“No, we’re all going,” Cook told them. “All of us. We’re going to explore this ship and we’re going to do it together.”
They were all standing in the corridor outside their cabins, smelling the stink of the ship and feeling its ominous weight settling down on them. Cook called them all out there and told them he wasn’t crazy about any of them wondering around alone on the ship.
“All I’m saying is that this is an old hulk. A lot of the decks are rotten and one of you could fall through and the rest of us would never know about it,” he explained to them, though rotting decks weren’t what he was really concerned about. “So, if you’ve got to stretch your legs, just take someone with you.”
Fabrini didn’t have a problem with that and neither did Menhaus. Crycek just shrugged. But Saks, of course, smirked at the idea.
“You wanna be big boss man, Cook, it’s okay with me,” he said. “But you’re not going to order me around.”
“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Just do what you’re told.”
“Who dropped a quarter into you, Fagbrini? I was talking to Cook, the big boss man. So kindly fuck off.” He turned back to Cook. “I’ll do what you say, if that’s the way you want it. But if you think I’m some kind of prisoner, guess again.”
Menhaus shook his head. “You starting again, Saks? We trusted you and untied you and you’re starting again?”
“Zip it, fat boy,” Saks told him. “I plan to do what I want. That’s all there’s to it. Besides, when I’m not around that gives you and Fabrini more time to suck tongue.”
“Cocksucker,” Fabrini said, coming at him now.
But he didn’t get too close, because Saks stepped back and pulled out a knife. It had a seven-inch blade on it, looked sharp like he’d been working it on a stone. “Don’t make me do something stupid, Fabrini, because I really don’t want to.”
Fabrini had his knife out then and the two of them faced each other, eyes filled with acid.
Menhaus looked pale.
Crycek just smiled, figuring it was inevitable.
Cook, figuring he was the only cool head, stepped between them. He had the Browning stuck in his belt, but he did not pull it. “Okay, you two, that’s enough. Put those fucking blades away.” He looked from Fabrini to Saks, his fingers drumming the butt of his gun. I mean it.
They saw that he did.
They backed off and the knives disappeared.
Cook said, “You know, we’ve got enough problems here, Saks, without your shit. You want to wander this goddamn wreck and kill yourself? Well, you go right ahead. No loss, I figure. But if you ever pull that knife on someone again, I swear to God I’ll just put you down like a sick dog. And if you think I’m kidding, you think I’m bluffing, then you try pulling it on me right goddamn now.”
Saks licked his lips and it was easy to see that he wanted to pull that knife. Wanted to show these pukes what he was made of, but he backed down. And backing down did not come easy to a guy like Saks. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he did and it filled him with poison. Poison that he secreted somewhere for later, when he had a chance to use it. But right then? No, not a good idea. Cook would kill him. He knew it. Cook was not bluffing.
“Okay,” Saks said, “now that we know who’s in charge, let’s take a walk and see what there is to see.”
Crycek was still smiling. “Yeah, nothing I love better than a ghost ship.” He just shook his head. “What is it you expect to find?”
Menhaus said, “I don’t know. People or something. Maybe.”
Crycek laughed. “People? People? There’s none left. Hasn’t been for years and years. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…”
“That’ll do,” Cook said.
Good old Crycek. He could make the Good Humor Man slit his fucking wrists. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them… Yeah, that was exactly what everyone needed to be hearing. Jesus.
“Let’s get going,” Fabrini said.
Saks had located a drum of kerosene, so they charged up a couple lanterns and went for a walk.
They found pretty much what they knew they’d find: lots of fungus and rust, some bones and debris. That was all they found thirty minutes into it, unless you wanted to count shadows or the distant sounds of scratching.
They let Saks lead them on, since he seemed to know his way around ships pretty well. But, as he reminded them again and again, he’d been in the Navy. He liked to remind them of all the places he’d been and all the things he’d done there. Cook didn’t hate him as much as before. Sure, Saks still reminded him – frighteningly so – of his father, just another inveterate asshole, but he didn’t want to kill him anymore. He almost felt sorry for the man. For all men like him who felt the need to hide their insecurities and fears behind a wall of machismo. And the realization of that came as something of a surprise to Cook. Somewhere along the way, he had changed. Hatred had become an odd species of pity. Now wasn’t that something?
One of the first places they visited was the surgery.
It was dirty and cobwebbed, debris everywhere, fungus oozing down the walls like streamers at a kid’s birthday party. The furniture and desk were pretty much rotten as was most of the woodwork in there. Cabinets held jars and bottles of drugs and chemicals, the liquids which had dried now to black goo and the powders solidified like cement. The labels on them were faded and unreadable. There were shelves of moldering books and a few yellowed medical degrees in dusty glass frames.
All in all, there was nothing but age here.
“You can almost feel the awful things that happened here,” Crycek said.
“Ah, knock it off with that,” Menhaus told him.
But he was right. As the others looted through cupboards of instruments and file cabinets of crumbling papers, Cook could actually feel it. Smell it. More than an odor of age and dissolution, but an odd trace memory of pain and blackness and lunacy. Things had happened here, he was certain, terrible things that you didn’t want to think about. It was here, he knew, that the men who’d been infected aboard the Korsund would have been taken. You could almost feel their slow, lingering deaths, the horror they felt as the Cyclops was locked tighter in the grip of something unknown and malevolent. They would have laid on those tables, vomiting their guts out, never knowing in their innocent minds what radiation poisoning truly was.
Yes, the pain was real here. You could feel it.
“Check this out,” Fabrini said, hoisting a large wooden chest up onto a tabletop, pushing aside a dusty rack of test tubes and a box of slides. He knocked over a tall, antique brass microscope that was tarnished green. Motes of dust filled the lantern light.
Cook brushed sediment off it, waving dust away.
It was a surgeon’s kit, he saw. Maybe the others didn’t recognize what it was, but Cook had seen them before. When he wasn’t pushing earth with a grader, he was something of a Civil War buff. He haunted reenactments and particularly the makeshift battlefield hospitals there. Most of the surgeon reenactors were medical men in real life and their equipment was contemporary to the 1860s.
“A doctor’s kit,” Cook told them. “A surgery kit.”
Ebony-handled scalpels were pressed into felt compartments along with sutures, needles, probing hooks, tourniquets, and a particularly fearsome-looking post mortem knife. Cook lifted the tray of instruments out, revealing another beneath which held bone saws, artery clamps, bone snips, a large and rusty amputation saw. There were other implements he was not familiar with.
“Shit,” Fabrini said, “makes my stomach weak just looking at that stuff.”
There was a brass presentation plaque on the inside lid. It read: “Chas. W. Kolbe.”
“That must have been the doctor,” Menhaus said.
“No, his name was Asper,” Fabrini said.
They all looked at him.
“How do you know that?” Saks put to him. “How do you know what his name was?”
Cook stepped in. “We saw it up on the bridge when we first came aboard. There’s a crew list up there.”
Which seemed to satisfy Menhaus and Crycek, but you could see Saks didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Really?” he said. “A crew list? Isn’t that something? Fabrini’s got a good memory.”
Cook led them out of there and back into the corridor.
They found the captain’s quarters before long and although dusty and dirty, they had once been somewhat lavish. At least in comparison to the other cabins. There was nothing of note in there, save for some mildewed antiques – a naval campaign chest and a set of salon lamps. Fabrini found a nice scrimshaw-headed walking stick that he took with him. Overall, the captain’s cabin was in worse shape that the others. There was a gaping hole in the bulkhead, fingers of mist seeping in.
“I wonder what caused that?” Menhaus said.
Saks was examining it. “Doesn’t look like a shell punched through there. This room would be in shambles if it had. No… it almost looks burned.”
Cook had trouble swallowing when he saw the hole and even more trouble when Saks said that. Yes, it probably was burned, he figured. Forbes had written about something coming through the bulkhead after Captain Worley.
“What could burn through iron that thick?” Menhaus wanted to know. “A torch? A goddamn laser beam?”
Crycek grinned at the idea.
“Any ideas, Fabrini?” Saks said.
Fabrini twisted a bit, but covered himself. “Who knows? So long ago, who could say?” Cook started breathing again. Goddamn Fabrini.. . how did he let the doctor’s name slip?
Menhaus and Crycek were not interested in any of that, but Saks was. He knew he was on to something here. He had sensed some secret shared between Cook and Fabrini and he wasn’t going to let go of it. Like a tongue working a sore tooth, he was going to keep at it. As they walked down the corridors, slopping through those mats of fungi, the lanterns creating wild and sinister shapes around them, he kept suggesting places they could investigate, digging and probing, trying to find out something that Cook and Fabrini did not want him to know about.
“I’d like to take a look at the engine room,” he said, watching Fabrini for a sign of discomfort. “That sound good to you, Fabrini?”
Fabrini looked at Cook, looked away. “Don’t matter to me.”
“We were already down there,” Cook said. “Nothing to see but a lot of rusty machinery.”
“Old steam turbines, I bet,” Saks said. “You wanna check ‘em out, Menhaus?”
“Why not?”
There was no way to get out of it.
So down they went into that cavernous blackness, the lanterns peeling the darkness back layer by layer. They stood before the rusted, seized up turbines which were gigantic.
“Look at that piston,” Menhaus said, in awe, as always, of mechanical things. “Bigger than a pillar… and solid fucking brass. Jesus.”
There were a few inches of slimy gray water on the floor. They checked the machine shops and storerooms, found the pile of bones Cook and Fabrini had found… but the giant sea lice were gone. That was a good thing. Saks was trying to force a rusted hatch. With Menhaus’ help, it came open with a terrible groaning that seemed to shake the ship. There was a companionway beyond it, a set of black iron steps.
“The bilge must be down here,” Saks said. “Let’s take a look.”
There was no arguing with the guy. He felt that he was on to something and nobody could talk him out of it, even if he was light years away from the logbook that so disturbed Cook and Fabrini. Saks in the lead, they went down those creaking steps that were thick with slime and mold.
“Smells bad down here,” Menhaus said. “You smell that?”
They all did. A black, filthy odor of decay and stagnance. A stench of moist, dripping subcellars, closets threaded with wood rot, caskets plucked from muddy graves. Things buried or that should have been buried. It was a stink similar to the rest of the ship, but down here the volume had definitely been turned up. It was actually warm and yeasty, curiously alive with a sweet/sour tang of organic profusion like a hothouse filled with jungle orchids.
Not a good smell at all.
Cook had smelled something like that once before. When he was a boy, beneath his Uncle Bobby’s trailer home. Bobby’s old dog, Bobo, had disappeared the autumn before and come June, when the weather turned warm, they followed the stench under the trailer and found him. Down there amongst the cobwebs and spiders, mouse droppings and rotting cardboard boxes, old Bobo lay. He had sickened and crawled down there to die. Cook was the first to see him. He had literally rotted in half. A black fungus was growing out of his eye sockets and hindquarters, a slimy collection of toadstools sprouting from his belly. What Cook was smelling now reminded him of that – hot, moist germination.
The deck down there was flooded with about two feet of water. The hull was breached in half a dozen locations. Weeds had grown up through the holes and were threaded along the bulkheads. The bilge trough itself was thick with weeds and black, oozing water.
And that was bad.
“Jesus, lookit those holes,” Menhaus said. “This goddamn wreck could sink at any moment.”
But Cook said he didn’t think it would. It was actually marooned in the weeds. They must have been thick beneath the ship beyond belief.
“Watch that trough,” Saks told them, leading them on.
“What the hell do you expect to find down here?” Cook asked him.
But Saks didn’t answer. He stepped lightly, over tangles of weed that were green and thick and thriving. Cook wanted them to turn back. What they were smelling, it was more than the stink of the weed. It was something else. A growing, noxious odor and he did not like it. From time to time he thought he heard a sort of secretive rustling from up ahead.
They passed around an arch of riveted steel and Saks stopped.
He brought his light up so they could all see. See that forest of white, pulsating things that grew up through an immense rent in the hull of the ship. They looked at first like the stems of some weird plant, but as Saks held the light up, they could see that they were wormlike, about as thick as fence posts and hollow. Hundreds of them, slithering and rustling, black mouths set at their ends.
“What the fuck?” Menhaus said.
“Worms,” Cook told them, his skin crawling at the sight of them. “I think they’re tube worms… like the kind you see around smoker vents on the ocean floor.”
It was hard to say whether they were dangerous or not and nobody was getting close enough to find out, but they were certainly hideous. Squirming and horribly alive, standing straight up like saplings, mouths opening and closing like those of fish.
Cook almost felt like screaming at the sight of them.
In his mind, he saw himself lost without a light, stumbling around down here, falling into the bilge and dragging himself back up, all snarled with weeds and then… then falling into that creeping mass of tube worms. Feeling them coil around him, brushing his arms and face with their hot, rubbery corpse-flesh.
But it was only his imagination hurting him here. The worms appeared to be stationary and they couldn’t get to him. But such thoughts, once born are not so easily dismissed. They exist in the dark spaces between rational thoughts, in the shadows of logic.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Saks said.
And then they were moving, trying not stumble over one another or fall into the bilge. Behind them, they could hear those worms moving and sliding against one another and by the time they got up the stairs to the engineroom, they had to stop themselves from running in blind panic.
No more was said about it.
As they made their way out of the engine room, they heard a sound. They all heard it.
Footsteps.
The sound of footsteps.
Someone was coming down the companionway ladder.