9 Tales Told in the Dark 21 Read online

  Mychael’s first day as the new greenhorn of the Sweet Maria was an endurance test on both his body and his psyche. Before reaching the Zhemchug Canyon to set the first string of pots he had already done his part in stacking 180 pots, stocking countless pounds of bait fish, helping Randy ensure the galley was well stocked, and generally being everyone’s bitch.

  “So, greenhorn means being literally EVERYONE’S bitch. That about right, Rex?” Mychael asked through a plume of blue-gray smoke as they lay, exhausted, in the piles of gear under the overhang of the deck.

  “Bro, you’re everyone’s bitch so much that you’re even MY bitch…and I’m still everyone’s bitch. Get used to it. Just keep your head down and bust your ass. And, dude, don’t bitch about sleep whatever you do. Trust me.” Rex grinned as he rambled on, “Bitchin’ about sleep is the number one thing that will get you pigeonholed as a punk on this boat. Look, no one gets sleep around here. Captain Jack doesn’t sleep, so he thinks you shouldn’t either. Besides, the more you work the more you make. And we ain’t here for health or fun, right?”

  Another blue-gray plume. Mychael said, “Fuck that. I’m here for the money and the glory. I’ve got no beef with being the bitch. I just wanted to know the extent of my bitchery.”

  “Glory?! Man, you been watching too much reality TV. Ain’t no glory here. Ain’t no glamour. The work itself is the ninth circle of Hell. The only payoff is the fat ass paycheck at the end. Period…end of story, sir.”

  “Maybe so,” Mychael muttered, “But I’ve got something to prove. I wanna be able to say I do the most dangerous job in the world. And I want a fat ass paycheck!”

  Rex smiled and shook his head. He said, “Bro, you’re going to find out about dangerous. Wait ‘til the first big storm. Wait until you see thirty-foot waves coming at the starboard side and your ass is out in the open. Wait until you see the sky go black in a matter of sixty seconds. The shitty part? You’ll still be working through it. TV doesn’t do justice to what this job really is.”

  “And what is it?” he asked nervously.

  “Punishment, bro. Braving Hell to see if you can grab the treasure at the end and outrun your sins. Just wait.” Rex exhaled a cloud, his cigarette dangling limply from his cracked lips. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. The silence stretched out for a few more minutes as the two young men chain-smoked Marlboros on the piles of gear yet to be stowed properly away.

  Enjoy it while you can, Mychael thought, I’m sure Randy will be here to chew our asses soon.

  How right he was.

  The first week saw seas that, while cold, were deadly calm by Bering Sea standards. Captain Jack had them set out the first string over the edge of what was known as Zhemchug Canyon, a place where the more shallow waters of the Bering dropped over a mile and half into the Aleutian Basin. Captain Jack simply referred to it as “the Drop.”

  The crew rigged up pot after pot with copious amounts of bait and the proper lines and floats as Captain Jack deftly steered the Sweet Maria across the lip of The Drop with skill and ease of a true master. He seemed, for a time, to be truly happy up in his wheelhouse. It resembled no so much a wheelhouse as a locomotive with its consistent clouds puffing out of the open window. Occasionally there was a flash of white as he smiled behind the glass. More often, there were colorful curses bellowing from the loudspeaker over the bait box as he belittled his new greenhorns.

  “Faster, tits!! Know why I call you tits, greenies? ‘Cause you’re both as useless as tits on a fish!!”

  “My granny ties better knots than that and the bitch is DEAD!!”

  “Smoke later….bait now, cullies!!”

  “Next time he slips up, Rodney, go upside his head!!”

  That week was a blur, a litany of curses, insults, threats, and sometimes-indecipherable gibberish that Rodney called “Jackspeak.” “Mikey” Rodney shouted, “You’ve got him spitting Jackspeak. Tread careful, bruddah!!”

  The plan was to lay out three test strings across The Drop and then let it soak for the next 48 hours. Billy told the greenhorns that after those next 48 hours they would probably get 3-4 hours of sleep if they were lucky. He wasn’t lying. They continued to lay out strings in a triangular pattern: 25 on the edge of The Drop, 25 out into the heart of Zhemchug Canyon, then a long 35 back to the edge. After that, the crew got their 3 or 4 hours of sleep in shifts and a quick meal before re-running the path along the edge to pull the soakers.

  It was a long turn of over 24 straight hours. Mychael felt the cold in places he didn’t know he could feel cold so deeply. The blisters on his gloved hands formed, burst, and then froze over. His muscles ached in new and hideous ways.

  Mychael had never been so happy or fulfilled.

  Mychael’s turn in the rack came halfway through the strings, as they were over the heart of Zhemchug. Captain Jack screamed over the loudspeaker to “send that useless greenhorn fuck” to bed for a few hours. Apparently, Captain Jack didn’t feel Mychael was any benefit to the crew at the time.

  Mychael’s head wasn’t even on the lumpy pillow before he was asleep.

  Seemingly, without pause after falling asleep Mychael was dreaming.

  Mychael was inside the crab pot. He scrambled and clawed at the crusty wire sides of his dream-cage, screaming and yelling. Around him, the crew hustled about their business, oblivious to his pleas. No one paid him any mind. No one except Captain Jack.

  “You’re gonna go down, Mikey!!” his voice boomed over the loudspeaker. “You’re gonna go down and find it. You are going to be the architect, the one who brings It back into the sun. It’s supposed to be you….it was always supposed to be you.” Captain Jack grinned from behind the wheelhouse window revealing filthy black teeth. Barnacles clung to his cheeks and chin. Things crawled in his kelp-strewn beard. His eyes glowed with an eldritch, green glow.

  Captain Jack returned to steering and puffing out constant clouds of hellish green smoke. The oblivious crew hoisted the pot (and Mychael) into the launcher. He screamed himself hoarse at the prospect of his watery death. The world shifted on its axis. The sky flipped and the black water briefly became sky. Then the cold stabbed Mychael like a million tiny knives. The world around him became pitch. His senses, dream or not, shut down and Mychael curled into a ball as the first real panic set in. He felt himself beginning to drown as he plummeted hard and fast to the bottom of The Drop.

  After an interminable time of icy blackness and panicked nausea, Mychael realized two things: there was a hint of light in the deep sea around him….and he wasn’t drowning. He had begun to breathe normally without even realizing that he was doing it. It was a sensation, he thought, that fish must feel on a regular basis.

  The light grew steadily stronger as Mychael raced toward the bottom of the Bering Sea.

  At first, the light illuminated a formless world of bubbles and small, floating creatures. Gradually, as his vision sharpened, Mychael became aware of things around him that could only be described as architecture. Columns and blurry statues swam out of the gloom casting shifty underwater shadows. All was coated in a virulent looking green plant life.

  There were no fish in sight. There was no sign of any living creature at all.

  Further he sank. The columns, statues, and squat buildings began to get larger. It all hurt his eyes on an instinctual level to look for too long. The geometry of it all just didn’t seem right; straight lines merged with curves and waves. Unknown hieroglyphs cavorted under the pale green fuzz, seeming to dance about and taunt him. Here and there were cavernous square openings in recessed walls. Sulfuric red steam issued forth from these new holes. Shifting movements occurred deep within these murky lairs.

  Mychael had a sense of approaching bottom. The columns thickened. The carvings grew more intricate and perverse. With a rush of displaced air, Mychael passed below and dangerously close to the roof of an unknown structure directly in front of his falling pot. Faces in the rapidly passing hieroglyphs resembled him; a variety of
Mychaels passed by. Impossibly old, childishly young, bearded and hardened….he saw his own countenance on a variety of crudely rendered faces. Between these faces were mingled bizarre fish creatures and tentacled monstrosities. They passed too quickly to make out just what these scenes were depicting.

  The pot thudded to a bone-jarring halt, tossing Mychael painfully into the roof and back down again. He lay on the rocky bottom and wondered how a dream could hurt so much. The impact had apparently caused the pot’s door to come unhinged. It lay twisted a few feet away. Mychael crawled out into the swirling cloud of settling sea floor sediment.

  The pot had come to rest in (as hard as this was for Mychael to believe) an ancient courtyard on the floor of the Bering Sea. The green fuzz that coated everything on the way down was almost nonexistent here in the courtyard. The stones that everything seemed to be fashioned from were a noxious grey color, shot through with flecks of red and green. Surrounding Mychael was an encircling wall of strange angles- graceful curves flowing into hard angles and wavy undulations. The man-high stones were porous and scratchy. Pale red bubbles issued from many of the pores.

  On the far side of the courtyard was a gigantic black stone archway. It towered over Mychael. He could barely make out the top of the arch where the murky water obscured everything. The stones were beyond obsidian, a black so total they seemed to swallow the scant light.

  The courtyard was full of statues, many of which were holding basins and pitchers. Some of the creatures holding the pitchers were humanoid with tentacular appendages. Some were octopoid with human appendages. All of the basins had one thing in common: although underwater, they were full of a pearlescent pink liquid of a much thicker viscosity than the sea around them.

  Just how the fuck is that possible? What kind of fucked up dream am I having?

  And on the heels of that: I really have been reading too much Lovecraft.

  Mychael swam to the nearest statue for a closer look at the “liquid.” The goo was in constant motion, swirls, and eddies forming and reforming in its murky depths. It was a vaginal pink with swirls that were sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes that nauseating shade of grey that all of the architecture down here was. Mychael experienced, for the first time, a sensation he had only read about: being drawn to something while utterly repulsed by it at the same time. He wanted so badly to dip his hand into its swirly depths, yet he knew somehow that there would be no turning back if he did.

  Just what he would be turning back from he couldn’t begin to guess. The sense of malice and (Mychael admitted to himself) pure, unadulterated evil was palpable all around him. The stones seemed to pulse and breathe like the edges of your vision during an intense LSD trip. Those tiny bubbles of pale red were all around him now. He could hear a watery, piping music that seemed to be coming from inside the black archway. He began to sway, unaware he was doing so. Every fiber of his being screamed danger in a hammering pulse to his brain.

  And yet. And yet his hands continued to move inexorably toward the pink, viscous goo. It had a feeling that Mychael could only describe as coming home. It felt right, destined, preordained. His balls tingled with a feeling like the world’s best hummer. His erection was enormous, the stuff of legend. Every nerve ending in his body felt shockingly alive. He knew the sense of danger was going to lose this tug of war. He plunged his hands into the goo.

  At first, the sensory overload was far more than Mychael could bear. Asleep in his bunk (and unseen by anyone else) he suffered a mini-stroke at the same moment he ejaculated a ridiculous amount of hot semen into his sweat soaked boxer shorts. He whimpered and twitched as the right side of his face slackened and the right side of his body locked up in panicky tightness. After ten seconds, his muscles released and his face loosened into a seething grin. His eyes fluttered rapidly behind his closed lids. He muttered barely audible curses in ancient tongues.

  Back in the deep (where Mychael really was), the light grew to a near daylight quality when Mychael plunged his hands into the basin. The piping flutes and beating drums reached a fever pitch. His hands burned as if dipped in boiling oil. He reflexively tried to remove them.

  They may as well have been dipped in dry cement. The stuff bubbled as the colors contained within swirled faster. The skin of Mychael’s hands burned with a living fire. He screamed through the rictus grin that was plastered onto his face.

  Just when he thought it couldn’t possibly hurt any worse, the pain dissipated. The glow and the swirls from inside the basin slowed and subsided to their previous dreamy slowness and hue. The light around him on the sea floor paled back to scant visibility.

  That was when the eldritch green light began to pour out of the giant black archway like a slow moving fog. The piping and the drums began again, this time clearly beating a rhythm of invitation.

  Can I refuse? he thought, even as his heavy feet began to march toward the black archway and its nauseating green pulse of light. Mychael swayed and pulsed in time with the piping flute. He should have been swimming toward the light, but Mychael found that he could walk as if the icy Bering Sea around him had become open air. The black arch loomed larger and larger, almost lost from view in its enormity.

  The sound of the unholy music and the pulse of the green glow intensified as Mychael passed under the arch and into his destiny. That’s what this was, he knew. It was his destiny. It was choosing a time when his soul, his essence, could travel unimpeded from sleep to the depths of Zhemchug….but it was very much HIS destiny. He was called, and answering was not optional. What his body (and his rational mind) wanted was not important to whatever was calling him.

  Mychael passed through the cyclopean archway. The space widened into a tunnel with walls of purest black, run through with that same metallic green. The pale, red bubbles were now everywhere. In the distance Mychael saw what he thought were jellyfish. As he came upon the first one, he found them to be triangular and nearly translucent except for a brownish-green curling at the edges of their gelatinous form. Willowy green tentacles, fat with suckers, billowed beneath them in a riotous mass. They glided away from Mychael, eluding his touch.

  The floor sloped almost imperceptibly down into the Earth itself, gradually at first and then with increasing angle. The black walls had begun their LSD trip again (a thing Mychael knew something about). The tendrilly moss he had seen higher up on the structure during his crab pot plunge to the bottom clung to the walls in greater frequency as he descended. The drums beat louder; the piping became frantic and orgasmic. The bastard jellyfish danced around him in a secret cadence.

  And then he saw it.

  The statue sat atop a dais in the middle of the tunnel, marking the edge of a drop into blackness. In the void beyond was the pure ebony space shaped like a reptilian eye. Stars glittered in a jumbled profusion of colors: white, blue, red, orange, green. Far off in the void hellish suns burned. A large gas cloud belched a variety of hues from its malevolent eye-shape. It seemed to stare at Mychael with avarice.

  How the fuck can that be? Space….in the sea??!! What have I found?

  Mychael tore his gaze away from the infinity of the void and that horrible, greedy eye. The statue crouched and leered before the lip of the drop. It was approximately ten feet tall and made of a pale green kind of soapstone. Soft and porous, it seemed almost to breathe in its readiness to uncoil from its crouch. It had leathery wings and an elongated, spiny head. A mass of tentacles sprouted from where its mouth should have been. Its furnace eyes were fashioned from some beautiful red stones that glowed with an inner light that spoke of beauty and disfigurement, pleasure and pain.

  It was humanoid in its figure, bloated and muscular at the same time. Like the non-Euclidian architecture outside in the courtyard its body was both sleek and round, sinewy and bulbous. The posture of barely restrained attack intimidated Mychael, but the object in its hands eschewed all fear.

  The statue’s long-fingered hands (look at those claws!!) held a cross-like object made of s
olid gold! The “cross” was thorny like a rose branch, wavy and not at all straight or symmetrical. Longer at the bottom, it could have been a cross or a dagger. It was certainly sharp and pointed enough to do serious damage. Upon closer inspection, Mychael realized each thorn was a jewel, a kind of jet obsidian polished to a high luster. In the center of the “cross” was an emerald bigger than any Mychael had ever seen. It was exquisitely worked. Every facet gleamed like the birth of a new sun.

  While Mychael stood enthralled by the beast and the beauty that crouched before him a sound was building under the din of the pan flutes. The sound was a shriek that was almost a mewling, a birthing noise of some abomination from a place beyond our space. It built in volume from out in the void. Once it achieved a volume higher than the steady fluting and drumming Mychael’s reverie was broken. He stepped back around the statue and peered over into the void.

  What he saw there destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.

  The eye had become a mouth, and it had opened. From this mouth poured a flood of hundreds, maybe thousands, of things that made the statue look like a house pet by comparison. Some were protoplasmic blobs, masses with dozens of eyes, mouths, and tentacles in random assortment. Some were skeletal wraiths with blank, smooth faces. Some were closely related to fish spawned in Hell’s own hatchery. Octopoid, gelatinous, rotting, and fetid, vapidly blank and hideously expressive – they came in a huddled mass of gibbering and snarling mouths. They crawled over each other and attacked each other. They babbled in strange languages no human had ever heard and ran their forked tongues across each other’s mouth-holes. Barbed, prehensile penises plunged into sharp, teeth-ringed vaginas. It was orgy of abominations, a roiling ball of things that should not be.

  Mychael’s paralysis finally broke. He turned to flee. As he did so, he slammed into the statue, simultaneously slicing open his shoulder and knocking the crossdagger loose from its hands. It drifted to the sooty stone floor with a clang. Blood spurted from his slashed shoulder as he snatched up the crossdagger and ran/swam back up the tunnel.