Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “There’s some bad shit in this place, isn’t there?” he said, trying to break the ice.

  Pollard didn’t even look at him.

  “I hear you were adrift by yourself for a time.”

  Pollard shrugged.

  “Must have been tough being alone out there.”

  Pollard cleared his throat. “I wasn’t alone.”

  Contact. “Who was with you?”

  Pollard looked at him briefly, as if he couldn’t believe George was quite that naive or stupid. And you could almost see it in his eyes: You’re never alone here, George, haven’t you guessed that yet?

  “I went overboard with Gosling. We bobbed around in our lifejackets, Christ, for hours and hours, maybe most of the day… what a day would be back home… and then we found this raft. Thank God for that.”

  He hoped that would be the wedge he’d need with Pollard, but Pollard still said nothing. He just stared off into the fog, now and again squinting his eyes as if he were looking for something, suspicious of something.

  “Whatever you’re looking for,” George said. “You won’t find it out there.”

  That got the thinnest of smiles from Pollard. Other than that, his face was still dead as cemetery marble. His eyes were hollow, blank things which emoted about as much as bullet holes in driftwood. Now and then, his lips quivered as if there was something he really needed to say… but that was about it.

  George gave it another shot. “What is it you hope to see out in that soup?”

  Pollard said nothing.

  Jesus, this guy. Getting into his head was like trying to pick a lock with a hairbrush.

  “Do you know why I’m sitting here with you?”

  That got Pollard’s attention. “Because they told you to.”

  “You’re right,” George said. Maybe being truthful here was the proper tact. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I might have come chatted with you anyway… but, yeah, well, they’re worried about you.”

  Pollard seemed unimpressed by that.

  So George said, “I know Marx has been riding you like… how would he put it? Like a swayback mare? Like a five-dollar mule?”

  Pollard almost smiled at that.

  “Marx is a hard guy, I know that,” George said to him. “Gosling has his moments, too. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them or write them off as assholes. They’re dealing with all this the best way they know how, which is toughening up. They won’t allow weakness in themselves or others. Gosling told me you were in the Coast Guard once. Well, you know how it was in the Coasties, you know how those guys get bullying each other. It’s the same here.”

  Pollard was looking at him now.

  “Sure, think about it. Marx is a tough guy. That’s pretty easy to see just looking at him. Looks like he should be riding with the Hell’s Angels or one of those outlaw biker gangs. He’s not a guy I’d want to piss off. But you know what? You know why he’s riding you?” George asked. “It’s because he’s fucking scared. He’s scared like I’m scared and you’re scared. He just shows it different, is all.”

  Pollard blinked his eyes. “I know.”

  That was something. George worked it, thinking maybe when he got back – if he got back – he was going to get off the construction gangs and become a therapist. George Ryan, blue-collar therapist. The Dr. Phil of the working class. “Sure, you know. Marx is all wigged-out about you and you know why?”

  “Because he’s scared?”

  George shook his head. “Partly… but mostly because there’s only a handful of us. And me, you, Cushing, and Chesbro? We’re the meat of their command, Marx’s and Gosling’s. They need us as much as we need them. They’ve got some ideas on what we’re going to do here and I think they’re pretty good ideas, but without us, they’re screwed and they know it. They need us. And the idea that their command, their crew is disintegrating around them, well, that’s enough to put them over the edge. Do you see?”

  George was just rolling with it, wasn’t even sure he believed everything he was saying, but, dammit, if it all didn’t sound pretty convincing. Regardless, it was enough to begin thawing Pollard a bit. And that was something.

  Pollard didn’t say anything for a few moments, then, “I keep looking out there… I keep looking for Mike.”

  “Mike?”

  Pollard nodded. “Mike Makowyz. We called him ‘Macky’.” Pollard smiled for a moment at the memory of it. “Macky. He was my bunkmate. Me and Macky and another guy, we shared a cabin.”

  “Did he go down with the ship?”

  “No. We both made it off her okay… Mike’s arm, I think it was broken, but other than that he was okay.”

  Pollard opened up then, like a flower he bloomed and let the sunlight in. And once he started, nothing could stop him: “We… me and Mike… we had lifejackets on, we were drifting on a crate. I don’t know how long. Only that we got into the weeds, the real weeds like here, before the rest of you. I don’t know why.”

  “What… what happened to him?” George asked.

  Pollard shook his head, his face sallow and drawn. “We were hearing things… things in the water, other things roaring out in the fog. Awful things. Big things moving out there and roaring… like some sort of prehistoric monsters. We were scared shitless. Mike was thinking we’d went through one of those time warps like in a movie he saw, that maybe we were trapped on the back side of the Jurassic or Triassic or one of those. I thought he was nuts at first, but then.. . well, those sounds, Jesus. I guess I was sort of expecting one of them monsters with the long necks and the big teeth… they got one in Chicago at the Museum there, thing’s gotta be seventy, eighty-feet long, has flippers like a whale… one of those things, those sea serpents to come gliding out of the fog and bite me in half. Christ, I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that I was scared shitless and I couldn’t believe any of it had happened. Maybe I still don’t.”

  George licked his lips. “Did something come out of the fog?”

  But Pollard shook his head. “No, not really. Something came out of the water. Two things came out of the water.”

  “What were they?”

  “They got Mike,” Pollard said, his hands balled into fists now. “They came out of the fucking water and they took him.”

  Pollard started talking fast then, not making a lot of sense to George, but purging what needed purging. He started talking about another guy, someone called Burky. How Burky was a good guy and all the crazy shit Burky would do in port, always with a couple black hookers on his arms, crazy old Burky taking the boys to back room card games and shows with dancing transvestites. How Burky had been on watch and Pollard had come to relieve him right after they went into the fog. And how Burky had been just fine, saying how he was hearing flapping sounds out in the mist like big Jesus birds, joking around about it, but kind of scared, too. And everything was just fine and then Burky lit a cigarette and, bam, something out there… like a bird or a bat with big scaly wings and a sideways beak like a sickle. .. swooped out of the fog and took him right over the side into the mist. Right in front of Pollard. Just goddamn took him and it was like nothing you ever saw in your life. Just swooped down and took him without breaking stride. And Pollard saw it carry him into the mist and the goddamn evil, horrible thing was laughing and laughing.

  “Laughing?” George said, feeling the flesh at his spine moving now.

  And Pollard nodded, his eyes dark as flint. “Yeah, laughing… it was fucking laughing, but an insane, shrieking kind of laugh like a laughing hyena. The sort of sound… just echoing, mocking… Christ…”

  George just sat there, feeling numb, feeling doped-up, unable to say a single comforting or reassuring thing.

  Pollard was breathing hard, squeezing his fists so tightly you could hear the knuckles popping. “And Mike… oh then those things got Mike. That bird just went past me and got Burky, then… then those others, they got Mike, you know? Came right up and got him. Not me, but Mike.”

 
And maybe that was it, George was thinking. Twice now, two of his friends had been snatched away by things and Pollard himself had gotten away without so much as a scratch. Guilt. Maybe that was what was burning a hole through his soul. Guilt. Never him, always his friends.

  George found his voice, said, “What got Mike?”

  Pollard opened his mouth wide, looked like he was going to scream, then his mouth slowly closed as if the jaw muscles were being gradually paralyzed. “That fog, that terrible goddamn fog… you know how it looks? How it’s dirty and vile and polluted-looking and you hate it. Deep-down you just hate that filthy stuff, like smog just hanging there like a fucking blanket. But other times… those sounds, dammit, you’re almost glad it’s there. It hides you, you can hide in it and those things out there, you can’t see them and they can’t see you. Me and Mike… we were hearing those goddamn awful sounds out there. Things screaming and growling, making slobbering sounds like mud sucked through a hose. We didn’t want to know what those things were, we were afraid of what those things would look like

  … what they would do to us…”

  George understood perfectly. “There’s bad things out there.”

  Pollard gripped his arm. “You know? You know what I was thinking while we waited out there? I was thinking… Jesus, it’s crazy.. . but I was just thinking that those things, them eating us wouldn’t be so bad, because there were probably worse things they could do.” Pollard cradled his head in his hands. “But Mike… what got him, it didn’t come out of the fog, it came up out of the water. Out of that slimy, stinking water. They came up quick and I thought, I thought they were people… they looked kind of like people, people covered in seaweed. Green tangles of seaweed. Those faces came out of the water, except they weren’t faces, but weeds, weeds that were alive and crawling like worms. One of them had an eye and that eye looked at me, right at me and it was a human eye, but… but crazy and psychotic, not human any more at all. They wrapped their weedy arms around Mike and Mike fucking screamed and I think I did, too, and those arms… all them weeds coiling and squirming like snakes.. . they pulled Mike down and he never came up. And I waited… yeah, I waited for hours and hours and maybe it was days, I just waited for those hands to take hold of me, those cold and worming hands…”

  Sure, there was guilt and there was horror. There was a lot of horror, George figured. Pollard seeing those weed-people… for lack of a better name… taking Mike like that, taking him down into those black, oozing depths. And then Pollard alone, just waiting and waiting for those hands to take hold of him. Well, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped completely.

  “It’s over and I know it’s over,” Pollard said, somehow defeated and wasted now. “But… I keep thinking I see Mike out there. I think sometimes I hear him calling to me…”

  George said, “We all hear things out there. But none of it’s real. Maybe it’s in our heads and maybe it’s something toying with us, but it can’t be real unless we make it real. We believe. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Just take it easy,” George told him. “If you see anything or hear anything at all, just call me over, okay? I’ve seen things, too. We all have.”

  George went and spelled Cushing at the oars and Pollard did the same for Chesbro. He was feeling pretty good, feeling like maybe he had some sort of sympathetic gift here. He could pull guys out of their shells and maybe, just maybe, he could even talk monster jellyfish out of eating people in rafts.

  “Well?” Gosling said.

  “He went through some bad shit,” George told him. “I think he’ll be okay. But you might want to tell Marx to go easy on him.”

  “Already did,” Gosling said. “Thanks, George.”

  George just smiled, thinking, well that’s my place in all this, I suppose. Marx is the engineer and Gosling is in charge, Chesbro’s the minister and Cushing is the scientist. Me? I’m the therapist.

  Christ, of all things.

  23

  Menhaus had been watching the candle burn down. Watching the wax run down the stem and pool at the base. He kept thinking that all he really wanted to do was to keep that candle burning. Somewhere during the process, he must have dozed off even though he had pretty much given up on sleep now as an impossibility. Yet, it had happened.

  It must have happened.

  For the next thing he knew his eyes were opening and he was seeing not the candle, but Makowski standing there, head cocked like a dog listening for its master. He seemed to be swaying on his feet to some unheard music.

  Or was it unheard?

  Menhaus was hearing something, he thought. But something distant, a sound, a melody… but coming from far away and resonating only in the back of his head.

  “Slim,” he found himself saying. “Slim… what the hell are you doing?”

  But Makowski did not answer.

  He was staring at the door, hearing something that seemed to be intended only for him. His mental shortwave had locked onto some channel and that was obvious. He was receiving and the rest of the world had ceased to exist for him.

  Menhaus turned and looked over at Saks.

  “Yeah, I’m awake,” Saks said. “The only one sleeping here is Slim Loony, I think.”

  And it did look like he was sleeping. Drugged or hypnotized, the way sleepwalkers often looked, that morphic gleam to their eyes. Makowski looked much like that. His eyes were fixed and staring, he was rubbing his hands against his legs. His conscious mind was locked-up in a box somewhere and his subconscious was at the wheel now.

  Menhaus knew they always said you weren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but it was probably just one of those old wife’s tales, a whaddyacallit, urban legend.

  No, he thought, I won’t wake him… unless he makes for that door.

  “What do you think?” he whispered to Saks.

  Saks just shrugged. He didn’t give a shit one way or another.

  Makowski just stood there, listening.

  Menhaus thought he was hearing that sound again… or was he? A weird, uncanny humming or was it a whistling? He could just hear it, but not clearly enough to decipher its nuances, its rhythm and flow, not enough so that he could say without a doubt that, yes, he was hearing it.

  He looked over at Saks and Saks had his knife out, like he was expecting trouble. His eyes were narrowed, his teeth set.

  “What’s going on here?” Menhaus said, because he knew something was. The atmosphere of the cabin had never been exactly cheerful and sunny, but right then it had gone positively bleak, crawling with something. A something you could sense, could feel like poison in your blood.

  Saks waited, drew out that silence, said, “There’s someone out in the corridor.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “There is,” Saks said with complete certainty. His eyes were filled with a dim, brooding light. Maybe it was just candlelight reflected and maybe it was something more. “There’s someone out there waiting for Makowski. He can hear it, whoever it is… he can hear it just fine.”

  Menhaus swallowed, had trouble doing so.

  Sure, he was picking up on it now, too. He wanted badly to tell Saks how wrong he was, but it just wasn’t in him. Because he was hearing something… a creaking or groaning out in the corridor and that sound, subtle as it was, set him on edge. Made his nerve endings tingle and the muscles of his abdomen pull up tight. More than just an old ship settling, more than just a creaking or groaning… this was the sound of occupancy, of someone waiting in the dankness out there. A secretive sound, one that was calculating and deceitful… and disturbing because of it.

  Like someone sneaking into your house in the dead of night to steal your children or slit your throat, Menhaus thought.

  He did not like it at all.

  Makowski went to the door and stopped. Just stood there dumbly like a zombie in a canefield awaiting his orders. Menhaus sat up now, careful to make no sound whatsoever. And he thought: C’
mon, Slim, don’t open that door, please don’t open that door… I don’t want to see what’s out there…

  “Saks-”

  “Shut up,” Saks snapped, but under his breath, trying damn hard to be quiet.

  And now Menhaus knew why that was.

  There was a very good reason to be quiet.

  Because he was hearing it fine now, too. You could call it a humming or a whistling or even a singing, because it seemed to be all these things. It was a woman’s voice, high-pitched and piping. A discordant and vapid melody that rose and fell, an eerie off-key wailing that sounded hollow and distant and haunted… like a little girl’s voice echoed through the ductwork of a house, becoming something metallic and jangling and oddly perverse.

  It created a tension in Menhaus, he felt his muscles bunch and his jaw clench tight. He thought it was the voice of an insane woman mourning at her child’s grave in a windy, midnight cemetery. For nothing sane could sound like this… it was the voice of something that crawled in dark places, hid in shadows.

  Makowski reached up for the latch and undid it.

  The sound of scraping metal was thunderous in the silence.

  And a crazy voice in Menhaus’ head said: He’s just going to take a piss or something. That’s all it is. Nothing more than that.

  But dear God, Menhaus did not believe it, for Makowski was bewitched by that strident melancholy wailing, he was being summoned and there was no way around that.

  Saks was holding his knife now, gripping it tightly.

  There was a momentary sound from down the corridor… a skittering, scratching sound.

  Menhaus felt unreality settle into him, because this was how the human mind processed abject, overwhelming terror: It shut down and refused to believe the madness its senses fed it. And maybe his mind would not accept, but his heart believed with a black certainty. For he could feel it at his spine, a cold and prickling horror that electrified his ganglia.