New Title 15

by Norris, Gregory L.

  The artist suddenly drew the sketch back. “Wait,” he said, and quickly ran his signature along the bottom. “Sorry, I’m really new at this.”

  “You could have fooled me, dude. Shit, I look almost as hot on paper as in person.”

  Brandon shook his head. The woman continued past, up the stairs. The artist settled back, beaming. For the first time, Brandon noticed the cut on his face, the bruises, all fresh.

  “You’re good,” Brandon said. Now that he was alerted to the artist’s words, he couldn’t stop looking, doing to the dude what Aaron had accused the dude of. “I’m Brandon.”

  They shook hands. Brandon remembered that Shaggy was an artist and dialed down the vice grip.

  “Mona Lisa over here’s my brother, Aaron.”

  “Aaron,” the artist sighed, a note of breathlessness in the lone word, as though he were speaking the most important part of an incantation, invoking the divine. Then he blinked himself out of the trance. “Cary Labonte. Pleased to meet you Brandon, Aaron.”

  Cary Labonte’s eyes lingered on Aaron.

  “Hope you don’t mind me saying this…and, again, consider the source—I’m really green at all of this—but Aaron, have you thought about modeling professionally?”

  Aaron’s eyes assumed the dopey, dazed expression Brandon recognized whenever the rent was due, and Aaron came up short. “Huh? You mean, like for an artist?”

  “An artist, a photographer. Print media. Hell, for a fashion designer.”

  Dopey grin and dimple followed. “Are you fucking with me?”

  Cary’s smile faltered.

  Fucking with me?

  Cary blinked. The notion of going horizontal with the handsome blue-collar ape in the wrinkled suit hadn’t entered his mind until that moment. Once there, the seed planted, Cary couldn’t harvest it. What fun it would be, fucking around with Aaron Dunne. The best sex of his young life. The only, thought Cary while choking down a bitter swallow. Apart from a few bold kisses fueled by alcohol at a graduation party, a bit of awkward fumbling, rubbing together, he didn’t have anything to compare the hypothetical sex to. He felt his face go red.

  “No,” he eventually said. “You should be a model, for real.”

  “Yeah, for a monster magazine,” said Brandon.

  “Fuck you,” Aaron fired back.

  “Speaking of monsters, what was it you said about some dude in a trench coat carrying a backpack?”

  “The genie,” Cary said. And then he told them the rest.

  It had lain dormant in the nepheloid, slumbering in that dense layer of mud deep beneath the ocean’s surface, the realm it always returned to when full and tired. A very old creature, it slept and it grew and, when hungry, it feasted on the flesh of the animals rich in blubber and warm blood. Sometimes, it hungered for the small, bold prey that ventured over its territory on shells crafted from wood in older times, when it was younger. Now, the prey traveled in sharp, shiny shells that were harder to crack apart.

  The monster found them palatable enough, and it had woken hungry, dragged on currents from the mud, from home, to this distant place where the water was colder, darker, and the prey not as plentiful to feed the emptiness within its core.

  It sighted the pod of warm-blooded animals, then the shell, knowing that should it crack open the hard exoskeleton, the insides would be filled with enough prey to satisfy its hunger. The pod darted away, toward the shell.

  The sea monster raised its main stalks, the ones containing its sonar-stunners, focused its will, and discharged the ancient ability into the unfamiliar waters.

  Right before the Avello’s sonar went down, Erin Wanamaker sounded the alert.

  “They’re turning,” she said to Captain Laighton. “The whales, sir. They’ve turned directly toward us.”

  “Come again?” Laighton asked.

  The captain moved beside the wheel, gazed at one screen, which was a blur of yellow crescents, and the other, which then went blank.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Laighton pointed at the large, fast-moving shape coming at them from starboard, charging up quickly on the pod of whales and also now aimed at the ferry.

  Cary opened his messenger bag.

  “He came at me, had this.” He showed the brothers the genie’s gun. “There was something else in his backpack. Shit, I think it’s a human head. I got away, rammed my skull into his ugly fucking face.”

  “Dude,” Aaron said. “You’re more bad-ass than anyone I know.”

  Brandon stood. “Come on.”

  “What—?” This came from Aaron.

  “That dude you got the gun from,” he said, tipping his chin at Cary’s open bag. “I’ve seen him. He’s on board.”

  “No, he’s not. I looked,” Cary said.

  “Then you didn’t look hard enough, because he almost tripped over me on his way up those stairs. And there’s something else. The backpack—you said you saw something. Whatever he’s got stashed in there smells like it turned rotten a week ago.”

  Both Aaron and Cary stood and followed Brandon up the stairs to the middle deck. There, Cary indicated the sealed men’s room door. Brandon nodded, knocked.

  “Hello, anyone in there?”

  No response came.

  “Hey, buddy, this is sort of an emergency.”

  Silence. Saying nothing more, Brandon waved the other two men toward the steps leading up to the top deck. But as soon as they emerged into the maelstrom swirling just outside the door to the pilothouse, it became clear the crew on the ferry Avello were dealing with an unfolding emergency of their own.

  10.

  6:16 p.m., Saturday the Thirteenth

  “You killed me,” a voice like his late sister’s burbled from within the backpack. “You fucking bashed my head in—for our father’s filthy lucre!”

  Her voice, yes—but it had taken on the inflections of his voice, and at that moment, Lester understood exactly what was at work here.

  “You were a monster, Rona, and now you’re dead.”

  “You were the monster, dick-face. You may have lopped off my squash, but I’m not going away any time soon.”

  Lester smirked. “That voice, it’s mine. You’re nothing more than a figment. I’m tired. That faggot boned me in the head when he probably wanted to punch-fuck me up the ass, fucking queer. And my nerves are frayed thanks to whoever keeps banging on this door. Serves him right for eating Mexican back on that shitty island, the mother fucker…”

  He stood, swayed, reached for the faucet. A few splashes of cold water helped.

  “On second thought, it might be best if I gave up that last little trophy of yours, dear sister. Drop you the fuck overboard, let the fishes feast on the evidence.”

  Lester tipped a glance at the backpack, which had gone silent.

  “What? Nothing to say all of a sudden? No, you miserable, money-loving bitch?”

  He kicked at the backpack again, then picked it up by the shoulder strap and unlocked the men’s room door. The angry knocker was gone, but Lester guessed he’d soon return. Minutes at the most, likely seconds in the short term. He couldn’t go down or up. There was only one direction left: directly forward to the open deck.

  He punched the automatic door release. The door rolled open and the storm’s anger surged in, pelting him with rain and the sea’s brine. If there was a port somewhere out there, it was hidden behind dark swells and soupy fog. The air reeked of salt and triggered a low tide analogy in his memory.

  “Jump, just jump,” Dead-Rona urged. “End your miserable life, you fuck.”

  Lester shook his head and ambled to the bow. He held onto safety rails, slid along the slippery deck. He made it all the way to the stem, as far as possible without taking that last ugly leap into the drink. It was a real DiCaprio moment, Lester thought. Only he didn’t exactly feel like the king of the world yet.

  Through the rain’s steady pelting and the rises and falls that would have sent lesser souls reaching for
their barf bags, he caught sight of the distant glow of what he assumed was Hyannis.

  “Fucking finally,” he mouthed aloud, and tasted salt.

  Lester closed his eyes. For several seconds, he indulged in thoughts of where he would go, what he would do. Down through the Mexican border to one of the resort towns—Cozumel or Tulum. All those Mexicano drug lords were keeping the U.S. government too busy to waste resources on one fat fugitive who’d likely eat and drink himself to death before the fiscal year ended, so why bother? He just needed to get off the water and onto land to beat his hasty exit from the United States to a place far less unified, uniform. Mexico for a start, sure.

  He opened his eyes, gazed again toward the shore. Only the lights of Hyannis, glittering purple-blue in the distance, had jumped off the horizon and into the water, and were making a zigzag toward the ferry.

  The ferry had made good time given the conditions. Avello moved quickly and maintained course. The monster moved faster.

  At 6:20 p.m., June the Thirteenth, the Avello and the ancient monster from the depths collided, and then one of the two juggernauts began to feed on the other.

  11.

  6:19 p.m., Saturday the Thirteenth

  The door to the middle deck’s men’s room stood open. Brandon cautiously approached. Choking down the last of his hesitation, he gave the door a push—no one inside, but the men’s head was hardly empty. The putrid smell of something dead lingered, enough to poison his next breath and the ones that followed.

  “He was here,” Brandon said, right as 6:19 ran out.

  “There,” Cary said, pointing to the exit and the night beyond, made indistinct by the rain.

  Aaron led the way toward the deck. 6:20 struck. As it did, something rammed the ferry.

  From the cut of her eye, Erin Wanamaker saw the unidentified object in that breathless instant before the collision: darting just beneath the waves, lit by colors that reminded her of neon tubes twisted into wild shapes, flowers and stars and constellations glowing in blue-grays and purple-whites. It wasn’t a submarine or torpedo, but after it surged into the Avello’s starboard flank, the violent jolt that resulted showed it was no less destructive.

  The small world contained within the wheelhouse instantly transformed from familiar to a foreign no-man’s land before Erin’s eyes. Lights flickered, cut out, and then came back on in shades of blood red. Emergency lights—clearly a bad sign. A dozen different alarm bells rang as a hundred things happened at once, though none of them sounded familiar, as they should have during any other emergency situation or collision. Maybe it was that pulse, registered right before the instruments went haywire, whatever scrambled the sonar. Or that her brains had taken a less violent but still sharp scramble of their own against the wheel. The delayed pain, coupled with the madness breaking around her, slowed time one instant, sped it up the next, creating a sequence of disconnected, animated gifs out of her crewmates and captain.

  “Mayday, mayday,” Domenic called into the radio, though his voice sounded a thousand miles away, shouted up from the bottom of the Atlantic.

  Erin gripped the controls. The Avello bucked. She had the sense of drifting, falling, even as Captain Laighton moved beside her, asking if she was all right. She hadn’t served long aboard this particular ship and route, but knock on the head or not, she knew when all right was long gone and life was about to get terribly, totally wrong.

  She wasn’t falling but listing with the ferry. Avello, she sensed without the facts yet to support such a claim, was taking on water.

  Animated gifs. She, too, had been cast into the replaying spool of a movie clip. A horror movie, remarked a voice in her thoughts, for outside the wheelhouse, a hideous giant monster’s head rose atop the glowing stalk of a neck. What passed on the creature for eyes, black and inhumane circles, seemed to take count of the people inside. Then, with those thousand things still happening all at once, the nightmare outside the pilothouse opened its maw, roared, and threw its colossal mouth and the multiple rows of bared teeth inside at the windows.

  He was out there, standing on the bow amid the waterlogged bunting, frozen. Cary recognized the trench coat, the shape of the man who’d tried to murder him back at the O’Keefe Cottage on Cardigan Island, now invisible long fathoms and miles at their backs.

  “You,” Cary bellowed.

  An instant later, another voice roared louder.

  He’d made it onto the deck, the rain-slick surface difficult enough to navigate, but made worse because the ferry was no longer cutting waves head-on—it was drinking them down, listing. Red emergency lights had activated within the Avello and poured through portholes. A brighter light source glowed in fantastic shades alongside the pilothouse, only it couldn’t be what it appeared. It just couldn’t!

  Bioluminescence, Cary thought as the giant head and throat around those living lights coalesced somewhere between the ferry and the clouds. The head lunged at the wheelhouse, where human shapes scrambled, clearly reacting to one emergency situation even as another, more horrific one unfolded. A chorus of screams added a soundtrack to the scene. Glass shattered in counterpoint. After impact, most of the pilothouse had been exposed to the night. Metal panels fluttered in the gusts of wind, jagged pinwheels ripped free of rivets.

  The sea monster drew back, raised up, and tipped its giant head with its trio of eyes and sharp snout leading to a maw filled with sharper teeth enough, just enough, to notice four men standing on the canted deck. The colors streaming in pulses up its throat quickened. Its eyes shifted focus from the pilothouse to easier prey, in clear sight.

  “Holy shit,” Brandon swore.

  Avello lurched to starboard, and the door back into the questionable safety of the middle deck’s covered passenger compartment might as well have been as far away as Cardigan Island and that wonderful little cottage where so many canvasses waited for the artist to finish, and might wait forever given this new wrinkle to what had been the most dangerous—maybe the last—day of Cary’s life.

  * * * *

  A hallucination, one more, like his sister’s talking head. It had to be. Only the head had jumped out of the backpack and its plastic bag prison and now loomed twenty feet around on the neck stalk easily that length. Crenulated muscle, teeth, and eyes fixed upon Jack Lester with a look of hunger more than anger, but as he lost his grip, the emotions reversed. The giant Rona opened its maw, let forth with a deafening scream, and surged toward him.

  That face, so big, distorted in the rain and chaos. Her dark eyes, now three of them, condemned him by not blinking. Her mouth wanted blood, only his. One of the enormous hooks jutting out of Giant Rona’s cheek became the hairy mole on her face, yet one more symbol of her sorcery and ugliness he so hated about his sister, now blown up to numerous times her old size.

  He lost his grip. The deck of the Avello skipped below his loafers, only to vanish. An instant later, his soles met the ocean. Lester plunged beneath the surface, the water so cold that every cell deep in his marrow sang out in agony. Breathing became impossible. His epidermis numbed at the moment of contact. Darkness surrounded him.

  The backpack—he lost his hold, and all that filthy money, all those expensive baubles, including the most priceless of the bunch, his dead sister’s head—floated away, lost.

  But then he broke the surface and the darkness got driven out by the sinister blues and purples and she, the monster, the bitch, loomed over him, bigger than ever. Rona Lester, vicious barracuda and money-grubbing whore, opened her giant mouth, baring her fangs. Gold coins dropped out of her maw, pelting him.

  Lester blinked and realized the horror wasn’t his dead sister, for he’d already killed that obscenity of a woman back on Cardigan. The drops of gold spilling onto him were the beast’s saliva.

  The sea monster grabbed hold of Jack Lester with its fangs, tossed back its head, and swallowed the shrieking man whole. Turning, it set its sight on the nearest of the remaining three bodies on the canted deck.


  Aaron Dunne froze. The sea monster charged.

  Precise, as though you are being surgical with your paintbrush; that the next stroke will mean the difference between a masterpiece and a mess.

  That’s how he sold it to himself, and also by ignoring another voice attempting to remind him that the object in his hand was not a paint brush but the dead genie’s gun; that to miss wouldn’t mean simply starting over with a different canvas because the subject, the model, would be dead.

  Aaron Dunne was the handsomest man Cary had ever set eyes upon. A true muse. Dare he think it, more than that? More than material for future masturbation sessions conducted in bed or before the easel. He doubted they had the potential for anything serious—clearly, the dude was a caveman, a tool, a dick with feet interested only in the opposite sex. But if this day in history, June the Thirteenth, had taught him anything, it was to believe in possibilities and to fight for them.

  He aimed the assassin’s gun. The sea monster, its terrible yet awesome image imprinting upon Cary’s psyche for future exhumation if any of them survived this night, swung its face toward Aaron. Cary didn’t know guns, but he was newly conversant with paintbrushes. That’s what it became in his mind’s eye. He needed to be precise, to take aim, to color within the lines or else Aaron would suffer. Aaron. He liked the unlikely possibility of their future together.

  Cary fired. The recoil knocked him the rest of the way off his feet. The report robbed most of his hearing, but not the alien howl that told him his aim had been perfect—right through one of those gargantuan eyes, now blinking around dark gouts of what could only be blood.

  And as he fell toward the ocean, Aaron caught him.

  “I got you, dude,” Aaron said.

  Cary clutched Aaron’s arm, regained what footing was available, watched as the colossal head snapped back and shook from side to side before disappearing beneath the turgid water, its glow waning, leaving them again bathed in the red glare of the Avello’s emergency lights.