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 shades. In another case, there was a ship’s chronometer.
He was figuring that back in the real world some of this stuff might have been worth money to collectors.
Most of the books were in poor condition, worm-holed with pages bloated from moisture and bindings crumbling with dryrot. Fabrini examined a few and the pages flaked away beneath his fingers like autumn leaves. Some were in better condition, but most were deteriorating and set with a webby sort of mold. He found an especially large book that looked to be leather-bound. Most of the pages were stuck together and those that weren’t were spotted with a black mildew.
“Looks like the ship’s log,” Cook said, bringing the lantern closer.
Fabrini nodded. “Yeah… U.S.S. Cyclops? Yeah, says it right on top of the page. Ever heard of her, Cook?”
He shook his head. “A warship like we thought, though.”
“How in the hell did a Navy ship end up here?”
“How do you think?”
Cook examined the fine spidery writing that had gone a copper color with age. Most of the pages tore when he tried to part them and it was a matter of reading fragments in-between the spots of mildew. Cook leafed through it, found many of the pages in the back in fairly good condition though warped from water stains.
“Christ, these entries… the most recent ones… all date from the First World War. 1917, 1918. Nothing beyond that.” He looked at Fabrini in the yellow light. “The Cyclops has been here a long time, I guess.”
Fabrini swallowed, but didn’t say anything.
Cook kept reading, trying to put together the last weeks before the ship ended up in the Dead Sea. Fabrini was getting impatient, but knew there was something important here, if they could just put it together.
“Apparently,” Cook said after a time, “apparently, the Cyclops was some sort of collier, a coal ship. She was spending a lot of time in the South Atlantic fueling British ships. In mid-to-late February, 1918, she was down in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds like she was having engine problems. There were some sort of repairs made. She took on eleven thousand tons of manganese ore and was supposed to head directly up to Baltimore.” Cook flipped through pages, tried to read through the mildew and separate stuck-together pages. “Apparently there was some kind of bullshit going on. The executive officer, a fellow named Forbes, was locked up by the captain. Guy name of Worley. A lot of these are his entries and they don’t make much sense. I can barely read ‘em.”
Cook read on and explained to Fabrini what he was learning. In Brazil they’d taken some three hundred odd passengers, mostly naval personnel from other ships returning home. But they’d also taken aboard some six military prisoners that were being sent to a naval prison in New Hampshire. Two of them had been implicated in the murder of another sailor and one was due to hang for it.
“They stopped in Barbados, I gather, and had dinner with some dignitaries there. Most of this is gone… but they left on March 4 ^th making for Baltimore. Dammit, these pages are ruined. I’d like to know what happened next…”
Cook went about reading, getting really interested now while Fabrini was getting really impatient. He read on and on for ten or fifteen minutes, ignoring Fabrini’s suggestions that they get out already and get back to the lifeboat.
“I don’t like leaving those two crazies alone down there with Menhaus,” he said.
“Just wait,” Cook said. “Okay, next thing I can read worth a damn is March 13 ^th. Apparently, the Cyclops was already lost, already caught in the fog and this sea. See, there’s been turmoil on the ship. That exec officer, Forbes, he’s doing all the entries now.”
Cook said it was like a soap opera what happened next. During the week that was unreadable, just about everything had happened and he could only put it together from bits and pieces. They were caught in that fog and the crew either mutinied or came damn close to it. Captain Worley refused to listen to the engineer that the engines were in rough shape. Worley kept the ship at full steam, running her right into a gigantic island of weed that fouled up her props. By that time, there was no getting out. The port engine was pretty much toast. The starboard was completely seized-up. The Cyclops was marooned in the weeds — same weed mass it still sat in, Cook figured — and the crew was coming unglued. Worley, from what Cook could tell, sounded violent and irrational, a shitty navigator on the best of days. He was drunk more often than not and spent most of his time verbally and physically abusing the crew.
“Sounds like he wasn’t fit for duty even before they sailed,” Cook explained, mulling it all over. “Somewhere during that lost week, shit hit the fan. Worley, completely out of his head and tired of the men and their ‘superstitious terror’ and ‘lack of fortitude’, as he put it, decided to flex his muscles a little. He took those six prisoners out of the brig and marched them up on deck. In full view of the crew, he shot them all down. Right in the heads with a. 45.”
“Quite a guy,” Fabrini said. “Sounds like Saks.”
“After that, the crew overpowered Worley and locked him in his cabin, they freed Forbes, the Exec. Apparently, he’d been locked up by Worley for standing up to the captain after a sailor died violently. Sounds like it was Worley’s fault, but nobody but Forbes had the balls to tell him so.”