I’m seeing it but I’m not seeing it.
It was not there, it had no more substance than smoke but yet he did not doubt its physical reality. He saw ghosts. At least, he guessed they were ghosts. He saw three men standing around in a cabin, a smaller cabin of the sort he had visited down in dunnage. They were gathered around a bunk and Charlie knew very well that there was a body on that bunk. He did not believe for a moment it was a living person.
The men were talking, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. It was garbled. Behind the men, the cabin door was partially open. Charlie caught sight of something, some hunched-over black shape pass before it.
In his brain, a voice said, See? It does not walk. It scuttles, it creeps, but it does not walk.
The men stepped away from the bed, three very ordinary-looking swabbies, and Charlie caught a glimpse of the body that was partially obscured by a sheet. A bearded man whose hands were locked into claws, his back arched, his lips wide open in a scream. There was something white all over his mouth as if he had gagged out a prodigious amount of foamy saliva before dying. Overall, it appeared as if he had died in the midst of the most awful convulsions. His flesh was purple-black and swollen as if he had been bitten by a dozen bushmasters or night-sleek mambas. The men just kept staring down at him and Charlie knew it wasn’t because they liked looking on the horror their friend had become, but because they wanted to lock that image in their mind. They wanted to suckle the milk of hate. It would nourish them and keep them bitter, allowing them to do things that had been unthinkable and inhuman, perhaps, just scant days earlier.
But what killed the sailor? a voice in Charlie’s head asked again and again like a riddle. And what else had happened that turned those boys hard and mean?
Though no one told him, he knew a few things in his weird, tripping, dreamy psychic connectivity. Captain Maxton was dead for one thing. He had taken a pistol and blown out his brains and he did so after something that was not his wife crawled into bed with him one night. He was the fourth captain of the Yvonne Addams to kill himself. His suicide set off a chain reaction of violence—beatings, stabbings, and murders, as well as more than a few disappearances. No one seemed to be in their right mind and they all blamed it on the ship itself and the images it opened in their minds. Afterwards, most of the crew lowered the lifeboats and set out into the open sea, not knowing they would never see land again. But five swabbies led by the 2nd Mate—his name was… was… Heslip, yes, that was it—stayed behind. Charlie was not sure why… vengeance? Were they going to deliver the ship to pirates or try to sell her and the ore she carried? That was unclear.
But what wasn’t unclear was Heslip.
Willard Heslip. 2nd Mate. Ex-con. He was a violent, cunning, and dangerous man. Even the 1st Mate, who’d fled in one of the lifeboats with the others, was intimidated by him. And on most ships the 1st was lord and master. Maybe the captain was the skipper, but ask any sailor who was really in charge and they’d tell you. Only Maxton himself was unafraid of the 2nd. Although Charlie had never met Heslip, he knew all about him. He’d done time with guys like him, yes, but his knowledge was more detailed, more personal. He knew that Heslip was essentially uneducated and quick with his fists. He was suspicious of anyone with an education. His father had abused him daily, using him as a punching bag, and his mother had been too drunk to care. In high school, he took mostly machine shop classes and auto mechanics. In every other class, he sat at the back of the room giving any kid that dared look at him a death stare that was legendary. He did his best work out in the parking lot where he had a free hand beating other kids. He had once pulled a knife on his sophomore math teacher who had dared laugh at him and that ended his high school career.
That’s what Charlie knew about him.
The rest, he saw.
Other than Heslip and his crew of tough guys, there was no one left on the ship but Virginia, Maxton’s wife. She had locked herself in the captain’s cabin, but they got in. Guys like them always got in. He thought they were going to rape her, but that’s not what happened at all. By that point, they were motivated by fear and when men like them were afraid, there was only one thing that made them feel better.
Charlie heard Virginia say, “Please.”
And he heard Heslip’s reply: the sound of a meaty fist striking her.
“You brought it onto us,” Heslip said. “You brought it aboard.”
“No! It was already here! Can’t you see that? It was already here as it’s always been here! It has nothing to do with me!”
Heslip said, “It killed Jim. It fucking killed him.”
“And Pete and China, too,” another sailor said. “It tormented them. It crawled inside them until they couldn’t take it anymore.”
Virginia tried to talk sense to them, but you could not talk sense to animals. Yet, she tried. Charlie had no idea what she was going on about. She was practically hysterical and she was pleading her case about sensing something on the ship, something that was dangerous but could be appeased because it was really just lonely. She said she left out food for it, but the others became hostile and it grew angry.
“Shut up! Shut up, you whore!” Heslip said and slapped her across the face.
“Please,” Virginia sobbed. “Oh, dear God, please don’t hurt me.”
Charlie could see him and the others gathered around her like a jury and that was pretty close to the truth because he knew they had already found her guilty of… something. Jury? No, judge and executioner was more like it.
She was crying and pleading, but Charlie could have told her that things like that never work with guys like Heslip. Begging is weakness and men like Heslip do not respect weakness. It makes them angry, it twists up something in them already twisted beyond repair. They see you as a victim then. Worse, they see themselves and their own unhappy, abusive childhoods.
The very act of pleading for mercy made Heslip hit her again and again until she was no longer begging like a human being but yelping like a whipped dog.
“You brought it onto us,” one of the others said. “You brought that thing onboard, you fucking witch.”
And it didn’t really matter what Virginia said because they had already made up their minds. Whatever had happened she was the cause. She was the scapegoat. She was the embodiment of their collective fears and anxieties and they were striking out at them through her. Then it wasn’t just Heslip beating her, it was all of them. And when she went down, they kept kicking her and stomping her until all that rage and frustration was used up and she no longer moved.
“Now what?” one of them said in a broken, fearful voice as if it had just occurred to him exactly what they had done.
Heslip said, “Put her over the side. Then we find the box.”
And though Charlie could not see their faces, he could almost feel the shiver that ran through them as if going to get the box filled them all with an irrational terror.
The images disappeared.
Charlie jerked in his seat and realized he’d actually dozed off for a moment or two. His cigarette was nearly burned down in his fingers and there was a long gray ash on the desktop. The dream he had had was fading fast. Something about men in a cabin. A dead guy all swollen up. Suicides and murders. Something at the door… something moving but not necessarily walking. The sailors beating Virginia to death because she made offerings to a creature no one could see but everyone could feel.