The Night That Finds Us All, page 19
“Let me make a guess,” I say. “All this baroque crap on this piece of shit boat brought us here?”
Maybe it wants to chat. Maybe it wants to crow. Maybe I can interest it long enough. After all, we fucked, didn’t we? Was that Seabees or this fucking thing? It had to be Seabees.
“Not quite,” the thing says in a prim and proper British accent. “Every ritual has its forms. But it is mostly intention.” It allows Hank to drop to the deck and Hank gasps. He clutches at his nuts, which took the brunt of his weight while she was dangling him about. “And blood.”
“I found Big Threve in the bilge,” I say. “Funny how your ‘ritual’ just looks like murder.”
“And yet look around you. Are we not here?” It raises its arms and gestures to the horizon, the strange wake. Above, the tatters of sails hang limply, yet we still move.
There is something moving in the water. Something massive. It broaches the surface and my mind struggles to understand it. It is too big for comprehension. A submarine the size of an island? It’s black and glistening. I have seen an intimation of it before. An echo, maybe. Maybe whatever this thing is was dreaming and its dream fucked with the Blackwatch and that’s what heeled us over outside of Sint Maarten. It twists and coils. It’s connected to something larger. I can feel my mind skittering away from thinking about it too hard.
Thankfully, the thing that was Seabees comes close enough, drawing my attention away from the surface of this distant ocean. I can feel strange emanations coming from her. Him. It. Whatever. Reverberations, as though Seabees and the thing and the amalgam that they have become are a bell after being struck. Bell, book, and candle.
“Another guess for you,” I say, casting my mind back to the book and papers and poor Hank’s clients. “Your name isn’t Seabees or whatever. It’s Ashwell, isn’t it?”
“I knew there was a reason to keep you as a witness,” it says. “And Sarahbelle—who you know as Seabees—is very much possessed of the Ashwell blood.”
“Figured,” I say. “And you’ve just been haunting this boat for what? A hundred years?”
The thing laughs. It’s that mirthless laugh I heard at the harbor in Puget Sound when I was in the library, fighting against the urge to drink down that bottle of rum. Remember.
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” it says. “Time doesn’t work that way here. I’ve lived too many eons this side of the rift. It wasn’t the boat I haunted, but her. But the term suffices. I only needed—”
“Blood,” I say. “Don’t we all?”
And I slam the wrench against the black thing’s head.
…
It is a good hit. A great hit. The thing goes flying and with it goes Seabees. For a moment, as they carom across the deck, the black Ashwell entity and Seabees separate. Ashwell becomes a diffuse and bloody haze and Seabees rolls forward, gouting blood from her scalp. I rush over.
Her mouth opens and closes like a fish’s out of water. I try to staunch the wound but it keeps bleeding—scalp wounds are a real bitch and I clocked her good. There’s a bit of white there in the gore. Bone, I think. I might have killed her.
Seabees’s hands paw at the straps of my overalls. She has one good eye and its gaze roves about and finally fixes upon me. The other is blown out, the pupil nearly black. I’ve seriously damaged her brain.
“Sam,” she says. “Sam.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. Sorry. I hoped you could save me,” she says.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say.
“You can’t—” She seems to be fumbling for something. “You can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
Her one eye—isn’t that strange? The eye. What did the old lady say? Seabees’s one eye focuses on me. For the last time. “You can’t let him get to where he’s going.”
“O-okay,” I say. I hadn’t intended to, but haven’t really worked out a game plan. I feel like I should be feeling something. But I don’t. I’m simply numb. And maybe that’s necessary. Maybe that’s why I’m here. The world needed an amoral, alcoholic asshole like me to counter…all this. “He seems to be gone,” I say. “I knocked him out of you, for what it’s worth.”
“The wake is a tether to our world. A path. He’s—not gone,” she says. Her mouth works but no sound comes. It’s taking all her strength to breathe—hard, quick breaths. Her hands spasm. “Not gone—”
He wasn’t gone.
But she was.
19
The Wake Is a Tether
I’m not going to think too hard about having become a murderer. Technically a murderer, but does it really count? He was already dead.
Seabees wasn’t, Little Miss Contrary in my head says.
Hank is shaking now. He thrashes about, still holding his crotch, but also there’s the strange onion-skinning effect and occasionally the form of Ashwell flickers over Hank’s.
I have to move fast. I grab Hank and before he can fight or protest, I bum-rush him headfirst into the crew’s cabin hatch. He falls and smacks against two bunks on his way down. It doesn’t kill him, but he lets go the grandaddy of all moans and shits himself with a flatulent burp. I drag him by the PFD down the corridor, through the salon, and into the engine room. I zip-tie his hands and feet together, trying to avoid the fecund snail paths of feces down his legs. Hank Fucking Huntington, I think, and not for the last time. He moans again as I cinch the ties down tight. Good old zip ties, every engineer’s friend. At this point the flickering blackness of Ashwell is prominent once more.
“Stop,” Ashwell says. “You will be the witness. This vessel will still suffice as the cup of sacrifice, still suffer the red lash. I can raise you up. I can give you all those things you want. Money, power, bliss.” And beneath that Hank is making other vocalizations. Maybe this is the Black Tongue the mimeographs talked about. The words are like the horizon or the thing that broached the surface of the ocean above—my mind struggles to make coherent thoughts of the sounds. Aphasia, they call this. These are the words that whispered to me through the hull. As my mind starved for alcohol and struggled to interpret them.
—The butterfly. The red lash, the hanged man, the slaughtered pig, the great serpent, the night that finds us all—
“Bliss,” he says again, as if he’s struck on something. “Everlasting bliss. A fevered bliss like an orgasm that never ceases.”
“Dirty talk will get you everywhere,” I say and slap Hank. I’ve wanted to do that for weeks and now I have the chance. I slap him again for funsies. This seems to rattle Ashwell.
I go to the engine-room door, stepping through. “It smells like shit in here thanks to you,” I say.
The door, when it slams shut, is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever experienced.
Well, almost.
…
I search the Blackwatch. I know what’s in the engine room intimately. But the rest of the boat, that remains a mystery. The captain’s quarters—all of Hank’s shit—is surprisingly devoid of anything useful other than a bag of weed. I dump it in the head and flush it as though I were a disapproving parent and he my miscreant teen. A laptop and an iPad. There’s a pistol, too, in one of his bags. Ostensibly for “pirates,” I would imagine, but fat lot of good it does me now.
In Seabees’s berth I find the satellite phones and EPIRBs and everything else useful. Once useful but no more. They’re in her wet locker in ruins. Crushed, broken, smashed. Whatever the fuck the Royston Ashwell thing is—I have to consider he’s not what he says he is, the spirit of the Ashwell paterfamilias; or maybe he once was but now here, in this sunless and lightless sea, he’s become something else—he is strong. I have to wonder how, when he uses his great strength, does that affect our mere human bodies? Seabees’s hands were strong, sure, but they weren’t strong enough to crush hard plastic devices. Exerting that sort of force through muscles and tendons and bones must have caused damage to her body. Maybe all the sad looks she was cutting at me weren’t just remorse but actual physical pain.
Sarahbelle. Jesus, why didn’t I just ask what her name was? Maybe I could’ve put it all together with what Abigail wrote in her journal. She found him and the German on the deck, and the German said that when a ritual isn’t complete the “celebrant” can become trapped. And Abigail came along and fucked up all their plans. She died stopping the ritual but the beat, as they say, went on.
I go through the salon, through Loick’s locker and bunk, and all the rest. No working radios. No compass. No phones, no communication. No hope.
Bupkis.
Well and truly fucked.
…
I go above deck. The weird horizon yawns at me, tilting and skewing reality. The wake trails away and there is the normal sky, the normal sea, casting about with its rambunctious and fractious waves. Not this calm monstrosity.
The swells (though that is such a puny word in the face of them) have shifted in their glacial movements. We are now high up on the mountainside of the wave and rising. It’s like the vertiginous feeling one gets when taking off in an airplane, yet curiously slow. A stretched-taffy confection of fear. Up and up. The peak of the mountainous wave oncoming. We’ve entered the haze and mist of this sunless sea and everything is obscured.
I watch and wait. There’s nothing left for me to do.
Below, Hank gibbers and chitters. The Ashwell thing must’ve let him go and gone to wherever things like him go in a place like this.
I wrap Seabees’s body in an old sailcloth and send her over into the deep. I don’t say anything other than “Sorry.” At some point I’ll have to dredge up the bits and bobs of Big Threve from the bilge and send him to follow her. I feel strangely devoid of sorrow or the pensiveness that comes with witnessing death. Whatever existential fear I might have has been made manifest here externally for me to view. We clear the mist and rise high in the eternal twilight of this…realm? Universe? I don’t really have the language for it.
And now I can see it.
Our destination.
A black wall. Towering up to infinity. I cannot fathom what it might signify other than the end. My own. Everyone’s. A cessation of perception. Consciousness.
My mind shorts and reinterprets what I’m seeing into something understandable. An obsidian island. It teems with movement, intricate and variform and seething. I’m reminded of the wood carvings all over the boat. Weird interpretations of the human mind processing the incomprehensible.
This is what they wanted to bring into our world, Royston and the German. This was what they wanted to set free through their fucking ritual.
I become aware of something here on the deck with me.
Bliss, it says. Everlasting, fervent bliss. That is what I interpret but that’s not really what it says. I’m not sure how sound waves travel here, in this place. Everything is muted and duller than home. Home—our reality—seems to me now like a ripe peach. A spoonful of sorbet. A fresh and cold drink of vodka, intoxicating.
Sensations of speech continue. The black tongue. My gods.
Ecstasy. Rapture. Constant and never-changing. I will bestow upon you this if you will just be my witness.
Near the main mast where the canvas hangs in tatters from the storm, a shadow grows. Jesus H. This guy just does not stop.
“I got some bad news for you, homeboy,” I say, finally deciding on what I will do. The wake is a tether, Seabees had said. And what do you do with tethers?
You cut them.
I don’t like it, but here we are.
I should’ve gotten in that boat with Loick, the fucking big galoot.
Here we go.
…
Back down below. There’s a relief in entering the salon and it’s the respite from viewing the horizon, the waves. The boiling obsidian island. The struggle of the mind to conjure images from the oblivion of sensation.
I’ll have to go back into the bilge. This time I come at it from here in the salon, and it’s much easier but still nasty as hell. The whiff of death has turned to a wall of fumes—big, meaty rot.
I don’t allow myself to retch. I slip into the black water of the bilge and after a few tries, find the stopcocks. Har-de-har-har. There is one main one and I turn it and there is movement in the water now. I would knock a hole in the side of the boat if I had something to get through six to eight inches of wood. Big Threve will stay here. In his myriad pieces.
I go back to the engine room and Hank explodes into chatter.
“Vines, Sam, Vines, Sam, Sam, Sam. You’re here. He’s gone. He’s gone. He let me go. He did. Cut me loose. Cut me loose, Sam. I’m so scared. I made a mess. It’s gross. Let me go to the head and wash off. It’s so gross. I made a mess—”
“You shit yourself, Hank,” I say. “But you’ll be clean soon enough.”
I move to Rollo. With my trusty wrench, I hammer at the water intake until the metal clamp makes a ping! sound and rockets across the room to ricochet off Rollo’s metal side. The intake tubing comes loose and water rushes in. It’s salty and cold and drenches both Hank and me immediately.
The taste of dead man and bilge lessens but doesn’t go away. Maybe it never will. Hank’s brown snail trails are gone and I pull him up and, grabbing a box cutter, free his legs.
“We’re gonna keep your hands like this,” I say. “As a precaution.”
I frog-march him up and out and onto the deck. I go back belowdecks and grab the remaining freshwater bottles from the galley. As an afterthought, I dip into my berth and grab a bag with this notebook, and into the library, where I rummage around and find the bottle of rum with the Remember label and bring it with me onto the deck. As an after-afterthought, I duck into Hank’s berth and grab something he’ll like. Moving to the galley, I turn on the hobs of the burners wide open—you know, like an action movie—and race back on deck.
The Blackwatch has reached the peak of the mountain. Water slopes away on all sides. It’s a vista of gigantic proportions. We have begun the downward slide toward the island. Or the wall. My mind has not made up its mind. But the Blackwatch has started taking on water. At first the boat seems to be sitting normal, and before you know it she’s wallowing in the peak of wave and logy as hell.
The isle is in clear view. It boils with…creatures? Entities? They coil and twist and seem to thrash and wrap around themselves. Their shapes writhe; some are titanic and massive and others minute. There is almost too much visual sensation to take in and I close my eyes for a moment of relief. Shutting it all out banks my fear, allows my anger at the whole situation to percolate. Abigail Ashwell fucked up their plan. I can at least honor her with a little fuckery myself. The wake is a tether. The wake is a path.
When we reach their shore, they’ll know where to go. Back to our world, following the wake.
But the Blackwatch will never reach the shore.
The mist of Ashwell coalesces around Hank, but as the boat fails, so does the Ashwell form. Figures. Evil sorcerers become hedge fund managers become malevolent spirits bound to possess their progeny. It’s a tale as old as time. Or something.
This is the end.
Almost.
…
Hank is a handful, getting his ungainly ass in the life raft. He’s disjointed and stuttering and blathering on. Every thought in his head is vocalized and I’ll spare you that, but it turns out he’s had the hots for me. Which is only natural. And he’s also very scared of me. Which is also very natural.
I’m a scary motherfucker.
It’s a self-inflating Crewsaver life raft and it flops over the side of the Blackwatch that sits so very low in the water and grows large in mere moments, the CO2 canisters hissing their compressed gas. Its hazard-orange color seems so unnatural and glaring in this bizarre and desaturated place. It looks like a large camping tent with a fat ass.
Hank cries from beneath the awning and I throw in the freshwater jugs and the wrench and the bottle of rum. I follow it with my bag and some blankets and clothes and foulies and PFDs for us both, and a sextant. The sextant is hope in physical form. Despair is Hank’s wee pistol sitting nicely in my pocket. I might need to use it. On him. On me, even. The jerricans of hand-pumped diesel are heavy, but I move through the Blackwatch dousing her intricately carved wooden panels and interior. I can feel the Ashwell entity shifting and turning around me, trying to coalesce. There’s something about me, maybe my anger, maybe my obstinance, but it cannot stop me and it cannot possess me. I am the witness, he said, and I’ll give my testimony, but that doesn’t mean I cannot act. Ashwell whispers and makes promises, that I’ll be drunk for a thousand years in bliss, that I can fuck gods, that I can become a god myself if only I finish the ritual started so long ago. I don’t listen. When the last drops of diesel drip from the jerrican onto the salon’s couch, I toss it aside. I turn on the stove’s propane burners. It’s a wet and gassy goodbye. I light a flare and place it on the top step of the companionway. I dash over to the life raft and climb in after HFH, every step crinkling with plastic.
With a great heave, we separate from the Blackwatch and drift away, so very slowly.
…
She doesn’t go up in some massive explosion—she’s too low in the water for it to have been visible anyway—but there comes a pooft! and black smoke begins pouring from the companionway and then flames begin licking at the vaporous sky and we slide down the slope of wave toward the island still as the Blackwatch tilts and the stern comes up and for an instant we can see the props streaming with water and then she rolls over once, showing her belly to the sky. The keening shriek that has peppered the air falls silent. The ritual of the Blackwatch is complete.
