Gosling went forward to the main engine room, feeling the hum and vibration of the gigantic plant. Boilers produced steam which was fed to the high and low pressure turbines which were connected to the propeller shaft by reduction gears. This room – if room it could be called – was cavernous, you could have dropped a three-story house in there and had plenty of elbow space. Everywhere, the engine room was webbed in piping, ducts, and armored hoses. One of the assistant engineers was studying a bank of overhead gauges.
Gosling breezed past him and went down the companionway to the pump deck, closed the hatch to get the thrum of the engines out of his ears. They weren’t as loud below, but you could feel them just fine. Here, on the pump deck, was a veritable maze of manifolds, ballast pumps, distribution piping, and valves. The tanks themselves held well over three million gallons of water at any one time.
Gosling stood before the aft starboard tank, studying the hatch.
Here, too, the blood had been mopped away, but you could still see signs of it where the bulkhead met the deck. Other than that, there was nothing really to suggest a tragedy here.
Yet, Gosling could almost feel something buzzing silently in the air.
But he knew it was just the silence. Even with the throb of the turbines above, it was complete and thick and somehow chilling in its total lack of life. It reminded him of someone holding their breath, waiting, waiting. A nameless hush. The sort of empty silence you would hear in a tomb.
What happened here, Stokes? What drove you mad?
Finding any evidence in this arterial labyrinth of conduits and pipes, tangled hoses and jutting equipment would be no easy feat. Yet, Gosling felt compelled to look and keep looking. It would have taken thirty men all day to canvas the pump deck minutely, and even then the margin of missing something was high. Gosling turned on all the lights and began searching, moving in what he thought would have been Stokes’ general path.
And it didn’t take him as long as he thought.
Jammed between the metal floor grating and the lines snaking from an electrical junction box, he found something. Using a screwdriver, he dug it out.
At first Gosling thought it was a horn. It was a small, three-inch section of hard, chitinous flesh. Mottled brown, dead, covered with tiny sharp spines. It had been cut from something. Severed. It ran from the thickness of a cigar to a pointy little tip. It was no horn. Neither was it some discarded length of rubber hose or plastic tubing like he had also first thought. It was a piece of something. Like the tail end of a snake or some other animal.
Gosling prodded it with the blade of the screwdriver.
He couldn’t bring himself to actually touch it. Something about it was revolting.
It was slimed in strands of some snotty, gluey material like transparent silicone caulk.
It’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing to be concerned about. If you’re thinking this might have something to do with Stokes, then I would have to say you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree here. You’re simply assuming too much, my friend.
But was he?
He wrapped the section carefully in a rag and, even more carefully, stuffed it into the pocket of his pea coat. It could’ve been nothing, but it could’ve been everything. He had never seen anything quite like it. But that meant nothing in of itself. The sea was full of strange creatures and new ones were discovered all the time.
Was this part of the thing that had bit Stokes? Was that even feasible? Had it got at him and he sliced it in half?
Because, regardless of whether that scenario made sense or not, it looked like a knife had done the job.
20
Marx, the chief engineer, had it wrapped in a handkerchief. Just a garden variety lockblade knife. Lot of the crew members carried them in sheaths at their belt. Gosling carried one himself.
“Found it about an hour ago,” Marx said to the first mate. “Got kicked under a boiler coupling… maybe by Stokes, maybe someone else.”
Sitting there with the Chief in the Engine Control Room, Gosling was looking at that knife. There was something on the blade. Something crusty and dark. Could have been blood… or rust. Maybe it had been lying under the coupling for the past two or three voyages… but Gosling didn’t think so.
Looking at it, thinking of what was wrapped up in his pocket, he felt his mouth go very dry. “You suppose… you suppose Stokes sliced himself open with it?” he asked, though he did not believe it for a moment. Not now and maybe not before.
“Dunno,” Marx said. “Could be. Could be how it happened.”
Marx was a big fellow with a head bald as a mountaintop and a thick gray beard, ZZ Top style, that hung down to his chest. There was a Harley tattoo on his left forearm and an old Molly Hatchet insignia on his right. He looked very much like a biker and very little like a freighter engineer. But he was the Chief and he was the best.
Hupp, the first assistant engineer, was the only other person in the Engine Control Room. Years ago, there might have been a dozen men, but these days with advanced computer controls and desktop interfaces, it didn’t take many men to man the station. The room was pretty much wall to wall video screens and computer terminals, monitors featuring displays of various systems. Most engine room functions could be manipulated by merely selecting the diagram of the system via touch screen and highlighting it, bringing up its menu.
Morse came through the door. He nodded to Gosling and Marx, went over to Hupp at his console. “You went in that tank with Stokes and the other man. What happened?”
Hupp went through it all for what seemed the fiftieth time in the past few hours. “I cleaned some weeds out of the intake… Stokes, he was behind me, he said there was something in the water. Fish, I figured. We’re always sucking fish through the screens, Sir, nothing new there. Well, we must have pulled in a lot of weeds because the mud box was full of them…”
Gosling just listened, hearing it now for the second or third time himself. The ballast intake was fitted with a grid to filter out large objects and a finer screen in the mudbox for the removal of smaller objects.
“… I replaced the screen and… well, Stokes said something brushed his leg. Something like that. I didn’t think much of it. Well, he took out his knife and slashed at something in the water… I don’t know what… and I told him to quit fooling around and lend a hand. We were replacing the second screen. You know how they rot away. Anyway, Stokes cut himself with his goddamn knife and… well, couldn’t have been more than a few moments later he started screaming and thrashing. He yanked off his coat and threw it at us, then he stumbled into the water, thrashing around. Before we could get to him, he was up and out of there. That’s all I know.”
Morse just nodded. He turned to Gosling and Marx. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a look in that tank.”
Down to the pump deck they went, pausing before the service hatch to the starboard aft ballast tank. There was a strong smell of stagnation and dank saltwater about it. The hatch was secured with a couple dozen bolts. Marx put a ratchet on them and they creaked at first, his muscles bulging, then they came loose easily. It hadn’t been that easy when Hupp had removed it. The bolts had been rusted in place since the last time the ship was serviced and they had to use an air ratchet to get them loose.
When Marx was down to the last few bolts, Morse said, “I’m thinking about what Hupp said. About how Stokes had cut himself. Maybe he got blood in the water and maybe it attracted something.”
It was a leap, but considering what had happened and what was happening, not much of one. Gosling thought it over, his brain churning up nasty images of creatures that could smell blood in the water: sharks, piranhas, other things he didn’t want to think about.
Marx loosened the last two bolts and Gosling helped him lift the hatch free. The stench of stagnation and cloying wetness was stronger now, wafting up from the depths of the ballast tank. It reminded Gosling of tidal pools and stranded marine life. Morse and he donned the rubber chest waders Marx had set out for them, yellow hardhats with highpower halogen lights strapped to them.
“You hear any funny business down there, Chief,” Morse said. “Feel free to send in the Marines.”
Marx offered him a sly grin and handed both men gaffs, being it was the only thing resembling a weapon that engineering could come up with on such short notice. They were basically meat hooks screwed onto the ends of
