Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  Then Gosling was put over the side in his weighted shroud. At first, he just languished on the weed and George thought, with a terrible sinking feeling inside him, that the body would never sink. It would lodge itself right there and make him look at it day by day. .. but then, slowly, it melted into the weed and the last remains of Paul Gosling, first mate of the Mara Corday, sank from view and something in George sank with them.

  As George watched the body disappear, he kept thinking: Message in a bottle, message in a bottle.

  14

  When Cushing saw the boat, it took his breath away.

  For one crazy, reeling moment he thought it was bearing down on them, a ghost ship coming at them out of the weed. But it wasn’t moving. It was just dead and vacant-looking, another derelict caught in the creeping weed of the ship’s graveyard. Ribbons and filaments of mist were rising from its decks and derricks as if it were exhaling pale swamp vapors. It was an old wooden purse seiner with a black, scathed hull and a white wheelhouse that had gone gray and dingy with mildew. Her prow was sharp, looked like it could slit open the underbelly of the weed quick as a razor… but beyond that, it was simply dead.

  Forgotten.

  Abandoned.

  Cushing saw it there in the fog and he could tell right away that Elizabeth wanted no part of it. The way she looked at it and then at him, told him that this vessel was shunned like the neighborhood haunted house. And it did look haunted. More than just empty. Occupied somehow, but not lived-in.

  Day had broke now… what day there was in the Dead Sea… and Cushing had joined Elizabeth on one of her little expeditions in the graveyard. She had shown him the old barge where she tended her gardens, the freighters which had more fresh water in their tanks than you could drink in a lifetime. And now, there was this old fishing boat, a sixty-eight footer of the sort that had not been seen in years. Cushing was willing to bet her keel had been laid back in the 1920s.

  “We should get back,” was all Elizabeth would say.

  But Cushing had no intention of leaving. He was standing there in the scow with her, one of the flat-bladed poles in his hands. “Tell me about that boat,” he said.

  “Just another wreck.”

  “No, it’s not. I can see it in your eyes… this one is different. What’s its story?”

  She just stood there a moment, like maybe she was trying to come up with something good that he would believe and would get them out of there and back to the Mystic. Finally, she sighed. “It’s… it’s where the Hermit lives. It’s his boat.”

  “The Hermit?”

  She nodded. “Some old man. He was here when we first got here. He doesn’t like people much. He has a gun.”

  But, for some reason, Cushing wasn’t buying that. “Have you ever talked to him?”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “And he was here when you got here?”

  “Yes.”

  Which, of course, added fuel to Cushing’s time-distortion theory. If Elizabeth and the others had arrived here in 1907 and this boat was already here, something that looked like it couldn’t be any older than the ‘20s, then it all came together, didn’t it? This fishing boat was built much later than the ship that had brought Elizabeth’s people to the seaweed sea… yet it had arrived before them.

  “I want to board her,” Cushing said. “I want to talk to this Hermit.”

  “Mr. Cushing, please…”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  Cushing smiled.

  Elizabeth frowned.

  Standing there, seeing it in the weed like that, all wrapped up in tissues of mist, it did look like a haunted house jutting from some overgrown, neglected yard. It was big and ghostly and soundless, the wheelhouse windows boarded shut, the bowline hung with a caul of weed. The decks were wreathed with shadows, a mat of fungus growing up over the aft stanchions and winches. There was a lot of wreckage on the foredeck… metal and fused plastic and all manner of debris that were blackened as if by a fire.

  Cushing just watched it, let it fill him up. It was just another boat, yet he was certain that it was saying something to him.

  “Let’s take a look,” he said.

  She shook her head and they began to pole through the weeds until they were close enough that he could grab hold of her bulwarks and pull them along side.

  Cushing pulled himself up and over the railing. The decks were moist and slimy and he almost went on his ass. The planking creaked beneath his weight, but held okay. Elizabeth tossed him a line and he tied off the scow to the fencerail. He helped her aboard, but she was very strong and lithe and didn’t seem to need his help. She looked nervous, uncomfortable, something. Her right hand clutched the hilt of the machete she wore at her waist.

  “He won’t like us being here,” she said.

  Cushing stood there, feeling the boat under him and around him and he was certain that it was empty. There was nothing here but memory. He could feel it.

  He moved forward, up around the mast tower, and up the short steps to the wheelhouse door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing.. . just the echo of his rapping knuckles inside, but nothing else. The door opened with a grating, groaning sound. It was dark and grainy inside. He found a lantern and lit it. Better. The Hermit had turned the wheelhouse into his quarters. There was a cot along one wall, books piled on the floor and in shelves. There was a writing desk scattered with papers and a table crowded with old charts. It smelled like an old library in there, like musty pages and rotting bindings.

  Cushing went to the chart table.

  Most of the charts were of the Atlantic, the Cape Hatteras region. But there was one that was not. It was hand-drawn. He studied it carefully in the lantern’s light. The longer he studied it, the more excited he became. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

  Elizabeth looked at it. “Yes,” was all she would say.

  It was a map of the ship’s graveyard rendered very carefully in ink. It was very detailed, though uncompleted, and must have taken years. Apparently the Hermit had spent his time exploring the wrecks and he had put all their names down. “By God, look at these names.. . the Enchantress, the Proteus, the Wasp, the Atlanta, the Raifuku Maru, the City of Glasgow… these are all famous disappearances tied in with the Devil’s Triangle.”

  “The what?” Elizabeth said.

  Cushing just shook his head. “Nothing.” He was going over that chart. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships listed, from old galleons to modern container ships. Many were named, others were tagged as “Unknown”. The Hermit had sketched out where the weed was thickest, where the greatest fields of wreckage were to be found, places nearly impassable on account of the great concentration of wrecks. To what would have been east and west on a normal chart were just labeled UNKNOWN or UNEXPLORED. Some ships and some areas of the weed were tagged with skulls and crossbones.

  “What do you suppose that means?” he asked Elizabeth.

  She studied the chart. “I can’t say what all of them mean… but this one -” she put her finger on one labeled UNKNOWN BARK – “I think… yes… I think this is the one the squid lives in. In the bottom.”

  So, then, that made sense. The skulls and crossbones indicated dangerous places. Other ships were marked with circles. The Mystic was marked thus and Cushing figured it meant that they were occupied. There weren’t many marked such. The Hermit had marked the open channels through the weed, the location of planes including what Cushing thought was the C-130. At the southern edge of the weed, was written SEA OF MISTS. And beneath that, OPEN SEA. In the latter there was a red X. It was large and circled several times.

  “This must be where he figured he arrived,” Cushing said. “Probably where the vortex dumped him. I bet that’s where we came in, too.”

  There was a dotted line leading from the red X to a smaller black X that was labeled Ptolemy, which must have been the name of the Hermit’s boat and its position in the weed.

  As Cushing went through
the ships, he found dozens of others he had heard of or read about, famous vanishings. About midway into the Sea of Mists, the derelicts were more spread out. But he found the Cyclops, a Navy collier that had disappeared during the First World War. It was marked with a skull and crossbones. To the north of the ship’s graveyard, the derelicts were fewer and the Hermit had marked channels cut through the weed that led to an area of what might have been open water. This was labeled OUTER SEA, and just about everything up there was tagged as being unknown or unexplored. Except, at the upper edge was another seaweed bank with a long rectangle lodged at its lower extremity, indicating a ship. S.S. Lancet, it said. There were a few other wrecks, most unnamed. Above the Lancet was what appeared to be another seaweed sea with wrecks, most of them labeled as being unexplored or unknown. And just above this, SEA OF VEILS. The Hermit had put a series of skulls and crossbones here. Whatever was up there, it must have been pretty damn bad.

  “What do you make of this?” Cushing asked her.

  Elizabeth didn’t even look where he was pointing. She just shrugged.

  “And the Lancet?”

  She sighed. “I’ve never been up there. It’s some kind of huge sailing ship… a ghost ship, my uncle said. Nobody comes back from up there.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Let’s just go,” she said, avoiding the question.

  Cushing rolled up the chart and went over to the writing desk. All the papers were covered in weird notations and complex mathematical symbols. Some of it looked like geometry or possibly calculus. There were dozens of pages like this. Cushing was starting to wonder if this guy was just some lost fisherman or possibly something else entirely. He didn’t suppose he’d ever know for sure.

  He opened the desk drawers and found a. 45 Colt auto. It was well-oiled and maintained. He ejected the magazine from the butt and it was fully-loaded. In the top drawer, there was a letter that went on for several pages in a cramped, economical script.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  Elizabeth pretended interest. “We’d better go.”

  But Cushing wasn’t going. Not yet. He began to read:

  December 2, Year Unknown

  To whom it may concern,

  I, like you, have been trapped in this abominable place for more years than I would care to admit. But unlike you, my exile into this void has been self-imposed. Yes, that is true… I chose to come here.

  Allow me to explain. I was part of a group of scholars and researchers, yes, mathematicians and physicists and quantum theorists, who had long been aware of the time/space anomalies associated with the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area. Betydon, Connors, Imab, and myself. We had long studied these aberrations… though privately, to avoid the ridicule often associated with such things publicly. Publicly, I say for each of us were at one time involved in what the ONR, the Office of Naval Research, called Project Neptune. Which was and is (I imagine) an ongoing investigation into sundry and shadowy areas of theoretical physics with potential marine/military applications. The group I and the others were involved in were concerned with the aforementioned time/space anomalies. The Neptune Project, of course, is highly classified. But I see no reason not to violate my loyalty oath here. At any rate, our little group studied these things privately after leaving the ONR. We called our little inquiry the Procyon Project. Now, after long years of formulating countless hypotheses (basically, a furtherance of what we had been doing with Neptune), we decided it was time to test our theories. I won’t go into all of it. Just let me say, that we were proven correct and pulled into this place.

  Connors died in the Sea of Mists, attacked by some type of sea monster. And the others? Well, I won’t go into it. I’ll only say that we were reconnoitering the Sea of Veils and particularly the S.S. Lancet, a vessel lost in this place in the 1850s and certainly the mother of all cursed ships.

  Regardless, I am as surely marooned here as you are.

  But what is this place? Where is this place? How can it possibly be? You may well wonder and it has taken me some years to put together the pieces of this puzzle and, even now, much of what I know or think I know is pure speculation ranging from the informed to the fantastic to the downright absurd. Before you toss aside this letter, this confession, and call me a crazy man, I think you owe it to yourself to read on.

  First off, understand that if you are here – in this place – then you have undergone what could be deemed hyperdimensional travel. More on that later. No doubt you arrived here by passing into what appeared to be a cloud or fogbank which was luminous. As you may or may not know such phenomena has been reported for a great many years in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area, a place where curvature of space and time is most pronounced. And your ship or plane was, of course, somewhere in this somewhat vast geographical area. The cloud you saw, were pulled into, was actually a sort of matter-energy vortex, a warp or rift in the space-time continuum. To understand how such a thing could be, let me touch on 4 ^th dimensional space a moment. You are probably familiar… or maybe not… with the three dimensions of space – x, y, and z – which are mathematical representations of the perpendicular dimensions of length, width, and depth. Now into this, let us factor in t, which is time, the 4 ^th dimension, and is perpendicular to the other three. Time is not lineal, but cyclical, looping over itself. Imagine a helix and you’ll grasp the general idea. Before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, according to classical mechanics time was an absolute, but we now understand it to be fluid.

  What does this have to do with anything? Well, when you passed through said vortex, you were actually passing through the Fourth Dimension. The dimension of time. Though the actual travel time through fourth dimensional space seemed minute to you… you will recall the sudden lack of air, the momentary derangement of gravitational forces as you passed through… probably seconds or minutes at most in your memory, thousands of years may have passed on earth or time may not have passed at all. It may have moved in reverse from your point of entry. Anything is possible.

  Trust me, I am doing my utmost not to bore you to tears with celestial mechanics and quantum theory.

  Where are you? You are in another spatial dimension, possibly a fractal which, according to non-Euclidian geometry, cannot be assigned a whole number. It would be represented not as the third, fourth, or fifth dimension, but as the 3.5 dimension or the 4.1 dimension etc. At any rate, as I said, you are in a spatial dimension far from home. How far? So very distant it probably could not be measured even in parsecs. Yet… through 4 ^th dimensional space… quite close. Einstein explained in his Theory of Relativity that dimensions or worlds could exist side by side, yet be invisible to one another because they occupy different planes of space. But why are they invisible? Probably for the same reason that if you were suddenly transported to, say, the 5 ^th dimension… and you may be there now… you would not be aware of it. Why? Because you are a three-dimensional creature who is designed by evolution only to detect the three dimensions of length, width, and depth. You do not have the necessary sensory apparatus to detect anything else. Confused? Excellent. Now this spatial dimension or fractal that you are in is a universe unto itself. In that, yes, you are on a planet which no doubt circles an alien star in some unknown void of space. Likewise, this star… though I’ve never seen it through the cloud cover, but do feel its heat… is part of a galaxy which is part of a universe in some deadend space that can probably only be represented mathematically. You’ve probably seen our two moons, but I believe there is a third. My studies of the orbital paths of the other two suggest a third satellite. No matter. We are on a planet with moons and a star somewhere out there. The day here lasts anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-three hours, the night thirty-six to forty-five. This anomaly may be in flux due to the unstable field of this dimension or due to seasonal changes or, perhaps, because that time in this place is distorted from what we know.

  But you’re probably asking yourself how one dimension can possibly
link with another. To understand how such things can exist, let us picture the birth of the universe – the so-called Big Bang. Evidence suggests that the universe as we understand it was born out of what physicists call a “singularity”. A speck of infinite density occupying zero volume. Boggles the mind, don’t it? Now in the first split-second of the Big Bang, this point of infinite density – which contained all the mass and energy that would become the universe-underwent an exponential diffusion or expansion, an inflation of sorts. This diffusion or explosion created matter, time, space, energy, everything known and more that aren’t. Now this primordial explosion is not simply three-dimensional, but multi-dimensional, and thus creates not only our universe, but all of multi-dimensional space in one fell swoop. This explosion or implosion, would create an endless number of spatial dimensions… those of real space and those of hyperspace.

  Now, if you are from the “modern” world… I use this loosely, as I left earth as such in 1983… then you are familiar with black holes. A black hole or “singularity” is created when a large star exhausts its nuclear fuel and implodes, collapses into its own intense gravity. This singularity becomes a sort of matter-energy whirlpool which sucks in anything, even light, and cycles it somewhere else. It may implode on our end, but explode open somewhere else. These singularities, in essence, may become wormholes, passages from one spatial dimension to another. Many cosmologists believe that the known universe is but one of countless parallel universes, sort of like an unknown number of soap bubbles suspended in mid-air. Normally, these universes or dimensions would be out of reach of one another, but according to Einstein’s equations, there may be a series of tubes or channels – wormholes – that connect these universes. Technically, these wormholes would be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, tunnels that connect two distant spheres of time-space. And you, my friend, have proven their existence for you have passed through one!