soon, soon I’ll be gone, too. The fog calls out my name, tells me to come to it, tells me how it will be when the end comes.. . how I’ll scream and scream…”
When Styles woke briefly the next day, he could hear a great activity above deck. The sound of hammering and sawing, footsteps rushing about and frantic voices shouting. Perhaps, perhaps the fog had blown clear and there was a wind. Styles hoped for this but did not believe it.
For in the dead of night, he heard screaming and a great, hollow booming sound. And a hissing, breathing sibilance blowing over the ship. He thought he heard a sound of buzzing, too.
But he was never sure what was real and what was imagination.
All things considered, that was for the best.
3
Styles woke and knew, but did not know.
He fell out of bed, sweating and shaking, his head filled with some crackling static. He was nauseated and weak, but still he made it up to deck and leaned there, against the bulkhead, staring out into that ashen mist.
The ship felt empty.
Abandoned.
Just some immense and empty coffin, creaking and groaning, the fog settling over it like a morbid growth of fungi, dripping off the yards and masts and bowsprit in ribbons.
Styles called out, but his voice echoed off into nothingness.
Alone again.
Alone on a derelict in this haunted sea.
His heart racing and his head spinning, he made it to the main cabin… saw immediately that the windows had been boarded-over as if the ship were under attack. But the door was not bolted. Inside, all looked to be in order… charts and tools, furniture and clothing. Styles stumbled from the mate’s cabin to the captain’s cabin and they both looked as if their owners had just stepped out for a pipe.
He made it back to the door and heard sounds coming from the fog. .. voices whispering and muttering and chanting. Yes, not coming from the ship, but off in the fog itself as if a boarding party was nearing. But those voices… they were not right. They were flat and hissing and artificial like recordings, scratching and repetitive.
Styles told himself they were not real.
He turned away from them, leaning there in the cabin doorway, knowing that whatever had taken off the crew of the ship was now coming for him. But he would not turn, not look, did not want to look whatever it was in the face. But it was coming, coming on now with a sound of rustling and footsteps and fingernails scraping wood.
Then he did turn, a scream venting itself from his lips.
There was nothing.
There was no one.
Yet, he could hear them whispering like spirits. Hear the sound of their bare feet slapping, the rustle of their clothing. And then out in the fog, there was a cold light. A glowing, thrumming luminosity like some malefic eye watching him through the mist.
Styles threw himself through the door, slammed it shut and bolted it, waiting, waiting, feeling it coming now with a heat and a cold electricity that was hot and acrid and stinking. Outside the door and boarded windows, Styles could see that the decks had gone phosphorescent, that some blinding and burning illumination had consumed the ship now. He heard a high, shrill whining sound and whatever was out there was crawling through him with fire and ice and acid, coming under the door and straight through the walls in a mist of flesh and intent and malevolence.
He screamed once.
Once as it fell over him, moved through him, sorting through his brain with hot needles and knives and gnawing at his thoughts with diamond teeth. He felt his mind boil and loosen, run out his eyes and ears in a cold, smoking sap as the flesh that housed it fell to ash and his bones rattled dryly in a smoking heap on the deck.
Then there was only silence.
Maybe Styles could not remember the name of the ship, but history would. For she would drift back out of the fog and men would remember her name.
The Mary Celeste.
PART ONE
INTO THE MIST
1
Although George Ryan had never been aboard ship before, never anything more radical than a rowboat in an inland lake, he knew there was something he didn’t like about the Mara Corday. Had he been a sailor, maybe he would’ve said she didn’t feel right. But he wasn’t a sailor. He’d never even been in the Navy or the Merchant Service. He’d spent three years in the Army, very landlocked, as an enlisted man in an engineer battalion. The closest he’d ever gotten to the ocean was a six-week stint at Edwards in California when they’d repaved runways. On the weekends, he and a few of the others would drive out to Ventura for a few days of sun, surf, and women. But that was it.
So this was his first time at sea.
And money or no goddamn money, he’d decided it would be his last.
They’d sailed at six in the morning, some twelve hours before, and at first, George had strutted about the decks like an experienced salt. It was nothing, he kept telling the green faces of his co-workers, all of whom had succumbed to seasickness almost immediately. None of them, save for Saks, had ever been out in deep water before. The rolling seas and the violent pitch of the ship hadn’t really affected George at that point. Sure, he had trouble walking the spar deck without pitching every which way (much to the amusement of the ship’s crew who all seemed to be studies in balance and control), but beyond that, everything was okay. All the worrying and fretting he’d done was for nothing.
He wasn’t going to get sick like the others. He was going to take it like Saks. He was a tough guy, too, he’d show ‘em all right.
Saks had told them all in Norfolk the night before they’d sailed that they were going to be miserable the first day out. “Well, you listen to me, girlies. The sea’ll turn you into babies. You pussies’ll be crying for your mommies when we lose land and you start puking your guts out.”
George had decided that, as afraid as he was of going out to sea, he wasn’t going to get sick. He wasn’t going to give Saks the satisfaction. He was going to show that loudmouth macho asshole how wrong he was.
And he had. Oh, yes.
That was… until they’d hit the so-called “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” off Hatteras, that place of evil seas and wild weather patterns. The very convergence of the warm Gulf Stream current pushing north and the cold currents sweeping down from Arctic waters. Oil and water, they just did not mix very well. Right away, the sea began to turn choppy and angry, the Mara Corday responding with what a sailor might have deemed a gentle roll, but to George was an all-out assault on his stomach. So, without further ado, he very promptly hurled his lunch into the head.
After that, of course, he really got sick.
The others were starting to get a little better by then. But George was lying in his bunk feeling like he’d swallowed a bucket of butterflies. He was nauseous, sweating, shivering… so dizzy he couldn’t even stand up to take a piss. Saks had looked in on him. He couldn’t refuse the opportunity, had a big, shiteating grin on his
