Dead Sea (59 page)

George was laughing now. “Did I miss something here?”

“Maybe she’s right,” Pollard said.

“About me wanting one thing?”

“No, about somebody else being in charge. Maybe Elizabeth needs a break. Maybe she’s been here way too long. Maybe she can’t see the forest through the trees. Maybe you should take over.”

“Me?”

“Why not you?”

“Cushing’s in charge.”

But Pollard shook his head. “No, he’s not. Ever since the First … well, ever since Mister Gosling has been sick, you’ve been in charge. Cushing’s like an advisor or something. He’s smart, but he doesn’t like making decisions. You should be in charge.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Aunt Else said. “He’s only a boy, Captain. A lying little boy and you can’t trust lying little boys. He’ll say anything to get his way. He’s always been like that. Manipulative.”

George felt overwhelmed. He was having trouble keeping up. “That’s a hell of a way to talk about your son.”

“Captain,” she said. “I’ll ask you not to interfere in family matters.”

“I’m just saying that maybe you’re the guy to be in charge is all,” Pollard said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

George held his tongue. He didn’t want to be in charge. It was the last thing in the world he really wanted … yet, if Elizabeth was going to maroon them all here without a single hope of deliverance, then maybe they did need different leadership. But then again, she knew this place. She knew what they were up against … and what really did he know?

“I prefer a democracy,” was all he would say.

“Just an idea,” Pollard said.

“I’ve never cared much for politics,” Aunt Else told them. “I lost interest after McKinley was assassinated. I think Roosevelt was an idiot. A lot of us thought Roosevelt was an idiot. But he was smart, wasn’t he? Crafty, wasn’t he? He knew the common man believed as he did and he used that power, that popular appeal. My father lost money during the coal strike.”

Cushing came back in. “What are you people talking about?”

“Politics,” George told him. “Did you favor Roosevelt, sir?”

“Bully,” was all Cushing would say on that matter.

Saks had it all figured out.

Maybe they thought he was really stupid, but he saw what was going on. He knew what Fabrini and Menhaus were up to. Same way he’d known what Fabrini and Cook had been up to. Jesus, you try to help these guys and first chance they got, they started scheming behind your back. Now that was gratitude. And it was just too bad, just too damn bad when you thought about it, because Saks had been starting to think that maybe Fabrini wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe he could mold the guy, make him into a real man, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Minute you trusted a guy like Fabrini, you were finished. First time you turned your back on him he’d slit your throat.

All right then, all right,
he thought as he laid there on the captain’s bunk.
You guys want to play it this way, you want to play games with me? I’ll show you a couple fucking games you never even heard of. This is where you sonsofbitches learn what it’s all about.

Saks calmed himself.

No, he wasn’t going to kill them. At least not Menhaus or Crycek, but Fabrini was a different matter. That little prick had to be made an example of. He was the same rotten apple that had gotten Cook thinking funny and now he was turning Menhaus.

Saks didn’t know how he was going to do it, but it was going to be spectacular. Those who saw Fabrini’s end would never forget it. Not in this lifetime.

Rubbing the sores along his arms and chest, Saks began to plot.

One minute there was life and the next there was death.

You could guard against it and fight it at every turn with drugs and disinfectants and healing bandages, but you only beat it back into the shadows. And it was there, in that damp and sullen darkness, that death grew like a tumor, reached out and clutched, squeezed, became something huge and hungry and inevitable. Breathing toxins and fevers. Its cold fingers were iron once they had taken hold and no man could hope to pry them loose. You could try, but death only grabbed that much harder, recognizing its own and determined to take what belonged to it. And it would not stop until life had been uncorked and spilled to the floor and there was only darkness, a whispering darkness that pulled you down and down …

When Gosling died they wrapped him up in a waterproof tarp from the raft and had Chesbro quote some scripture over him. It was the best they could do. Elizabeth managed to keep her Aunt Else out of the entire affair and that was a good thing. Because George was taking it hard, was feeling Gosling’s death like his insides were filled with tacks and ground glass. Whichever way he turned, he hurt and hurt badly. And had Aunt Else laid into him about his negligence as captain of the ship, he would have shared some of that pain with her, he knew. Said things to her that would have waxed her lips shut forever.

They performed the threadbare service out on the deck by lantern light. It was a grim and disturbing affair, those lanterns flickering and shadows jumping and that fog pressing in like corpse-gas.

Then Gosling was put over the side in his weighted shroud. At first, he just languished on the weed and George thought, with a terrible sinking feeling inside him, that the body would never sink. It would lodge itself right there and make him look at it day by day … but then, slowly, it melted into the weed and the last remains of Paul Gosling, first mate of the
Mara Corday,
sank from view and something in George sank with them.

As George watched the body disappear, he kept thinking: Message in a bottle, message in a bottle.

When Cushing saw the boat, it took his breath away.

For one crazy, reeling moment he thought it was bearing down on them, a ghost ship coming at them out of the weed. But it wasn’t moving. It was just dead and vacant-looking, another derelict caught in the creeping weed of the ship’s graveyard. Ribbons and filaments of mist were rising from its decks and derricks as if it were exhaling pale swamp vapors. It was an old wooden purse seiner with a black, scathed hull and a white wheelhouse that had gone gray and dingy with mildew. Her prow was sharp, looked like it could slit open the underbelly of the weed quick as a razor … but beyond that, it was simply dead.

Forgotten.

Abandoned.

Cushing saw it there in the fog and he could tell right away that Elizabeth wanted no part of it. The way she looked at it and then at him, told him that this vessel was shunned like the neighborhood haunted house. And it did look haunted. More than just empty. Occupied somehow, but not lived-in.

Day had broke now … what day there was in the Dead Sea … and Cushing had joined Elizabeth on one of her little expeditions in the graveyard. She had shown him the old barge where she tended her gardens, the freighters which had more fresh water in their tanks than you could drink in a lifetime. And now, there was this old fishing boat, a sixty-eight footer of the sort that had not been seen in years. Cushing was willing to bet her keel had been laid back in the 1920s.

“We should get back,” was all Elizabeth would say.

But Cushing had no intention of leaving. He was standing there in the scow with her, one of the flat-bladed poles in his hands. “Tell me about that boat,” he said.

“Just another wreck.”

“No, it’s not. I can see it in your eyes … this one is different. What’s its story?”

She just stood there a moment, like maybe she was trying to come up with something good that he would believe and would get them out of there and back to the
Mystic.
Finally, she sighed. “It’s … it’s where the Hermit lives. It’s his boat.”

“The Hermit?”

She nodded. “Some old man. He was here when we first got here. He doesn’t like people much. He has a gun.”

But, for some reason, Cushing wasn’t buying that. “Have you ever talked to him?”

“He’s crazy.”

“And he was here when you got here?”

“Yes.”

Which, of course, added fuel to Cushing’s time-distortion theory. If Elizabeth and the others had arrived here in 1907 and this boat was already here, something that looked like it couldn’t be any older than the ‘20s, then it all came together, didn’t it? This fishing boat was built much later than the ship that had brought Elizabeth’s people to the seaweed sea … yet it had arrived before them.

“I want to board her,” Cushing said. “I want to talk to this Hermit.”

“Mr. Cushing, please …”

“You don’t have to come.”

Cushing smiled.

Elizabeth frowned.

Standing there, seeing it in the weed like that, all wrapped up in tissues of mist, it did look like a haunted house jutting from some overgrown, neglected yard. It was big and ghostly and soundless, the wheelhouse windows boarded shut, the bowline hung with a caul of weed. The decks were wreathed with shadows, a mat of fungus growing up over the aft stanchions and winches. There was a lot of wreckage on the foredeck … metal and fused plastic and all manner of debris that were blackened as if by a fire.

Cushing just watched it, let it fill him up. It was just another boat, yet he was certain that it was saying something to him.

“Let’s take a look,” he said.

She shook her head and they began to pole through the weeds until they were close enough that he could grab hold of her bulwarks and pull them along side.

Cushing pulled himself up and over the railing. The decks were moist and slimy and he almost went on his ass. The planking creaked beneath his weight, but held okay. Elizabeth tossed him a line and he tied off the scow to the fencerail. He helped her aboard, but she was very strong and lithe and didn’t seem to need his help. She looked nervous, uncomfortable, something. Her right hand clutched the hilt of the machete she wore at her waist.

“He won’t like us being here,” she said.

Cushing stood there, feeling the boat under him and around him and he was certain that it was empty. There was nothing here but memory. He could feel it.

He moved forward, up around the mast tower, and up the short steps to the wheelhouse door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing … just the echo of his rapping knuckles inside, but nothing else. The door opened with a grating, groaning sound. It was dark and grainy inside. He found a lantern and lit it. Better. The Hermit had turned the wheelhouse into his quarters. There was a cot along one wall, books piled on the floor and in shelves. There was a writing desk scattered with papers and a table crowded with old charts. It smelled like an old library in there, like musty pages and rotting bindings.

Cushing went to the chart table.

Most of the charts were of the Atlantic, the Cape Hatteras region. But there was one that was not. It was hand-drawn. He studied it carefully in the lantern’s light. The longer he studied it, the more excited he became. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

Elizabeth looked at it. “Yes,” was all she would say.

It was a map of the ship’s graveyard rendered very carefully in ink. It was very detailed, though uncompleted, and must have taken years. Apparently the Hermit had spent his time exploring the wrecks and he had put all their names down. “By God, look at these names … the
Enchantress,
the
Proteus,
the
Wasp,
the
Atlanta,
the
Raifuku Maru,
the
City of Glasgow
… these are all famous disappearances tied in with the Devil’s Triangle.”

“The
what?”
Elizabeth said.

Cushing just shook his head. “Nothing.” He was going over that chart. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships listed, from old galleons to modern container ships. Many were named, others were tagged as “Unknown”. The Hermit had sketched out where the weed was thickest, where the greatest fields of wreckage were to be found, places nearly impassable on account of the great concentration of wrecks. To what would have been east and west on a normal chart were just labeled UNKNOWN or UNEXPLORED. Some ships and some areas of the weed were tagged with skulls and crossbones.

“What do you suppose that means?” he asked Elizabeth.

She studied the chart. “I can’t say what all of them mean … but this one —” she put her finger on one labeled UNKNOWN BARK — “I think … yes … I think this is the one the squid lives in. In the bottom.”

So, then, that made sense. The skulls and crossbones indicated dangerous places. Other ships were marked with circles. The
Mystic
was marked thus and Cushing figured it meant that they were occupied. There weren’t many marked such. The Hermit had marked the open channels through the weed, the location of planes including what Cushing thought was the C-130. At the southern edge of the weed, was written SEA OF MISTS. And beneath that, OPEN SEA. In the latter there was a red X. It was large and circled several times.

“This must be where he figured he arrived,” Cushing said. “Probably where the vortex dumped him. I bet that’s where we came in, too.”

There was a dotted line leading from the red X to a smaller black X that was labeled
Ptolemy,
which must have been the name of the Hermit’s boat and its position in the weed.

As Cushing went through the ships, he found dozens of others he had heard of or read about, famous vanishings. About midway into the Sea of Mists, the derelicts were more spread out. But he found the
Cyclops,
a Navy collier that had disappeared during the First World War. It was marked with a skull and crossbones. To the north of the ship’s graveyard, the derelicts were fewer and the Hermit had marked channels cut through the weed that led to an area of what might have been open water. This was labeled OUTER SEA, and just about everything up there was tagged as being unknown or unexplored. Except, at the upper edge was another seaweed bank with a long rectangle lodged at its lower extremity, indicating a ship. S.S.
Lancet,
it said. There were a few other wrecks, most unnamed. Above the
Lancet
was what appeared to be another seaweed sea with wrecks, most of them labeled as being unexplored or unknown. And just above this, SEA OF VEILS. The Hermit had put a series of skulls and crossbones here. Whatever was up there, it must have been pretty damn bad.