Cook lashed the lifeboat to the boarding ladder, avoiding the fungus and wincing as the nylon rope cut into that shivering mass, making it bleed black again. “Just the same, Saks, you’ll stay tied until we decide different.”
“Which is probably forever,” Fabrini told him.
Cook took the gun and stuck a chemical lightstick inside his shirt. Fabrini took the knife and then they started up. The boarding ladder trembled as Cook put his weight on it. It groaned and moved, but did not collapse. He could feel the steps giving slightly under his boots, but he decided they would probably hold him.
Fabrini wasn’t crazy about boarding the derelict, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t about to chicken out. Particularly in front of Saks. Regardless of the situation, the macho games between them persisted.
About half way up, as the mist seeping from the water and weeds began to make the lifeboat below look hazy, Fabrini said, “Look at that, Cook. You see that?”
Cook did. It looked like a series of long, jagged furrows in the hull like something had scratched the ship lengthwise. Cook figured he didn’t want to know what caused them.
“Looks like she scraped up against something,” he said.
“Or something scraped up against her.”
3
When they reached the main deck, they just stood there, feeling the ship and certain it was feeling them, too. Much of the decks were obscured in fog and what they could see was a maze of hunched shapes and shadows, the bridge rising up above them. They walked along, Cook in the lead, past the upraised horns of stokeholds and ventilators, the blocklike deckhouses and high, circular gun turrets.
“Must have been a warship,” Cook said, “with guns like that.”
“At least they had some firepower when they ended up here.”
The decks creaked beneath them like doors in rotting houses. To Cook, the entire ship was like some huge casket thrust up from a grave, a nitrous and moldering thing full of dank secrets and viscid, crawling shadows. The atmosphere was blighted and noxious, filled with a gnawing sort of spiritual pestilence that he could feel right down into the marrow of his bones. There was an almost palpable odor of putrescence and age. Everything was rusty and leaning and going to rot. There were great, gaping holes eaten through the decks and bulkheads as if acid had been liberally sprinkled about. All in all, it was grim and haunted and forbidding, the sort of place that made something inside you pull up and hide.
They moved aft, carefully checking the strength of the decks as they went, for it looked as if the entire ship wanted to collapse beneath them. When they got beneath the skeletal, reaching arms of those booms and derricks, they saw that they were enshrouded in ropes of fungus.
“Like wax,” Fabrini said. “Dripping and running everywhere.”
Cook said it was enough and they made their way forward back to the bridge or wheel-house. Snaking fingers of fog and sinister, clutching shadows oozed from riven bulkheads and askew hatches. The stink of the ship was moldy and vaporous, thick and aged and repulsive. If anything indeed lived on that ship, it could be nothing good, nothing remotely wholesome… whatever could breed under such conditions, they didn’t want to look it in the face. From time to time, Cook felt a slight rumble below decks as if some morbid weight were shifting down there, waking up and sucking in that pestiferous air.
When the bridge was above them, they paused, both breathing fast and not from exertion.
“Should we… should we maybe go back?” Fabrini asked, so very hopeful it was almost hard to tell him no.
But Cook did tell him no. “We should go up and check out the bridge, see if we can find anything. You want,” Cook said, taking hold of the ladder that led up there, “you can wait down here.”
Fabrini looked around through the shadows and tendrils of searching mist. “Yeah, fuck you, too. Let’s go.”
It was almost humorous to Cook seeing Fabrini act this way. Oh, he understood the fear, all right, for it was on him, too, just as tight as sweat… but to see Fabrini scared shitless, well it was almost comical. A guy like that with all those muscles.
Cook climbed the ladder with Fabrini coming up beneath him. Neither man looked down until they were safely on the catwalk outside the boxish, rectangular wheelhouse. Up there, they had a view of the ghostly fog closing around the ship, the endless expanse of weeds and the mist rising from them like smoke. Looking out there into that haunted world, it was not hard to believe in sea monsters, ghost ships
… and worse things.
“Quite a view,” Cook said.
“Yeah, enough to make you wanna slit your wrists.”
Unlike most ship’s wheelhouses which seemed to have a preponderance of circular portholes, the wheelhouse here had large square ports. All of them were black and filthy and Fabrini couldn’t even scrape them clean with his knife.
Cook found the door and it was unlocked. But it was laden with rust and they had to hammer it with their shoulders to get it open even two feet. It made a groaning sound like nails pulled from old boards and then seized- up completely. They could neither open it or close it after that.
Inside it was black as a mineshaft.
Cook stood there, feeling that darkness and asking himself if he really wanted to go in there.
“Well?” Fabrini said.
Cook snapped the lightstick against his knee and led the way in. The air was dry and stale, motes of dust the size of snowflakes drifting in the glare of the lightstick. They moved around carefully, afraid they’d fall through a hole or gore themselves on a jagged shelf of metal. And maybe, just maybe, they were afraid that something with long white fingers and eyes like red ice would take hold of them.
“Christ, it smells like a tomb in here,” Fabrini said.
And that was close, Cook decided. A sarcophagus that had been brought up from abyssal depths. It smelled of brine and mildew, rust and antiquity. There was another odor, too, something just plain dirty that he did not like.
“Look,” Fabrini said. “A lantern.”
He pulled it off a hook and let Cook see it. Cook took it, saw the shadow of kerosene sloshing around inside. He pulled a pack of waterproof matches from his pocket that he’d taken from the survival equipment. He struck one off the riveted bulkhead and wild, jumping shadows paraded around them. The wick was bone dry and it caught almost immediately.
“Let there be light,” he said, turning up the valve until the bridge was flickering with orange-yellow illumination.
That’s when they got their first good look at the room they were in. It was long and rectangular with life rings on the bulkheads, everything covered in a thick, furry layer of dust. They uncovered an old-fashioned shortwave radio set that was tarnished green. The ship’s compass was thick with sediment. The bridge telegraphs for the port and starboard engines were both locked tight with rust and completely immovable. There was so much grime on the bridge rail that Cook didn’t realize it was brass until he brushed against it and revealed the gleaming metal below. And the ship’s wheel itself was threaded with cobwebs and clotted with dust.
None of what they saw had been touched in decades.
“Christ,” Fabrini said, examining a brass tripod telescope. “How long has this ship been derelict? A hundred years or what?”
Cook just shook his head, led them off into another room. This one had a large, flat table and things like rolled-up posters in slots along the far wall.
“Chart room, I’d guess,” Cook said, setting the lantern into an inch of collected dust on the table.
There were copper chart tubes and navigational books set in low shelves. A nickel-plated aneroid barometer hung above them. Beneath that down of dust, the table was crowded with old navigational instruments – dividers and parallel rulers, three-armed protractors and quadrants. Cook found a sextant in a wooden case with mirrors and
