“Okay,” Saks said, “now that we know who’s in charge, let’s take a walk and see what there is to see.”
Crycek was still smiling. “Yeah, nothing I love better than a ghost ship.” He just shook his head. “What is it you expect to find?”
Menhaus said, “I don’t know. People or something. Maybe.”
Crycek laughed. “People? People? There’s none left. Hasn’t been for years and years. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…”
“That’ll do,” Cook said.
Good old Crycek. He could make the Good Humor Man slit his fucking wrists. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them… Yeah, that was exactly what everyone needed to be hearing. Jesus.
“Let’s get going,” Fabrini said.
Saks had located a drum of kerosene, so they charged up a couple lanterns and went for a walk.
They found pretty much what they knew they’d find: lots of fungus and rust, some bones and debris. That was all they found thirty minutes into it, unless you wanted to count shadows or the distant sounds of scratching.
They let Saks lead them on, since he seemed to know his way around ships pretty well. But, as he reminded them again and again, he’d been in the Navy. He liked to remind them of all the places he’d been and all the things he’d done there. Cook didn’t hate him as much as before. Sure, Saks still reminded him — frighteningly so — of his father, just another inveterate asshole, but he didn’t want to kill him anymore. He almost felt sorry for the man. For all men like him who felt the need to hide their insecurities and fears behind a wall of machismo. And the realization of that came as something of a surprise to Cook. Somewhere along the way, he had changed. Hatred had become an odd species of pity. Now wasn’t that something?
One of the first places they visited was the surgery.
It was dirty and cobwebbed, debris everywhere, fungus oozing down the walls like streamers at a kid’s birthday party. The furniture and desk were pretty much rotten as was most of the woodwork in there. Cabinets held jars and bottles of drugs and chemicals, the liquids which had dried now to black goo and the powders solidified like cement. The labels on them were faded and unreadable. There were shelves of moldering books and a few yellowed medical degrees in dusty glass frames.
All in all, there was nothing but age here.
“You can almost feel the awful things that happened here,” Crycek said.
“Ah, knock it off with that,” Menhaus told him.
But he was right. As the others looted through cupboards of instruments and file cabinets of crumbling papers, Cook could actually feel it. Smell it. More than an odor of age and dissolution, but an odd trace memory of pain and blackness and lunacy. Things had happened here, he was certain, terrible things that you didn’t want to think about. It was here, he knew, that the men who’d been infected aboard the Korsund would have been taken. You could almost feel their slow, lingering deaths, the horror they felt as the Cyclops was locked tighter in the grip of something unknown and malevolent. They would have laid on those tables, vomiting their guts out, never knowing in their innocent minds what radiation poisoning truly was.
Yes, the pain was real here. You could feel it.
“Check this out,” Fabrini said, hoisting a large wooden chest up onto a tabletop, pushing aside a dusty rack of test tubes and a box of slides. He knocked over a tall, antique brass microscope that was tarnished green. Motes of dust filled the lantern light.
Cook brushed sediment off it, waving dust away.
It was a surgeon’s kit, he saw. Maybe the others didn’t recognize what it was, but Cook had seen them before. When he wasn’t pushing earth with a grader, he was something of a Civil War buff. He haunted reenactments and particularly the makeshift battlefield hospitals there. Most of the surgeon reenactors were medical men in real life and their equipment was contemporary to the 1860s.
“A doctor’s kit,” Cook told them. “A surgery kit.”
Ebony-handled scalpels were pressed into felt compartments along with sutures, needles, probing hooks, tourniquets, and a particularly fearsome-looking post mortem knife. Cook lifted the tray of instruments out, revealing another beneath which held bone saws, artery clamps, bone snips, a large and rusty amputation saw. There were other implements he was not familiar with.
“Shit,” Fabrini said, “makes my stomach weak just looking at that stuff.”
There was a brass presentation plaque on the inside lid. It read: “Chas. W. Kolbe.”
“That must have been the doctor,” Menhaus said.
“No, his name was Asper,” Fabrini said.
They all looked at him.
“How do you know that?” Saks put to him. “How do you know what his name was?”
Cook stepped in. “We saw it up on the bridge when we first came aboard. There’s a crew list up there.”
Which seemed to satisfy Menhaus and Crycek, but you could see Saks didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Really?” he said. “A crew list? Isn’t that something? Fabrini’s got a good memory.”
Cook led them out of there and back into the corridor.
They found the captain’s quarters before long and although dusty and dirty, they had once been somewhat lavish. At least in comparison to the other cabins. There was nothing of note in there, save for some mildewed antiques — a naval campaign chest and a set of salon lamps. Fabrini found a nice scrimshaw-headed walking stick that he took with him. Overall, the captain’s cabin was in worse shape that the others. There was a gaping hole in the bulkhead, fingers of mist seeping in.
“I wonder what caused that?” Menhaus said.
Saks was examining it. “Doesn’t look like a shell punched through there. This room would be in shambles if it had. No… it almost looks burned.”
Cook had trouble swallowing when he saw the hole and even more trouble when Saks said that. Yes, it probably was burned, he figured. Forbes had written about something coming through the bulkhead after Captain Worley.
“What could burn through iron that thick?” Menhaus wanted to know. “A torch? A goddamn laser beam?”
Crycek grinned at the idea.
“Any ideas, Fabrini?” Saks said.
Fabrini twisted a bit, but covered himself. “Who knows? So long ago, who could say?” Cook started breathing again. Goddamn Fabrini.. . how did he let the doctor’s name slip?
Menhaus and Crycek were not interested in any of that, but Saks was. He knew he was on to something here. He had sensed some secret shared between Cook and Fabrini and he wasn’t going to let go of it. Like a tongue working a sore tooth, he was going to keep at it. As they walked down the corridors, slopping through those mats of fungi, the lanterns creating wild and sinister shapes around them, he kept suggesting places they could investigate, digging and probing, trying to find out something that Cook and Fabrini did not want him to know about.
“I’d like to take a look at the engine room,” he said, watching Fabrini for a sign of discomfort. “That sound good to you, Fabrini?”
Fabrini looked at Cook, looked away. “Don’t matter to me.”
“We were already down there,” Cook said. “Nothing to see but a lot of rusty machinery.”
“Old steam turbines, I bet,” Saks said. “You wanna check ‘em out, Menhaus?”
“Why not?”
There was no way to get out of it.
So down they went into that cavernous blackness, the lanterns peeling the darkness back layer by layer. They stood before the rusted, seized up turbines which were gigantic.
“Look at that piston,” Menhaus said, in awe, as always, of mechanical things. “Bigger than a pillar… and solid fucking brass. Jesus.”