Next he checked the crew's quarters below. They were deserted. The galley showed no signs of recent use.
What next? The emptiness, the silence, the stale, musty air were getting on Jack's nerves. He wanted to get back to dry land and fresh air. But Kusum was aboard and Jack wasn't leaving until he found him.
He descended to the deck below and found a door marked ENGINE ROOM. He was reaching for the handle when he heard it.
A sound… barely audible… like a baritone chorus chanting in a distant valley. And it came not from the engine room but from somewhere behind him.
Jack turned and moved silently to the outer end of the short corridor. There was a watertight hatch there. A central wheel retracted the lugs at its edges. Hoping it still had some oil in its works, Jack grasped the wheel and turned it counterclockwise, half-expecting a loud screech to echo throughout the ship and give him away. But there came only a soft scrape and a faint squeak. When the wheel had turned as far as it would go, he gently swung the door open.
The odor struck him an almost physical blow, rocking him back on his heels. It was the same stink of putrescence that had invaded his apartment two nights in a row, only now a hundred, a thousand times stronger, gripping him, jamming itself against his face like a graverobber's glove.
Jack gagged and fought the urge to turn and run. This was it! This was the source, the very heart of the stench. It was here he would learn whether the eyes he had seen outside his window Saturday night were real or imagined. He couldn't let an odor, no matter how nauseating, turn him back now.
He forced himself to step through the hatch and into a dark, narrow corridor. The dank air clung to him. The corridor walls stretched into the blackness above him. And with each step the odor grew stronger. He could taste it in the air, almost touch it. Faint, flickering light was visible maybe twenty feet ahead. Jack fought his way toward it, passing small, room-sized storage areas on either side. They seemed empty—he hoped they were.
The chant he had dimly heard before had ceased, but there were rustling noises ahead, and as he neared the light, the sound of a voice speaking in a foreign language.
Indian, I'll bet.
He slowed his advance as he neared the end of the corridor. The light was brighter in a larger, open area ahead. He had been traveling forward from the stern. By rough calculation he figured he should be almost to the main cargo hold.
The corridor opened along the port wall of the hold; across the floor in the forward wall was another opening, no doubt a similar passage leading to the forward hold. Jack reached the end and cautiously peeked around the corner. What he saw stopped his breath. Shock swept through him front to back, like a storm front.
The high, black iron walls of the hold rose and disappeared into the darkness above. Wild shadows cavorted on them. Glistening beads of moisture clung to their oily surfaces, catching and holding the light from the two roaring gas torches set upon an elevated platform at the other end of the hold. The wall over there was a different color, a bloody red, with the huge form of a many-armed goddess painted in black upon it. And between the two torches stood Kusum, naked but for some sort of long cloth twisted and wrapped around his torso. Even his necklace was off. His left shoulder was horribly scarred where he had lost his arm, his right arm was raised, as he shouted in his native tongue to the crowd assembled before him.
But it wasn't Kusum who seized and held Jack's attention in a stranglehold, who made the muscles of his jaw bunch with the effort to hold back a cry of horror, who made his hands grip the slimy walls so fiercely.
It was the audience. There were four or five dozen of them, cobalt-skinned, six or seven feet tall, all huddled in a semicircular crowd before Kusum. Each had a head, a body, two arms and two legs—but they weren't human. They weren't even close to human. Their proportions, the way they moved, everything about them was all wrong. There was a bestial savagery about them combined with a reptilian sort of grace. They were reptiles but something more, humanoid but something less… an unholy mongrelization of the two with a third strain that could not, even in the wildest nightmare delirium, be associated with anything of this earth. Jack caught flashes of fangs in the wide, lipless mouths beneath their blunt, sharklike snouts, the glint of talons at the end of their three-digit hands, and the yellow glow of their eyes as they stared at Kusum's ranting, gesticulating figure.
Beneath the shock and revulsion that numbed his mind and froze his body, Jack felt a fierce, instinctive hatred of these things. It was a sub-rational reaction, like the loathing a mongoose must feel toward a snake. Instantaneous enmity. Something in the most remote and primitive corner of his humanity recognized these creatures and knew there could be no truce, no co-existence with them.
Yet this inexplicable reaction was overwhelmed by the horrid fascination of what he saw. And then Kusum raised his arms and shouted something. Perhaps it was the light, but he looked older to Jack. The creatures responded by starting the same chant he had faintly heard moments ago. Only now he could make out the sounds. Gruff, grumbling voices, chaotic at first, then with growing unity, began repeating the same word over and over:
"Kaka-jiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiii!"
Then they were raising their taloned hands in the air, and clutched in each was a bloody piece of flesh that glistened redly in the wavering light.
Jack didn't know how he knew, but he was certain he was looking at all that remained of Nellie Paton.
It was all he could take. His mind refused to accept any more. Terror was a foreign sensation to Jack, unfamiliar, almost unrecognizable. All he knew was that he had to get away before his sanity completely deserted him. He turned and ran back down the corridor, careless of the noise he made; not that much could be heard over the din in the hold. He closed the hatch behind him, spun the wheel to lock it, then ran up the steps to the deck, dashed along its moonlit length to the prow, where he straddled the gunwale, grabbed the mooring rope, and slid down to the dock, burning the skin from his palms.
He grabbed his binoculars and camera and fled toward the street. He knew where he was going: To the only other person besides Kusum who could explain what he had just seen.
4
Kolabati reached the intercom on the second buzz. Her first thought was that it might be Kusum; then she realized he would have no need of the intercom, which operated only from the lobby. She had neither seen nor heard from her brother since losing him in Rockefeller Plaza yesterday, and had not moved from the apartment all day in the hope of catching him as he stopped by to change his clothes. But he had never appeared. "Mrs. Bahkti?" It was the doorman's voice. "Yes?" She didn't bother to correct him about the "Mrs."
"Sorry to bother you, but there's a guy down here says he has to see you." His voice sank to a confidential tone. "He doesn't look right, but he's really been bugging me."
"What's his name?"
"Jack. That's all he'll tell me."
A rush of warmth spread over her skin at the mention of his name. But would it be wise to allow him to come up? If Kusum returned and found the two of them together in his apartment…
Yet she sensed that Jack would not show up without calling first unless it was something important.
"Send him up."
She waited impatiently until she heard the elevator open, then she went to the door. When she saw Jack's black knee socks, sandals, and shorts, she broke into a laugh. No wonder the doorman wouldn't let him up!
Then she saw his face.
"Jack! What's wrong?"
He stepped through the door and closed it behind him. His face was pale beneath a red patina of sunburn, his lips drawn into a tight line, his eyes wild.