Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  Upon a tablecloth that is spread on the floor before the captain’s desk, two small forms have been laid out. They lie side by side, in profile. They are the size of five-year-old children and blackened by age; not dissimilar to the preserved forms of ancient peoples, protected behind glass in museums of antiquities. They appear to be shrivelled and contorted. Vestiges of a fibrous binding has fused with their petrified flesh and obscured their arms, if they are in possession of such limbs. The two small figures are primarily distinguished by the irregular shape and silhouettes of their skulls. Their heads appear oversized, and the swollen dimension of the crania contributes to the leathery ghastliness of their grimacing faces. The rear of each head is fanned by an incomplete mane of spikes, while the front of each head elongates and protrudes into a snout. The desiccated figures have had their lower limbs bound tightly together to create a suggestion of long and curling tails.

  Inside the second crate lies a large black stone, crudely hollowed out in the middle. The dull and chipped character of the block also suggests great age. A modern addition has been made, or offered, to the hollow within the stone. A single human foot. The shoe around the disarticulated foot matches the footwear inside the shower cubicle of the crew member’s cabin.

  The contents of the third crate has barely been disturbed. In there lie several artifacts that resemble jagged flints, or the surviving blades of old weapons or knives to which the handles are missing. The implements are hand-forged from a stone as black as the basin that has become a receptacle for a human foot.

  Pictures of a ship and framed maps have been removed from the widest wall, and upon this wall a marker pen has been used to depict the outlines of two snouted or trumpeting figures that are attached by what appears to be long and entwined tails. The imagery is crude and childlike, but the silhouettes are similar to the embalmed remains laid out upon the bed sheet.

  Below the two figures are imprecise sticklike figures that appear to cavort in emulation of the much larger and snouted characters. Set atop some kind of uneven pyramid shape, another group of human figures have been excitedly and messily drawn with spikes protruding from their heads or headdresses. Between the crowned forms, another plainer figure has been held aloft and bleeds from the torso into a waiting receptacle. Detail has been included to indicate that the sacrificed figure’s feet have been removed and its legs bound.

  The mess of human leavings that led here departs the captain’s cabin and rises up a staircase to the deck above and into an unlit canteen.

  Light falls into this room from the corridor, and in the half-light two long tables, and one smaller table for the officers, are revealed. Upon the two larger crew tables, long reddish shapes are stretched out and glisten: some twelve bodies dwindling into darkness as they stretch away from the door. As if unzipped across the front, what was once inside each of the men has now been gathered and piled upon chairs where the same men once sat and ate. Their feet, some bare, some still inside shoes, have been amputated and are set in a messy pile at the head of the two tables.

  The far end of the cafeteria is barely touched by the residual light. Presented to no living audience, perversely and inappropriately and yet in a grimly touching fashion, two misshapen shadows flicker and leap upon the dim wall as if in joyous reunion. They wheel about each other, ferociously, but not without grace. They are attached, it seems, by two long, spiny tails.

  Back outside and on deck, it can be seen that the ship continues to meander, inebriated with desolation and weariness; perhaps punched drunk from the shock of what has occurred below deck.

  The bow momentarily rises up the small hillside of a wave and, just once, near expectantly, looks to the distant harbour the vessel has slowly drifted toward overnight since changing its course.

  On shore and across the surrounding basin of treeless land, the lights of a small harbour town are white pinpricks, desperate to be counted in this black storm. Here and there, the harbour lights define the uneven silhouettes of small buildings, suggesting stone façades in which glass shimmers to form an unwitting beacon for what exists out here upon these waves.

  Oblivious to anything but its own lurching and clanking, the ship rolls on the swell, inexorably drifting on the current that picked up it’s steel bulk the day before and now slowly propels the hull, though perhaps not as purposelessly as was first assumed, towards the shore.

  At the prow, having first bound himself tight to the railing with rope, a solitary and unclothed figure nods a bowed head towards the land. The pale flesh of the rotund torso is whipped and occasionally drenched by sea spray, but still bears the ruddy impressions of bestial deeds that were both boisterous and thorough. From navel to sternum, the curious figurehead is blackly open, or has been opened, to the elements. The implement used to carve such crude entrances to the heart is long gone, perhaps dropped from stained and curling fingers into the obsidian whirling and clashing of the monumental ocean far below.

  As if to emulate the status of a king, where the scalp has been carved away, a crude series of spikes, fashioned from nails, have been hammered into a pattern resembling a spine or fin across the top of the dead man’s skull. Both of his feet are missing and his legs have been bound with twine into one, single, gruesome tail.

  A SONG ONLY PARTIALLY HEARD

  by John Langan

  This is the story he doesn’t tell.

  Not because no one will believe him (although no one would), and not because of the stares he knows his account would provoke, the poorly concealed laughs and muttered remarks (“Crazy,” “What the fuck is he talking about?” “Goddamn boss’s cousin”). No, the reason Horacio Martinez keeps his story to himself is that it won’t make a difference, won’t return Hector to life, won’t alter the judgement of the sheriff’s deputies, who have ruled the death an accident, which Horacio supposes it was, only one with slightly less randomness than the declaration implies.

  There’s something else, too, a reason under the reason. What he saw, what he heard, not so much when his friend died, but in the moments before and after it, was like nothing his ears and eyes have experienced, not during his decade here, in Wiltwyck, upstate New York, and not during his decade growing up in San Juan. He isn’t sure how to describe it; although holy occurs to him. It’s a term from his childhood, redolent of incense and candlewax, from when he was devout, when he spent each week anticipating the candle he would light at the foot of the Virgin, when his daily dress included his Maltese cross and his scapula, when every morning he checked his children’s missal to see which saint’s feast day it was. Uttering it now puckers his lips with embarrassment, unless it’s as half of a curse. But it attaches itself to Hector’s death with a force which will not be denied, and he supposes this means it’s correct.

  Following the departure of the police, everyone has been sent home with pay for the remainder of the day, a nod to compassion on the part of Cousin Fernando qualified by the fact that the work day had less than an hour left. Shocked as even the older men were by the violence of Hector’s end, the employees were happy to take advantage of the boss’s generosity, most of them walking down and across the street to the bar which occupies the ground floor of a large, three-story house on the corner there. No one paid much attention to Horacio, who found it easy to stay behind after the chain-link gate was rolled closed. To be certain his failure to depart wouldn’t be noticed, he kept to the other side of the white trailer that serves as Fernando’s office, remaining there as the echoes of his coworkers’ voices faded into the distance. Once the only sound is the whoosh of a car passing by, Horacio peaks his head around the trailer, confirms the yard is empty, and crosses to where the Helen Leucoria sits in her ship cradle.

  She’s the tug half of an ATB, an articulated tug and barge combination, brought to the shipyard Fernando manages on the northern bank of the Redout Creek for an assortment of repairs and renovations. Her almost comically high bridge has been removed entire and set to one side, where a designa
ted team works on it. A second team labors inside the ship’s rounded hull, while a third, to which Hector and Horacio were assigned, has tended to the tug’s exterior, inspecting and mending small injuries to the surface, in a couple of places replacing what can’t be fixed. Horacio hasn’t been at the shipyard long enough to be trusted with any truly significant task, nor does he find the work particularly easy to learn, but once he masters a task, he does so with a thoroughness that has attracted grudging nods from his coworkers, whose respect for him has grown as he has demonstrated himself more competent than his first week on the job indicated (about which, the less said, the better). Though he doesn’t care for the work, he finds it oddly satisfying, and as his father is fond of saying, you don’t have to like a job if the money is good, which it is. Give Fernando that much credit: he pays his workers well.

  Overhead, one of the massive collars that encircle the tug’s propellers hangs, like something from a jet. To the right, on the other side of the keel, the space the second collar occupied is empty, the hull torn and hanging down in strips. Directly beneath it, jagged and torn pieces of metal, some the size of windows, doors, begin a path stretching the twenty or so feet to the edge of the yard, where it drops to the surface of the creek seven or eight feet below. On a sunny summer day like this one, you can stand at this ledge and gaze through the clear water at schools of fish maintaining their positions in the current. This is the spot Hector was when, with an ear-splitting shriek, the collar tore loose from the tug and crashed to the ground, rolling toward the creek, leaving shards of itself behind as it went, revealing the propeller it contained. Tangled with half a dozen lengths of metal, each a razored whip, the propeller struck Hector.

  Although he witnessed his friend’s death, Horacio isn’t certain exactly what he saw happen to him. He isn’t sure he wants to know. One instant, Hector was turning to the juggernaut rumbling toward him; the next, he appeared to move in several different directions at once. The propeller and its metal necklace rolled off the edge of the yard into the creek, taking the better part of Hector with it, leaving behind his right arm below the elbow and a slice of his skull, the flesh stubbled from his recent buzz cut. His blood fell from the air in droplets. Already knowing it was too late, Horacio ran to the place his friend had been in time to watch the propeller rock to a halt, half-submerged in the water splashing around it. He saw Hector’s leg, caught on a strand of metal wound around one of the propeller’s blades. Horacio scanned the water, could distinguish no more of Hector amidst the turbulence the propeller had stirred. But there was something else, between the shore and the propeller, a movement at the creek’s churning surface, a shape that glowed crimson and gold with the sunlight, that resolved into a form more shocking than the sight of Hector’s leg floating in the Redout. Horacio’s glimpse of it lasted for what seemed to be minutes, yet couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds, before he was joined by a handful of the other workers, all searching for Hector and crying out when they saw what remained of him, and the thing beneath the water darted out of view.

  It was a woman: why not say that? Because she was like no woman he’s ever seen. She was drifting on her back, her long gold hair spreading around her head in a cloud. He guesses she was naked, if that’s the right way to describe skin crosshatched with dark red and gold scales. What appeared to be trains of red silk, each the length of her long body, attached to her forearms, her hips, her calves, and rippled in the surrounding water. They reminded him of Ocho, the beta fish Fernando keeps in the office, and he understood that they were fins. From eyes a uniform blue (Azure, he thinks), she regarded him, an unreadable expression on her face. Tiny silver fish darted around her. In her look, he felt the weight of an intelligence ancient and strange.

  There was one more detail, a sound, distant and musical, what might have been a song. The memory of it lingers, hours after he (thinks he) heard it. Almost, he can pick out lyrics, though the language is foreign to him. They have a plaintive quality that evokes images of clusters of rocks washed by foaming seas, of the sun high and unforgiving in a blue, blue sky. Come, the lyrics seem to be pleading, come here, join us below the waves, where everything is calm, peaceful. Come to the peace of the kelp forests, of the eel dens, of the lobster roads. Come down to where ships lie in quiet rust and rot. Come let the small crabs and fish feast on you, give yourself to the sea, to the sea, to peace.

  This, the woman with her trailing red fins, her blue eyes on him, the song he (thinks he) heard, comprise the secret story, the experience he cannot help thinking of as holy. There is no doubt in his mind that Hector was gripped by a similar but more intense version of it in the minutes leading up to the accident. Horacio noticed him at the edge of the yard, his head tilted toward the creek. Nothing remarkable about that, but in the final moment of his life, as Hector turned to the mass of metal screeching toward him, Horacio saw reflected in his friend’s face an experience of profound beauty. It was as if a beam of light were shining directly on his features, illuminating them, casting them into sharper relief. Horacio was reminded of endless paintings of ecstatic saints, bathed in the light of God. When the propeller and its looping shards struck him, Hector must have thought the beauty that illuminated him was killing him.

  Or so Horacio imagines. He walks out from under the Helen Leucosia. Police tape flutters around the path of metal fragments leading to the edge of the yard. There, patches of Hector’s blood still stain the ground. In the creek, the propeller rises like a bizarre idol. Hector’s leg has been retrieved from it, along with what other pieces of him the police divers could locate. Horacio gives the men their due: they worked for a good couple of hours, searching for and retrieving his friend’s remains with care and deliberation. With the exception of his left hand and a scoop of his lower back, the divers succeeded in recovering all of Hector, for which Horacio is grateful to a degree that surprises him. He is unclear whether the search for those last fragments of Hector will continue tomorrow, or if as much of him has been found as is going to be; he suspects the latter. In which case, assuming the police give the okay, the early part of the morning will be spent lifting the propeller from the Redout, inspecting it, and deciding if whatever damage it suffered can be repaired, or if a replacement will have to be ordered.

  Horacio would like to see the propeller melted down, destroyed, but he assumes this is unlikely. Though battered and dented by its murderous transit, the propeller appears basically sound, able to be fixed, and a new one would be expensive, much more costly than the life of a man from Santo Domingo who enjoyed spending his Sunday afternoons with his girlfriend and her daughter, picnicking one place or another. Horacio’s first, disastrous week at the shipyard, Hector invited him to join them that weekend, which he did, and while he had little to say to either Megan or Ella, he appreciated their smiling friendliness enough to join the three of them again a couple of weeks later, and intermittently thereafter, as recently as this past Sunday, when the four of them took an order of Chinese takeout to the picnic benches at Wiltwyck Point, an arm of land reaching into the Hudson. As Ella tip-toed across the rocky beach to splash in the river, Megan calling after her not to go too far, Hector and Horacio studied the boats traveling the water, from the sailboats whose sails belled from their masts, to the speedboats galloping from the crest of one wave to the next, to a combined ATB making its slow way south. Unlike Horacio, Hector loved boats, loved working on them, loved being out on them. He named the different types of sailboats, the horsepower of the speedboats’ engines, the top speed of an articulated tug with and without its barge. This afternoon, he was most interested by an enormous oil tanker which had dropped anchor a couple of hundred yards north of them, almost beneath the Wiltwyck-Rhinecliff Bridge. “That’s an old one,” he said. “Early sixties. Didn’t know any of them were still in service. Can you see what flag she’s flying? I swear, my eyes are no good anymore.” Horacio squinted, but did not recognize the colors. “It’s gray,” he said, “or black, w
ith some kind of design on it in yellow. I think it’s a triangle, but the sides are all wavy. That could be the wind, though. Whose flag is that?” Hector didn’t know, nor could either of them read the letters in which the tanker’s name and country of origin were written. Hector ventured they were Russian or Greek; Horacio guessed Thai or Sanskrit. Later, as they were packing up to leave, they saw water venting from a hatch in the tanker’s flank. “They aren’t supposed to do that,” Hector said, frowning. “What?” Horacio said. “The water,” Hector said, pointing to the green stream foaming into the Hudson. “That’s sea water. They use it for ballast, to keep the ship stable. They aren’t allowed to dump it up here. This is fresh water. Who knows what’s in that shit?” Horacio shrugged. “What can you do?”

  What can you do? He doesn’t know what he expects, standing here as the creek eddies round the propeller. Another glimpse of the strange woman? To hear her song as Hector did, in all its terrible loveliness? To what end? He shakes his head. He feels himself caught in a narrative whose parameters he cannot identify, a minor character moved by a plot he does not understand. Disgust twists his lip, propels him away from the water at a brisk pace. If he hurries, maybe he can catch up to the others at the bar.

  If he remained in place, staring into the water, would he make out the woman floating a half-dozen feet down, amidst a grove of green weeds, her fins wrapping around her like red robes? Would he see Hector’s hand in hers? Would he watch her lift it to her perfect mouth, take one of the fingers between her lips, and strip the waterlogged flesh from the bones with her narrow, razored teeth?

  For Fiona

  BY THE SEA