by Tim Curran
C’mon, man, would you knock if off already? You’re really starting to scare me with this raving.
But, Charlie knew he was not raving, not really. It was the room that was raving. It was doing things to him, planting dark and crawling things in his head that were hatching like worms from moist, snotty clusters of eggs laid deep in his brain. He could almost feel them in there, burrowing and tunneling, chewing away at his sanity and resolve until nothing really made any sense and the less sense it made, why, the more sense it made. Did that sound right or was it just impossibly fucked-up and convoluted? He couldn’t really be sure. He was in the captain’s cabin, lying in the captain’s bed, breathing the captain’s air and looking at his wallpaper and his dust and his webs and feeling things moving around him or inside him and maybe both at the same time.
Charlie sat up, clutching his hands to his head.
What the hell was going on here?
His head didn’t feel right; nothing felt right. It was like everything was mixed up, running, blending together…his thoughts and consciousness and sanity and willpower and identity, all of them mixing inside of his head like one of those crazy hallucinogenic pictures you made at a county fair, dribbling paint onto a spinning card until all the colors were swirled together in some vibrant spiral. It wasn’t right, none of it was right. His head was pounding, sweat running down his face.
He became aware of a sound, a pained sobbing and he realized that it was his own voice. He was weeping openly and he couldn’t seem to stop. His head spun with vertigo and his guts flip-flopped with nausea. He wanted to throw up, to scream. He was seized by an inescapable sense of melancholy and loss and anxiety. His mind didn’t make sense and his senses were reeling with something he could not identify. It was like a thousand black birds were shitting in his mind at the same time, oh Jesus, the despair, the horror, the madness of it all…
You need to get out of here now.
Yes, certainly, only he couldn’t seem to remember why.
He knew the sheets were clean and so was the blanket, but they no longer felt clean. They felt dusty, dirty, moth-eaten. Not sheets but dead skin, dry and flaking, and he was lying beneath it, feeling its scales and mold. And the coverlet…it was not freshly laundered linen, it was something else. It was a cocoon. A warm and webby cocoon. It was like being wrapped up in a living placenta and he could feel the things that had spun it nearby, edging closer and closer.
He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He was an empty, soundless void inside. He was staring at that awful wallpaper and seeing things moving in it, leggy forms dragging themselves in and out of it. Transparent things you could only truly see if the light was angled properly and then only a suggestion of their morbid outlines.
As he scratched at his hand, he wondered if this was what those sailors felt after the thing in the box got Heslip. When he closed his eyes, he could see them: hollow-eyed, damaged, and silent as they got in the last remaining lifeboat and sailed away from the Addams, never to be seen again. That was the end of the story. And as he knew that he also knew that Arturo had lied to him. The Coast Guard reached the conclusion that there had been violence and possibly murder aboard the ship. The missing crew and the bloodstains they found reinforced that. The Coasties conducted a protracted investigation but never arrived at a conclusion. If there was something unnatural on the Addams, they never found it. But, then again, maybe they weren’t looking in the right place.
Charlie thought: You can’t look for it like you look for a lost dog or a runaway child or even a dangerous animal. You have to seek it with your mind, feel for it with your instincts. Once it knows you, once it trusts you, then it will show itself as it showed itself to Virginia who fed it table scraps and even foil-wrapped sweets, mothering it like a starving waif.
“But then they killed her,” he said aloud. “And all that did was piss it off.”
Charlie laughed at the very idea, thinking of Arturo and his plans to put a crew about this fucking mortuary. What a fool, what a prize fool that wop was.
He only stopped laughing when he realized he could no longer remember what Arturo looked like. Now wasn’t that funny?
He got out of bed.
This was the breaking point. Right now. He either manned up and spent the night or he packed up his stuff and went on his merry way with his tail tucked between his legs. And, of course, if he did that, Arturo would know it. Those guys in the van would call him right away. And Arturo would let it slip. Everyone would know that Charlie Petty had no balls, that he was afraid of spooks. He’d never live it down. Never.
Which, of course, brought him back to Arturo and his reasons.
He could not get past the idea that Arturo knew he was banging his wife and that this had little to do with a $50,000 debt and everything to do with breaking him, exposing Charlie Petty for the gutless heap he was beginning to suspect he indeed was. Arturo wanted to de-ball him and if he succeeded, Charlie’s reputation as a stand-up guy would be forever marred. A professional gambler existed on his nerves and when he lost them, he was no good to himself or anyone else.
Leaving this tomb does not make you weak or gutless. It makes you smart.
Maybe. But it didn’t really matter what Arturo thought or what he was trying to prove, if anything, what mattered was how Charlie viewed himself. If he began to think he had no guts, soon enough, he might begin to believe it and then his card playing days were all done with. That was what he risked by walking away from this now. He honestly believed that Arturo knew more than he was saying about the Yvonne Addams. He knew damn well there was something very bad about her. It was beyond mere sailor’s superstitions. Whatever haunted this goddamn ship was the real thing and he knew it. Maybe he was on the level about needing Charlie to spend the night there so he could a get crew aboard. And maybe he knew that Charlie had a thing with Pam…but what it came down to was that he was using this as an opportunity to break him.
And I won’t be fucking broken.
There. That felt better. Charlie felt like he had his guts back. And since he had his guts back, it was time to think rationally and accept the fact that he was in danger. He needed to leave…yet, even with all he’d been through, the idea of tucking his quivering tail between his legs was unacceptable.
Somehow, it was cowardly.
But wait, just wait—there was an obvious solution to all these questions or at least some of them. He had his cell. He had Pam’s number. He’d call her. Together, they could hash this out. Maybe Arturo had told her something about the boat and maybe she was suspicious that he knew about her lover. Together, they could figure it out.
Charlie sat down at the desk with his cell and gave her a ring.
He was so excited to hear another voice that his heart pounded and his hands shook. Pam usually picked up right away or she didn’t pick up at all. The phone seemed to ring and ring, echoing in his head so loudly it seemed like it was echoing down the corridors of the ship, bouncing off bulkheads and up ventilation shafts.
Her voicemail kicked in.
“Dammit,” he muttered.
He tried again. Nothing. Out of frustration, he tossed the phone. It bounced off the bed and landed on the floor. It beeped, then beeped again.
He picked it up, put it to his ear. This is what he heard:
“You’ve reached Charlie, but I’m out. You can look for me, but you can’t find me. I’m in a secret place that nobody knows. Check the corners and the cracks and the dust on the closet shelf. I’m not alone. There’s someone else with me, someone very old, very wise and very jealous. I can’t tell you who it is, only that they’ve been here a long time, hiding by day and creeping by night. I believe plans have been made for me. I believe my mind is gone to soft rot. I believe my soul is being eaten. I believe that my cage has no door. I believe in the bones inside me when nothing else is left—”
He was shaking with terror and rage. His voice, but he had never recorded anything like that. He di
aled 911. This was enough. This was more than fucking enough.
Click. Bing. Connect. “You have reached Charlie, but I’m out. I’m sinking into the floor and the walls have teeth—”
He threw the phone.
The door.
If he did not get out that door right now, he never would. He felt sick to his stomach. Waves of nausea rolled through him, his brain seeming to swim in his skull with vertigo. His mouth was dry. His hands were shaking. He stood up and his legs would barely hold his weight.
Get to the door! C’mon! If you don’t get to it now and get out of here, you’ll be trapped in this fucking hulk forever! Move! You have to fucking move!
And he tried. Oh, how he tried. He made it maybe three steps—clumsy, faltering toddler steps—before he went down on his knees. Instinct was driving him. Pure, hot-blooded instinct because his conscious mind was incapable of directing his body to perform even the most basic of functions. He crawled towards the door and even simple locomotion like that seemed impossibly complex, his brain short-circuiting in his head.
He looked over at the rocking chair and Virginia was sitting in it…or at least, the entity he believed to be Virginia. She wore the gray, rotting, water-stained tarp they had wrapped her in before pitching her corpse overboard. Her face was a white globular oblong mass, swollen and distorted and disfigured as if it had been beaten to the point that the bones beneath it had all been broken. Her nose was twisted off to the side. One black gelid eye was pushed back into a tunnel-like socket, the other drawn down towards her cheekbone as if the orbit that held it had been shattered. She grinned with a mouth that was a lopsided hole. At her feet sat the box.
Charlie knew she had brought it for him.
It was a gift.
There was something inside for him.
He shook his head. No, he didn’t want what was in there even if it wanted him. The lid opened and two gnarled gray hands that looked very much like rat claws emerged. There were sharp hair-like bristles growing from the back of them.
He blinked his eyes and the apparition was gone.
He pulled himself to his feet using the bed and a wave of dizziness hit him, laid him flat, and he fell back, gasping and panting and senseless. Blackness came at him from every direction and he passed out cold.
13
He came awake to the unpleasant sensation that a mouth was sucking on the end of his finger, pulling on it the way a newborn puppy will pull on its mother’s teat with immense, hungering suction. He let out a cry and sat up. The cabin was pitch-dark.
The lantern had gone out.
There was nothing at his finger. Nothing at all. A nightmare.
Breathing fast, he checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was nearly three a.m., which meant he’d been sleeping for at least two or three hours. Could the batteries in the lantern have died out in that time? Or had something else happened? Something he did not want to consider?
If there were dreams, he could not—or would not—remember them.
He laid there, his head pounding slightly, and he was glad he could not see the wallpaper. The sheets felt pretty much just like sheets and the coverlet like a coverlet. He ran his fingers over the latter…it was sticky. As he pulled his hand away, tiny threads of something like webs were stuck to his fingertips like spiders had been at work since he fell asleep. Just the feel of them, clinging and oddly warm, made a moan come up out of his throat.
Not webs, not webs, he told himself. Hairs. Fine hairs.
He brushed them away.
He had a plan now: he was going to go see Arturo.
Piss on it all. And while he was there he was going to tell him the air was bad on the Addams. That’s what he was going to do and nothing could stop him. That’s what it all had to be: the air or lack of the same. Maybe some kind of gases. That would explain the hallucinations, the dizziness, the passing out. Hell, it was the strand that could connect it all and put it in some kind of perspective.
Dummy. You should have thought of this before.
He sat up and his head started spinning right away. But he refused to lie back down. It was dark in the room, so very dark. He reached in his pocket and found his cigarettes, his Zippo. He fired one up and the pungent smell of smoke seemed to clear his head. He was rooted to the here and now, at any rate.
As he pulled off his cigarette, he was aware of the dankness of the air and the fact that his heart was racing wildly like it wanted to gallop right out of his chest. Leaving the cigarette in his mouth, he scratched at his bare arms. They were itchy, terribly itchy…but as he touched them, he became aware that they were covered in a fine down of silky hairs. He scratched them away frantically. They clung to his fingers: intricate, lacey webs. But what was worse, is that there were tiny things crawling in them.
Charlie screamed and fell out of bed.
He scrambled over to the desk and found his flashlight. He clicked it on and turned on the lantern. It worked fine. It was just shut off. That’s all it was. He didn’t remember shutting it off, but he must have. Maybe it had some kind of energy-saving device on it that turned it off automatically. Maybe. Possibly. He really couldn’t imagine someone coming in here and turning it off for him. If Arturo really had goons aboard, they must have known Charlie was armed.
Creak, creak, creak.
It came from behind him, bringing a cool sweat to his face that tasted like sea brine on his lips. He knew he had to turn around and face his fears, but he could not bring himself to. Maybe if he just ignored it, it would go away. Things had reached the stage now where either he curled-up in the corner and screamed his mind away or he took some action and looked whatever the hell this was dead in the face.
There was no choice.
Charlie was a particular type of man and he responded true to form. He reached into his duffel and pulled out the .45. Because in his narrow world, this was how you handled threats. You drilled rounds into them and let them bleed out. Then you got on with your fucking life.
He spun around with the Smith .45.
What he saw was an ethereal, filmy shape in the rocking chair. It did not move. It was hunched over, grotesque like some living sack. Without hesitation, he put two slugs into it. It was like shooting a patch of mist, of course. He put two very neat holes through the back of the chair but he did not disturb the nebulous shape that sat in it. Was it his imagination or did he hear something like a low, pained mewling of a newborn kitten? It was there and then it was gone, almost like it was echoing off into the distance.
There was no shape in the chair.
In fact, there was nothing but Charlie himself standing there, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, his eyes bulging from their sockets and his lips trembling as if they were trying to find words that would never come. His hand was shaking so badly he thought he might drop the gun so he set it on the desk.
His hand kept itching, a constant burning, tingling, tickling sensation that was enough to drive him mad. He held it up to the lantern and it was so swollen he could not move his fingers. It seemed as if something was moving beneath the makeshift bandages.
He saw the can of beer sitting there.
He reached out and grabbed it. It was warm and foamy but there was alcohol in it and that’s what he wanted, what he craved, what he had to have. He finished the can, gulping tepid beer down his throat. Right away, something inside him eased. His nerves seemed to relax. Everything went loose and limp.
He heard the scratching from inside the wall again.
Beads of sweat ran down his face.
The scratching got louder.
Swallowing, fumbling for the gun on the desk, he looked over at the wall. The wallpaper split open. It looked like the vaginal slit of a woman. A clear and viscid slime began to bubble out and run like tears. In it were dozens of tiny transparent things like fetal termites. They oozed down the wall, creeping out of the slime.
It’s not there. You are not seeing it.
The insects continued
to flow from the gashed wallpaper, a pool of them spreading over the floor. He would drown in it. Yes, the placental discharge would fill his mouth, then his lungs.
The lantern flickered and went out.
No, no, no, not in the dark, not in the dark.
Something touched his cheek like a wisp of hair. And in the darkness around him, things were moving, he could sense them, hear the creeping sounds of their legs on the walls. Yes, even on the floor, a skittering of leggy things. He scrambled to his feet, trying to orientate himself in the seething, living blackness. A net of hairs fell over his face. He clawed them away. He tripped over his feet in his panic and fell against the wall. Just a wall…yet, it was also covered in those filament-fine hairs.
He blinked his eyes and the light was back. He knew that somehow it had never been out in the first place.
He giggled deep in his throat at the absurdity of such a thing, light being dark and dark being light. Then he giggled at the absurdity of himself: tough guy morphed into frightened little boy. Hee, hee, hee.
His wounded hand was pulsing like a heart, throbbing and pumping. As he looked at it, it seemed to inflate like it was being filled with air or rising like bread dough. A strangled shriek breaking loose in his throat, he tore the bandages free because he had to see, he had to look at it.
Yes, it was horribly distended; the fingers like sausages, the hand itself like a fleshy, puffy catcher’s mitt. It was warm and pulsing to the touch and he snatched his fingers away out of sheer revulsion. The skin was purple and contused, hot and bubble gum pink, the fingernails blackening like those of a corpse.
And the itching.
Dear God, how it itched!
He could see that there were pink welts on his arms now that were rising like blisters. He lifted his shirt and they were on his belly, too. He pressed a finger into one and it burst like a rotten grape. He let out a cry and grabbed the lantern, stumbling into the head. Yes, yes…there were pink sores on his face. They were even on his tongue. He could feel them expanding on the roof of his mouth.