After the sun was well up the next day I warily ventured back to the scene of the previous night’s horror, and found the man’s fresh white skeleton, picked quite clean. Upon finishing their ghoulish feast the creatures had, fortunately, vanished elsewhere. I disposed of the grim remains over the side, then came to realize with a shudder that I was the only one up and about. I went below, forward to the forecastle where the other three hands were quartered.
It was dark and musty, as most of the hatches leading up to the light and fresh air were battened down. I approached the doorway cautiously and with a heightening sense of apprehension resolved not to enter the compartment, but merely called out loudly to my mates. There was no answer from within save for a tell-tale scurrying noise. I backed away, noticing for the first time on the floor at my feet the multitudes of sluglike tracks and slimy trails of bloody mucus extending off in all directions.
With skin suddenly acrawl, I retreated quickly and returned aft, bringing myself up to the old man’s cabin door. Knocking repeatedly, calling to him in a tone of growing alarm, he finally responded. He sounded distracted, distant and hoarse, betraying a note of terrified resignation beyond despair.
“Go away!” he croaked. “Leave me be.”
“But sir,” said I, “you did not answer, and the others ...”
“I am fine,” he snapped, his voice rising to an angry tremor. “—Begone with you!”
Confused and concerned, I withdrew to my cabin for the remainder of the day, feeling increasingly helpless, a chilling and forlorn weight upon my shoulders. Then, at about dusk, I was startled by the loud report of a pistol from the old man’s stateroom, and frantically bolted through the main cabin into his sleeping quarters. My shock was complete when I found him on his berth, having just put a ball of lead through his brain. Blood was everywhere and almost at once I detected a movement to my right, turning so to encounter not one but several of the creatures scuttling swiftly through his cabin toward where the dead man lay.
Fully fearing now for my own life, I fled to my cabin and thought quickly. Doubtless these demons would soon be upon me as well, lest I acted shrewdly and with haste. This room had no door, but rather a makeshift curtain that could be drawn. With desperation born of fear, I struck on the idea of prying loose my bunk and positioned its frame and pallet upright across the doorway. It was a thin and relatively flimsy obstacle, though I pushed a heavy sea-chest against it for additional support.
Wiping my brow of the perspiration there, like warm rivulets of fear, I became painfully cognizant of how cramped and inadequate my refuge was, and somehow cold as a crypt.
The night slowly ebbed away, merciless in its eternity. I am the lone survivor of an entire crew of ablebodied men, and a hideous death creeps on the other side of my temporary barricade. In these long, darkling hours I have screwed up my courage and set to pondering as objectively as possible my dire state of affairs, ever mindful of the fearsome skittering and chewing sounds issuing from immediately outside my cabin. We have inadvertently brought these accursed creatures up from the bottom of the sea, and there appears to be no alternative but to send them back whence they came. My plan is simple yet perilous. If, at dawn’s first light, I can dash across the galley and the length of the steerage, and can hurl a well-aimed, burning oil-lamp into the blubber room, the greasy tryworks will ignite instantly and burn fiercely, the conflagration hopefully consuming everything on her before she goes down. And, saints willing, I can escape speedily up through the main hatch and take some substantial jetsam overboard with me onto which I can cling.
Our first mate kept the ship’s log, and since his death the old man had assigned me to keep the daily entries, my being learned of books. I have been previously too preoccupied by the calamity of the past few days to do so, but now bring everything to date, and leave this journal as both witness and warning, in the event something goes awry. I pray no one ever need find this, that I am successful in my mission and the Reaper is consigned to her watery grave.
Alas, I feel the time has come. I go now, to do what must be done.
In his gloomy cabin aboard the Jezebel, Captain Seabury finished reading this last line of script and slowly closed the log. Morbid recollections of the pitiful skeleton at the foot of the steerage companionway, with the shattered oil-lamp beneath it, flickered ominously in the dark recesses of his mind. And now he comprehended with dawning horror the full implications of the strange account he had just read. The night had almost slipped by, like a thief, unnoticed. In less than two hours it would be daybreak, the men preparing to transfer the oil from the Reaper. He was but a fool—damn the oil! Orders must be given immediately to torch the nightmare ship and cast loose before it was too late.
All at once he heard a terrified scream from somewhere on board his own ship, touching every inch of his body with fear. This was promptly followed by another, and then he cleared the paralyzing fog in his head long enough to realize that this second came from his own throat.
Indeed, for something large, wet, and cold was slowly crawling up his leg ...
DEAD WEEK by Leonard Carpenter
Born in Chicago in 1948, Leonard Carpenter grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended college at Berkeley—an experience which furnished the background to “Dead Week.” Says Carpenter: “There’s a certain pressurized intensity to student life, when we’re still finding out whether we’re viable human beings or not, which all of us share to some extent. It’s a time of great discovery and of great dread; I hope the story conveys it.”
“Dead Week” is Carpenter’s first professional sale, followed by “The Ebbing” in Writers of the Future. Just now he is under contract to write new Conan novels for Tor Books; his first two, Conan the Renegade and Conan the Raider, have recently come out. Carpenter now lives with his wife and twin daughters in Santa Maria, California. He hopes to make writing a full-time career.
From 6:00 P.M. until 11:00 P.M., Cassy slept the sleep of the hunted. She awoke still dressed, stiff and cold on her cot, and lay for a long time in a semicomatose state watching the ghosts of car lights creep across the ceiling.
Sleeping odd hours was a method she used to cope with her roommates’ erratic study habits, and their taste for bluegrass music played loud and long. Now the house below her was finally quiet. The long night lay ahead for a last-ditch effort to prepare for finals next week.
Cassy couldn’t understand why no one else ever needed to study. Between her full load of classes, the cafeteria job to supplement her meager scholarship, and the lab requirements for the advanced biology program, she had no time left. The endless talking, socializing, and kicking back that the others engaged in were luxuries she couldn’t afford. By accepting a steep increase in rent she had managed to get a room to herself—not a room really, just a cramped vestibule atop the back stairway, probably rented out in violation of fire regulations. But she needed it to study in peace.
Her first task, the one she had been dreading, was to clean off her desk. It was an unexplored drift of papers reflecting the disorder of her own mind—books, lecture notes, handouts, reading lists, and who-knew-what-else dumped there in moments of exhaustion during the semester. Now she would need to review all her course requirements in order to cram efficiently. She dragged herself up, switched on the naked bulb overhead, plugged in her coffee pot, and went to work.
The job went faster than she expected. Most of the papers could be arranged by course number and date or thrown away. The notes were legible, if sparse, and she had really only fallen behind in her reading a few weeks before—so maybe things weren’t so bad.
Then she found something. Near the bottom of the mess was a pink, printed card with the hours and days of a week blocked out like a calendar, bearing the motto “Courtesy of the Berkeley Student Bookstore.” The card itself wasn’t strange—the times of Cassy’s classes, labs, and work shifts were sketched into it with the care of someone mapping out a glorious new life, long before it tur
ned into a murderous routine.
The strange thing was that on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at 3:00 P.M.—right in the middle of her cherished library study time—were penciled blocks labeled “Demo 168.”
It looked like her writing, but it puzzled her. She certainly wasn’t taking any courses in demonology. Maybe it was demolitions—she laughed, thinking that would make a good poli-sci course. On an impulse she picked up her dog-eared schedule and directory and thumbed through the alphabetical listings. There it was, in tiny computer print, underscored in red pencil. “Demography Dept.—Demo 168—133 Dwindle Hall—TTh 3.”
Intrigued and a little disturbed, she plunged into the thick yellow course catalog. “Demography 168.3 units. The Limits of Population. An exploration of the theoretical and practical limits to population growth, with special emphasis on the roles of birth and death controls in restoring equilibrium. Professors Thayer and Munck.”
Slowly, with the elusive quality of a dream, it came back to her. She had indeed considered taking the course in February, nearly five months before. She’d even attended one or two lectures. The subject had sounded interesting—and relevant, she had thought, to the populations of microbes she would be working with in bio. She’d heard that it was a smart precaution to sign up for extra classes in case your first preferences were too crowded.
But the professor had indicated that the course would focus on human populations, using a social-science approach. That was the main reason Cassy had dropped it.
At least she seemed to recall dropping it. She began hunting through the desk drawers. There it was—the green carbon copy of the enrollment card, signed by her faculty advisor. As she read it her heart plunged and her fingertips felt numb. It listed five courses; the fifth one was Demo 168.
But that was crazy! How could she be taking a course without even knowing it? She was sure she hadn’t bought any of the texts—at some point she must have just stopped attending and forgotten all about it.
Frantically she searched through the last of the clutter on the desktop. A single sheet, mimeographed in pale purple, came to light. It read, “Demography 168—Course Requirements. The grade will be based sixty percent on the final exam and forty percent on the term paper, to be handed in at the last class meeting. Lecture attendance is recommended. Required reading: Man against the Ceiling by Storvich and Smith, Sutton House, 1973; The Dynamics of Death Control by E. C. Festung, 1978 ed.; Sower and Reaper by G. Hofstaedler, Vendome, 1979. Additional readings to be assigned periodically.”
Cassy felt a great, sinking despair. The chance of catching up so late in the semester was nil. She would have to request some kind of administrative relief. Whether it would affect her scholarship, she didn’t know.
There was certainly nothing to be done so late at night—and no one she could talk to. She tried to study for other classes, but thoughts of the phantom class kept twisting through her brain. As the night dragged on she accomplished nothing more. Sleep was unattainable.
The most upsetting thing was the realization of her own mental lapse—somehow, under all the demands and stress, her mind had slipped gears. Was it the first time? Would it be the last?
The Berkeley campus seemed deserted the following day as Cassy walked to the Admin Building. Dead Week, students called it—week of anguished repentance for thoughtless months of procrastination. The sky was steely gray with the fog that can make San Francisco Bay summers colder than its winters. Swishing sprinklers transected the lawns.
Cassy’s route passed Barrows Hall, the eight-story math building. She involuntarily glanced at the demolished shrub where a grad student had dived from the roof a few days before. He had been the second suicide to choose the boxlike building this term, the fourth this school year. They were keeping the roof doors locked now.
Sproul Hall loomed impassive on the left, seemingly built of sugar cubes. The plaza wasn’t deserted—its bizarre bazaar never ceased. Two die-hard disc throwers, a vagrant guitar player, a revivalist preacher ranting to nobody, and an odd assortment of street people were all doing their things. Cassy hurried through. Somehow the sight of the anonymous social transactions taking place here only intensified her loneliness.
Cassy had friendships, of course—smooth working relationships with the people in her major, her job, and her house. But she felt there was some kind of sustenance she wasn’t getting. She knew that she didn’t fit the conventional beauty standard; the schoolkid puns about “Cassy’s chassis” had stopped being funny after her chassis became a little too stout for most boys’ liking. And though she had definitely and finally determined that she was not “pigfaced,” it was depressing to have to remind herself of it each time she looked into a mirror.
Not that she wanted a delirious romance. Her schedule didn’t allow for it. Summer loomed ahead, with two accelerated class sessions, more hours at the cafeteria, and a visit or possibly two with her mom. She would have liked to do more dating and partying, but lately the guys who approached her always seemed a little slimy. “Let’s talk about you,” they said; “Tell me about yourself”—willing to give only as much as they absolutely had to. Their attention shifted too easily. The latest one, Howie, had been that way. He had left a message for her a few weeks ago, but she had forgotten to return his call.
Inside Sproul Hall there were long lines at the administration window in spite of Dead Week—students fighting their bureaucratic battles to the bitter end. No one in her line said anything to her; Cassy vainly opened up her biochem text and stared at the chapter on protein synthesis.
When her turn came she tried to explain her situation. The clerk, a bored girl who looked younger than Cassy herself, pointed to an orange bulletin under the glass countertop. “I’m sorry, the last day to add or drop classes was March third.”
“But I never really took this class. I mean, I didn’t mean to!” She felt herself getting in deeper. “I don’t need it ... I only took it by mistake.”
“I’m sorry. The only way to drop now would be to withdraw from the University.” The girl peered over Cassy’s shoulder to summon the next one in line.
“But that’s impossible ... my other classes. My scholarship! I want to talk to someone else, please.”
“You could ask the instructor for a grade of Incomplete.”
“Please let me talk to someone else.”
“Very well. You’ll have to make an appointment to see the dean. His office is on the second floor, in front of you as you leave the stairwell. Next.”
After waiting in the dean’s anteroom and making an appointment for the following day, Cassy didn’t have time to go home before her work shift. Instead she went to the Graduate Social Sciences Library in Stevens Hall. There, at the back of a yellow-lit aisle in the soundless stacks, she was able to find one of the books on the Demo 168 reading list, the Festung text. It was a hardcover maroon volume two inches thick, and it looked as if no one had ever opened it. The glossy pages were densely printed, with graphs of sociological data.
The chapter titles made it sound pretty heavy: “Nature’s Inexorable Balance,” “Death Controls Versus Human Ingenuity,” “The Pathology of Crowding,” “The Role of the Unconscious,” and so on. The graphs dealt mainly with crime rates and deaths from various causes as functions of population density, in an endless series of uptailing curves. The prose was impenetrable—written in Berkeleyese, a pretentious academic style that tries earnestly to make itself immune to all criticism and ends up qualifying itself into meaningless obscurity.
Typical social sciences material, Cassy thought. There was no hope of making sense of it without the lectures and the teacher’s help, if she did end up having to do the coursework.
That was one reason Cassy had majored in biology. It had no shortage of cumbersome facts and figures to grapple with, but there was also the laboratory work—real, concrete procedures that could show the truth or untruth of the theories in solid, life-or-death terms. She was good in the lab, and it was
largely on the strength of this aptitude that she’d been accepted into the advanced bio program.
Of course, it had put unexpected demands on her time and cut into her other activities—but she didn’t mind. It made her feel good to be valued as a researcher. Much of it was routine work and errand-girl stuff—growing and feeding cultures, caring for test animals, and delivering specimens—still, she was learning a great deal about immunology research. Some of it was quite advanced; she suspected that the lab programs were tied to defense—though her instructors would never admit that, with the current sentiment on campus.
Returning home in a haze of fatigue, Cassy cut across the grassless front lawn and climbed the porch steps of her house. It was a worn, gaudily-painted Victorian perched on a roaring one-way street. The front door stood open and an acrid smell drifted out. She headed down the hall, past the communal kitchen, and heard voices raised.
“There she goes now.” It was an angry-sounding female, Vickie or Connie, speaking from one of the rooms. An intense murmur interrupted her, and then the voice shrilled, “Well, somebody’s got to tell the creep!”
Cassy turned as Dave’s tee-shirted figure, built square for soccer, appeared in the kitchen doorway. His face was set grimly. “Cassy, come here.” He jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen.
Cassy complied. Dave stepped back to reveal the room. The acrid smell was heavier here, and the ceiling was smoke-stained. The blackened, ill-scrubbed stove with scorched and blistered cabinets above it resembled an altar.
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