Dead Sea (44 page)

my lover tastes so sweet

robert

like candied meats love his taste like candied meats

i creep and i wait

The entries as such ended there.

Cook was sweating and shaking. It was all the mad ramblings of an insane mind, yet he almost half-believed it, crazy and improbable as it all sounded. His heart was pounding and he could not hold the book still. He was angry. Angry at a God that would allow this woman to become a lonely, deranged thing that maybe had to eat her husband’s corpse to survive. Angry at Saks for showing it to him and maybe angry at that woman herself for invading his mind, spinning lustrous webs in the corners where things breathed and crept and light would never touch. He did not want to see these things. Did not want to ever feel them.

“You’re not done yet,” Saks said.

“No, you’re fucking wrong, I am done,” Cook said, filled with hatred now. “You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”

“No, you’re not,” Saks said, blocking his way. “There’s more. Just look at it.”

Cook toyed with the idea of hammering his way through Saks with his fists, but instead he just picked up the book. Blank page after blank page. All of them yellowed and going to pieces.

What was the point?

Then he saw. More writing.

A single sentence repeated, but at the intervals of a year each time:

March 27, 1956

Another lovely day!

March 27, 1957

Another lovely day!

March 27, 1958

Another lovely day!

In fact, the rest of the diary was just this repeated again and again every March on the anniversary of Lydia Stoddard’s madness. Something about that really sucked the wind out of Cook. The funny thing was, the real disturbing thing, was that these cryptic little entries continued right to the present year … but went no farther. As if Lydia’s ghost showed up once a year to scribble in the diary.

“She must … she must have written these entries back in 1955,” Cook said, knowing it sounded thin as a sliver.

“And she just happened to pick this year as the year to stop?”

“C’mon, Saks. You’re a little too hard-headed to believe in ghosts.”

Saks smiled. “Ghosts wasn’t what I was thinking. Not exactly.”

“Then what
were
you thinking?”

But Saks did not answer that. “Do you know what today’s date is?”

“No. My watch stopped working-”

“Well, my digital works just fine. Today is the twenty-seventh of March.”

Cook felt a chill on his arms. Sure, it was easy to believe absurd, frightening things like that and especially in this cabin with the drifting dust and age and that oppressive atmosphere that just seemed to drain you dry minute by minute. But Cook wasn’t going there.

He said, “Maybe … maybe Makowski forged this shit.”

“You don’t believe that, Cook, and neither do I,” Saks said. “Unless you’re willing to take a real wild leap here and say he wrote the
entire
thing. But that’s a woman’s writing and we both know that. The entries from the fifties are faded, the newer ones pretty fresh … now how would that fucking idiot pull that off?”

Saks was right. The forgery angle was silly … but there had to be an explanation, didn’t there? Or was it just this place? This goddamn nameless dimension where anything went. Because, deep down, that’s what he was thinking. Lydia Stoddard went slowly and completely insane here. All alone, her mind went to pieces. Who could blame her? She was long dead, certainly, but what if her madness was not? What if it came back once a year? If that was even remotely possible, they were all in serious danger.

Saks said, “You heard what that freak Makowski was saying, stuff about
her
coming back and
her
not wanting us here. Jesus, Cook, I’m getting some ideas here and I don’t like ‘em.”

“We better get back. I don’t like the idea of leaving the others alone.”

Saks picked up the diary, paged through it. “What the hell?” he said. He dropped the book on the desk, backing away from it.

Cook knew and did not know. He picked up the diary, thought it felt warm in his hands, like something alive. He saw today’s entry … then he saw something else which had not been there five minutes before. What he was seeing could not possibly be … but it was there, glaring and fresh, daring him to talk it away with nonsense like logic and reason. But Cook could not talk it away, could not make sense of it, he could do nothing but stand there, terror oozing out of him like bile … hot and sour and rancid-smelling. He could hear himself breathing with a dry, rattling sound like a dying breath blown through straw.

He kept staring at the diary and what he saw, just beneath what had been the last entry, was this:

March 27

i am waiting

i am waiting

waiting

waiting

hear me creeping

i am coming

now

Cook dropped the diary with a little cry of revulsion, for in his mind, he suddenly saw it sprout segmented legs, becoming not a book, but something bloated and pale and hairy. Something that like to creep.

He looked over at Saks and Saks’s face had gone bloodless, his eyes were huge and wet and filled with a wild sort of horror.

“Listen,” Saks said.
“Listen … ”

And there it was, coming down the corridor: a high-pitched, mournful whistling/wailing sound, like some eerie dirge piped from a throat stuffed with ashes and dry things. It carried a profane melody to it.

Jesus. Cook felt his heart suddenly just stop dead in his chest like something had gripped it … it stopped, then began to beat so fast he thought he would pass out. Droplets of cold sweat burst out on his forehead. His lips felt as though they’d been tack-welded shut.

Saks was scared.

Scared like Cook had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. All that tough-guy machismo had melted away into a tepid shivering puddle. The gray streaks in his hair looked positively white and those bags under his eyes were like pouches.

Cook could only imagine what he must have looked like.

That whistling came again … only it was not so distant now, it was closer and more shrill. And there was something morbidly seductive about that melody it carried, made you want to stay put until you could see the mouth that sang it.

“She’s coming,” Saks said.

Cook had his gun out.

He took hold of the lantern and walked out into the corridor and it took every bit of strength he had. There was nothing out there. Nothing but clutching shadows that seemed viscidly alive and coiling. Motes of dust spinning in the light. No, there was nothing there, but there soon would be. He was smelling that sharp stink of ozone again because lightning was about to strike. Something was about to strike … something creeping and leggy and impossible. Something grinning and insane and lonesome. The sort of grin that haunts your childhood nightmares … just a smiling mouth with long yellow teeth and no face to go with them.

The whistling came again.

Came with a volume that made them curdle inside.

It was so close … it could only be around the next bend in the corridor. And Cook thought … yes … thought he could hear her coming, all those legs scratching along the bulkhead like a thousand scraping nails.

Run for godsake!
a voice was shouting in his head.
Get the fuck out of here … if you see what comes around that bend, if you see what comes creeping along the wall …

They started running, pounding through that fungus and nearly going on their asses half a dozen times. They went up one companionway, then another until they reached the deck. They could hear that mad, insectile skittering behind them, something like a braying laughter echoing through a black and shuttered attic … and then Saks slammed the hatch on the deckhouse shut, secured the latch.

And almost immediately, on the other side, the sound of many things rasping and clawing against the rusted steel door. Things like knives and hooks and awls.

They ran until they found their cabins.

And did not dare breathe until their doors were shut and locked.

They were rowing and making some distance, according to Gosling. It was an ungainly craft they had roped together, the lifeboat on one side and the oblong raft on the other. But with two men on either side pulling with the oars, they were indeed moving.

Marx and Gosling took their break together, as the other four pulled.

“We’re going to come onto something,” Marx said. “I can feel it now.”

Strange thing was, Gosling could feel it, too. They were going somewhere and he could feel it in his bones. A certainty that they were getting close to something.

“Way I’m figuring this whole shitting thing,” Marx was saying, “is that we’re going to be finding some boats. We’ve got to. And maybe people, too, because this drift leads somewhere. A dumping ground, a junkyard … whatever in the Christ you want to call it. Wouldn’t you say, First?”

Gosling nodded. “There’s something out there. I know that much. I guess I keep wondering, thinking that if we survived this, then others must have, too.”

“You … you try your VHF?” Marx asked him.

“Yeah. There’s nothing out there, nothing you want to hear.”

“We tried it for a time … but some of the shit we heard out there, well, it didn’t do my boys much good. Didn’t do me much good either. Just that static out there … never heard static like that before. Now and again …”

“A distress call?”

“You got it. But crazy, spooky shit. Maybe we imagined it.”

“Not unless we imagined it, too.”

Marx looked thoughtful. “You ever see any of them Devil’s Triangle shows on Discovery or one of them?”

“Sure.”

“You probably heard about Flight 19, then?”

Gosling had. Happened in 1945. Five Navy torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale and flew into oblivion. A search plane sent out to look for them vanished, too. No wreckage found, not so much as a slick of oil. Even all these years later, it was one of the great Bermuda Triangle mysteries, a point of great controversy.

“Well,” Marx said, “we kept picking up distress calls. Some fellow saying how they were flying into ‘white water’ and then later, one about being ‘lost in the fog, the bottomless fog.’ It was pretty spooky stuff. I didn’t link it up with Flight 19 until I heard something on the VHF a few hours later. ‘FT, FT, FT, FT’ … just repeated on and on like that. You know what ‘FT’ was?”

Gosling shook his head.

“That was part of Flight 19’s call letters.” Marx swallowed. “You’re probably wondering how it is I know that, how I might remember such a thing.”

Gosling, staring out into the fog, was wondering exactly that.

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Marx rubbed his eyes, looked very uncomfortable suddenly. “Had me an uncle, named Tommy. My old man’s younger brother. I never met him. He was a radioman on one of those Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared out there all those years ago. Now and again, my old man would get in a funny mood, start talking about the Brooklyn neighborhood he was raised in. Soon enough, he’d be talking about Uncle Tommy and what happened to him. The old man didn’t buy the official U.S. Navy line about them just going down … all those planes, without a spot of wreckage. He didn’t believe any of it. The old man was of the mind that something out there reached out and grabbed Tommy and the rest of them boys. He would never say what he thought it was. But it haunts him to this day.”

Marx went on to say that his old man was in his eighties now. And every December he went down to Florida on the anniversary of Flight 19’s disappearance, out to Ft. Lauderdale and just stood there for a few hours, staring out over the sea, remembering his brother and praying for him.

“Yeah, the old man’s getting on in years, First, but sometimes he still talks about it. Told me he talked with some of the other crew members’ families and none of them believe what the Navy said either. Still don’t.” Marx shrugged. “I’m thinking Flight 19 ended up here. In this goddamned place. Maybe, maybe if I could find some trace of it out there and get my ass out through one of them doors Cushing was talking about … well, I think my old man could die in peace finally knowing. But one way or another, First, I got to get out of here. I don’t want my old man dying thinking that something out there took his son, too.”

Gosling patted his arm, knowing it had been hard for Marx to admit any of that. Like most sailors, he wasn’t given to airing his family secrets in public. Wasn’t given to showing a hint of the softness all men had at their core. What he had shared with Gosling was almost a sacred thing and Gosling knew he had to treat it as such.

“I’ll do anything I can to help,” Gosling told him.

“Hell, I know that, First. I knew you would without me even squeezing my soul out to you. That’s the kind of man you are. Everyone on the
Mara
knew that.”

Gosling managed a smile, uncomfortable as always with anything approaching praise. He swallowed, said, “What happened to Pollard?”

But Marx just shook his head. “Don’t know exactly. Like I told you, when the ship went down, I was treading water … then along comes the lifeboat with Chesbro in it. We didn’t come across Pollard until we got into the weed. He saw something, I know that … something that peeled his mind raw. But he won’t say what.”

Gosling could just imagine. For he remembered after the fog first encased the
Mara Corday,
remembered Pollard running on deck, half out of his head then, saying how something had grabbed Burky … the guy on watch … and pulled him out into the fog. Pollard had been in bad shape then … but what had he seen since?

“I tried getting that little shit to talk,” Marx said, “but all he wants is his mommy and I ain’t his fucking mommy.”

Gosling laughed. “I love you like a brother, Chief, but you’re not exactly real sympathetic.”