Jared cocked his head while he smoked, resting an elbow on a kneecap, dimly realizing the sun was no longer as bright as before. “Could be.” He sucked tobacco. “But that don’t mean it don’t breathe freshwater. I could smell it all over that puddle there,” he said, pointing down at the pink lake on the floorboards.
Her head shivered and flashed red. “You’re a stupid idiot. Water doesn’t smell.”
“Wait,” Jared said, getting an idea. “I’ll prove it to you.” He lumbered over to the sail and adjusted the mast.
“What do you think you’re doing? You’re not going back where we were now, are you?”
“Yup,” Jared said, directing the boat toward where his bobber floated like an eyeball on the sea. “We’re goin’ freshwater fishing.” He lumbered over to his rod, grinning.
“Oh no, we’re not.” She lunged, grabbed the mast, and randomly twisted.
The boat dipped, and Jared fell onto an out-thrust arm, catching himself sideways.
They seemed to be spinning in a spiral. “Lady,” Jared grumbled, dizzily straightening himself. “Either you let that thing go, or you go overboard. I’m not tellin’ you again.” He tried to keep a straight face. “Captain’s orders.”
Sandy’s head was still shaking, her grip on the mast so tight her muscles shook. “I’m not going back anywhere near that thing. You can try to throw me overboard if you want, but I’ll take my chances. I can put up one helluva fight against a drunk old fool like you.”
Jared’s mouth filled with sticky saliva.
And that’s when he knew he was angry enough to hit her. It had always been that way—in barrooms and brigs, drool spilling out of his lips when he threw the first punch. Like a salivating lust to taste the violence again. But he’d never hit a woman, and he wasn’t about to begin now. He was in enough trouble, with a man lost overboard. So he spit what had flooded into his mouth over the side of the boat.
And the rectangular thing suddenly sailed into the air, belly-first, catching the spit in its suckers like a mitt before slapping back down onto the water. Amazed, Jared watched its dark shape float then sink into the green.
Sandy’s entire face dilated: “Did you…My God, we gotta get out of here.”
“Just as I suspected.”
Sandy was madly attempting to adjust the sails, tugging on lines and poles, but clearly had no idea what she was doing. She was like a cat trussed up in a ball of yarn. The boat slowed to a dead stop. One of the sails loosened and sagged to the deck. Awkwardly, she stepped on it, and her foot slipped.
With the sound of tearing cloth, the thing cut the surface of water again and landed flatly on the boat. Sandy shrieked, backing away, keeping her eyes glued on the rectangular gray fish, bumbling against the sail and mast which seemed to wrestle with her.
Jared watched closely.
Sandy’s eyes flicked up to meet Jared’s, but only for an instant. She stared down at the gray fish in front of her feet as if it were a lion. “Well,” she shouted, daring to glance up at him again. “Aren’t you gonna do something?”
Jared coughed softly in the back of his throat. “Yup,” he replied.
And he spat across the boat, gobbing her right in her face.
The fish lunged, slapping over Sandy’s dumb-struck maw like a giant suction cup, air instantly wheezing from its gills like a cancerous lung while it squirmed, working its sides around both of her ears, slowly repositioning itself to entirely cover her thrashing head. She tried to beat it away, but it did no good—the suckers writhed and dug their way into her skin, tightening. To Jared, it looked like Sandy was wearing nothing more than a strange Halloween mask, dancing and flailing like a monster. It was almost funny when she dropped to her knees. But then he saw its eyes.
Its black eyes…
Its eyes that threshed red and pulsed with blood.
No, not blood.
Oxygen. From the water. The freshwater that Sandy’s slumping body held inside, like slimy wet clay. Sucking it out of the bloody mud under the skin. Nearly all of the human body was water, everyone knew, and the rest was just dust. Not saltwater. Fresh.
Jared watched as Sandy withered and dried while the monster on her head puffed up with it. Her skin collapsed with a muffled fart.
And the thing’s eyes pulsed a deeper red as it glared at him like a vampire.
The sail was ruined, torn free of the mast by Sandy’s flailing hands. Now it was draped on the floor, as useless as the emptied sheet of flesh beside it. The boat drifted, the ocean still and indifferent.
He wondered how much time he had left, if any at all…whether the boat would ever make it to shore, and what would remain when it got there.
Jared didn’t completely understand the creature, but in the time it took for the beast to completely drain Sandy, he figured out how it worked. It drained the body of water—simply sucked it dry. Probably used some sort of vacuumed suction between its suckers and the lining of the victim’s lungs to become a kind of lung parasite. Most likely, it was used to bigger animals than humans—working the water from the gills of sharks and whales, instead of air-breathers. Jared figured the thing couldn’t get through some of the fat cells, just like water can’t pass through the scaly skin of a fish. So it left the bones and fat for scraps. But it had undoubtedly inhaled most of the body’s water. Nearly all. Enough to breathe and maybe store. To keep itself alive.
Jared watched as its defunct gills quivered like the tiny mouths of two drowning men.
His drunk was numbing him into an instinctive stupor—Jared’s thoughts were jumbled, turning to darker thoughts, churning concepts without reason. He couldn’t stop his mind from drifting…drifting to stories he’d heard from other fishermen at the bars. Tall tales of alien ships crashed at sea. Thoughts of vampire children tossed overboard and adapting to the elements for survival. Insane thoughts. But possible thoughts. Survival thoughts.
The only thing he knew—truly knew because he could feel it—was that he was thirsty. As thirsty as the thing that attached to Sandy’s face. His parched throat felt scratchy, as though clogged with day-old bread.
Water water, everywhere…
The boxy gray baby-shaped head rolled its black-red eye up at him.
It was waiting.
Jared figured that he’d drunk enough booze to keep it at bay. He’d suffered enough hangovers to know how dehydrated alcohol could make you. And he guessed the creature could sense the strange spirit of alcohol, pulsing in his veins and cells. The same way it sensed the water in the blood of the hamburger meat they were using for bait. The water in Jared’s spit. The water in Twitchell and Sandy’s bodies.
It was waiting. And waiting was also his only chance.
Maybe the little monster would dry out first.
Maybe it wouldn’t notice the tiny beads of nervous sweat accumulating under his collar.
His tongue was dry, a thick cracker in his mouth. He painfully bit on the muscle, trying to force his mouth to fill with saliva. Minutes passed—Jared and fish, eye to eye—while he collected the saliva like ammo. Finally, he spit overboard. A thin bloody drool. Part of it caught on his chin.
Its eyes flickered, but the creature didn’t budge. It pulsed. And waited.
Jared broke his eyes away and sighed, craning his neck toward the sky. He prayed for rain. Cool, freshwater rain.
His collar parted.
Its red eye focused on the sweat beading on his neck, and for the first time it swiftly lifted its yellow-gray, mucous lid in what could have been a blink.
HIPPOCAMPUS
by Adam Nevill
Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmos appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water; forged then sucked beneath the hull; or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.
On board, lighted portholes and square windows offer tiny, yellow squares of reassurance amidst the lightless, roaring ocean that stretches all around and so far below. Reminiscent of a warm home offering a welcome on a winter night, the cabin lights are complimented by the two metal doorways that gape in the rear house. Their spilled light glosses portions of the slick deck.
All of the surfaces on board are steel, painted white. Riveted and welded tight to the deck and each other, these metal cubes of the superstructure are necklaced by yellow rails intended for those who must slip and reel about the flooded decks. Here and there, white ladders rise, and seem by their very presence to evoke a kang kang kang sound of feet going up and down quickly.
Small lifeboat cases resembling plastic barrels are fixed at the sides of the upper deck, all of them intact and locked shut. The occasional crane peers out to sea with inappropriate nonchalance, or with the expectation of a purpose that has not come. Up above the distant bridge, from which no faces peer out, the aerials, satellite dishes, and navigation masts appear to totter in panic, or to whip their poles, wires, and struts from side to side as if engaged in a frantic search of the ever-changing landscape of water below.
The vast steel door of the hold’s first hatch is raised and still attached to the crane by chains. This large square section of the hull is filled with white sacks, stacked upon each other in tight columns that fill the entire space. Those at the top of the pile are now dark and sopping with rain and sea water. In the centre, scores of the heavy bags have been removed from around a scuffed and dented metal container, painted black. Until its discovery, the container appears to have been deliberately hidden among the tiers of fibre sacks. One side of the double doors at the front of the old container has been jammed open.
Somewhere on deck, a small, brass bell clangs a lonesome, undirected cry; a traditional affectation as there are speakers thrusting their silent horns from the metallic walls and masts. But though the tiny, urgent sound of the bell is occasionally answered by a gull in better weather, tonight the bell is answered by nothing save the black, shrieking chaos of the wind and the water it thrashes.
There is a lane between the freighter’s rear house and the crane above the open hatch. A passage unpeopled, wet, and lit by six lights in metal cages. MUSTER STATION: LIFEBOAT 2 is stenciled on the wall in red lettering. Passing through the lane, the noise of the engine intake fans fills the space hotly. Diesel heat creates the apprehension of being close to moving machine parts. As if functioning as evidence of the ship’s purpose and life, and rumbling across every surface like electric current in each part of the vessel, the continuous vibration of the engine’s exhaust thrums.
Above the open hatch and beside the lifeboat assembly point, from a door left gaping in the rear house, drifts a thick warmth. Heat that waits to engulf wind-seared cheeks in the way a summer’s sun cups faces.
Once across the metal threshold the engine fibrillations deepen as if muted underground. The bronchial roar of the intake fans dull. Inside, the salty-spittle scour of the night air, and the noxious mechanical odours, are replaced by the scent of old emulsion and the stale chemicals of exhausted air fresheners.
A staircase leads down.
But as above so below. As on deck, no one walks here. All is still, lit bright and faintly rumbled by the bass strumming of the exhaust. The communal area appears calm and indifferent to the intense, black energies of the hurricane outside.
A long, narrow corridor runs through the rear house. Square lenses in the steel ceiling illuminate the plain passageway. The floor is covered in linoleum, the walls are matte yellow, the doors to the cabins are trimmed with wood laminate. Halfway down, two opposing doors hang open before lit rooms.
The first room was intended for recreation to ease a crew’s passage on a long voyage, but no one seeks leisure now. Coloured balls roll across the pool table from the swell that shimmies the ship. Two cues lie amongst the balls and move back and forth like flotsam on the tide. At rest upon the ping-pong table are two worn paddles. The television screen remains as empty and black as the rain-thrashed canopy of sky above the freighter. One of the brown, leatherette sofas is split in two places and masking tape suppresses the spongy eruptions of cushion entrails.
Across the corridor, a long bank of washing machines and dryers stand idle in the crew’s laundry room. Strung across the ceiling are washing line cords that loop like skipping ropes from the weight of the clothing that is pegged in rows: jeans, socks, shirts, towels. One basket has been dropped on the floor and has spilled its contents towards the door.
Up one flight of stairs, an empty bridge. Monitor screens glow green, consoles flicker. One stool lies on its side and the cushioned seat rolls back and forth. A solitary handgun skitters this way and that across the floor of the otherwise tranquil area of operations, as if a drama has recently passed, been interrupted, or even abandoned.
Back down below, and deeper inside the ship, and farther along the crew’s communal corridor, the stainless steel galley glimmers dully in white light. A skein of steam clouds over the work surfaces and condenses against the ceiling above the oven. Two large, unwashed pots have boiled dry upon cooker rings glowing red. From the oven, wisps of black smoke puff around a tray of potatoes that have baked to carbon and now resemble the fossils of reptile guano.
Around the great chopping board on the central table lies a scattering of chopped vegetables, cast wide by the freighter’s lurches and twists. The ceiling above the work station is railed with steel and festooned with swaying kitchenwear.
Six large steaks, encrusted with crushed salt, await the abandoned spatula and the griddle that hisses black and dry. A large refrigerator door, resembling the gate of a bank vault, hangs open to reveal crowded shelves that gleam in ivory light.
Inside a metal sink the size of a bathtub lies a human scalp.
Lopped roughly from the top of a head and left to drain beside the plughole, the gingery mess looks absurdly artificial. But the clod of hair was once plumbed into a circulatory system because the hair is matted dark and wet at the fringes and surrounded by flecks of ochre. The implement that removed the scalp lies upon the draining board: a long knife, the edge serrated for sawing. Above the adjacent work station, at the end of the rack that holds the cook’s knives, several items are missing.
Maybe this dripping thing of hair was taken to the sink area; brought here from somewhere outside of the galley, and carried along the corridor, and up one flight of stairs that lead from the crew’s quarters. Red droplets that have splashed as round as rose petals lead a trail into the first cabin that is situated in a corridor identical to the communal passage on the deck above. The door to this cabin is open. Inside, the trail of scarlet is immediately lost within the engulfing borders of a far bigger stain.
A fluorescent jacket and cap hang upon a peg just inside the door of the cabin. All is neat and orderly upon the bookshelf, holding volumes that brush the low, white ceiling. A chest of drawers doubles as a desk. The articles on the desktop are weighed down by a glass paperweight and are overlooked by silver-framed photographs of wives and children at the rear of the desk. Upon the top of the wardrobe, life jackets and hardhats are stowed. Twin beds, arranged close together, are unoccupied. Beneath the bedframes, orange survival suits remain neatly folded and tightly packed.
The bedclothes of the berth on the right-hand side are tidy and undisturbed. But the white top sheet and the yellow blanket of the adjacent berth droop to the linoleum floor like idle sails. There is a suggestion that an occupant departed this bed hurriedly, or was removed swiftly. The bed linen has been yanked from the bed and only remains tucked under the mattress in one corner. A body was also ruined in that bed: the m
iddle of the mattress is blood sodden and the cabin now reeks of salt and rust. Crimson gouts from a bedside frenzy have flecked and speckled the wall beside the bed, and part of the ceiling.
Attached to the room is a small ensuite bathroom that just manages to hold a shower cubicle and small steel sink. The bathroom is pristine; the taps, showerhead, and towel rail sparkle. All that is amiss is a single slip-on shoe, dropped to the floor just in front of the sink. A foot remains inside the shoe with part of a hairy ankle extending from the uppers.
From the cabin more than a trail of droplets can be followed farther down the passage and towards the neighbouring berths. A long intermittent streak of red has been smeared along the length of the corridor, past the four doors that all hang open and drift back and forth as the ship lists. From each of these cabins, other collections have been made.
What occupants once existed in the crew’s quarters appear to have arisen from their beds before stumbling towards the doors as if some cause for alarm was announced nearby. Just before the doorways of their berths they seem to have met their ends quickly. Wide, lumpy puddles, like spilled stew made with red wine, are splashed across the floors. One crew member sought refuge inside the shower cubicle of the last cabin because the bathroom door is broken open, and the basin of the shower is drenched near black from a sudden and conclusive emptying. Livestock hung above the cement of a slaughterhouse and emptied from the throat leave similar stains.
Turning left at the end of the passage, the open door of the captain’s cabin is visible. Inside, the sofa beside the coffee table, and the two easy chairs sit expectantly but empty. The office furniture and shelves reveal no disarray. But set upon the broad desk are three long wooden crates. The tops have been levered off, and the packing straw that was once inside is now littered about the table’s surface and the carpeted floor below. Intermingled with the straw is a plethora of dried flower petals.
Death by Water Page 45