“Now what did you see?” Gosling put to him.
“Something…” He shook his head. “Something came out of the fog… I saw a dark blur… and, damn, it was big, whatever it was it was real big.” He looked at Gosling, maybe to see if the first mate and his superior was going to laugh dead in his face. But Gosling was not laughing; he was just staring. “It just grabbed him, First, grabbed him real quick… I think, I think it had wings… big, black wings… and it just yanked Burky off his feet and pulled him off the deck and out into the fog.”
Gosling gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Listen to me now. I want you to go below to your cabin and I want you to lay down. That’s an order.”
“But I got watch,” he said. “I was going to replace Burky.”
“You let me worry about the watch. Just go below and take it easy and don’t go telling anybody about this. We don’t need a general panic here.”
Pollard nodded. “Okay, okay I will. But… what’s with this fog, First? What the hell gives here?”
Gosling just sent him below. He stood there, watching that awful fog billow and surge. It was bad. By God, it was real bad. But Gosling was almost glad it was there, hiding things, masking others. For if it cleared, he was almost afraid of what they might see out there.
And what might see them.
22
Iverson was at the wheel, steering the freighter through the fog, and Gosling was at the chart table making computations the old fashioned way. With a pencil and quadrant laid over a chart of their last confirmed position, he had plotted their course… he hoped. But without working compasses, LORAN, GPS, or even a plain old star to pinpoint their position, they were sailing blind and he knew it.
He was just going through the motions.
But, honestly, he didn’t know what else to do.
“Come left to one-twenty-three,” he told Iverson.
“Aye, sir, one-twenty-three and holding.”
“Rudder amidships and keep her so,” Gosling said. He scribbled a few figures on the chart. “Mark your head.”
“One-twenty-three, sir, steady on”
Gosling sighed, staring down at the chart. In the old days with a good compass and a few stars, it was all you needed. Gosling was a good navigator and he had complete faith in his ability to navigate the old-fashioned way. But out here, out in this damnable sea on the far side of the Devil’s asshole, all he was doing was making wild, desperate guesses. He was changing their heading just about every hour on the hour, hoping they’d sail clear of that damn fog.
But it wasn’t happening and he had a nasty feeling it never would.
“Sir… the radar,” Iverson said, a note of panic in his voice.
But Gosling was already on his feet, the alarm of the collision-avoidance radar pulling him from his daydreaming. He stood before the console. What he was seeing nearly filled the screen and the Mara Corday was on a collision course with it. Something, according to the radar, that was about the size of a football field.
“Right hard rudder!” he called out.
Iverson spun the wheel and the ship canted to starboard. Everybody on board was feeling it now, that sudden drastic shift. Gosling was staring intently at the radar screen. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t a ship. It was big as one, but it was just too low in the water. The Mara Corday missed it by a matter of feet. As whatever in the hell it was swung past the freighter’s port side, it vanished from radar… then reappeared, only it wasn’t a single immense object, but a school of smaller blips each about the size of a station wagon, according to the screen. As it or they passed, they vanished from radar again and did not come back.
Gosling felt something in him drop. It had been close. Damn close. He exhaled, wiped a dew of sweat from his face. “Come left to one-twenty-three,” he said.
“Aye, one-twenty-three,” Iverson repeated. He was breathing hard himself. “What in the fuck was that?”
“Hell if I know. Whatever it was, we almost hit it.” Gosling sank into his chair at the chart table. “I thought… I thought maybe it was an overturned hull riding that low… then it broke up into something like a pod of goddamn whales. You log it.”
The door at the rear of the pilothouse opened and Morse appeared. He did not look happy. “What in the hell’s going on, Mister?”
“We came over hard,” Gosling told him. “Something… something bearing down on us.”
“What?”
The question was addressed to Gosling, but Iverson couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Ghosts, sir,” he said, tittering under his breath. “Just ghosts.”
23
The captain’s Christian name was Arlen Morse.
The sea was in his blood and always had been. When other boys had wanted to be Major League ball players or pilots or locomotive engineers, Morse had only wanted to be a sailor. He wanted to be ship’s master and have a craft of his own. Something big, something powerful, something important. In his twenty years in the Navy he’d helmed destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, patrol boats, light cruisers, and even tugs. It was his life and he wanted no other.
Then one day the Navy soured for him. He’d been a petty officer. Then, through ROTC, had made ensign. He climbed through the ranks to captain almost effortlessly. He did what he was told and in the way he was told to do it. There were only two types of men in any navy — those who followed orders and went by the book and those that didn’t. And those that didn’t went nowhere.
Morse played the game by the rules.
And in the end, the rules turned on him.
He had command of his own ship but that was it. Because he was not an Annapolis graduate he would never go beyond where he already was. His career was over. And this is why he left the Navy. Took his retirement at twenty years and went into the commercial service. He had no regrets. Life had been good to him.
Then came this voyage.
Like any other sailor, he’d heard stories and yarns from day one. Some sailors, it seemed, were more afraid of the water than kids were of dark closets. They made up stories. Missing ships were snatched by malefic forces or gobbled up by sea monsters. Howling winds were the moaning, disembodied voices of the drowned dead. Odd patches of mist were ghost ships. Stories of spooks and monsters and haunted seas were numerous.
Every sailor had a story.
But they were just that.
Stories.
But now Morse was really beginning to wonder.
24
The next bad thing happened toward morning.
The night seeped by like tar, slow and drawn-out, just as black and enveloping. Every man on board wanted daylight, hoping, praying maybe that it would burn off the fog and bring the world back to them. For everyone, even the ones who had not witnessed any of the true madness with their own eyes, was certain that they were lost now, lost in some terrifying plane of madness. Maybe it was the stories circulating like colds bugs, tall tales certainly no worse than the raw, unflinching reality of the situation. And maybe it was just something every man felt right down to his marrow, a sense that Hell had unzipped beneath them and swallowed them whole.
So the night moved toward day.
According to the ship’s digital chronometer, it was just after four a.m. when the shit duly landed and sprayed in every conceivable direction. Gosling, unable to sleep, unable to close his eyes without seeing immense mutant sea worms, was in the pilothouse. Pierce was at the wheel. At the chart table Gosling was drifting off, his eyes finally closing.
Then Pierce started shouting, spinning the wheel and moving the rudder hard to the right. About that time, the deckhand out on watch was on the intercom: “Barge… bearing down on us! We’re gonna collide! Hard over! Hard over! She’s running with no fucking lights on, no fucking lights…”