The Jonah Watch

Chapter 14

The apparition seemed born of werelight, and, as if no cock would ever crow the dawn, it took its time a-building. It came from Hester C., which lay canted on the mudflats. Later on, no man could tell at which pointing, mincing moment the manifestation shook like a rumple-furred dog and detached itself from the mist. Some men did not see the apparition at all.

In later years, cooking at the Base, Lamp would claim that he was the first man to see Jensen, and he would believe it. Lamp’s interpretation rose from that spacious imagination that swelled like a circus balloon filling his huge frame, giving reason for that frame’s existence. Lamp actually saw nothing for several days, or rather, he saw no apparition. Nor did Brace.

“I thought it was a reflection at first,” Glass told Howard after enough time had passed to still Glass’s trembling.

Adrian had once more swung against the pier. Cutter Abner had disappeared into the mist, having towed Theresa into Gloucester, then caught a search to the south in company with the lousy cutter Able. Men joked, made sympathetic noises in behalf of Abner’s crew. Gunner Majors claimed that Able was searching for the overdue yacht Seascamp, and Abner was sent along to keep Able from getting lost. It was a dull joke, made even more dull because of a general suspicion that it described the facts.

“I’m trying to convince myself that it was a reflection.” Howard acted like a man prepared to bargain his half interest in the hereafter in return for the assurance of a reasonable world.

“Reflection of what? That’s what I want to know,” Glass said. “Reflection of what?”

Glass had been standing the in-port midwatch on the bridge in a muffled night of foghorns and the crackle of the radio. Lamp was resting his well-exercised tongue under the fog of sleep. Mist swirled about Adrian and was cut by a light breeze. The mist lifted in small whirls, gave way to narrow views and tunnels of clear darkness. It was like paint being stirred, folding in smooth swells that colored and became more solid with the mixing. Glass, having lived for so long with the mist, was bored, unimpressed, but he logged the fact of the breeze with some interest. He would have said, and did, that the breeze put different odds on the tote board.

The breeze was not a dancer. It held no cyclonic persuasions. It was interrupted. Sporadic. If it swirled, it did so because of broken flow that bent around buildings and vessels. Glass, in cynical sureness of the value of prophecy, would not ordinarily bet ten cents on a race that was fixed. Still, Glass was a child of New England. He shivered on the warm bridge, while the radio crackled, chattered, buzzed. Glass later confided to Lamp that he felt like “saying a little more about that breeze.” Since he did not know what to say, he simply logged it.

The breeze folded the mist, opened dark and narrow alleyways down which a man might peer, then closed the far entry, as if it were blocked by the appearance of a blacked-out and prowling police car.

A pale light appeared on the mudflats where it was not possible that a light could be. It was like foxfire, luminous, indifferently unblinking as it flavored only itself while not revealing its surroundings. The light came and went and came and went, as mist ran in small torrents across the mudflats. Glass reached for a pencil, looked at the log, looked at his hump nose beneath untidy and lengthening hair reflected on the blacked-out screen of the radar, which behind its open mask took a faint sheen of red light from the night bulbs. Glass laid the pencil down, picked up binoculars. The light expanded, contracted, seemed in an effort of concentration. Glass watched, put the binoculars aside, picked up the telescope, although Hester C. lay within three hundred yards. The light was coming from the hulk. As Glass watched, it began to change, focus, become more incandescent.

“Like a work light,” Glass told Lamp. “Like when you see one-a these lobstermen putting over traps after dark. It was even swinging, like he was riding a swell.”

The mist whirled, swept, cloaked; and, through the wavering telescope, revealed a figure bent over the engine box. The figure was shadowed by the sideways cant of Hester C. The unwalkable deck seemed not to affect the figure at all. Glass would swear that if the thing had feet, it was using them to walk on mist. The figure was vague. It busied itself with its own concerns. It seemed to be drawn into the framework of the hulk, or into the engine box. Then it would rise as if attempting to step free of the wreck. Glass saw arms that waved in despair or struggle. The mist closed down, opened, closed.

Glass checked the watch list. The sarcastic Racca was in the engine room. Glass pressed a buzzer beside a voice pipe.

“Get up here. On the double.”

“Can’t leave the station. We’re on generator.”

“Move it. Move it.”

Racca entered the bridge, took the telescope, looked.

“I’m going below.”

“You see it?”

“And I’m staying below. For always. You’ve done some crazy things, Glass, but this cuts it.” Racca’s face was the color of whey, or at least it was that color when Dane later called him back to the bridge.

Glass, having once before woken Conally on the subject of Hester C., went to the crew’s compartment to wake him again. Glass thumped down the ladder with loud indifference to all sleepers.

“This better be good.” Conally came from sleep, and he moved like a man half afraid, half joyous over some grim confirmation. As he passed Howard’s sack, Conally shook Howard.

“You’ve had something on your mind, chum.”

“It’s not my watch.”

“Get movin’. Glass caught hisself a ghost.”

Howard found himself staring, wide-eyed, awake. “Something funny’s been going on.”

“Somethin’s going on, but it ain’t funny.”

“I’m surrounded by experts,” Glass chattered.

Fallon snorted, snorked, came awake. “What? What?” He rolled out, began pulling on his pants, then followed.

The mist was updrafting, back flowing, like cold layers of slag magically unfrozen. There were cliffs and crevices in the mist; hollows, arroyos, switchbacks. It seemed geologic, and it seemed like the indifferent sweep of time or timelessness that chews planets into forms of dark mountains and dark seas.

“You see it, you see it there?”

“Call Dane. On the double.”

“Log it.”

“Don’t log it. You crazy? Log it and you got it.”

“What do you reckon? ”

“It’s fightin’to get loose.”

“What is it? What?”

“That lobster guy, I think.”

“I don’t think so,” Fallon said. “I don’t know what I think.” He lowered a set of binoculars, and his keglike shape seemed suddenly frail, thin. “We’re doin’ okay,” he said in a voice wrung from fear. “We’re makin’ it.” He seemed to be pleading with a friend.

A burst of static came from the radio, like chattering teeth, and, muted by mist, the commission pennant tapped from high above the heads of confused and frightened men. On the mudflats the arms waved, grasped, groped in undisguised battle as the creature struggled. The mist opened, closed.

“It’s swelling. Gettin’ bigger.”

The mist closed over the bright light, opened again, and when Dane arrived on the bridge like a startled frog a-jump from a known and comfortable river bank, the bright light was dimming to luminosity. Dane looked at Conally, at Fallon. Dane’s expression changed. His face no longer held the opinion that he had been woken by some punk seaman having dreams.

“There,” Conally said. “Right over there.”

Dane wrinkled his flat nose. “It’s lights from the million dollar bridge. The mist cleared aft, and the bridge is glowin’ at us.” He looked at Conally, at Fallon. “Tell me.”

Conally told him. ”… and it’s walking in that mist right now.”

“Then you got no trouble, right?”

“A’course we got trouble,” said Fallon. “What’s it mean?”

“Smell the breeze.”

“Wind?”

“No fog by morning,” Dane said. “It’s just this minute come onto winter.”

Howard’s voice was as querulous as a child begging to be spanked. “That has nothing to do with it. What does that have to do with it?”

“If it’s walkin’ in the mist, and if there ain’t no mist, then you got no trouble, right?”

“I have trouble,” Glass admitted with perfect diction. “I am not going to stand this watch alone.”

“You’ll stand it on top of the mast if I say so.” Without his chief’s hat, Dane seemed not as bulky or tough. Thin strings of hair, and most of them white, lay across his skull like a tangle of webbing spun by a committee of spiders. His rolled shirt sleeves revealed thick wrists, heavy hands, and his fingers were tapping some invisible surface. He looked like a man digging through his ditty bag of tales. He discovered the memory he sought. He looked at Glass, at Conally. “Stuff like this happens. I never seen it mean nothin’ yet.”

“It means something,” Fallon said. “You didn’t see it, chief.”

Dane, whose one law was competence, looked at Fallon, who had spent a winter running the engine room after the drowning of Jensen. Dane seemed to be mentally turning over the tale dredged from memory. “It means one thing. Crews get spooked if their main guys get spooked.”

Fallon hesitated, thought himself toward a brief jolt of understanding.

Dane turned back to Glass. “Relieve the engine room.” He turned back to Fallon. “When your punk Racca gets here, square him away.” To Howard and Conally he said, “Set double watches. Kiddies get lonely.” Dane gave a vague snort, for a moment seemed indecisive. Then he gave a full blown and heavy snort, the contempt falling back into his voice as surely as any actor pulling on his mask of role before stepping toward a familiar stage. “I was on an icebreaker once. You punks don’t know nothin’ a-tall about winter.” He went below, stomping, as though feet could hammer nails of certainty through the brains of uncertain and tremulous men who stood on the bridge, watched each other, looked at the dark mudflats, and concealed from each other their private tremors.