Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “God will grant us what’s needed if he wants us to survive,” Chesbro said.

  “Oh, shut the hell up with that,” Marx said, a big man with tattooed arms, looked like he’d could hurt somebody bad, he got the notion to.

  George was thinking that was something Chesbro might want to remember.

  Gosling seemed to forget about George and Cushing right away, was just happy to be reunited with his old shipmate… and drinking partner, if the stories they were swapping were even half-true.

  Cushing climbed over into the lifeboat, tried talking with Pollard, tried drawing him out of his shell.

  George just sat there, taking it all in. New blood. It was exciting and somehow depressing at the same time.

  “Can’t say exactly where this shitter is,” Marx said, “south of the goddamn Twilight Zone and north of the Devil’s Triangle. You go figure. But, way I’m seeing it, if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Gotta be a back door around here somewhere.”

  “You wanna be careful of that,” Pollard said, not looking at any of them.

  They all stared at him. He had been silent for days, Marx said, and him speaking was big news, like Ghandi busting a move.

  “Careful of what?” Gosling said.

  “That back door,” Pollard said. “Never know where it might lead.”

  And that was it. Pollard’s jewel of the day. He would speak no more of it and even Marx bullying him brought no results.

  “Just leave him alone,” Chesbro said. “He’s scared. He’s been through a lot.”

  “No shit?” Marx said. “Has he really? Well, I haven’t. I just been sitting here pulling my meat and hoping Jesus would see us through this pigfuck. I haven’t been trying to hold you goddamn pussies together for the past three days with spit and hope and snot, now have I? Trying to keep you alive when things came out of the sea with empty bellies and big shitting teeth. Guess again, Chesbro, we’ve all been through a lot. Each and every one of us. But you don’t see me shutting down, do you? Or the First here? Not even Mr. Cushing or Mr. Ryan. No sir. They’re all ready to slap ass and slide dick. They got their peckers out and are just looking for some sweet hole to fill. You know what that is? That’s called being a man.”

  Chesbro, true to form, was mumbling prayers under his voice. He looked up at Marx. “I put my faith in God,” he said. “Whatever happens here, will be His will. I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, Chief, there’s things here a lot tougher than you.”

  “Sure as shit there are, dumbass. I’m just saying that we got to buck up and take it. We all wanna get out of here, don’t we? Well, if we’re dead, that ain’t gonna happen… now is it?” He looked over at Pollard, shook his head, looked like maybe he wanted to clop him upside the head. “Case in fucking point, Chesbro. Goddamn Pollard here. You want us all to drop to his level? Sit there with that hang-dog, where-is-my-fucking-mommy look about us? I mean, hell and ice, look at him. Looks like he got cornholed by a striped ape with a bowling pin for a pecker, got his shit packed so tight he don’t know whether to squat and push or call the Roto-Rooter man. You want us all to sink to that?”

  But Chesbro was praying again, looking close to tears.

  “It’s been a tough business from square one,” Gosling said. He was looking on Pollard with a sort of compassion and that much was obvious. “It’s been tough on everyone.”

  “Sure,” Marx said. “People handle it different ways, I suspect. But, way I see it, we got a hell of a plot to hoe, we don’t stick together and toughen up, we might as well drop our pants and jump in that slop, let the first thing that swims by make a sandwich out of our bare asses.”

  “Amen to that,” Cushing said.

  George wasn’t sure what to make of Marx. He was a tough bastard, to be sure, not exactly sympathetic, but something told him the chief engineer was okay. Down deep, he was a good guy… you got past the salty language.

  Marx maybe read his mind, because he looked over at George, smiled, stroked his mustache which was flecked with silver. “Don’t mind me, boys, I just go off sometimes. I’m not so bad as I sound. But we got to toughen our asses up. That’s how I see it. Every man for himself doesn’t wash dirty shorts here. We gotta stay tight and stay hard. Am I right, First?”

  “As rain,” Gosling said. “As always.”

  Cushing cleared his throat. “But Pollard’s right, you know.”

  “How’s that?” Marx asked.

  “In saying we should be real careful of that back door. In this place, we should be careful of every door.” He had everyone’s attention now and that was what he’d wanted. “Way I see it, we slipped through some kind of door into this place, some kind of warp, if you will. Vortex. Time/space distortion. Wormhole. Call it what you want. If there’s a doorway into our world there just might be doorways into others. We had best be careful we don’t walk through the wrong one.”

  That gave everyone something to chew over in their minds.

  “I mean, some of the things we’ve seen here… some of the local wildlife… who can say if it’s even native to this place? It might have been pulled in from other places. Maybe.”

  George thought that made sense. Most of it was probably native, but some of it could have been as alien as they were. Possibly. Just a theory, but it held some water when you thought about it. And George had been thinking about such things. “I like it, Cushing,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe all those crazy stories of sea monsters sailors reported, maybe they were things that got vomited out of this place and into ours.”

  “Sure,” Marx said, “why in the Christ not? I shipped with a boilermaker out of Baton Rouge when I was first a deckhand. Claimed he saw something off of the Ivory Coast like out of one of them prehistoric movies, long neck and all, Loch Ness monster-type. Said it was pea-green and had teeth like knives. Dove before they could get a good picture of it. Maybe that shitter swam out of here.”

  “Sounds like a plesiosaur,” Cushing said.

  “Sounds fine to me,” Marx said. “Fucking sea monster, all right. You seem to know your science, son. You a scientist or some shit?”

  “No. I just like the stuff, natural history and all that. A hobby, I guess.”

  George knew he was being modest. Cushing was a trove of information. And as George well knew most hobbyists knew more about their chosen obssessions than did most experts. When something was your blood and soul, rather than your bread and butter, you lived it. You drank it and breathed it and slept it. He figured Cushing was like that.

  “Well, we can sure use your head,” Marx said. “When we find that way out, we’ll let you pick door number one or two or three.”

  George thought that you just had to admire Marx’s energy level. He was always up, always ready to tango. To a guy like him, pessimism was unthinkable. Not among his natural rhythms. If you were to ask him, George figured, Marx would have said that pessimists weren’t nothing but sissies with philosophy and good diction.

  Gosling said, “Let’s rope the raft to your lifeboat and do some rowing. I have a feeling these channels through the weed here, by accident or purpose, lead somewhere. And I want to know where that is.”

  “And there’s a drift here,” Marx said. “And it’s pulling us in that general direction. Sooner or later we’re going there, might as well row our nuts off and get a look at it before it gets a look at us.”

  Chesbro looked like he was going to say something, but shut his mouth.

  Which George figured was probably a good thing.

  Marx explained to them that anyone else that got spit into this place would drift in the same direction, chances were. So that if there were other survivors they would be up ahead. “And who knows? If this is the same place that’s been sucking ships and planes out of the Triangle and the Sargasso since god-knows-when, they’re probably up there, too. Jesus, we could find a good boat… I could get my hands on some engines and fuel… shit, I’d either push us back home or make one hell
of a stab at it.”

  And that, George realized, was about as close as you were going to come to a reason to live in this place.

  It was too much to hope for… but it was better than drifting and brooding. He had a funny feeling they were poised at the edge of revelation. He just hoped it didn’t have big teeth and an empty belly.

  18

  When Menhaus came awake, he knew instinctively something was wrong.

  His eyelids fluttering open, he could not put a name to it. But he could feel it, same way you can feel someone in the darkness with you. You do not need to see them or be told that they are there, you can feel it. An invasive sense of presence… no less palpable than fingernails drawn up your spine.

  Saks was snoring lightly.

  Menhaus could not see Makowski. It was too dim in the cabin. Shadows nested like snakes, finding each other, combining, mating, breeding a slithering brood of shifting darkness.

  Menhaus tried to blink it away, for there was something positively unnatural about that darkness.

  He listened. Yes, he could hear it. He could hear the darkness.

  Just a subtle whisper of motion, but he’d sensed it, felt it somehow. And now he heard it: a wet, dragging sound. Like a soaked, moth-eaten blanket dragged over the floor. Swallowing, he pulled himself up on his elbows, craning his neck, listening. There. He heard it again. A secretive, moving noise. Menhaus imagined that’s how snakes would sound in the dark… but it wasn’t snakes; he knew that much. Not here. Not in this dead ship in the boundless graveyard sea. No, this was a stealthy, intelligent locomotion. The sound of something trying to be quiet. Something that knew it was being listened to and was trying not to be heard.

  He wanted to write it off to imagination, to nerves, but he was beyond all that now.

  For not only could he hear it, he could smell it now.

  A rank, wet smell. The stink of something from the bottom of a pond.

  Carefully, Menhaus found his lighter and flicked it into life.

  “Saks?” he whispered softly. “Saks?”

  Nothing. Saks was out cold.

  Only that rustling, breathing motion.

  Menhaus swung his legs over the bunk and hopped off. But quietly, a cat dropping soundlessly to the floor. He snatched one of the candles they’d purloined from the lounge and lit it.

  Makowski’s berth was empty.

  No, not empty. Not exactly. There was a form there, a shape, a sense of solidity. Makowski was there, all right, but wrapped in a net of shadow.

  Except that the shadow wasn’t moving… it was not evaporating as the light hit it.

  Yes, as he approached Makowski with the candle the darkness did not retreat. It hung over him like a shroud. Blacker than black, glistening and wet, an oil slick of shadow. It seemed to almost shudder at the intrusion of light like it was not shadow at all, but something pretending to be shadow.

  Menhaus felt his heart seize momentarily in his chest.

  Makowski was enveloped in the stuff.

  He looked like he’d been dipped in tar.

  As Menhaus brought the candle closer, closer, the mass began to slide off of Makowski, running like hot wax from his staring face. A thick, serpentine clot of it deserted his open mouth with the sound of viscera yanked from the belly of a fish. He began to convulse, to gag and sob and tremble. The black stuff was like tissue, fleshy and convoluting. You could see the flex of alien musculature beneath that neoprene skin.

  Jesus, it was alive… living blackness.

  Menhaus saw, for just one brief insane moment, a face in that blackness. The smooth, shining mockery of a woman’s face grinning at him… then it melted away and maybe it had not been in the first place.

  He wanted to scream.

  Wanted to, but his throat was constricted down to a pinhole. Shaking now, he held the candle out towards the retreating black mass. It moved quickly now, seeking darkness in which to hide in. One crazy, insane moment he could see it fluttering and shifting, the next it had vanished into the shadows or become the shadows.

  Menhaus stood there helplessly, the candle flickering wildly in his trembling fist, throwing nightmare shadows over the bulkheads. He wanted to collapse, to cry, to yell, but his lips were glued tight.

  Makowski, however, found his voice.

  It was a high, mad wailing that filled the cabin, reverberated and pounded through the still air. He fell to the deck and screamed and howled and sucked in great, wheezing lungfuls of air in-between. He fell against Menhaus who nearly dropped the candle, knowing damn well he could not drop it. For if it went out, if it went out…

  Makowski was clutching his legs like a terrified toddler, his mouth frozen open, spraying spittle and horror: “IT’S ALL OVER ME CAN’T BREATHE CAN’T-”

  Menhaus first tried to kick him away, then went down on his knees, setting the candle on the floor, letting its radiance keep the darkness at bay. He took hold of Makowski and shook him, tried to shake the madness out of him. Makowski fought in his arms like a freshly landed salmon, twisting and turning and clawing at him, out of his mind with panic.

  “STOP IT!” Menhaus cried. “STOP IT! MAKOWSKI! STOP IT! IT’S GONE DAMMIT! IT’S GONE AWAY, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  Finally, he slumped into Menhaus’ arms, weightless, powerless, curled up on his lap like a sick child, just shaking, damp with sweat. His hands furled and unfurled.

  Saks was out of his bunk by then. “What?” he demanded. “What the fuck is it?”

  And what was Menhaus to say? The shadows, he was attacked by the shadows? But saying something like that sounded even crazier that seeing something like that. So he said nothing, feeling his heart racing and his breath coming hard.

  Saks was staring at him. “Well? What in the fuck are you two pussies screaming about?”

  Menhaus had a sudden, irrational need to laugh. But he didn’t. Instead, he found his voice and told Saks what he’d seen. “I saw it. By Christ, Saks, I mean I really saw it.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” Saks said bluntly.

  “Fuck you, Saks. What the hell do you think happened?” Menhaus said fiercely, his eyes glaring with rage. “You think we both goddamn well dreamed it?”

  Makowski was not saying a thing. His eyes were wide and glassy. Wherever he was, it was a lonely place and certainly not a very good place.

  There was a pounding at the door, Cook saying, “What the hell’s going on in there? Unlock this goddamn door.”

  Saks, tittering under his breath, did. “Hey, Cook, c’mon in… we got a ghost in here.”

  Menhaus helped Makowski into his bunk. “I never said ghost,” he told them. “Ghost is not what I said.”

  “Okay, peaches, call it what you want. Ghost, spook, oogie-boogie man. Jesus H. Christ, Menhaus, I bet you still wet the fucking bed.”

  “Kiss my white ass.”

  “All right, all right,” Cook said. “Settle down. Just tell me what happened and Saks? Just zip it for once.”

  Menhaus, sensing an ally, told Cook everything. There really wasn’t much to tell and by the time he was done, he wasn’t even sure if he believed any of it. Sounded like some bullshit story you told around a Boy Scout campfire.

  Cook said, “But the light drove it off?”

  Menhaus nodded.

  “All right. Keep a candle burning then.” Saks didn’t say a word.

  Menhaus knew Saks might be acting like some hard-headed rationalist asshole, but he believed, all right. He believed everything Menhaus had said. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit it was all.

  “Saks?” Cook said. “Come over to my cabin. I want to talk with you. You okay here, Menhaus?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”

  He was thinking about the black tissue, wondering what it was and what it wanted. Was it trying just to suffocate Makowski? Was that it? Or, given time, would it have devoured him, bones and all? It all made Menhaus remember when they’d first rowed through the weed around the Cyclops. At the stern, there
had been a patch of oily darkness in the water, shifting in the weeds. Not a shadow exactly. Like a shadow, but more solid. Cook had seen it, too.

  And what had Crycek said?

  Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…

  Yeah, Menhaus did not doubt that at all.

  He could hear Saks and Cook out in the corridor, arguing with lowered voices. Knowing Saks and his ways, it could go on for some time.

  “It was my turn,” Makowski suddenly said.

  Menhaus turned, his flesh gone rigid. There was a chill moving up the small of his back. “What? What did you say?”

  “It was my turn,” he said again. He turned and looked at Menhaus, his head revolving with an almost mechanical slowness like that of a puppet. His eyes were glistening and mad. “It was my turn tonight and you ruined it.”

  “I… saved you,” Menhaus mumbled.

  But Makowski just shook his head. “She’ll come again… when she’s ready. Maybe tonight or tomorrow. Maybe this time she’ll come for you…”

  19

  “It’s just something you need to see,” Saks was saying. “You’re in charge and you have to know about things like this. I’ll just be glad to wash my hands of it.”

  Cook didn’t like the idea. Didn’t like it at all. Going on a walk with Saks made you wonder if you were going to come back again. Made you wonder a lot of things. Fabrini was against it, of course. He did not trust Saks and never would. Cook told him just to stay with Crycek, that they were going to look at something and Saks said it was the sort of thing that Crycek definitely should not see.

  “You think I’m up to something, don’t you?” Saks said to him when they were moving down the companionway to one of the lower decks. Just them and that great creaking ship, the kerosene lantern creating macabre shapes around them.

  “Are you?” Cook said.

  “No, I’m not. Shit, Cook, I’m just trying to help you out here. Way I see it, you the man. You’re in charge. Okay… then you better see this. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something. You don’t wanna? Fine. You think I’m luring you down here so I can knife you, then let’s go back right now.”