Dead Sea (31 page)

He was figuring that back in the real world some of this stuff might have been worth money to collectors.

Most of the books were in poor condition, worm-holed with pages bloated from moisture and bindings crumbling with dryrot. Fabrini examined a few and the pages flaked away beneath his fingers like autumn leaves. Some were in better condition, but most were deteriorating and set with a webby sort of mold. He found an especially large book that looked to be leather-bound. Most of the pages were stuck together and those that weren’t were spotted with a black mildew.

“Looks like the ship’s log,” Cook said, bringing the lantern closer.

Fabrini nodded. “Yeah …
U.S.S. Cyclops?
Yeah, says it right on top of the page. Ever heard of her, Cook?”

He shook his head. “A warship like we thought, though.”

“How in the hell did a Navy ship end up here?”

“How do you think?”

Cook examined the fine spidery writing that had gone a copper color with age. Most of the pages tore when he tried to part them and it was a matter of reading fragments in-between the spots of mildew. Cook leafed through it, found many of the pages in the back in fairly good condition though warped from water stains.

“Christ, these entries … the most recent ones … all date from the First World War. 1917, 1918. Nothing beyond that.” He looked at Fabrini in the yellow light. “The
Cyclops
has been here a long time, I guess.”

Fabrini swallowed, but didn’t say anything.

Cook kept reading, trying to put together the last weeks before the ship ended up in the Dead Sea. Fabrini was getting impatient, but knew there was something important here, if they could just put it together.

“Apparently,” Cook said after a time, “apparently, the
Cyclops
was some sort of collier, a coal ship. She was spending a lot of time in the South Atlantic fueling British ships. In mid-to-late February, 1918, she was down in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds like she was having engine problems. There were some sort of repairs made. She took on eleven thousand tons of manganese ore and was supposed to head directly up to Baltimore.” Cook flipped through pages, tried to read through the mildew and separate stuck-together pages. “Apparently there was some kind of bullshit going on. The executive officer, a fellow named Forbes, was locked up by the captain. Guy name of Worley. A lot of these are his entries and they don’t make much sense. I can barely read ‘em.”

Cook read on and explained to Fabrini what he was learning. In Brazil they’d taken some three hundred odd passengers, mostly naval personnel from other ships returning home. But they’d also taken aboard some six military prisoners that were being sent to a naval prison in New Hampshire. Two of them had been implicated in the murder of another sailor and one was due to hang for it.

“They stopped in Barbados, I gather, and had dinner with some dignitaries there. Most of this is gone … but they left on March 4
^th
making for Baltimore. Dammit, these pages are ruined. I’d like to know what happened next …”

Cook went about reading, getting really interested now while Fabrini was getting really impatient. He read on and on for ten or fifteen minutes, ignoring Fabrini’s suggestions that they get out already and get back to the lifeboat.

“I don’t like leaving those two crazies alone down there with Menhaus,” he said.

“Just wait,” Cook said. “Okay, next thing I can read worth a damn is March 13
^th
. Apparently, the
Cyclops
was already lost, already caught in the fog and this sea. See, there’s been turmoil on the ship. That exec officer, Forbes, he’s doing all the entries now.”

Cook said it was like a soap opera what happened next. During the week that was unreadable, just about everything had happened and he could only put it together from bits and pieces. They were caught in that fog and the crew either mutinied or came damn close to it. Captain Worley refused to listen to the engineer that the engines were in rough shape. Worley kept the ship at full steam, running her right into a gigantic island of weed that fouled up her props. By that time, there was no getting out. The port engine was pretty much toast. The starboard was completely seized-up. The
Cyclops
was marooned in the weeds — same weed mass it still sat in, Cook figured — and the crew was coming unglued. Worley, from what Cook could tell, sounded violent and irrational, a shitty navigator on the best of days. He was drunk more often than not and spent most of his time verbally and physically abusing the crew.

“Sounds like he wasn’t fit for duty even before they sailed,” Cook explained, mulling it all over. “Somewhere during that lost week, shit hit the fan. Worley, completely out of his head and tired of the men and their ‘superstitious terror’ and ‘lack of fortitude’, as he put it, decided to flex his muscles a little. He took those six prisoners out of the brig and marched them up on deck. In full view of the crew, he shot them all down. Right in the heads with a .45.”

“Quite a guy,” Fabrini said. “Sounds like Saks.”

“After that, the crew overpowered Worley and locked him in his cabin, they freed Forbes, the Exec. Apparently, he’d been locked up by Worley for standing up to the captain after a sailor died violently. Sounds like it was Worley’s fault, but nobody but Forbes had the balls to tell him so.”

Forbes was popular, it seemed, he managed to hold the crew together, but the engines were beyond repair. There was no hope. During the night, or what passed for night in this place, a number of lifeboats were lowered and much of the crew and passengers set off into the fog. That was the last anyone ever heard of them.

“Read this,” Cook said. “This is important.”

Fabrini sighed, not too happy about the history lesson he was getting here. Leaning over the chart table, he began to read in that oily light:

15 March 1918 (position unknown)

Matters grow worse. Been in this damnable fog for nearly eight days now. Trapped in this seaweed bed with no avenue of escape open to us. Some of the men have suggested, and understandably, that we abandon the Cyclops as she is a death ship now, a derelict, a great tomb for us all unless we abandon her. But abandon to what? Into that awful, congested mist and steaming seaweed sea?

Though I dare not admit it to the crew, I fear there is no earthly deliverance from this place.

For this is not home. This is not the Atlantic. This is no sea one can locate on any chart. I cannot say where we are. As I was under incarceration when we sailed into the fog, I witnessed not a speck of it. What my officers and Dr. Asper have told me of it is grim indeed. Asper has alluded that he believes that we have transported to some unknown world or sphere of existence, through some unguessable conduit that may have to do with distortions of time and space. Although my knowledge of physics is limited, Asper tells me that we can liken this distortion to a crack in a wall, a hole through which we have fallen. Although it sounds fantastic, I concur. I have no choice. I recall a story by H.G. Wells in which a laboratory explosion hurdles a chemist into another, terrible dimension. Our fate is similar.

I wonder into what nightmares the crews of those purloined lifeboats have sailed …

16 March, 1918 (position unknown)

Although it sounds mad at the very least or a lurid chapter pulled from an equally lurid novel, I must record the horrors we have seen or sensed out in the fog. We have caught sight on two different occasions of some immense and luminous beast haunting the weed. It appears able to make itself glow at will. I cannot ascertain its shape, as I only caught a single glimpse of it. But it is immense in size. The men on watch claim to have seen long-necked things rising from the weeds and great brown worms the size of pythons. They also tell of odd patches of weed that move independently of the mass. It’s incredible, to be sure, but I myself have seen some bat-like beast swooping out of the fog over the decks that I first took to be some gigantic moth.

I know we must leave the ship, but I wonder how long we would last in that haunted, primeval sea. For there is life out there, obscene and shadowy life …

17 March, 1918 (position unknown)

Captain Worley is completely insane now. I spoke with him earlier and that blustering, intolerant man I had known so well is forever gone now. What is left is but a shell. A mad, trembling thing that whimpers and screams, given to wild bouts of mania in which he points at things I cannot (and will not) see. In his calmer moments, all he speaks of is taking his own life before “them from out there get to me … for it will not be good.” He is convinced that there is some arcane, hideous intelligence out in the fog, one that toys with us. He claims it comes through the bulkheads like a ghost when he is alone. That it “has eyes that watch and burn” and that its touch is like “a burning, poisoned ice.”

I dearly wish it were only Worley that has been so plagued by dementia. But the remaining crew and passengers are like demented to varying degrees. The fog that enshrouds us is no common fog. Something about it gets inside men’s minds and turns their thoughts black, turns their brains to rot. Yes, I have felt it, too, and do not dispute the terrible influence it wields.

The morale of the ship is positively decayed. I have not abandoned hope, yet I fear it has abandoned me.

The next few entries were blotted out with mildew. Fabrini wanted to stop right there, but Cook wouldn’t have it. He wanted Fabrini to know the rest. To know what he now knew. So, swearing under his breath, Fabrini skipped to the next legible entry that Cook had his finger on:

20 March 1918 (position unknown)

I have not slept in days now. I dare not. Reading through my entries of the past two days, it seems that I have been near-hysterical. They read like the ravings of a madman. But who can claim not to be mad in this hellish place? I will not go into the things that crawl up the sides of the ship or the loss of the lifeboat and crew to that repellent octopoid monstrosity in plain view of us on the main deck. The less said of such nightmares, the better. Just let me put down here that events have taken a decidedly dark turn. There has been a rash of suicides amongst the crew and passengers. Men have vanished on watch and others right out of their staterooms. Worley is gone now, too. We discovered a hole in the bulkhead of his cabin as if something had chewed its way through steel to get at him. Insane or not, Worley was right about one thing: there is something intelligent in the fog. Some haunter of the dark, some creeping bogey that has slithered up from the pits of primal fear all men carry within their souls. I have felt its influence. It is a cold and deranged intellect, a lunatic shadow out of space and time that watches from the fog and picks clean the minds of men as of a vulture with carrion. Yes, it is driving everyone mad and I with them. The men claim it calls to them out of the fog in the voices of dead loved ones, that it shows them things that are destroying their minds. I will not speak of what it has shown me. God help us all. For each night it gets closer and plucks more men into that noisome mist …

21 March 1918 (position unknown)

Trapped in the weed we are and trapped in the weed we shall remain. Out of frustration more than anything else, I ordered a motorized whaleboat be dropped. The beasts in the weed have been quiet of late, but not that other thing out there. That ghost or whatever it might be called. I ordered the whaleboat lowered, so that I and a select crew including the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Asper, might reconnoiter our position in hopes of finding some possibility of salvation. The mental strain on the crew and passengers is such now, that command has nearly broken down and they have formed into little groups or enclaves which violently oppose one another. There have been several instances now of barbarity. I fear that, given time, the crew and passengers remaining will descend into savagery. Something has to be done. For the sake of our lives and souls, we must take action.

(later)

We rowed through the weeds and once clear, motored our way through the clear channels of the sea. Although “clear” is a bit subjective, considering where we are. The water is pinkish and heavy, scummed with a trembling slime that reminds me of gelatin. Clumps of weeds and rotting debris of all sorts drift through it. Dr. Asper commented that this unknown sea is akin to an organic soup.

An hour out, we sighted a steamship languishing in another mass of weeds. We decided to board her and I wish to God we had not. We used a grappling ladder to climb over the bulwarks. According to the trailboard on the bridge, she is … or was … the Korsund out of Copenhagen. Though slimed with a weird fungus and great growing patches of moss, she was a fine-looking steamer. Straight up-and-down bow and graceful stern. The superstructure was a maze of derricks and booms, spiderwebbed by a profusion of cables and overhead supports. She had tall twin stacks and high ventilators, a fine long deckhouse. Yes, she was a proud and hardy-looking vessel.

But she was derelict … though not, we discovered, empty.

We found great blackened sections on the main deck. Some of the bulkheads crumbled at our touch. I would guess that some intense, mysterious heat had been directed selectively against her. Inside the deckhouse, we found dozens of dead men. Many had killed themselves with razors or by hanging themselves. It was a ghoulish, awful sight. The ship itself had the atmosphere of a morgue, one of violated tombs and dissection rooms. We all felt it. We discovered men in their berths that had been burned to a crisp, oxidized into flaking mummies by a consuming, directed heat that did not so much as char the bedsheets or bolsters! Some of the men immediately began whispering of witchcraft and the like, though Dr. Asper and I do not believe any of this has such a pat, though disturbing explanation.

We found the captain in his cabin. In his chair, he had slit his wrists with a straight razor and was still gripping it. But his face … a mask of utter horror, those eyes staring at something we could not see. I got the mad impression that he killed himself before whatever it was he saw got to him.