Tim Curran - Dead Sea

Gosling would have been disgusted, but there was no time.

For something hit the service hatch from below and then hit it again and all he could think of was those bolts laying on the deck, the bolts Marx hadn’t had time yet to screw into the hatch flange. Something hit against it from below and Marx grabbed a bolt, dove on the hatch cover and managed to start a bolt and then the hatch exploded open and both he and the hatch were pitched aside.

What came slithering out of there was not the thickness of a garden hose, but probably big around as a man’s thigh. A worm. But the mother of all marine worms, something mottled gray above and dripping white below, loops of transparent slime hanging from the puckered black mouth like drool.

Marx made a sound and Gosling didn’t have the wind to.

“Oh my God,” Morse said under his breath.

About four feet of it came up through the hatch. It was wet and slimy and stinking, undulating repulsively under the electric lights. Its black, puckered mouth shriveled away from what was inside. A tongue. A tongue that was shaped like a corkscrew, something designed to drill into its victim’s flesh. Like an abyssal hagfish, a slime eel, this monstrosity – like the dead one on the deck – would bore into its victim’s flesh and devour it from the inside out.

At least this is what crossed through Gosling’s mind and he was pretty certain it was close to the truth.

It was moving side to side like a swimming snake, making a hissing sound, that hideous pink tongue jutting from the mouth maybe five or six inches. It was obscene. It was invidious. Morse hit it with his gaff and it made a high, keening sound. He kept hitting it and it reacted by inflating its body like a balloon, rivers of that vile slime pouring from its flesh, tangling it in a snotty web.

All Morse had done was piss it off.

Another two feet of the thing came up through the manway and it was puffed and swollen so thickly in defense mode, that it was big around now as a man’s waist.

Gosling grabbed a wrench and pegged the thing at what he thought might be its head.

Morse kept ducking in and swatting it with his gaff.

But Marx was way ahead of them. He ran off and came back with a CO ^2 fire extinguisher. He pulled the tab and hosed the worm down with a freezing mist of white. The effect was immediate. The creature had inflated itself probably as a defensive mechanism and now it shrank back to its original size, spiraling and looping on the deck, trying to throw off the spray from the extinguisher that was sucking away its body heat.

“Here, have some more, you sonofabitch,” Marx said, spraying the thing down until you couldn’t even see it anymore. Just that white, rolling mist and all the slime the worm was pouring out. With a shrill, deafening squeal, it slipped back through the manway and they all heard it splash below.

Nobody needed prompting.

They threw the hatch cover in place and started turning those bolts into the flange until they could turn them no more. All the while, gagging on the cloud of CO ^2 and the stench of the beast. Coughing, Marx put the ratchet on the bolts and locked the cover in place.

There were no more sounds from below.

Everyone was panting and gasping, just beside themselves with a combination of horror and nausea and bunched nerves.

When Morse found his breath, he said, “Seal off those outlets below, Chief. And… drain that goddamn tank. Flood it with bleach or bug spray or anything you fucking got.”

Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense.

“Hey, Paul.”

Gosling heard his name spoken and nearly jumped. Lots of things made him jump now. But it was just George Ryan, out taking a walk or something. He was leaning up in the corridor outside the crew’s mess smoking a cigarette.

“Are you doing a little detective work?”

Gosling cleared his throat of whatever had been stuck in it. “No. Why the hell would I be doing something like that?” he said a little more sternly than he intended.

“Why wouldn’t you? You’re just as curious as the rest of us, aren’t you?”

“There’s nothing to be curious about.”

George ran thin fingers through his matted beard. He dragged slowly off his cigarette. “Isn’t there?”

“No, there isn’t.”

Christ, this was the last thing Gosling needed right now. It hadn’t even been an hour yet since they danced the nasty with that fucking worm and he was beginning to wonder if it had happened at all. Morse was up in his cabin, trying to figure out their next move. Gosling himself had taken a hot shower and still he could smell that thing on him… that sharp stink of carrion. What he didn’t need right now was George Ryan reading his mind.

George laughed. “No, I guess getting lost in some weird fog and having a deckhand go crazy is par for the course at sea. I gotta get out more.”

“Jesus bloody Christ, George. I thought you were smarter than that. I was starting to think that you and Cushing were the only ones with brains on this goddamn ship. I guess I was wrong.”

George was smiling. “Save it,” he said. “Save it for Saks and those other idiots, okay? All the dumb swabbies who’ll swallow anything you guys tell ‘em. I know better”

“And what is it you know?”

“I know you guys are clueless. You don’t know what’s going on here or where we are or how we’re going to get out of any of this. And I also know there’s a lot more to that bit with that deckhand than any of you guys want to let on about. Why don’t you just admit it?”

Gosling just stood there, feeling completely defenseless. There were a lot of things he could have said. Countless lies he could have manufactured. But it would have all been pointless. George had him and he knew it.

“You want me to tell you we’re lost in the Bermuda fucking Triangle, George? You want that?”

“If it’s the truth”

“Well, it’s not, so if you don’t mind, I got work to do,” he said, walking away and leaving George standing there, that amused little grin on his face. Sonofabitch was just too damn smart for his own good.

Gosling made his way topside and coming up that companionway, he started to get a bad feeling. There was no real reason for it. But, regardless, it descended on him and filled him with a bitter sense of hopelessness, an anxiety that left him feeling utterly helpless. He paused there, leaning up against the bulkhead, and he honestly didn’t have the strength to face any of it. Things had already happened that were beyond anything rational and they would keep happening. Keep happening, he figured, until he was drained dry, without an ounce of fight left in him. And that was really the problem, wasn’t it? Gosling was a handson sort of guy. Very blue-collar, very working class. He was not the imaginative sort. His world was very black and white, the perimeters very well-defined. He asked very little of reality other than for it to always be the same.

And now this.

It was just too goddamn much.

He started up the steps again, telling himself in no uncertain terms to suck it in. He was the First and that meant people looked to him. Looked to him for strength and stability. Sometimes, when the going got rough, the First was the only thing standing between chaos and calm.

Gosling came out of the hatch into that boiling fog and right away, he knew there was trouble. Just as something in him had suspected. Somebody was hollering, crying out frantically.

“Now fucking what?” Gosling said under his breath.

It was coming from somewhere in front of the superstructure, somewhere out on the bow. Gosling made his way forward, that fog thicker than pillow down. He could hear one of the men shouting about something and then the sound of feet running in his direction. The fog whistle sounded, as it did every few minutes, but this time it made him jump.