Dead Sea (43 page)

Cook did not want to think about what that might have meant.

Saks pulled open a drawer on the desk and took out an old leather-bound book with a clasp on it like a journal or a diary.

“You better read what’s in here,” he said.

So this was it. Another goddamn book, another confession of nightmares. Cook, his hands trembling now, began to page through it. The first ten pages were blank. Then they began to be filled with stunted paragraphs, quickly scribbled odds and ends written in a woman’s flowing hand. She claimed that her name was Lydia Stoddard. That she had been aboard a sixty-five foot two-masted schooner called
Home Sweet Home
with her husband, Robert, and five others. They were apparently en route from Bermuda to Antigua in January of 1955 when they found the fog or it found them. Entry after entry told of the
Home Sweet Home
floundering in the becalmed, fog-enshrouded sea. Of people disappearing until it was just her and her husband. The entries began to get very jumbled and incomprehensible, the handwriting was practically illegible. About all Cook could figure was that the
Home Sweet Home
had to be abandoned for some reason. That Lydia and Robert packed up a dinghy and floated for days until they found the hulk of the
Cyclops.

Cook sighed. “Why am I reading this?”

But the look Saks gave him told him it was important, so he read on:

January 26? 1955

I have not written for several days. I do not wish to write now. I am so alone in this place and I think I have lost my mind. I do not know where I am now. This ship is the Cyclops, I know that much. It disappeared during the First World War and I remember hearing something about it. But I can’t seem to remember exactly what.

This place is purgatory or limbo, some borderland on the outskirts of Hell. Perhaps God is punishing us. I do not know why he would punish us. Robert and I have been good people. We have done nothing wrong. We do not deserve to be marooned in this awful place.

Oh dear God, why? Why?

What have we done?

Robert is very sick now. I think he may be dying. He is feverish and disoriented. He thinks I am his mother and I do not know who I am. My mind seems to wander and I’m not sure what is dream and what is reality.

Last night or maybe a few days ago … I can’t be certain … I walked on deck and I saw something like a huge and glistening snake laying over the decks. When I approached it, it moved, slid away back over the side. It must have been the tentacle of some sea monster. There are horrors in the fog. Strange beasts and worse things, things that try to get inside my head. But I will not let them inside my head.

Oh, God, I hear things. Things on the ship. But I must not be hearing them. It must be in my head.

I am so scared now.

So scared.

If Robert dies, I will be alone.

Oh, God, give me the strength to take my own life. Please.

January 27? 1955

I am not alone here.

There is another.

A woman.

I hear her at night.

She hums to herself out in the corridor.

Humming, humming, humming.

January ? 29

Robert is dead. He must be dead. He does not move and he is so very cold. There is no pattern now. Life is a maze, an arabesque, and I can find no way out.

I cannot sleep.

When I close my eyes, I hear Robert calling out to me. Why does he call out to me when he is dead? Sometimes I think he moves, but the dead do not move and I wonder if maybe I am dead, too. Can I be dead? For surely I am not alive in this place.

No, I cannot sleep.

Last night or tonight, I can’t be sure, I awoke feeling hot breath in my ear, smelling something decayed leaning over me. I could not see it, but it was there. It was telling me awful things. It wants me to commit suicide. I hear it at night, I hear it whispering to me out in the corridor. I lock the door tight and huddle with Robert. But it can see me through the door and I can feel it smiling at me.

I think it is a woman.

Yes, just like I thought.

I think the other is a woman.

Perhaps she is mad and perhaps she is trapped here, too. But she is dangerous. She is a lunatic. She has been hiding down in the black, stinking confines of the ship. I think she eats rats. She must live on rats. Oh dear God what must she look like after all these years eating rats and living like a mushroom in wet darkness?

She cannot be human. Not like me.

Oh, the voices? How long must I hear those voices?

February 5?

I am afraid all the time.

The woman will not leave me alone. Even during the day … what I think is day here … she haunts me. She chases me through the ship. I barely made it back today. And then she was out there, scratching at the door. She knows my name. Somehow she knows my name.

Food is running short. What will I eat next? I will not eat what she says I must eat.

Robert opened his eyes and spoke to me. He said: “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything, my pretty little darling.”

No, no, no, I wasn’t going to write that down. None of it.

Robert is dead, dead, dead. I must remember that he is dead and the dead do not speak.

Not like me.

Not like me.

Not like me.

February 10?

Yes, I am scared all the time.

How long can you be scared before you stop being scared?

Only a little bread left that is moldy. I will eat the mold, too. Yes, I will. Watch me eat the mold. It is green and yeasty-tasting. It turns my stomach.

I killed a rat.

It was delicious.

February 11?

I am not afraid of the woman.

She wants to be my friend and tells me so.

Last night or today or maybe last week I heard her humming down the corridor. That incessant, lunatic humming. I took my knife with me. My knife and a candle. I will stop that humming or it will stop me.

I saw her.

A misshapen, dwarfish creature in rags. Her face is white as a corpse. Her eyes are yellow. She was waiting in a darkened cabin for me. I wanted to kill her. She would not speak to me. She would only hum. She has a puppet. I saw it. A little puppet on wires that she makes dance. Oh dear God, it is not a puppet … it is a mummified infant. It has yellow eyes, too. It smiled at me and began to drool. It was wrapped in a dirty blanket and I could see things moving beneath that blanket. The puppet infant has too many legs.

I locked myself in my cabin.

Something has been eating Robert’s corpse. Rats. They must come in when I am out. Come in and chew on him.

Terrible.

February 15?

The woman is not my friend. She is horrible.

She does not hum now. She sits outside the cabin door and whistles. The whistling is melodious, yet eerie. She likes to whistle as I eat my dinner. That whistling makes me think things and do things I cannot remember later.

Why does she torment me? What does she want?

Why does she keep scratching at the door? Fumbling with the latch.

I will not let her in.

She wants my food and I will not share it.

She and that puppet-baby are hungry. Let them eat rats.

Robert says our food is not to be shared.

It is secret our food. Our secret food.

Let them be hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Cook stopped reading there.

It was terrible, like a dirty window looking into a madhouse, a guided tour of a woman’s mind going to rot. It was very unnerving. There were things she was not writing about. Awful things. Like what she was eating and Cook had a pretty good idea what that might be.

“Why do I need to read this?” he asked Saks.

“You’ll see. Just keep going.”

“This is pointless.”

“No, it’s not. It’ll make sense to you when you’re done.” His eyes were bulging, his face twisted into a grimace. “You don’t like it, do you? Well, I didn’t like it either. You know what it was like for me? Down here … alone … reading that warped shit, sure I was hearing things out there. Funny things. At least you got me with you …”

Cook sighed, picked up the book again.

February 21?

I hear things at night or maybe in my head.

Different things now. Like snakes crawling against the door. How can there be so many snakes? And why do they whistle? But maybe it is that insane woman and maybe it is me.

I am confused.

I do not know.

The walls make me crazy. The bulkheads have rivets only they are not rivets. I know they are not really rivets. Yes, they are tiny yellow eyes that blink and watch and see. They like to watch me to stare at me I am never alone now. Never ever never. Those eyes want to know my secret things that I have locked up in my head. But only I have the key. Yet they stare and leer and watch. They’re waiting for something. Waiting for me to do something.

But what?

I cut smiling mouths into my palms with the knife.

The mouths wake me up.

They like to scream.

February 25?

The insane woman still haunts the corridor.

Oh, she thinks I do not know what she wants.

But I know because I can think with her mind as easily as with my own. Ha, ha, ha. She didn’t expect that.

Still, she creeps in the corridor. The sounds she makes. Patter, patter, tink, tink, tink. She must have a dozen legs to make sounds like that.

The creeping.

The hideous creeping.

Oh, how it echoes even now.

February 26?

I woke spun in webs.

She must have gotten in while I slept. She is very sneaky with her loathsome creeping. The webs were all over me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. Oh, sticky and clinging and wet with spider mucus. Gossamer strung with pearls that must be eggs. Eggs for puppet-spider babies. Hee, hee. What an image that conjures? But I know it to be true, so very true. Out there, walking and creeping about with all those legs.

Do they think I do not know?

Yes, I woke spun with webs.

As I walked through my cabin, they were strung everywhere. Like spiderwebs breaking across one’s face … but imagine a thousand million spiderwebs breaking over your face at once.

Be quiet. They’re out there now … the lady and the puppet-baby. Can you hear them creeping? They have a thousand legs.

I know their game.

I know her game.

Creeping out there and staring through holes in the walls.

Does she think I cannot hear her whispering those profane things?

March

That puppet-spider baby is crying.

It cries out in the corridor, creeping on those long black legs. It is hungry. It wants its milk. It sucks the milk from things wrapped in silk high up in its web.

I hear it nursing at night.

It wishes to nurse on me, little puppet-spider baby. I saw it through a hole in the wall and it saw me. It has many eyes and they are all black.

It needs to nurse.

I will let it nurse on me, sweet evil puppet-spider baby. Yes, yes, yes. It scratches over my bare belly. It is hairy and plump and gurgling. I let it nurse at my breast. Its teeth are very sharp. Its mouth is slimy.

Sucking and sucking.

The feel of its tongue lapping makes me scream. I like to scream.

March?

Creeping in the corridor.

I hear her creeping even now.

She has more than one child and they all have many legs. A thousand creeping legs.

I have only two.

But I have ten fingers.

I can make them crawl.

See how they crawl.

Over walls and over faces.

Lovely spider legs, see them creep.

March 27

i creep up walls

robert does not like it

does not like what i have webbed up

tasty things in webs yes

i have many legs with which i creep and crawl up walls and down walls over floors and under cabinets

it is such good fun

the face of my lover: flyblown and grinning, soft and pulpy with white bone bearing teeth marks. i paint his face with kisses he tastes sweet beneath the cobwebs i have spun over him he is safe in a gray coccoon.

she will not have him

i have chased her and her leggy babies down below for i am queen and i eat children with yellow snapping teeth i eat spider babies their meat is rich their blood brown like gravy cold gravy

i seek dark damp corners to spin my webs places i can creep and crawl and slink i dream of basements and cellars and webby places

i hang over Robert

he is my lover so i cocooned him laid my spider eggs in him

creeping

always creeping

waiting for my spider babies to be born

when they are born we will eat