Deadlock

12

Later, he stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes and smoked.

He had no idea why he had gone after the box or why he had stuck his hand inside it. Whatever madness had been in his brain seemed to have vanished now like a bout of the flu.

She lured you and you went. That’s what happened.

She?

Yes, she. It was female. He knew that much. Lonely and desperate.

You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you’re determined to spend the night here, then stay in this room or go up on deck, but don’t wander the corridors.

Now that was sound advice, but he had the worst feeling that he would not be able to follow it because it was almost as if he were no longer making the decisions but someone or something else was making them for him. The box, he kept thinking. That damned box and what’s in it. His hand was swollen now, it throbbed with a dull ache. It was itchy like his finger. He knew he should walk out now and get some medical attention, but he could not seem to move.

Rest, first some rest.

He butted his cigarette, trying not to think of haunted houses filled with crawling, hungry things, but it seemed he could think of nothing else. Like maybe he wasn’t thinking it at all, but the images were being placed in his head. Leaning walls and bowed ceilings, plaster rot and rat droppings, empty corridors and worm-eaten four-poster beds threaded with cobwebs… insects slipping from crevices and cracks, spiders mending webs, flies buzzing and filling the air—

All right.

Enough.

This was all beginning to feel like a bad trip, like his brain was wrapped in discolored cellophane. His mind was not working the way it should and he was painfully aware of the fact… yet, he felt helpless to do anything about it. Maybe it was the air in here or something seeping up from the holds below. Who knew what kind of chemicals were down there, what toxic substances were leaking and fuming? Jesus, maybe he was being poisoned. Regardless, something surely wasn’t right here.

He stumbled over to the porthole and sucked in some warm, salty air.

His mind stabilized right away and he could think. But as it did, he found himself just beat, dead-tired. That was the ticket. Go to sleep and wake in the morning and it would all be over with.

“That’s what I’ll do,” he said, refusing to hear echoes or look at that weird wallpaper. “Enough of this baby-ass shit. I need sleep, that’s all.”

He pulled the coverlet aside and then the sheets, slid in between them. It felt cool in the cabin, almost chilly and dank. The sheets and blanket felt warm. Yes, nice, very nice. He realized then, after five minutes or so beneath them, that he kept telling himself this, making himself believe it. But the reality was that they did not feel right, nothing in the room felt right. There was something warped about the goddamned cabin, something unnatural. It did things to you, made you think things and feel things you had no right to think or feel. Just crazy, batty shit circling in your head. Things that made no sense whatsoever on the surface like the ranting of a madman, but underneath… well, yes, underneath they made all the sense in the world, a tilted and demented sort of sense possibly, but sense all the same.

C’mon, man, would you knock if off already? You’re really starting to scare me with this raving.

But, Charlie knew he was not raving, not really. It was the room that was raving. It was doing things to him, planting dark and crawling things in his head that were hatching like worms from moist, snotty clusters of eggs laid deep in his brain. He could almost feel them in there, burrowing and tunneling, chewing away at his sanity and resolve until nothing really made any sense and the less sense it made, why, the more sense it made. Did that sound right or was it just impossibly fucked-up and convoluted? He couldn’t really be sure. He was in the captain’s cabin, lying in the captain’s bed, breathing the captain’s air and looking at his wallpaper and his dust and his webs and feeling things moving around him or inside him and maybe both at the same time.

Charlie sat up, clutching his hands to his head.

What the hell was going on here?

His head didn’t feel right; nothing felt right. It was like everything was mixed up, running, blending together… his thoughts and consciousness and sanity and willpower and identity, all of them mixing inside of his head like one of those crazy hallucinogenic pictures you made at a county fair, dribbling paint onto a spinning card until all the colors were swirled together in some vibrant spiral. It wasn’t right, none of it was right. His head was pounding, sweat running down his face.

He became aware of a sound, a pained sobbing and he realized that it was his own voice. He was weeping openly and he couldn’t seem to stop. His head spun with vertigo and his guts flip-flopped with nausea. He wanted to throw up, to scream. He was seized by an inescapable sense of melancholy and loss and anxiety. His mind didn’t make sense and his senses were reeling with something he could not identify. It was like a thousand black birds were shitting in his mind at the same time, oh Jesus, the despair, the horror, the madness of it all…

You need to get out of here now.

Yes, certainly, only he couldn’t seem to remember why.

He knew the sheets were clean and so was the blanket, but they no longer felt clean. They felt dusty, dirty, moth-eaten. Not sheets but dead skin, dry and flaking, and he was lying beneath it, feeling its scales and mold. And the coverlet… it was not freshly laundered linen, it was something else. It was a cocoon. A warm and webby cocoon. It was like being wrapped up in a living placenta and he could feel the things that had spun it nearby, edging closer and closer.

He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He was an empty, soundless void inside. He was staring at that awful wallpaper and seeing things moving in it, leggy forms dragging themselves in and out of it. Transparent things you could only truly see if the light was angled properly and then only a suggestion of their morbid outlines.

As he scratched at his hand, he wondered if this was what those sailors felt after the thing in the box got Heslip. When he closed his eyes, he could see them: hollow-eyed, damaged, and silent as they got in the last remaining lifeboat and sailed away from the Addams, never to be seen again. That was the end of the story. And as he knew that he also knew that Arturo had lied to him. The Coast Guard reached the conclusion that there had been violence and possibly murder aboard the ship. The missing crew and the bloodstains they found reinforced that. The Coasties conducted a protracted investigation but never arrived at a conclusion. If there was something unnatural on the Addams, they never found it. But, then again, maybe they weren’t looking in the right place.

Charlie thought: You can’t look for it like you look for a lost dog or a runaway child or even a dangerous animal. You have to seek it with your mind, feel for it with your instincts. Once it knows you, once it trusts you, then it will show itself as it showed itself to Virginia who fed it table scraps and even foil-wrapped sweets, mothering it like a starving waif.

“But then they killed her,” he said aloud. “And all that did was piss it off.”

Charlie laughed at the very idea, thinking of Arturo and his plans to put a crew about this fucking mortuary. What a fool, what a prize fool that wop was.

He only stopped laughing when he realized he could no longer remember what Arturo looked like. Now wasn’t that funny?

He got out of bed.

This was the breaking point. Right now. He either manned up and spent the night or he packed up his stuff and went on his merry way with his tail tucked between his legs. And, of course, if he did that, Arturo would know it. Those guys in the van would call him right away. And Arturo would let it slip. Everyone would know that Charlie Petty had no balls, that he was afraid of spooks. He’d never live it down. Never.

Which, of course, brought him back to Arturo and his reasons.

He could not get past the idea that Arturo knew he was banging his wife and that this had little to do with a $50,000 debt and everything to do with breaking him, exposing Charlie Petty for the gutless heap he was beginning to suspect he indeed was. Arturo wanted to de-ball him and if he succeeded, Charlie’s reputation as a stand-up guy would be forever marred. A professional gambler existed on his nerves and when he lost them, he was no good to himself or anyone else.

Leaving this tomb does not make you weak or gutless. It makes you smart.

Maybe. But it didn’t really matter what Arturo thought or what he was trying to prove, if anything, what mattered was how Charlie viewed himself. If he began to think he had no guts, soon enough, he might begin to believe it and then his card playing days were all done with. That was what he risked by walking away from this now. He honestly believed that Arturo knew more than he was saying about the Yvonne Addams. He knew damn well there was something very bad about her. It was beyond mere sailor’s superstitions. Whatever haunted this goddamn ship was the real thing and he knew it. Maybe he was on the level about needing Charlie to spend the night there so he could a get crew aboard. And maybe he knew that Charlie had a thing with Pam… but what it came down to was that he was using this as an opportunity to break him.

And I won’t be fucking broken.

There. That felt better. Charlie felt like he had his guts back. And since he had his guts back, it was time to think rationally and accept the fact that he was in danger. He needed to leave… yet, even with all he’d been through, the idea of tucking his quivering tail between his legs was unacceptable.

Somehow, it was cowardly.

But wait, just wait—there was an obvious solution to all these questions or at least some of them. He had his cell. He had Pam’s number. He’d call her. Together, they could hash this out. Maybe Arturo had told her something about the boat and maybe she was suspicious that he knew about her lover. Together, they could figure it out.

Charlie sat down at the desk with his cell and gave her a ring.

He was so excited to hear another voice that his heart pounded and his hands shook. Pam usually picked up right away or she didn’t pick up at all. The phone seemed to ring and ring, echoing in his head so loudly it seemed like it was echoing down the corridors of the ship, bouncing off bulkheads and up ventilation shafts.

Her voicemail kicked in.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

He tried again. Nothing. Out of frustration, he tossed the phone. It bounced off the bed and landed on the floor. It beeped, then beeped again.

He picked it up, put it to his ear. This is what he heard:

“You’ve reached Charlie, but I’m out. You can look for me, but you can’t find me. I’m in a secret place that nobody knows. Check the corners and the cracks and the dust on the closet shelf. I’m not alone. There’s someone else with me, someone very old, very wise and very jealous. I can’t tell you who it is, only that they’ve been here a long time, hiding by day and creeping by night. I believe plans have been made for me. I believe my mind is gone to soft rot. I believe my soul is being eaten. I believe that my cage has no door. I believe in the bones inside me when nothing else is left—”

He was shaking with terror and rage. His voice, but he had never recorded anything like that. He dialed 911. This was enough. This was more than fucking enough.

Click. Bing. Connect. “You have reached Charlie, but I’m out. I’m sinking into the floor and the walls have teeth—”

He threw the phone.

The door.

If he did not get out that door right now, he never would. He felt sick to his stomach. Waves of nausea rolled through him, his brain seeming to swim in his skull with vertigo. His mouth was dry. His hands were shaking. He stood up and his legs would barely hold his weight.

Get to the door! C’mon! If you don’t get to it now and get out of here, you’ll be trapped in this fucking hulk forever! Move! You have to fucking move!

And he tried. Oh, how he tried. He made it maybe three steps—clumsy, faltering toddler steps—before he went down on his knees. Instinct was driving him. Pure, hot-blooded instinct because his conscious mind was incapable of directing his body to perform even the most basic of functions. He crawled towards the door and even simple locomotion like that seemed impossibly complex, his brain short-circuiting in his head.

He looked over at the rocking chair and Virginia was sitting in it… or at least, the entity he believed to be Virginia. She wore the gray, rotting, water-stained tarp they had wrapped her in before pitching her corpse overboard. Her face was a white globular oblong mass, swollen and distorted and disfigured as if it had been beaten to the point that the bones beneath it had all been broken. Her nose was twisted off to the side. One black gelid eye was pushed back into a tunnel-like socket, the other drawn down towards her cheekbone as if the orbit that held it had been shattered. She grinned with a mouth that was a lopsided hole. At her feet sat the box.

Charlie knew she had brought it for him.

It was a gift.

There was something inside for him.

He shook his head. No, he didn’t want what was in there even if it wanted him. The lid opened and two gnarled gray hands that looked very much like rat claws emerged. There were sharp hair-like bristles growing from the back of them.

He blinked his eyes and the apparition was gone.

He pulled himself to his feet using the bed and a wave of dizziness hit him, laid him flat, and he fell back, gasping and panting and senseless. Blackness came at him from every direction and he passed out cold.