Tim Curran - Dead Sea

Gosling said, “You telling me you were running east and ended up a thousand miles south of your last position? And within an hour?”

“That’s what happened, all right.” Smalls began cutting biscuits out of the dough with an aluminum cutter. “Hard to believe, ain’t it? Well, ya’ll imagine our poor captain trying to explain a navigational tanglefuck like that to the ship’s owners. Wasn’t pretty. Guess what I’m saying here, First, is that you start playing out in the Sargasso like we are and the stars are right, conditions favorable for funny business, and you run into what we’re running into. Folks these days, they call it the Bermuda Triangle and what not. But I’m old school. Sargasso to me. The Sargasso Sea. That triangle they bullshit about just touches the southern edge of the Sargasso, but most of those ships and planes that have trouble are really in the Sargasso. I should know, on account I was on one of them.”

Gosling knew Smalls too well to think that the man was spinning tales here. But the Sargasso Sea was no true mystery. It existed, all right. It was an oval region of the western North Atlantic, roughly between the east coast of the U.S., the West Indies and the Azores. Unlike other seas that were bordered by land, the Sargasso was bordered by ocean currents – the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic, Canary, and North Equatorial – which flowed in a clockwise pattern around it, creating a deadly calm within its boundaries. Because of the calm, the Sargasso was a great floating desert of sargassum seaweed. In the old days of sail, it had been called the Sea of Lost Ships because of the many craft that had been becalmed or trapped in its vast weed banks. And in the realm of maritime folklore, it had a centuries-old reputation of disappearing vessels and derelict ships, ghost ships and sea-monsters and bizarre phenomena.

But Gosling knew those tales were just bullshit.

They couldn’t be anything else.

Modern tankers and freighters could plow through the Sargasso without hesitating. It was only smaller boats that got their props tangled with weed. And as for the rest… well, sailors liked to tell stories and you could leave it at that.

“Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” Gosling said.

“You do that,” Smalls said to him. “We’re bound to come out of it sooner or later. Maybe we’ll be on course and maybe we’ll be down by the Bahamas… or maybe we’ll be somewhere else entirely.”

Somewhere else entirely.

That last bit was loaded with allusions Gosling wasn’t about to let himself think about. Not yet. He told Smalls they’d get together and discuss it all in more depth later on and Smalls said that his calendar was wide open for the foreseeable future.

And again, Gosling didn’t care for what that implied.

Gosling thought: What the hell is it I’m looking for?

But he didn’t know, couldn’t know. Not yet. He was down in engineering, near the stern of the ship, making his way down the port side companionway to the steering flat. On the metal steps which were painted an abysmal off-yellow that reminded Gosling of the color of vomit, he was seeing the darker splotches and stains of Stokes’ blood. You could maybe write it off in your mind as worn-in grime or grease, but if you knew what happened… could see in your mind Stokes stumbling up the companionway, spilling blood and screaming, his face hooked into a rictus of terror and agony… it wasn’t quite so easy.

It was blood.

Probably take lacquer thinner to get the dried stains out.

Gosling moved down the steps, studying the bloodstains, keeping his boots from making contact with them the same way a kid avoided sidewalk cracks. He wasn’t even aware he was doing so. At the bottom of the companionway, he could gauge Stokes’ mad flight up to the spar deck. Yes, Gosling could gauge it… but he could never understand the depths of stark madness that had peeled the kid’s mind free.

There were a few flecks on the bulkheads that hadn’t been mopped away.

Below, in the steering flat, Gosling paused.

Still, he was not sure what he was looking for. Stokes had lost his mind here and maybe Gosling thought he might find it, laying about somewhere like a cast-off rag. The steering flat was a huge room in which the massive gear quadrant that moved the rudder was located. Just off it, was the shop with its assorted lathes and drill presses, grinders and milling machines.

Gosling went forward to the main engine room, feeling the hum and vibration of the gigantic plant. Boilers produced steam which was fed to the high and low pressure turbines which were connected to the propeller shaft by reduction gears. This room – if room it could be called – was cavernous, you could have dropped a three-story house in there and had plenty of elbow space. Everywhere, the engine room was webbed in piping, ducts, and armored hoses. One of the assistant engineers was studying a bank of overhead gauges.

Gosling breezed past him and went down the companionway to the pump deck, closed the hatch to get the thrum of the engines out of his ears. They weren’t as loud below, but you could feel them just fine. Here, on the pump deck, was a veritable maze of manifolds, ballast pumps, distribution piping, and valves. The tanks themselves held well over three million gallons of water at any one time.

Gosling stood before the aft starboard tank, studying the hatch.

Here, too, the blood had been mopped away, but you could still see signs of it where the bulkhead met the deck. Other than that, there was nothing really to suggest a tragedy here.

Yet, Gosling could almost feel something buzzing silently in the air.

But he knew it was just the silence. Even with the throb of the turbines above, it was complete and thick and somehow chilling in its total lack of life. It reminded him of someone holding their breath, waiting, waiting. A nameless hush. The sort of empty silence you would hear in a tomb.

What happened here, Stokes? What drove you mad?

Finding any evidence in this arterial labyrinth of conduits and pipes, tangled hoses and jutting equipment would be no easy feat. Yet, Gosling felt compelled to look and keep looking. It would have taken thirty men all day to canvas the pump deck minutely, and even then the margin of missing something was high. Gosling turned on all the lights and began searching, moving in what he thought would have been Stokes’ general path.

And it didn’t take him as long as he thought.

Jammed between the metal floor grating and the lines snaking from an electrical junction box, he found something. Using a screwdriver, he dug it out.

At first Gosling thought it was a horn. It was a small, three-inch section of hard, chitinous flesh. Mottled brown, dead, covered with tiny sharp spines. It had been cut from something. Severed. It ran from the thickness of a cigar to a pointy little tip. It was no horn. Neither was it some discarded length of rubber hose or plastic tubing like he had also first thought. It was a piece of something. Like the tail end of a snake or some other animal.

Gosling prodded it with the blade of the screwdriver.

He couldn’t bring himself to actually touch it. Something about it was revolting.

It was slimed in strands of some snotty, gluey material like transparent silicone caulk.

It’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing to be concerned about. If you’re thinking this might have something to do with Stokes, then I would have to say you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree here. You’re simply assuming too much, my friend.

But was he?

He wrapped the section carefully in a rag and, even more carefully, stuffed it into the pocket of his pea coat. It could’ve been nothing, but it could’ve been everything. He had never seen anything quite like it. But that meant nothing in of itself. The sea was full of strange creatures and new ones were discovered all the time.