The Hanck ships were famous—or was it notorious? They were old Fore River ships, well-deck tankers. They were dirty and unseaworthy, and they were hungry ships and paid ordinary seaman’s wages to their petty officers, grading it on down from there. Twenty-eight lousy dollars a month. No overtime. Eighty-six-day runs.
Barry got up one elbow and said half to himself, “What did I do—ask for this job?”
The other man rolled out and sat on the edge of his bunk, putting on a tankerman’s safety shoes. “Damfino. Did you ever meet a guy called Zilio?”
“Ah—Yeah.”
The man nodded. “There you are then, shipmate. He gave you a drink. You passed out. You wake up aboard this oil can. That’s Zilio’s business.”
“Why the dirty—I’m a union member! I’ll tie this ship up! I’ll have her struck! I’ll report her to the Maritime Commission! I’ll—”
The other man rose and came across the fo’c’s’le to lean his elbows on Barry’s bunk and breathe his gingivitis into Barry’s face. “You’ll do your work and shut up. When you sober up enough to look around, you’ll find out you’re sailing without seaman’s papers. If you’re a good boy and play along with the seahorse that calls himself a chief mate, you’ll get them back. Step off the straight and narrow and you’ll be beached somewhere without your livin’. An’ listen—better dry up with that union talk. You got picked up by a fink-herder and shipped on a fink ship. They don’t go for that around here, that fellow-worker stuff.”
“Yeah?” Barry swung his feet over the side of the bunk and had to clutch his pounding head. “I’ll jump ship in Panama! We got to go through the canal!”
“Ain’t nobody jumpin’ no ship in Panama nowadays, friend. They’ll send out a fifth-colyum alarm fer you from the ship an’ you’ll spend somethin’ like fifty years in a military bastille. Besides—time you get to Colon you won’t want to be jumpin’ ship. Better cool off now. G’wan back to sleep. I got the eight to twelve. You got the twelve to four.”
So Barry went back to work again. He spent his days and nights in the utmost misery. The packing around the posthole beside his bunk had kicked out some years ago, and every time the weather got a little drafty, his bunk shipped water. The food was atrocious, and the crew was composed of bootblacks, kids on vacation, ex-tenant farmers, and one or two bonafide seamen like himself, either outright finks or shanghaied wrecks. But all of this didn’t stack up to his horrors. They persisted and they grew.
It isn’t often a man gets them that badly, but then it isn’t often that a man lets himself get into the state that Barry was in. He walked in a narrowing circle of ravenous beasts. When he slept he dreamed horrible dreams, and when he lay awake he could feel tiny, cold, wet feet crawling over his body. He was afraid to stand a lookout watch by himself, and the mate had to batten down his ears for him before he would go out to the fo’c’s’le head at night. He was dead sure that there was something horrible hiding in the anchor engine, ready to leap out at him and wrap him up in the anchor cables. He was just as afraid to be in a roomful of men, because, to his sodden eyes, their faces kept running together fluidly, assuming the most terrifying shapes. So he spent his hours off watch hovering in the outskirts of smaller groups of men, making them nervous, causing them to call him Haunt and Jonah.
He found out what the eight-to-twelve man had meant when he’d said that Barry wouldn’t feel like jumping ship in Panama. A day before they made the canal, those who might make trouble were called to the second mate’s room, each secretly, and fed rotgut liquor. They hadn’t learned—not one of them. It was a Mickey again. When they came to, they were in the Pacific.
The Jesse Hanck steamed well out of the usual steamer lanes. The Hanck fleet were charter boats, and they saw to it that they were always behind schedule sufficiently to enable the captains to pad the fuel and store consumption accounts enough so that pockets were lined all around, except for those of the crews. A thoroughly rotten outfit. At any rate, Barry had his little accident eight days out of the canal.
The ship was shuffling along somewhere on the tenth meridian, and it was hot. It was one of those evenings when a man puts clothes on to soak up perspiration and rips them off thirty seconds later because he can’t stand the heat of them; when sleeping on deck is just as bad.
The men bunked all over the place, throwing mattresses down on the after boatdeck, swinging hammocks from the midship rigging, crawling under the messroom tables, which were out on the poop now—sleeping anywhere and everywhere in impossible attempts to escape the cruel heat. Calling the watch was a hit-or-miss proposition; you might find your relief and then again you might wake the wrong man from a rare snatch of real sleep and get yourself roughed up for your mistake.
Barry came off watch at four that morning. He turned in somewhere back aft. He never got up for breakfast anyway, and when the eight-to-twelve ordinary seaman tried to call him for lunch at eleven-thirty, he couldn’t be found. It was one-thirty before the bos’n missed him. Sometime between four in the morning and one in the afternoon, then, Barry had left the ship.
It gave all hands something to talk about for a couple of days. The captain wrote up a “lost at sea” item in the log and pocketed Barry’s wages. An ordinary seaman was given Barry’s duties with no increase in pay. Barry was forgotten. Who cared, anyway? Nobody liked him. He wasn’t worth a damn. He couldn’t steer. He couldn’t paint. He was a lousy lookout.
Barry himself always gets that part of his story garbled. How a man trained at sea, capable in any emergency of looking out for his own skin, no matter what the weather or his state of sobriety, could possible fall off a ship at sea is beyond understanding. I don’t believe he did. I think he jumped off. Not because of the way he was being treated aboard that slave ship; he hadn’t self-respect enough left for that. It must have been his horrors; at any rate, that, according to him, is the last thing he remembers happening to him aboard the Jesse Hanck.
He had just drifted off to sleep, when he was aroused by some shipboard noise—the boilers popping off, perhaps, or a roar from the antiquated steering engine. At any rate, he was suddenly dead certain that something was pursuing him, and that if he didn’t get away from it, he would be horribly killed. He tried, and then he was in the water.
As the rusty old hull slid past him in the warm sea, he looked up at it and blinked the brine out of his failing eyes and made not the slightest attempt to shout for help. He trod water for some moments, until the after light of the tanker was a low star swinging down on the horizon, and then he turned over on his back and kicked sluggishly to keep himself afloat.
Now delirium tremens is a peculiar affliction. Just as the human body can be destroyed by a dose of poison, but will throw off an overdose, so the human mind will reach a point of supersaturation and return to something like normality. In Barry’s case it was pseudosanity; he did not cease to have his recurrent attacks of phantasmagoria, but he became suddenly immunized to them. It was as if he had forgotten how to be afraid—how, even, to wonder at the things he saw and felt. He simply did not care; he became as he is today, just not giving a damn. In effect, his mind was all but completely gone, so that for the first time in weeks he could lie at ease and feel that he was not mortally afraid. It was the first time he had been in real danger, and he was not afraid.
He says that he lay there and slept for weeks. He says that porpoises came and played with him, bunting him about and crying like small children. And he says that an angel came down from the sky and built him a boat out of seaweed and foam. But he only remembers one sun coming up, so it must have been that same morning that he found himself clutching a piece of driftwood, rocking and rolling in a gentle swell just to windward of a small island. It was just a little lump of sand and rock, heaped high in the middle, patched with vegetation and wearing a halo of shrieking sea birds. He stared at it with absolutely no interest at all for about four hours, drifting closer all the while. When his feet struck bottom he did not kn
ow what it meant or what he should do; he just let them drag until his knees struck also, and then he abandoned his piece of wood and crept ashore.
The sun was coming up again when Barry awoke. He was terribly weak, and his flesh was dry and scaly the way only sea-soaked skin can be. His tongue was interfering with his breathing. He lolled up to his hands and knees and painfully crawled up the sloping beach to a cluster of palms. He collapsed with his chin in a cool spring, and would have killed himself by over-drinking if he had not fallen asleep again.
The next time he pushed the groggy clouds from him, he felt much better. He was changed; he knew that. He was basically changed; he felt different about things. It took him quite a while to figure out just how, but then it occurred to him that though he was still surrounded with the monsters and visions and phantoms of his own drink-crazed creation, he did not fear them. But it was more than that. It was not the disinterest he had experienced out there when he was adrift. It was a sullen hatred of the things. It was an eagerness to have one of them come near enough for him to attack. He crouched by the spring and looked craftily about him, trying to find an object to kill and tear. He found it. Near him was a coconut. He picked up a stone and hurled it, and cracked the coconut. He caught it up and drank greedily from the streaming cracks, and then broke it and ate the meat until it made him sick. He was enormously pleased with himself.
All around him the ground pimpled and dimpled, and from the little depressions what he thought were strange plants began to grow. They were sinuous stalks, and they seemed to be made of two rubbery sheaths that wound about each other spirally, forming a tentaclelike stem, and spreading out at the tip in two flashy extensions like snail’s eyes. He reached out and touched one as it grew visibly, and it writhed away from him and began clubbing the ground blindly, searchingly. He’d never dreamed up anything like this before. But he was certain he had nothing to fear from them. He got up, kicking one out of the way disgustedly, and began to climb the central hill for bearings. Just as he left, one of the growths spurted up out of the ground, curved over his head and smashed wetly down on the spot he had just vacated. He didn’t even look over his shoulder. Why should he, for a figment of his imagination? The mistake he made was that the things were real. Just as real, my friend, as you and I!
Barry, poor crazed wreck, couldn’t realize it then, because the growing, writhing trunks all around him were mixed and mingled with things of his own creation, dancing and gibbering around him. There were things harmless and beautiful, and things too foul to mention, and it is little wonder that the stemlike things were of little importance.
Barry went on up the hill. He picked up a thorny stick, quite heavy, and strode on, casually swiping at the monsters, real and imaginary. He noticed subconsciously that when he struck at a unicorn or a winged frog, it would vanish immediately, but when he swung at a growing tentacle it would either duck quickly or, when struck, twist into a tight knot about its wound. He even looked back and noticed how the stalks kept pace with him, sinking back into the ground behind him and sprouting ahead. It still meant nothing to him.
A few hundred yards from the top he stopped and sniffed. There had been a growing, fetid odor about the place, and he didn’t like it. He connected it somehow with the smell of the ichor that exuded from the wounded stalks after he had slashed them, but he was incurious; he didn’t really care. He shrugged and finished his climb.
When he had reached the top he stood a moment wiping his forehead with his wrist, and then sighted all around the horizon. There were no other islands in sight. This one was small—nearly round, and perhaps a mile by a mile and a quarter. He spotted two more springs and a tight grove of coconut and breadfruit. That was encouraging. He stepped forward as a rubbery trunk poured out of the ground and lashed at his legs with its two prehensile tentacles. It missed.
A puff of wind bearing an unspeakable odor brought his attention back to the crest of the hill. It was nearly round, almost exactly following the contours of the island, and fell in the center to form a small crater. Down at the bottom of the crater was a perfectly round hole, and that was the source of the noisome smell.
Barry walked down toward it because he happened to be facing that way and it was the easiest way to go. He was halfway down the slope when two points of what looked like pulpy flesh began to rise out of the hole. They seemed to be moving slowly, but Barry suddenly realized that it was an illusion due to their enormous size. Before he could bring himself to stop, they had risen twenty feet in the air. They began leaning outward, one directly toward him, the other across the hole, away from him. They grew thicker as they poured upward and outward, and finally they lay flat on the slope and the near one began licking up toward him.
It was the most frightening phantasm that had yet presented itself to Barry’s poor alcoholic brain, but now he would not be frightened. He stood there, legs apart, club at the ready, and waited. When the thing reached his feet he raised himself on his toes and brought the thorny club down with all his strength on its fleshy tip. It winced away and then poured back. He hit it twice more and it retreated. He ran after it and smashed it again and again. It suddenly rocketed up in the air, as did its mate from the other side of the crater. They struck together with a mighty wet smack! and stood there, a pale-green, shining column of living flesh, quivering in the sunlight. And then, with unbelievable speed, they plunged into the ground, back into their hole. Barry dropped his club, clasped his hands over his head and smirked. Then he turned and went back to his spring.
And all the way back, not another trunk showed itself.
He slept well that night under a crude shelter of palm leaves. Not a thing bothered him but dreams, and of course they didn’t bother him much any more. His victory over the thing in the crater had planted a tiny seed of self-esteem in that rotten hulk of a man. That, added to the fact that he was too crazy to be afraid of anything, made him something new under the sun.
In the morning he sat up abruptly. At his feet was a pile of breadfruit and coconuts, and around him was a forest, a wall of the waving stalks. He leaped to his feet and cast about wildly for his club. It had disappeared. He drew his sheath knife, which by some miracle had stayed with him since he left the Jesse Hanck, and stood there, palisaded by the thickly planted, living stems. And he still was not afraid. He took a deep breath and stepped menacingly toward the near wall of stalks. They melted into the ground before he reached them. He whirled and rushed those behind him. They were gone before he could get within striking distance. He paused and nodded to himself. If that was the way they wanted it, it was O.K. He put away his knife and fell to on the fruit. The stems ranked themselves at a respectful distance, as if they were watching. And then he noticed something new. Deep within his brain was a constant, liquid murmur, as if thousands of people were talking quietly together in a strange tongue. He didn’t mind it very much. He’d been through worse, and he wasn’t curious.
After he was quite finished he noticed a rustling movement in the wall surrounding him. The creatures were passing something, one to the other—his club! It reached the stalk nearest him; it was taken and laid gently by his side. The stalk straightened and dropped into the earth quickly as if it were embarrassed.
Barry looked at the waving things and almost grinned. Then he picked up the club. Immediately the things on one side of him melted into the ground, and those on the other side doubled in number. A couple of them began sprouting under his feet; he jumped away, startled. More sank into the earth from his path, and more sprang up behind. He looked at them a little uneasily; it occurred to him that they were a little insistent, compared with his usual disappearing monsters. He walked away from them. They followed; that is, they massed behind him, sprouting in his footsteps. And the murmuring in his mind burst into a silent cacophony; gleeful, triumphant.
He wandered inland, followed by his rustling company of pale-green stalks. When he turned aside they would spring up around him, and it was no good tryin
g to press through. They made no attempt to harm him at all. But—they were forcing him toward the hill! Perhaps he realized it—perhaps not. Barry, by this time, was totally unhinged. Any other man could not have lived through what he did. But his peculiar conditioning, the subtle distortion of his broken mind, gave him the accidental ability to preserve himself. Certainly he himself could take no credit for it. His fantastic world was no more strange to him than ours is to us. If you or I were suddenly transported to that island, we would be as frightened as—well, a gorilla in Times Square, or a New Yorker in an African jungle. It’s all a matter of receptivity.
And so he found himself marching up the central slope being driven gently but firmly toward that monstrous thing in the crater by his entourage of pale-green stalks. They must have been a weird-looking company.
And the thing was waiting for him. He came up over the crest of the rise, and the tip of one of the two great green projections curled up over his head and lashed down at him. He threw himself sideways and belted it with his club as it touched the ground. It slid back toward the hole. He took a step or two after it. It was huge—fully sixty feet of it stretched from him to the hole in the center of the crater. And no telling how much more of it was in there. At the first movement from the thing, there had been a rustle behind him and every one of the stalks had dropped from sight.
As Barry ran forward to strike again, a shape shot up out of the ground at his side, whipped around his leg and flung him down. He rolled over and sat up, to see the other great green arm come swooping down on the stalk that had tripped him and—saved his life. The two huge tentacles slapped together, twisted the slender stalk between them, and began to pull. The stalk tried to go underground, and for a moment held, while its spiraled body stretched and thinned under tons of pull. Then the ground itself gave, and with a peculiar sucking sound, the stalk came up out of the earth. And for the first time Barry saw it for what it was.
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