by Tim Curran
They went down that fungi-strewn corridor past staterooms that were rusted shut. The air was congested with a briny, stagnant odor. After a time, you almost got used to it. Almost.
Saks stopped before a stateroom door. “It’s in here. I found it after we first came aboard, when I took my little tour.”
Cook nodded. He remembered Saks coming into his cabin after his little tour, as he called it, saying he heard scratching in the walls, thought it was maybe rats. Had a real funny look in his eyes that Cook had thought was either fear or something like it.
Cook said, “I think Fabrini and I checked this door, it was locked tight. Rusted shut.”
“Well, it wasn’t rusted shut when I came down here,” Saks said. “It was open.”
Those words hung heavy in the air, full of dark implications Saks wasn’t about to put into words.
Cook said, “Maybe… maybe it was just locked from the inside. Maybe Makowski was hiding in there.”
Saks smiled. “You think so?”
Cook took hold of the latch, the door groaning as he pushed it inward. The sound was sharp and creaking like nails pulled from a coffin lid. It went right up his spine, sounding to him as if the door was screaming. In the light of the lantern, dust motes and flakes of filth swam like sediment disturbed in the bowels of a sunken ship. Everything in there was dirty and crumbling, like what you expected in an Egyptian tomb. The porthole was so thick with grime it looked practically furry.
But what paused Cook at the doorway was the smell in there. He could not immediately associate it with anything else. Certainly, there was a dry tang of age and nitrous decay and rust, but there was more, too. An inexplicable odor that reminded him of ozone, a sharp and heady almost chemical odor mixed with older corruption.
Right away, Cook figured that was trouble.
“You don’t want to go in there, it’s okay with me,” Saks said, maybe smelling it, too, or feeling it down deep as Cook had.
But Cook shook his head. He was expecting some smartassed comment from Saks, something about him being afraid of the dark and pissing himself… but it did not come. Saks’s eyes were wide and bright, almost fearful. There was a tic in the corner of his mouth. As they entered the room, Saks started to say something half a dozen times, but promptly shut his mouth. There was an almost infantile sense of confusion about him in this place. He would start in one direction, stop, reverse himself, then start again only to take a faltering step back. That’s how Cook knew that it was inside Saks, too. That like himself, he could not find his center here, could not get his bearings. This place had a strong, withering negative psychic charge that filled your mind with whispers and reaching shadows. Psychologically, it felt like the end of the world… beyond even, shivering blackness trying to suck you down into nothingness.
“Jesus, but I don’t like this fucking place,” Saks said.
Cook did not either. A terror, vague and half-formed, was prickling the back of his neck. This place was sucking him dry. He felt something like a wild, hysterical scream building inside him.
“Show me,” was all he would say.
Saks led him over to a writing desk pushed in the corner. The dust on its top was disturbed, maybe from Saks’s earlier visit. The metal of the bulkheads was riddled with holes like great ulcers. You could see into the cabin next door through them. In the far corner, amongst the debris and settled dust, there was something like soap flakes strewn about. Looked like somebody had scaled a fish in there, a big fish… but many years back, for the flakes were curled and brown like autumn leaves.
Cook did not want to think about what that might have meant.
Saks pulled open a drawer on the desk and took out an old leather-bound book with a clasp on it like a journal or a diary.
“You better read what’s in here,” he said.
So this was it. Another goddamn book, another confession of nightmares. Cook, his hands trembling now, began to page through it. The first ten pages were blank. Then they began to be filled with stunted paragraphs, quickly scribbled odds and ends written in a woman’s flowing hand. She claimed that her name was Lydia Stoddard. That she had been aboard a sixty-five foot two-masted schooner called Home Sweet Home with her husband, Robert, and five others. They were apparently en route from Bermuda to Antigua in January of 1955 when they found the fog or it found them. Entry after entry told of the Home Sweet Home floundering in the becalmed, fog-enshrouded sea. Of people disappearing until it was just her and her husband. The entries began to get very jumbled and incomprehensible, the handwriting was practically illegible. About all Cook could figure was that the Home Sweet Home had to be abandoned for some reason. That Lydia and Robert packed up a dinghy and floated for days until they found the hulk of the Cyclops.
Cook sighed. “Why am I reading this?”
But the look Saks gave him told him it was important, so he read on:
January 26? 1955
I have not written for several days. I do not wish to write now. I am so alone in this place and I think I have lost my mind. I do not know where I am now. This ship is the Cyclops, I know that much. It disappeared during the First World War and I remember hearing something about it. But I can’t seem to remember exactly what.
This place is purgatory or limbo, some borderland on the outskirts of Hell. Perhaps God is punishing us. I do not know why he would punish us. Robert and I have been good people. We have done nothing wrong. We do not deserve to be marooned in this awful place.
Oh dear God, why? Why?
What have we done?
Robert is very sick now. I think he may be dying. He is feverish and disoriented. He thinks I am his mother and I do not know who I am. My mind seems to wander and I’m not sure what is dream and what is reality.
Last night or maybe a few days ago… I can’t be certain… I walked on deck and I saw something like a huge and glistening snake laying over the decks. When I approached it, it moved, slid away back over the side. It must have been the tentacle of some sea monster. There are horrors in the fog. Strange beasts and worse things, things that try to get inside my head. But I will not let them inside my head.
Oh, God, I hear things. Things on the ship. But I must not be hearing them. It must be in my head.
I am so scared now.
So scared.
If Robert dies, I will be alone.
Oh, God, give me the strength to take my own life. Please.
January 27? 1955
I am not alone here.
There is another.
A woman.
I hear her at night.
She hums to herself out in the corridor.
Humming, humming, humming.
January? 29
Robert is dead. He must be dead. He does not move and he is so very cold. There is no pattern now. Life is a maze, an arabesque, and I can find no way out.
I cannot sleep.
When I close my eyes, I hear Robert calling out to me. Why does he call out to me when he is dead? Sometimes I think he moves, but the dead do not move and I wonder if maybe I am dead, too. Can I be dead? For surely I am not alive in this place.
No, I cannot sleep.
Last night or tonight, I can’t be sure, I awoke feeling hot breath in my ear, smelling something decayed leaning over me. I could not see it, but it was there. It was telling me awful things. It wants me to commit suicide. I hear it at night, I hear it whispering to me out in the corridor. I lock the door tight and huddle with Robert. But it can see me through the door and I can feel it smiling at me.
I think it is a woman.
Yes, just like I thought.
I think the other is a woman.
Perhaps she is mad and perhaps she is trapped here, too. But she is dangerous. She is a lunatic. She has been hiding down in the black, stinking confines of the ship. I think she eats rats. She must live on rats. Oh dear God what must she look like after all these years eating rats and living like a mushroom in wet darkness?
She ca
nnot be human. Not like me.
Oh, the voices? How long must I hear those voices?
February 5?
I am afraid all the time.
The woman will not leave me alone. Even during the day… what I think is day here… she haunts me. She chases me through the ship. I barely made it back today. And then she was out there, scratching at the door. She knows my name. Somehow she knows my name.
Food is running short. What will I eat next? I will not eat what she says I must eat.
Robert opened his eyes and spoke to me. He said: “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything, my pretty little darling.”
No, no, no, I wasn’t going to write that down. None of it.
Robert is dead, dead, dead. I must remember that he is dead and the dead do not speak.
Not like me.
Not like me.
Not like me.
February 10?
Yes, I am scared all the time.
How long can you be scared before you stop being scared?
Only a little bread left that is moldy. I will eat the mold, too. Yes, I will. Watch me eat the mold. It is green and yeasty-tasting. It turns my stomach.
I killed a rat.
It was delicious.
February 11?
I am not afraid of the woman.
She wants to be my friend and tells me so.
Last night or today or maybe last week I heard her humming down the corridor. That incessant, lunatic humming. I took my knife with me. My knife and a candle. I will stop that humming or it will stop me.
I saw her.
A misshapen, dwarfish creature in rags. Her face is white as a corpse. Her eyes are yellow. She was waiting in a darkened cabin for me. I wanted to kill her. She would not speak to me. She would only hum. She has a puppet. I saw it. A little puppet on wires that she makes dance. Oh dear God, it is not a puppet… it is a mummified infant. It has yellow eyes, too. It smiled at me and began to drool. It was wrapped in a dirty blanket and I could see things moving beneath that blanket. The puppet infant has too many legs.
I locked myself in my cabin.
Something has been eating Robert’s corpse. Rats. They must come in when I am out. Come in and chew on him.
Terrible.
February 15?
The woman is not my friend. She is horrible.
She does not hum now. She sits outside the cabin door and whistles. The whistling is melodious, yet eerie. She likes to whistle as I eat my dinner. That whistling makes me think things and do things I cannot remember later.
Why does she torment me? What does she want?
Why does she keep scratching at the door? Fumbling with the latch.
I will not let her in.
She wants my food and I will not share it.
She and that puppet-baby are hungry. Let them eat rats.
Robert says our food is not to be shared.
It is secret our food. Our secret food.
Let them be hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Cook stopped reading there.
It was terrible, like a dirty window looking into a madhouse, a guided tour of a woman’s mind going to rot. It was very unnerving. There were things she was not writing about. Awful things. Like what she was eating and Cook had a pretty good idea what that might be.
“Why do I need to read this?” he asked Saks.
“You’ll see. Just keep going.”
“This is pointless.”
“No, it’s not. It’ll make sense to you when you’re done.” His eyes were bulging, his face twisted into a grimace. “You don’t like it, do you? Well, I didn’t like it either. You know what it was like for me? Down here… alone… reading that warped shit, sure I was hearing things out there. Funny things. At least you got me with you. ..”
Cook sighed, picked up the book again.
February 21?
I hear things at night or maybe in my head.
Different things now. Like snakes crawling against the door. How can there be so many snakes? And why do they whistle? But maybe it is that insane woman and maybe it is me.
I am confused.
I do not know.
The walls make me crazy. The bulkheads have rivets only they are not rivets. I know they are not really rivets. Yes, they are tiny yellow eyes that blink and watch and see. They like to watch me to stare at me I am never alone now. Never ever never. Those eyes want to know my secret things that I have locked up in my head. But only I have the key. Yet they stare and leer and watch. They’re waiting for something. Waiting for me to do something.
But what?
I cut smiling mouths into my palms with the knife.
The mouths wake me up.
They like to scream.
February 25?
The insane woman still haunts the corridor.
Oh, she thinks I do not know what she wants.
But I know because I can think with her mind as easily as with my own. Ha, ha, ha. She didn’t expect that.
Still, she creeps in the corridor. The sounds she makes. Patter, patter, tink, tink, tink. She must have a dozen legs to make sounds like that.
The creeping.
The hideous creeping.
Oh, how it echoes even now.
February 26?
I woke spun in webs.
She must have gotten in while I slept. She is very sneaky with her loathsome creeping. The webs were all over me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. Oh, sticky and clinging and wet with spider mucus. Gossamer strung with pearls that must be eggs. Eggs for puppet-spider babies. Hee, hee. What an image that conjures? But I know it to be true, so very true. Out there, walking and creeping about with all those legs.
Do they think I do not know?
Yes, I woke spun with webs.
As I walked through my cabin, they were strung everywhere. Like spiderwebs breaking across one’s face… but imagine a thousand million spiderwebs breaking over your face at once.
Be quiet. They’re out there now… the lady and the puppet-baby. Can you hear them creeping? They have a thousand legs.
I know their game.
I know her game.
Creeping out there and staring through holes in the walls.
Does she think I cannot hear her whispering those profane things?
March
That puppet-spider baby is crying.
It cries out in the corridor, creeping on those long black legs. It is hungry. It wants its milk. It sucks the milk from things wrapped in silk high up in its web.
I hear it nursing at night.
It wishes to nurse on me, little puppet-spider baby. I saw it through a hole in the wall and it saw me. It has many eyes and they are all black.
It needs to nurse.
I will let it nurse on me, sweet evil puppet-spider baby. Yes, yes, yes. It scratches over my bare belly. It is hairy and plump and gurgling. I let it nurse at my breast. Its teeth are very sharp. Its mouth is slimy.
Sucking and sucking.
The feel of its tongue lapping makes me scream. I like to scream.
March?
Creeping in the corridor.
I hear her creeping even now.
She has more than one child and they all have many legs. A thousand creeping legs.
I have only two.
But I have ten fingers.
I can make them crawl.
See how they crawl.
Over walls and over faces.
Lovely spider legs, see them creep.
March 27 i creep up walls robert does not like it does not like what i have webbed up tasty things in webs yes i have many legs with which i creep and crawl up walls and down walls over floors and under cabinets it is such good fun the face of my lover: flyblown and grinning, soft and pulpy with white bone bearing teeth marks. i paint his face with kisses he tastes sweet beneath the cobwebs i have spun over him he is safe in a gray coccoon. she will not have him i have
chased her and her leggy babies down below for i am queen and i eat children with yellow snapping teeth i eat spider babies their meat is rich their blood brown like gravy cold gravy i seek dark damp corners to spin my webs places i can creep and crawl and slink i dream of basements and cellars and webby places i hang over Robert he is my lover so i cocooned him laid my spider eggs in him creeping always creeping waiting for my spider babies to be born when they are born we will eat my lover tastes so sweet robert like candied meats love his taste like candied meats i creep and i wait
The entries as such ended there.
Cook was sweating and shaking. It was all the mad ramblings of an insane mind, yet he almost half-believed it, crazy and improbable as it all sounded. His heart was pounding and he could not hold the book still. He was angry. Angry at a God that would allow this woman to become a lonely, deranged thing that maybe had to eat her husband’s corpse to survive. Angry at Saks for showing it to him and maybe angry at that woman herself for invading his mind, spinning lustrous webs in the corners where things breathed and crept and light would never touch. He did not want to see these things. Did not want to ever feel them.
“You’re not done yet,” Saks said.
“No, you’re fucking wrong, I am done,” Cook said, filled with hatred now. “You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”
“No, you’re not,” Saks said, blocking his way. “There’s more. Just look at it.”
Cook toyed with the idea of hammering his way through Saks with his fists, but instead he just picked up the book. Blank page after blank page. All of them yellowed and going to pieces.
What was the point?
Then he saw. More writing.
A single sentence repeated, but at the intervals of a year each time:
March 27, 1956
Another lovely day!
March 27, 1957
Another lovely day!
March 27, 1958
Another lovely day!
In fact, the rest of the diary was just this repeated again and again every March on the anniversary of Lydia Stoddard’s madness. Something about that really sucked the wind out of Cook. The funny thing was, the real disturbing thing, was that these cryptic little entries continued right to the present year… but went no farther. As if Lydia’s ghost showed up once a year to scribble in the diary.