Deadlock

13

He came awake to the unpleasant sensation that a mouth was sucking on the end of his finger, pulling on it the way a newborn puppy will pull on its mother’s teat with immense, hungering suction. He let out a cry and sat up. The cabin was pitch-dark.

The lantern had gone out.

There was nothing at his finger. Nothing at all. A nightmare.

Breathing fast, he checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was nearly three a.m., which meant he’d been sleeping for at least two or three hours. Could the batteries in the lantern have died out in that time? Or had something else happened? Something he did not want to consider?

If there were dreams, he could not—or would not—remember them.

He laid there, his head pounding slightly, and he was glad he could not see the wallpaper. The sheets felt pretty much just like sheets and the coverlet like a coverlet. He ran his fingers over the latter… it was sticky. As he pulled his hand away, tiny threads of something like webs were stuck to his fingertips like spiders had been at work since he fell asleep. Just the feel of them, clinging and oddly warm, made a moan come up out of his throat.

Not webs, not webs, he told himself. Hairs. Fine hairs.

He brushed them away.

He had a plan now: he was going to go see Arturo.

Piss on it all. And while he was there he was going to tell him the air was bad on the Addams. That’s what he was going to do and nothing could stop him. That’s what it all had to be: the air or lack of the same. Maybe some kind of gases. That would explain the hallucinations, the dizziness, the passing out. Hell, it was the strand that could connect it all and put it in some kind of perspective.

Dummy. You should have thought of this before.

He sat up and his head started spinning right away. But he refused to lie back down. It was dark in the room, so very dark. He reached in his pocket and found his cigarettes, his Zippo. He fired one up and the pungent smell of smoke seemed to clear his head. He was rooted to the here and now, at any rate.

As he pulled off his cigarette, he was aware of the dankness of the air and the fact that his heart was racing wildly like it wanted to gallop right out of his chest. Leaving the cigarette in his mouth, he scratched at his bare arms. They were itchy, terribly itchy… but as he touched them, he became aware that they were covered in a fine down of silky hairs. He scratched them away frantically. They clung to his fingers: intricate, lacey webs. But what was worse, is that there were tiny things crawling in them.

Charlie screamed and fell out of bed.

He scrambled over to the desk and found his flashlight. He clicked it on and turned on the lantern. It worked fine. It was just shut off. That’s all it was. He didn’t remember shutting it off, but he must have. Maybe it had some kind of energy-saving device on it that turned it off automatically. Maybe. Possibly. He really couldn’t imagine someone coming in here and turning it off for him. If Arturo really had goons aboard, they must have known Charlie was armed.

Creak, creak, creak.

It came from behind him, bringing a cool sweat to his face that tasted like sea brine on his lips. He knew he had to turn around and face his fears, but he could not bring himself to. Maybe if he just ignored it, it would go away. Things had reached the stage now where either he curled-up in the corner and screamed his mind away or he took some action and looked whatever the hell this was dead in the face.

There was no choice.

Charlie was a particular type of man and he responded true to form. He reached into his duffel and pulled out the .45. Because in his narrow world, this was how you handled threats. You drilled rounds into them and let them bleed out. Then you got on with your fucking life.

He spun around with the Smith .45.

What he saw was an ethereal, filmy shape in the rocking chair. It did not move. It was hunched over, grotesque like some living sack. Without hesitation, he put two slugs into it. It was like shooting a patch of mist, of course. He put two very neat holes through the back of the chair but he did not disturb the nebulous shape that sat in it. Was it his imagination or did he hear something like a low, pained mewling of a newborn kitten? It was there and then it was gone, almost like it was echoing off into the distance.

There was no shape in the chair.

In fact, there was nothing but Charlie himself standing there, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, his eyes bulging from their sockets and his lips trembling as if they were trying to find words that would never come. His hand was shaking so badly he thought he might drop the gun so he set it on the desk.

His hand kept itching, a constant burning, tingling, tickling sensation that was enough to drive him mad. He held it up to the lantern and it was so swollen he could not move his fingers. It seemed as if something was moving beneath the makeshift bandages.

He saw the can of beer sitting there.

He reached out and grabbed it. It was warm and foamy but there was alcohol in it and that’s what he wanted, what he craved, what he had to have. He finished the can, gulping tepid beer down his throat. Right away, something inside him eased. His nerves seemed to relax. Everything went loose and limp.

He heard the scratching from inside the wall again.

Beads of sweat ran down his face.

The scratching got louder.

Swallowing, fumbling for the gun on the desk, he looked over at the wall. The wallpaper split open. It looked like the vaginal slit of a woman. A clear and viscid slime began to bubble out and run like tears. In it were dozens of tiny transparent things like fetal termites. They oozed down the wall, creeping out of the slime.

It’s not there. You are not seeing it.

The insects continued to flow from the gashed wallpaper, a pool of them spreading over the floor. He would drown in it. Yes, the placental discharge would fill his mouth, then his lungs.

The lantern flickered and went out.

No, no, no, not in the dark, not in the dark.

Something touched his cheek like a wisp of hair. And in the darkness around him, things were moving, he could sense them, hear the creeping sounds of their legs on the walls. Yes, even on the floor, a skittering of leggy things. He scrambled to his feet, trying to orientate himself in the seething, living blackness. A net of hairs fell over his face. He clawed them away. He tripped over his feet in his panic and fell against the wall. Just a wall… yet, it was also covered in those filament-fine hairs.

He blinked his eyes and the light was back. He knew that somehow it had never been out in the first place.

He giggled deep in his throat at the absurdity of such a thing, light being dark and dark being light. Then he giggled at the absurdity of himself: tough guy morphed into frightened little boy. Hee, hee, hee.

His wounded hand was pulsing like a heart, throbbing and pumping. As he looked at it, it seemed to inflate like it was being filled with air or rising like bread dough. A strangled shriek breaking loose in his throat, he tore the bandages free because he had to see, he had to look at it.

Yes, it was horribly distended; the fingers like sausages, the hand itself like a fleshy, puffy catcher’s mitt. It was warm and pulsing to the touch and he snatched his fingers away out of sheer revulsion. The skin was purple and contused, hot and bubble gum pink, the fingernails blackening like those of a corpse.

And the itching.

Dear God, how it itched!

He could see that there were pink welts on his arms now that were rising like blisters. He lifted his shirt and they were on his belly, too. He pressed a finger into one and it burst like a rotten grape. He let out a cry and grabbed the lantern, stumbling into the head. Yes, yes… there were pink sores on his face. They were even on his tongue. He could feel them expanding on the roof of his mouth.

The nausea that took control of him forced him to his knees. His face went hot as cold sweat dripped from it. He convulsed with dry heaves, finally spewing out bile and mats of hair like the fur balls a cat might spit up. He hacked out half a dozen of them, watching with horror as they sprouted minute segmented legs and began to skitter across the floor. Making a low moaning sound in his throat, he smashed one with his good hand and it cried out in a tiny, shrill voice. More of the things raced over his shoes and tried to climb his legs. He kicked them away, swatted at one that crawled up his shirt. Another ran up his spine and he grabbed it in his hand, feeling the nipping, licking mouthparts and bloated, warm body, the bicycling legs. He crushed it to jelly in his fist and it screamed like the other one.

He was sure it screamed his name.

He crawled away, over to the head itself and vomited again. This time, there was only foamy warm beer that came out. It went into the stagnant water of the pot, roiling its surface as he gripped the metal bowl, shaking uncontrollably. The smell wafting up at him was more than the stench of his stomach contents, but a high briny stink of green weeds, rotting crustaceans, and polluted mud thrown up by the sea. He saw movement in the bowl. Looping tendrils were darkening the water, spreading out, multiplying, becoming slithering braids and writhing fibers, clotting the bowl and rising in a reef of knotted hair. And from it, parting the waters and undulant tresses like some obscene ova, was a huge fishlike eye, yellow-green and unpleasantly juicy like a peeled plum.

Riven white with terror, but still clutching the metal bowl as if it was the only thing that tethered him to this world, Charlie uttered a tiny scream as a flaccid mouth in the water puckered for a kiss. And then there was an explosion that threw him backwards with incredible force, slamming him into the wall. The toilet exploded with a rain of foul water and waste, brine and backed-up shit and ribbons of grease. Covered in filth and black drainage, he tried to climb to his feet, but they slid out from under him and he hit the wall, the stink hot and enveloping, a living moist miasma that crawled down his throat, seizing his stomach and dragging it back up.

His feet slid out from under him again and his head struck the sewage-painted wall and he went out cold, sliding to the floor in a rubber-limbed heap.

When he woke up, clods of waste were still dripping from the ceiling, dropping onto his face like bits of loose clay from the ceiling of a cave. He skated over the waste as he tried to stand and right himself. Even though he knew the water was turned off, he instinctively gripped the sink and turned on the spigots. They groaned and coughed, the pipes rattling in the walls. A trickle of tepid, rusty water came out followed by clumps of grease and sludge that were tangled with wiry hairs.

He stumbled out into the cabin. His head kept spinning and he went down to his knees against the bed, breathing hard and shaking, one arm tossed over the crumpled coverlet. He felt something brush his arm and then… then a moistness at his fingertips as something not only licked his fingertips, but lapped greedily at them.

But there was nothing there.

Nothing that he could see.

The cabin seemed to lose focus, it tilted, leaned, floor reaching up to meet ceiling, walls bowing like the broken backs of hags, reality morphing to dark fairy tale. Everything seemed fluid and runny, yet almost hallucinogenic in its clarity. When it righted itself and Charlie’s head quit spinning and his eyes once again took in things three-dimensionally, he saw that everything had changed. The walls were no longer covered in flowery wallpaper or painted a drab battleship gray, they had gone pink and glistening like new skin. They flexed like muscles and pulsated like quivering mats of flesh, engorged veins sluicing with blood standing out. Knoblike follicles put out long black wormy hairs that were like silken threads that proliferated, joining into greased plaits and snakelike braids. Thick and ropy tresses descended from the ceiling eagerly like tree roots seeking the charnel nourishment of buried oblong boxes. The door became a puckered oval like some quivering orifice that wanted to eat him alive.

Charlie screamed, but not because he seemed trapped in a throbbing pocket of tissue, but because he could hear her coming for him—the ghost in this machine of dread. She made a dry rustling sound, a scrabbling scratching sound of graveyard rats in narrow walls. Her breath steamed in his face, searing and foul. She exuded a perfume that smelled sweet and honeyed like summer wildflowers and lilacs and sandalwood oil, then a heavy hot musk like sex, and finally the rank meat smell of a woman’s menses flowing like lava.

As the cabin pulsed like a fleshy sac around him, hairs breaking against his face like midnight webs, he saw that the pink blisters and lesions and bioplasmic sores crowding his flesh were ever rising, swelling fat like fertilized eggs ready to burst. He tore off his shirt and ran his fingers over the pulpous oyster-gray buttons that pushed from inside him. They were meaty pearls and pink-red golfball-sized nodes that pulsed with the glistening afterbirth within him. He writhed on the floor like some white, corpse-greasy maggot.

He began tearing at the blisters with clawing fingers, popping them like boils and screaming at the agony of it. They erupted with gouts of cold pulp that burned his fingers. And from each of them there came a single black hair that divided, becoming two, then dividing again, becoming four, then dividing again and again, releasing a forest of worming rootlets that covered him like a living, rustling mink coat. The sores opened one after the other until his body was a rich luxurious pelt of glossy fur, each hair alive and squirming with obscene life. They grew out of him and netted him securely like fishing twine.

He crawled over the floor, an undulant rug, an animate hide, crying out with a squeaking, pained mewling that was far beyond a human voice.

But it was not over.

His body continued to rupture and grow new hairs, silk tresses emerging in strings and ribbons. Hair poured from his mouth and erupted from his eyes and from somewhere distant he heard a humming sound and realized it was his own voice. He was humming some nonsensical tune as he ran fingers through his thick, rich mane, marveling at the tactile delight of his luscious pelt. And the individual crawling hairs… yes, they were answering. Mocking him, celebrating him, humming as he hummed, ringing out like the plucked strings of antique lyres and exotic harps in shrill, discordant voices.

It was then that his host showed, exuding calming scents of jasmine, sweet vanilla, and rosebud-delicate perfumes that calmed his hairy, twitching mass.

She cooed at him, promising seduction and consummation, but the idea repulsed him… he could not become part of her, he would not be joined to that ambulant hairball despite the febrile chemical cocktail of pheromones and hormonal secretions she misted at him.

He made for the door, struggling to open it with the wooly nap of his fingers which were threaded together by fibrous hairs, but it was impossible. She came at him and he stumbled away, knocking over chairs and overturning a table in his flight. He could not run. He couldn’t even walk. The best he could do was a sort of frantic hopping, pulling away but leaving a silken train of locks in his wake that she seized like reigns and quickly overtook him.

Charlie let out a guttural hissing from his hair-clotted throat, but that was about it as she mounted him, clutching him with needling fingers like fish hooks.

She slid fangs like slivers of ice into the mound of his skull and when he fought no more, dosed on toxins that filled his head with rioting endorphins and explosive pleasure spikes, she engulfed him, unhinging herself like the jaws of a snake and pulling him inside her before closing up once again like some immense clamshell. He was vaguely aware of his insides pulping and his bones cracking and his skin ripping like wet canvas, but that was all. Even the viscera ejecting from his mouth under great pressure was no bother. There was only the formless, inert serenity of golden depths as he submerged into the murky microcosm of self.

Sometime later, bloated and moody, the thing that haunted the Yvonne Addams disgorged a set of shattered bones. They were well-gnawed and well-used. They came out with undigested globs of marrow. By the time the sun came up, even these would be gone.

In the cavernous silences of the ship, joined in biochemical stasis, Charlie and his lover pupated as one, waiting to rise again and seed the night. And in the hot, placental darkness, this was enough.