’re tube worms… like the kind you see around smoker vents on the ocean floor.”
It was hard to say whether they were dangerous or not and nobody was getting close enough to find out, but they were certainly hideous. Squirming and horribly alive, standing straight up like saplings, mouths opening and closing like those of fish.
Cook almost felt like screaming at the sight of them.
In his mind, he saw himself lost without a light, stumbling around down here, falling into the bilge and dragging himself back up, all snarled with weeds and then… then falling into that creeping mass of tube worms. Feeling them coil around him, brushing his arms and face with their hot, rubbery corpse-flesh.
But it was only his imagination hurting him here. The worms appeared to be stationary and they couldn’t get to him. But such thoughts, once born are not so easily dismissed. They exist in the dark spaces between rational thoughts, in the shadows of logic.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Saks said.
And then they were moving, trying not stumble over one another or fall into the bilge. Behind them, they could hear those worms moving and sliding against one another and by the time they got up the stairs to the engineroom, they had to stop themselves from running in blind panic.
No more was said about it.
As they made their way out of the engine room, they heard a sound. T
hey all heard it.
Footsteps.
The sound of footsteps.
Someone was coming down the companionway ladder.
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Everyone froze
Everyone just stood there.
Cook went for his gun, thinking that this had to be the very worst thing you could possibly hear on an old derelict: the sound of footsteps coming in your direction. He thanked God then and there than he was not alone. He wasn’t sure he could have handled this alone.
The footsteps stopped outside the hatch. They could hear someone out there, someone breathing hard as if they’d run a long way. Of course, in everyone’s mind, it was not that at all, it was something far worse. Some dead and dripping thing sheathed with fungus coming to pay them a call.
There was the sound of scraping as the latch was worked from the other side. That harsh breathing. The door opened a few inches and Saks, good old hardass Saks, pulled it open all the way and took hold of whoever-or whatever-was on the other side and pitched them or it to the floor with a quick, violent jerk of his hand.
It wasn’t an it.
It was a he.
And whoever he was, the moment Saks pitched him to the deck, he let out a wild surprised cry and tried to find his feet. At which point, Saks kicked him in the side with enough force to knock the wind out of him.
“That’s enough,” Cook told him.
The face looking up at them in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp was round and streaked with dirt. Great, sunken half-moons were dredged beneath staring eyes. The lips were trembling. The face belonged to a chubby little man wearing jeans and a denim shirt so greasy and filthy, it looked like they’d been used to clean out a chimney.
“You… you’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “Not supposed to be on this ship… this is my ship… I’m supposed to be here, but not you…”
He was breathing hard with a rattling sound as if his lungs were clogged with phlegm.
“What’s your name?” Cook asked him.
“I… my name,” he said, examining his left hand like maybe it was written there. “I don’t know…”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Fabrini said. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“He’s crazier than a grub in shit,” Saks said with his usual sensitivity.
The man kept babbling, not making a squirt of sense. Something about how they were not supposed to be there, that them being there was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Maybe he has amnesia like in one of them movies,” Menhaus speculated.
But Cook found it hard to believe it was something so simple. Not here, not in this place. Whatever the reason was, he knew, it would be overblown and fantastic like everything else. What Cook was really wondering was: How long had this guy been aboard? Had he been here all the time, hiding from them or had he just arrived?
“Just tell us your name,” Fabrini said. “How you got here.”
But the guy just shook his head.
And Crycek, who’d been silent so far over the whole matter, said, “His name is Makowski, Bob Makowski. He was an oiler on the Mara, our ship. Guys called him ‘Slim’’’
Now all eyes were on Crycek.
“So why didn’t you say so?” Saks said.
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Crycek explained. “It looked like him. .. but that don’t mean nothing. Not here.”
They ignored that.
“Help him up,” Cook said.
Everyone stood there. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of touching him, as if maybe he was a ghost that would go to mist in their fingers or whatever had driven him crazy might be catchy.
“Give him a hand, shit-fer-brains,” Saks told Menhaus. “C’mon, Fabrini, get your hand out of your shorts. You heard the man.”
Grudgingly, they helped Makowski to his feet. He couldn’t stop staring at them as if he wasn’t convinced of their reality anymore than they were convinced of his.
“It’ll be okay, Slim,” Menhaus told him. “We’re all friends here.”
Which got a laugh out of Saks.
They brought him up to the main deck and then down to their cabins. They sat him on Menhaus’ bunk and tried to get something out of him. Which was about as easy as squeezing grape juice from a brick.
He just kept shaking his head as all those faces put questions to him.
He clutched his head in his hands, said, “I don’t remember how I got aboard… I remember drifting… I must have drifted here. Do you think that’s how it happened?”
Saks just shook his head. “Now he’s asking us. What a fucking piece of work this one is. Crycek? You sure he ain’t related to you?”
“You must remember something,” Cook said to him. “Just relax and try to remember. The ship went down in the fog… do you remember that?”
Makowski’s face twisted up like he’d bitten into a lemon. “The fog
… oh the fog… there’s voices in the fog… the voices.. . they told me things…”
Crycek had stepped back now, like maybe he’d smelled something on the guy he didn’t like. Or maybe he thought Makowski’s head was going to split open and a monster was going to jump out.
“He was probably hallucinating,” Menhaus said.
But Makowski shook his head. “No, no, no… I heard them, they told me things, they said-” he sketched his index finger in the air like he was writing words “-they told me to come here… they showed me how to get here.”
Saks shook his head. “This guy’s a real fucking treasure.”
“All right,” Fabrini said. “Can you at least tell us how long you’ve been here?”
Makowski just looked at him dumbly like the question had been spoken in Aramaic or low Latin.
“Don’t waste your time, Fabrini,” Saks said. “This guy don’t have no bristles on his broom.”
“You know, you’re not helping a thing here, Saks,” Cook told him. “Let’s just go easy.”
Saks laughed at the idea. Like maybe if he had his way, they’d throw Makowski’s useless ass over the side.
They kept at it another twenty or thirty minutes until it became pointless… if it hadn’t been before. Then they packed it in and decided to get some sleep. Saks’s watch, a digital, was still working and he told them it was getting on around eleven p.m. back in the real world.
“I suppose this crazy squirt of shit gets to bunk with us, eh?” Saks said. “Why not? Me and Menhaus, we already have Crycek. Might as well make it a full set.”
Cook sighed. “Well, I thought-”
“He ain’t sleeping with us,” Crycek said and you could see he meant it. “I’m not having this… guy sleeping with us. No damn way.”
“Now what’s your problem?” Fabrini said.
“My problem? Jesus Christ, are you all blind? Can’t you see it on him? Can’t you feel it? He isn’t right. Something got to him and there’s no way in hell I’d close my eyes with him nearby.”
“Oh, for chrissake,” Saks said.
But Crycek looked stern… and crazy, ready to do just about anything. “I mean it. He’s not sleeping with us.”
“Why, Crycek? Is he a fucking ghost?” Saks said.
“Maybe he is.”
Saks burst out laughing. “Oh, c’mon. Ghost, my white ass. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Richard Simmons has a dick.”
Menhaus looked unhappy. “You know what? I’m pretty tired here. I’m goddamn hungry, worn out, and I’m not in the mood for this nonsense.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Crycek said. “I won’t sleep with him in our cabin.”
Makowski just looked around, confused.
“Good going,” Saks said. “Now you got Crycek all worked up again. C’mere, Crycek, let daddy hold you against his tit.”
“Shut up,” Fabrini said.
“All of you shut up.” Cook rubbed his temples, massaging away the headache they all gave him. “Crycek? You bunk with us. Menhaus? You take Makowski in with you.�
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Saks seemed to approve. “Sounds good. We’ll take Mr. Slim Loony and you get Crycek. Give the three of you time to be alone. You can get a nice circle jerk going in there. Fabrini can do a striptease and show you his pussy.”
And that’s all it took.
Fabrini almost knocked Cook to the deck getting at Saks. He’d had his fill and now Saks was going to get his. He made it right over to him, Saks grinning the whole time. Fabrini reached out for him… and stopped.
Saks had his knife out and the blade was pressed to Fabrini’s belly.
“Go ahead, you fucking wop,” Saks told him. “If you got the stomach for it.”
Fabrini backed off, thinking about his own knife, but never pulling it because Cook and Menhaus got between them. Were both sick to death of this shit. Even jolly old Menhaus had had enough.
“Put it away, Saks,” Cook said. “You know, we’re all getting shit-tired of you and your mouth. And we’re getting really, really tired of your high school locker room wit. We’ve had enough. If you don’t have anything good to say, then kindly shut the fuck up.”
Saks laughed, put his knife away. “Take it easy, big chief. Don’t go getting pissed-off at me if Fabrini can’t take a joke. Shit, we all know that wop is an ass-pirate, don’t jump me over his lifestyle choices.”
“Just shut up, Saks,” Menhaus said. “For once in your life, just shut up.”
Saks started laughing. Menhaus getting a backbone to him was like Mister Rogers telling you to go fuck yourself.
Fabrini, calmer now, said, “You think we should post a watch?”
“Against what?” Menhaus asked.
“Nothing to watch against… unless you believe in ghosts, that is.” Saks thought the whole idea was pretty funny. “Besides, I’m not standing out in that goddamn corridor all night listening to Fabrini moan while Crycek puts the meat to him.”
“You mother… fucker,” Fabrini said low in his throat like the growl of a dog and launched himself at Saks again.
Menhaus and Cook stopped him, holding him back.
Crycek just stood there, managing to look amused and disturbed at the same time.
And Saks? He just smiled, loving it how he could push Fabrini’s buttons so easily. Loved the power he had over the man. And the thing was, he honestly wanted Fabrini to come at him, to get in real close. Maybe Cook had been partially right when he said that Saks had a deep-set fear of being alone and that he wouldn’t kill the others for that reason… but that fear didn’t extend to Fabrini. He would’ve killed Fabrini. Happily so. You could see it in his eyes.