by Tim Curran
“She must… she must have written these entries back in 1955,” Cook said, knowing it sounded thin as a sliver.
“And she just happened to pick this year as the year to stop?”
“C’mon, Saks. You’re a little too hard-headed to believe in ghosts.”
Saks smiled. “Ghosts wasn’t what I was thinking. Not exactly.”
“Then what were you thinking?”
But Saks did not answer that. “Do you know what today’s date is?”
“No. My watch stopped working-”
“Well, my digital works just fine. Today is the twenty-seventh of March.”
Cook felt a chill on his arms. Sure, it was easy to believe absurd, frightening things like that and especially in this cabin with the drifting dust and age and that oppressive atmosphere that just seemed to drain you dry minute by minute. But Cook wasn’t going there.
He said, “Maybe… maybe Makowski forged this shit.”
“You don’t believe that, Cook, and neither do I,” Saks said. “Unless you’re willing to take a real wild leap here and say he wrote the entire thing. But that’s a woman’s writing and we both know that. The entries from the fifties are faded, the newer ones pretty fresh. .. now how would that fucking idiot pull that off?”
Saks was right. The forgery angle was silly… but there had to be an explanation, didn’t there? Or was it just this place? This goddamn nameless dimension where anything went. Because, deep down, that’s what he was thinking. Lydia Stoddard went slowly and completely insane here. All alone, her mind went to pieces. Who could blame her? She was long dead, certainly, but what if her madness was not? What if it came back once a year? If that was even remotely possible, they were all in serious danger.
Saks said, “You heard what that freak Makowski was saying, stuff about her coming back and her not wanting us here. Jesus, Cook, I’m getting some ideas here and I don’t like ‘em.”
“We better get back. I don’t like the idea of leaving the others alone.”
Saks picked up the diary, paged through it. “What the hell?” he said. He dropped the book on the desk, backing away from it.
Cook knew and did not know. He picked up the diary, thought it felt warm in his hands, like something alive. He saw today’s entry.. . then he saw something else which had not been there five minutes before. What he was seeing could not possibly be… but it was there, glaring and fresh, daring him to talk it away with nonsense like logic and reason. But Cook could not talk it away, could not make sense of it, he could do nothing but stand there, terror oozing out of him like bile… hot and sour and rancid-smelling. He could hear himself breathing with a dry, rattling sound like a dying breath blown through straw.
He kept staring at the diary and what he saw, just beneath what had been the last entry, was this:
March 27 i am waiting i am waiting waiting waiting hear me creeping i am coming now
Cook dropped the diary with a little cry of revulsion, for in his mind, he suddenly saw it sprout segmented legs, becoming not a book, but something bloated and pale and hairy. Something that like to creep.
He looked over at Saks and Saks’s face had gone bloodless, his eyes were huge and wet and filled with a wild sort of horror.
“Listen,” Saks said. “Listen… ”
And there it was, coming down the corridor: a high-pitched, mournful whistling/wailing sound, like some eerie dirge piped from a throat stuffed with ashes and dry things. It carried a profane melody to it.
Jesus. Cook felt his heart suddenly just stop dead in his chest like something had gripped it… it stopped, then began to beat so fast he thought he would pass out. Droplets of cold sweat burst out on his forehead. His lips felt as though they’d been tack-welded shut.
Saks was scared.
Scared like Cook had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. All that tough-guy machismo had melted away into a tepid shivering puddle. The gray streaks in his hair looked positively white and those bags under his eyes were like pouches.
Cook could only imagine what he must have looked like.
That whistling came again… only it was not so distant now, it was closer and more shrill. And there was something morbidly seductive about that melody it carried, made you want to stay put until you could see the mouth that sang it.
“She’s coming,” Saks said.
Cook had his gun out.
He took hold of the lantern and walked out into the corridor and it took every bit of strength he had. There was nothing out there. Nothing but clutching shadows that seemed viscidly alive and coiling. Motes of dust spinning in the light. No, there was nothing there, but there soon would be. He was smelling that sharp stink of ozone again because lightning was about to strike. Something was about to strike. .. something creeping and leggy and impossible. Something grinning and insane and lonesome. The sort of grin that haunts your childhood nightmares… just a smiling mouth with long yellow teeth and no face to go with them.
The whistling came again.
Came with a volume that made them curdle inside.
It was so close… it could only be around the next bend in the corridor. And Cook thought… yes… thought he could hear her coming, all those legs scratching along the bulkhead like a thousand scraping nails.
Run for godsake! a voice was shouting in his head. Get the fuck out of here… if you see what comes around that bend, if you see what comes creeping along the wall…
They started running, pounding through that fungus and nearly going on their asses half a dozen times. They went up one companionway, then another until they reached the deck. They could hear that mad, insectile skittering behind them, something like a braying laughter echoing through a black and shuttered attic… and then Saks slammed the hatch on the deckhouse shut, secured the latch.
And almost immediately, on the other side, the sound of many things rasping and clawing against the rusted steel door. Things like knives and hooks and awls.
They ran until they found their cabins.
And did not dare breathe until their doors were shut and locked.
20
They were rowing and making some distance, according to Gosling. It was an ungainly craft they had roped together, the lifeboat on one side and the oblong raft on the other. But with two men on either side pulling with the oars, they were indeed moving.
Marx and Gosling took their break together, as the other four pulled.
“We’re going to come onto something,” Marx said. “I can feel it now.”
Strange thing was, Gosling could feel it, too. They were going somewhere and he could feel it in his bones. A certainty that they were getting close to something.
“Way I’m figuring this whole shitting thing,” Marx was saying, “is that we’re going to be finding some boats. We’ve got to. And maybe people, too, because this drift leads somewhere. A dumping ground, a junkyard… whatever in the Christ you want to call it. Wouldn’t you say, First?”
Gosling nodded. “There’s something out there. I know that much. I guess I keep wondering, thinking that if we survived this, then others must have, too.”
“You… you try your VHF?” Marx asked him.
“Yeah. There’s nothing out there, nothing you want to hear.”
“We tried it for a time… but some of the shit we heard out there, well, it didn’t do my boys much good. Didn’t do me much good either. Just that static out there… never heard static like that before. Now and again…”
“A distress call?”
“You got it. But crazy, spooky shit. Maybe we imagined it.”
“Not unless we imagined it, too.”
Marx looked thoughtful. “You ever see any of them Devil’s Triangle shows on Discovery or one of them?”
“Sure.”
“You probably heard about Flight 19, then?”
Gosling had. Happened in 1945. Five Navy torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale and flew into oblivion. A sear
ch plane sent out to look for them vanished, too. No wreckage found, not so much as a slick of oil. Even all these years later, it was one of the great Bermuda Triangle mysteries, a point of great controversy.
“Well,” Marx said, “we kept picking up distress calls. Some fellow saying how they were flying into ‘white water’ and then later, one about being ‘lost in the fog, the bottomless fog.’ It was pretty spooky stuff. I didn’t link it up with Flight 19 until I heard something on the VHF a few hours later. ‘FT, FT, FT, FT’… just repeated on and on like that. You know what ‘FT’ was?”
Gosling shook his head.
“That was part of Flight 19’s call letters.” Marx swallowed. “You’re probably wondering how it is I know that, how I might remember such a thing.”
Gosling, staring out into the fog, was wondering exactly that.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Marx rubbed his eyes, looked very uncomfortable suddenly. “Had me an uncle, named Tommy. My old man’s younger brother. I never met him. He was a radioman on one of those Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared out there all those years ago. Now and again, my old man would get in a funny mood, start talking about the Brooklyn neighborhood he was raised in. Soon enough, he’d be talking about Uncle Tommy and what happened to him. The old man didn’t buy the official U.S. Navy line about them just going down… all those planes, without a spot of wreckage. He didn’t believe any of it. The old man was of the mind that something out there reached out and grabbed Tommy and the rest of them boys. He would never say what he thought it was. But it haunts him to this day.”
Marx went on to say that his old man was in his eighties now. And every December he went down to Florida on the anniversary of Flight 19’s disappearance, out to Ft. Lauderdale and just stood there for a few hours, staring out over the sea, remembering his brother and praying for him.
“Yeah, the old man’s getting on in years, First, but sometimes he still talks about it. Told me he talked with some of the other crew members’ families and none of them believe what the Navy said either. Still don’t.” Marx shrugged. “I’m thinking Flight 19 ended up here. In this goddamned place. Maybe, maybe if I could find some trace of it out there and get my ass out through one of them doors Cushing was talking about… well, I think my old man could die in peace finally knowing. But one way or another, First, I got to get out of here. I don’t want my old man dying thinking that something out there took his son, too.”
Gosling patted his arm, knowing it had been hard for Marx to admit any of that. Like most sailors, he wasn’t given to airing his family secrets in public. Wasn’t given to showing a hint of the softness all men had at their core. What he had shared with Gosling was almost a sacred thing and Gosling knew he had to treat it as such.
“I’ll do anything I can to help,” Gosling told him.
“Hell, I know that, First. I knew you would without me even squeezing my soul out to you. That’s the kind of man you are. Everyone on the Mara knew that.”
Gosling managed a smile, uncomfortable as always with anything approaching praise. He swallowed, said, “What happened to Pollard?”
But Marx just shook his head. “Don’t know exactly. Like I told you, when the ship went down, I was treading water… then along comes the lifeboat with Chesbro in it. We didn’t come across Pollard until we got into the weed. He saw something, I know that… something that peeled his mind raw. But he won’t say what.”
Gosling could just imagine. For he remembered after the fog first encased the Mara Corday, remembered Pollard running on deck, half out of his head then, saying how something had grabbed Burky… the guy on watch… and pulled him out into the fog. Pollard had been in bad shape then… but what had he seen since?
“I tried getting that little shit to talk,” Marx said, “but all he wants is his mommy and I ain’t his fucking mommy.”
Gosling laughed. “I love you like a brother, Chief, but you’re not exactly real sympathetic.”
“Never claimed to be.”
“What Pollard needs is someone real easy to talk to. Somebody with some compassion.”
“You for chrissake?”
“No, not me. But I know just the guy.”
Then they were both looking over at George and he was looking back at them and wondering what in the hell he was doing wrong to get those hard-assed swabbies staring him down like that.
Marx went over to relieve Pollard on the oars, gave him a ration of shit for being crazy and spooked, said the first sea monster they came across he was throwing his shitting ass to that mother. Might even season it first so it tasted better.
Gosling smiled as he replaced George at the oars.
Marx. Jesus, he was something else, all right.
21
Saks would not tell Menhaus or Makowski where he had gone with Cook. He refused to say anything about it, just that they had business to hash out in private. But Menhaus saw how Saks had looked when he came back. Like he was all bound up, needed to shit something out but couldn’t find the proper opening.
After that, for the longest time, in the flickering orange candlelight, Saks just sat there with his knife in his hand and a dangerous look in his eye. Now and again, he’d cock his head as if he were listening for something he just did not want to hear.
“Rats,” he finally said after a time, “ship’s full of rats.”
“Rats?” Menhaus said.
Saks nodded.
Menhaus was beginning to believe that to Saks, ‘rats’ was the key word for anything he couldn’t or wouldn’t put a proper name to. A metaphor for just about everything unex-plainable aboard the Cyclops.
“I ever tell you, Menhaus, about the rats in Vietnam? Jesus, but we had rats there. Millions of rats. Bastards big as cats, sometimes bigger. They loved our dumps. They’d come into camp at night.”
Saks looked sullen with the memory, as if he could see them running in packs in his mind. Smell them and hear them squeaking.
“Did you poison ‘em out?”
But Saks didn’t seem to hear the question. “I was a Seabee, Construction Battalions. We put in air strips and docks and roads, threw together camps in godforsaken places.” He shook his head. “My first classification was gunner’s mate. So when the river rats, the river patrol sailors, took some bad causalities and were under strength, they would yank guys from other units to build the riverine forces back up to strength. Yeah, they pulled my ass off a big Cat dozer and stuck me in the stern of a PBR, a river patrol boat, on the fifty cal. Had to pull that shit for a month until the replacements made it in-country. What a clusterfuck that all was. Cruising around that stinking brown water down in the Delta, blowing the piss out of little villages. Taking fire and giving it back. Riding herd on all those sampans out in the channels. Most of ‘em were just gook fishermen, papasan and his fucking net, but now and again you’d run across some VC.”
Menhaus wasn’t really in the mood for war stories. He was watching the shadows and thinking about that black, oozing tissue that had nearly consumed Makowski. Wondering if it was coming back and if he’d really seen that woman’s face in it.
“What’s the rivers have to do with rats?” he said.
So Saks told him. “One day, the chief gets a call from an A-6 pilot. There’s some barge drifting downriver, looks derelict. We gotta go check it out. Quick-and-dirty like everything else. The brass says that hulk is a hazard to navigation and the chief is pissed. Hazard to navigation? Down there in the fucking mud flats? Sheee-it. Command says for us to take a peek at her, if she’s derelict, they’ll have some UDTs or SEALs go in there and blow it.”
“So you went aboard the barge?”
“Sure as shit we did.”
“What did you find?”
Saks clenched his teeth, then said, “It was like this tub… dirty and rusting, taking on water. Full of spiders and slime and stinking of decay. Thousands of flies. We found a weapons cache and called it in. Then we found the bodies…”
About tw
enty VC sappers had been using the barge as a staging point. They had weapons and ammo, explosives and det cord, the works, Saks told him. All the shit they needed to cause all manner of suffering and trouble. The bodies had been there over a month and were just black and rotted, the worms all done with them. Just husks like mummies. But they were chewed-up looking, their bones full of teeth marks.
“About then, the rats show,” Saks said. “Hundreds of ‘em. Their eyes were red in our flashlights. Red and glaring and hungry. Those rats were hiding in the dark corners and debris… but when they saw us, they were hungry enough to come out. Just starving and slat-thin, having picked those bodies down to bones, they wanted some meat and they were going to have it.”
Saks said they came charging out of the darkness, all squeaking and chittering and snapping their teeth. The sailors opened up on them, drove most of ‘em back, but still dozens got through, biting and clawing and drawing blood.
“What did you do?”
“We got off her in a hurry. But you know what?”
Menhaus shook his head.
Saks grinned. “Those fucking things were so hungry, they dove off the ship into the water, started swimming after our launch. Hundreds of ‘em. The chief flooded the water with fuel oil and lit it up. Fucking barbecue. What a smell. Jesus lovely Christ, I’ll never forget that smell. The A-6 pilots came in and dropped napalm on the barge until she was nothing but a blackened, smoking hulk. They put a few missiles into her and down she went.”
“Damn,” Menhaus said. “Of all things.”
“You know what?” Saks said to him. “That’s why I hate this fucking hulk, because it smells just like that barge. Like vermin and bones and death.”
22
Of course George didn’t know much about Pollard, thought he’d seen him around on the Mara Corday once or twice, but had never actually spoken to him. It was Gosling’s idea for him to have a chat with Pollard. Pollard needed someone to talk to, a sympathetic ear. That’s what Gosling said. So while the others pulled at the oars, George was sitting with Pollard in the back of the raft.