Fabrini giggled dryly. “Who can say? What kind of bullshit is that?” he wanted to know. “We saw him. We all saw him. The guy was covered in blood screaming that something had him, something was inside him.”
Saks’s heavy brow furrowed. “Shut the hell up, Fabrini. You saw a guy with blood on him. A guy totally out of his mind for chrissake. If he said Jesus and Mary were chasing him down the hallway with chainsaws would you believe that too?”
Fabrini shook his head slowly from side to side. “You know, Saks, you’re really starting to piss me off here. What’s with you? What’s with all you guys?” He looked around at them with accusing eyes. “You know something’s totally fucked up here. This fog ain’t right. The captain here is serving up the bullshit on a platter and expecting us to chew and swallow and Saks? Saks is pretending nothing has happened. Well, I ain’t fucking buying it. No way. And neither are any of you.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Saks said in disgust.
Soltz just shook his head. “He’s right. Something’s wrong here.”
Cook and Menhaus kept silent, but their minds were going full tilt. Cook was the sort of guy who rarely said anything. Menhaus didn’t like confrontation; he would wait and see what the majority thought and then adopt this thinking himself.
The next one to speak was George Ryan. What he had to say was simple and to the point. “What is it you think is happening, Fabrini?”
Cushing nodded, smiling thinly, seeming to enjoy the anarchy. “Yes, tell us.”
All eyes were on Fabrini now. His dark face was somehow flushed, a vein at his temple throbbing. “I don’t know what happened. But it sure as hell wasn’t just some guy going nuts and jumping overboard. There’s more to it than that. Christ, look at that fog. I’ve seen fog before and it doesn’t fucking glow. And it doesn’t suck away the air.”
Captain Morse just stared, then cleared his throat. “I’ll be the first to admit we’ve experienced some strange phenomena here, but nothing that has happened is what I would call supernatural, gentlemen. I’ve been sailing the Atlantic for over thirty-five years and it still never fails to surprise me.”
“What is it you think happened, then?” Cushing said, amused by it all.
“I don’t know really. My guess is that we experienced some bizarre atmospheric anomaly. The fog is just the result of some strange weather pattern, maybe the sun acting on a cold sea. The lack of air and those gases that nearly suffocated us all, those could have came from a mile down… a bubble of methane, maybe. It’s happened before.”
“That’s right,” Saks said. “A day or so and we’ll be out of this, so all of you knock it off with the spooky stories here.”
Cushing and George looked at each other. Like Fabrini, they knew bullshit when they heard it. They knew when somebody was telling them something just to shut them up and that’s exactly what was going on here. The real ugly, unpleasant part of it all, they knew, was that nobody knew what was going on. And that was scary.
“This is pointless,” Fabrini said and stomped off.
Soltz followed suit.
There was nothing more to say.
18
Gosling wasn’t present at the session between Morse and Saks’s crew. But the captain filled him in on it. Morse wasn’t a guy who enjoyed lying. He would’ve liked to have told the others the truth. The only problem being he didn’t know what the truth was. No one did. Yes, something was wrong, but what? They were sailing blind here. No navigational aids. No radio contact. Even the radar was acting screwy. The thick fog made visual navigation impossible… there were no stars that could be seen. It was all very disturbing.
Gosling had never been in a situation like this.
It was insane.
He assumed they were somewhere between Norfolk and South America, which was pretty much saying they were a needle in the biggest haystack in creation. Somewhere between Norfolk and French Guiana.
That was slick. Like telling someone the contact lens they’d dropped was somewhere between Milwaukee and Buffalo.
But where else could we be? he asked himself. Sure, the fog and everything else is goddamn strange, but it doesn’t mean much in itself. We’re caught in some freakish weather pattern here and like Morse said, it’ll blow over sooner or later. So what is it I’m worried about?
He had no answer to that.
What you’re worried about, a low, menacing voice in his head said, is that Morse is wrong. And down deep, you know he’s wrong. This is no fucking weather pattern, freak or otherwise. Weather patterns might screw with the radio or the RDF, but they couldn’t touch the GPS and sure as hell not the radar. And if that isn’t enough, then why don’t you tell me about the compasses? Why are they spinning counterclockwise? Why the hell can’t they zero in on magnetic north? You’ve never seen one act like that and you know it. Even the feel of the sea is wrong. The water’s too calm and that smell is just not right. You have no explanation for any of this and if you did, you wouldn’t want to admit it.
Licking his lips, Gosling left his cabin.
He would not think anymore.
That was the way it would have to be from now on. No thinking, no theorizing, no wild guesses. Whatever was happening here would have to take care of itself. The wheels were spinning now and he’d just have to wait and see where they took him. Took all of them.
But, again, that damn voice, sharp and cutting in his head: You know very well what you’re avoiding here, Paul. You know very well. You’ve heard about things like this from sailors too drunk to know better. In books. On TV. You’ve heard about strange seas like this. Places where compasses spin and technologies die a hard death. Where nothing is right. Where everything is wrong.
Dead Sea.
“Dead Sea” not as in the Dead Sea itself, but as in a phenomena which has been reported since men began sailing the seas. Strange becalmed bodies of water where everything suddenly goes insane. Where men kill themselves rather than face the reality of what has happened to them. The Bermuda Triangle. The Devil’s Sea. The Sargasso Sea. Ship’s graveyards. Maritime dead zones few return from.
He shook his head. No. Absolutely not.
I will not accept this.
He started walking again. Moving blindly, not seeing anything. The gears of his brain were revolving madly now and it was all going so fast he could make no sense of any of it. And he didn’t want to. He didn’t plan on touring the ship, but this is what he did. He walked the decks from the stern to the bow, visited the boat decks and checked the equipment stowed on the spar deck. He checked hatch covers and derricks. He went up to the pilothouse, made sure Iverson was steering the ship with his hands and not his feet, staying true on course. Then down into the lounge and messrooms, crew’s hall and forward cargo holds. He walked aimlessly, lost in thought. He hadn’t planned on making the galley his ultimate destination, yet, somehow, he knew that’s exactly where he was going.
The night kitchen.
It was kept running even in the wee hours, for there was always someone on duty or out on watch that needed a meal or a hot cup of coffee. Gosling walked in there, found Bobby Smalls, the second cook and one of the new porters on duty. They nodded to him and Gosling nodded back. The porter was filling Tupperware containers with cold cuts, pickles, cheeses, and veggies for late-night sandwiches for the dog watch crew.
The chief steward was the head cook, but the second cook did all the baking and prep work. The porters handled clean-up and serving.
“Fog thinning any?” Smalls asked, as he kneaded a huge glob of dough with his fists.
“Not yet,” Gosling told him.
The porter arranged condiments on a serving platter and headed off to the crew’s mess with them.
