9 Tales Told in the Dark 21 Read online

  He dared not look back over his injured shoulder to see if the mass of abominations had made it out of the void and into his world. He didn’t know how big, how deep, that void was and how long it would take them to arrive. He simply swam back toward the courtyard.

  As he swam, he realized the most terrifying thing of all: he could no longer breathe underwater as he could when this dream (is this really a dream?) started. Mychael’s coordination left him as he began to get dizzy and light headed. He slumped as he reached the black arch. The world around him began to spin as the last of his oxygen left.

  Blackness again. Mychael passed out.

  Mychael emerged from his dream that was not a dream in the coffin confines of his sleeping berth. As his heart slowed, he realized that he was neither drowned nor swallowed by a horde of unholy creatures. The faded wood in front of his eyes was scarred with graffiti: initials, crude pictures of naked women in various sex acts, poems (bait ‘em up and drop ‘em down, just don’t let me fucking drown!!), and a bullseye with the inscription SLAM HEAD HERE!!

  At least I avoided doing THAT to myself, he thought with a ghost of a relieved grin.

  Mychael was dripping with sweat and tangled in a ball of sheets. He rolled out of bed and stood up with an audible popping of the knees as Rodney burst into the bunk. His sense of direction was still off-kilter, but at least he knew where he was and who was hulking over him.

  “Get up, bruddah!! Captain Jack said to have your ass out on deck five minutes ago. We’re getting’ ready to pull the Drop string!!” Rodney slapped him hard enough on the back to break a lesser man’s bones and hustled back out of the door, leaving it ajar.

  Even down in the bunks he could the crashing waves and the wind howling. The weather had turned.

  “Get your ass over to the table, Tits!!” Captain Jack barked over the loudspeaker. Mychael emerged on deck in his full gear to find the first pot being locked into place by the dogs. It was stuffed with crab, almost overflowing. Mychael stepped up to his spot at the table as Randy opened the door and the clicking, crawling creatures spilled onto the table. Billy the Kid on his left and Rex on his right frantically began to grab and measure them. They tossed the ones that were big enough into the holding tank. They tossed the little ones back over into the Bering.

  That was the next few hours for Mychael. He measured and evaluated and tossed the Bering Sea gold into its appropriate place. Finally, they came to the last pot of the Drop string. It seemed to take a longer time than the others getting to the surface did. It was as stuffed as the others were and looked the same as all the others in this string, but Mychael suddenly felt all of the hairs on the back on his neck stand up. His cock suddenly became rock hard, and his throat was excessively dry.

  There was no reason at all to respond this way to a pot, but every nerve in his body screamed danger.

  Everyone on deck was hollering, whistling, and cheering as they hauled the last (and possibly most stuffed) pot of the entire trip onto the launcher, locking the “dogs” in place. Almost immediately, the crew noticed something strange about these crab. They were an unusual green color that none of them had ever seen before

  (Same color as the stones in that courtyard or in that statue)

  In all of their combined years of crab fishing.

  It was a giant pot, stuffed full and nearly overflowing with the strange, green crab. At the beckon call of Rodney, Captain Jack came lumbering down from the wheelhouse to see these unusual monstrosities. The closer he got the bigger his eyes grew until they were all but bugging out of his skull.

  “Christ almighty, what in the bleedin’ fuck are those, those THINGS?!!” Captain Jack stammered, “Look at the legs, Rodney…wha’ fuck are those spines?! Are these things actually GREEN?!!”

  The greenish monstrosities were mottled with dark red splotches on their surface. Their legs were unusually short and stubby and covered with rock-hard spines like coral clusters. All of the men made sure they had their gloves before they started measuring and sorting the “things” over to the side of the table. The few remaining normal crab in the pot were quite dead. Some had legs missing. Others were simply dead, their beady eyes gone a hideous, blank white.

  Even with the roar of the sea and crashing waves, the silence was palpable on the deck of the Sweet Maria. These were veteran crab fishers for the most part, men who had seen the fury Mother Nature could produce. Still, they were silenced by the things that came up in the final pot. Over at the hydraulics, Joe maneuvered the pot towards the greenhorns who were waiting to guide it into the final spot in the stack. Mychael was at the top of the precarious stack for the final fit.

  As he tied his knots to secure it to the rest of the stack a gleam out of the corner of Mychael’s eye caught his attention. What appeared to be something made of gold, lay on top of the stack. The glinting object was long and pointy. Mychael reached across to grab it. His heart froze in his chest. His vision narrowed down to a tunnel of black with only the golden object at its center. He felt that he was about to faint.

  It was the crossdagger from his dream. Every aspect of it was exactly as he remembered it from his dream- the polished jet spines, the wicked business end, the emerald at the center. It seemed almost to pulse in his hand. It was warm and felt impossibly alive, not at all solid. Mychael felt his barely recovered sanity shudder a bit as he sought a way to justify the presence of it. No justification could be found.

  Gradually Mychael became aware of time reinstating itself. He heard, dimly at first, the sounds of Randy yelling his “name.”

  “Tits!! Hey, Tits!! Get your spacy ass down here, and help us blow these fireworks!! Time to go home, kid. You did okay!” he shouted through an honest-to-God grin. It was the first time Mychael had seen the prick smile, and it had a calming effect on him.

  “We hit the mother lode! It’s a one-turn fill up!” Rex exclaimed.

  “Fishing the Zhemchug paid off. We got lucky this time, Captain,” Rodney shouted into the Captain’s speaker.

  Mychael tucked the crossdagger away in the side pocket of his heavy raincoat and climbed down the stack. Rex waited at the bottom. His out of breath whisper barely reached Mychael’s ear. “What’d you blank out up there for?” he asked.

  “I just can’t believe it’s over. We’re going home.” Mychael lied through chattering teeth.

  “Fuckin’-A right” Rex exclaimed, “The worst is behind us!”

  The warmth in Mychael’s pocket seemed to shift in response.

  The Sweet Maria barreled back towards Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The ever-watchful Captain Jack had met his quota of 75,000 pounds of Opilio crab needed for this run. The crab sat stuffed in the ship’s holding tanks, and Captain Jack couldn’t wait to get back to port so he could get some good whiskey and one of Dutch Harbor’s best hookers.

  The one dead monstrosity that he kept (“for proof,” he had marveled to Rodney) sat on the windowsill beside the big chair. Captain Jack couldn’t keep his eyes off of the thing. It resembled a crab in its basic form, but all of the proportions were wrong: the legs too short, the eyestalks too fat, spines where there shouldn’t be any and smoothness where there were usually spines. And on top of all that, it had something that could only be a stinger!

  A fucking stinger on a mutant green crab, Captain Jack thought to himself, I have officially seen it all. Fucking Bering Sea.

  Captain Jack checked his gauges and charts. He made minor corrections for the horrific weather and dangerous trip through False Pass. He pushed on like the sleepless enigma that he was, blissfully unaware of what had been awakened by Mychael beneath the waves of the Bering Sea.

  The crossdagger sat pulsing in Mychael’s gear bag on the floor beside the bed in his hotel room. Mychael himself was celebrating with the rest of the crew at the local watering hole.

  “That storm…one of the worst I’ve seen in any season, bruddah. Nothin’ but black sky, cold stars and colder waves. Big fuckers, too.” Rodney said with a haunte
d look.

  Despite the thirty plus beers and double-digit number of shots, Mychael had personally seen the big Aleutian put into his system there was no slur to his words, no list to his gait. The man had to be superhuman, in Mychael’s estimation.

  “Well, shit…” Mychael leaned decidedly to starboard with one eye open. “I hope it’s the last one I see,” he slurred heavily.

  “Not a chance, little man” Rodney laughed, clapping Mychael hard enough on the back to nearly knock him off of his stool “You done pretty good out there. Captain Jack’ll ask you back. Good help is hard to find. Good help with BALLS? Impossible.”

  Mychael confessed, “That shit was beyond scary, big man. Scariest shit I’ve ever seen. I don’t think my balls are that big. How do you keep doing this year after year? I mean, you’ve been doing this since Clinton was in office!”

  Rodney calmly swallowed another shot of Gentleman Jack whiskey, slow and with deliberate care. He smiled. “Bruddah,” he said, “If you ain’t scared shitless at least half the time you out on the Bering Sea then you should be locked up. Fear and respect. You gotta respect her. She’ll eat you up and spit out your bones on some shore or other.”

  The image of the monstrosities from the last pot crossed his mind like a sour wind, and he shuddered.

  Mychael spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “And wha’ the fuck were those things? You ever seen any shit like that?”

  “Never” (without hesitation).

  “Not even close?” Mychael asked with a dazed, drunken stare.

  “Never. Mutations happen, but a whole damn pot full of mutations? I don’t wanna ever see that again.” The expression behind the stink of beer and whiskey was intense and stone-cold sober. The seriousness of it sobered Mychael up considerably.

  Mychael said “Well, sir, if I haven’t said it before I’ll say it now: Thank you. Thanks for all your help. I just pulled in, like, a year of pay at my old job in five weeks. Safe to say I’m hooked.”

  Rodney grinned a row of huge, impossibly white and totally false teeth.

  “Atta’ boy!”

  Mychael didn’t feel the wound in his shoulder until the following afternoon as he stumbled, hungover, to the motel bathroom to heed the urgent call of nature. The throbbing was low but constant. After emptying his bladder, Mychael checked himself in the grimy mirror. What he saw stopped him cold, sending a chill reverberating through his entire body.

  There was a suppurative, vaginal-looking tear on his right shoulder. It was two inches long and slightly open, like a mouth puckering for a good night kiss. The greenish edges were strangely moist. It was warm to the touch; it radiated warmth.

  “No fucking way” Mychael said in disbelief to the empty room.

  In the fever dream (it had to be a fever dream, didn’t it?), he had during the storm Mychael had cut his shoulder on the obscene statue as he was fleeing the courtyard. Now here he stood in a seedy motel room in Dutch Harbor, Alaska with both a wound and a physical object, the alien looking crossdagger, that were obtained in a dream of some nightmarish passage between worlds.

  This isn’t possible, he thought.

  Mychael felt the room spinning in a way that didn’t have anything to do with the ridiculous amount of alcohol he had consumed the night before. He sat down hard on the toilet and put his hands over his face. Eventually the room stopped spinning. The warm throbbing from his shoulder did not stop.

  Mychael brushed his teeth to knock some of the stale beer and whiskey off of his breath and set out in search of Rex.

  “Hey, buddy. It’s pretty fucking early to be messing with me after a night like last night. What’s up?” Rex mumbled through a fetid yawn.

  “Can I steal a minute of your time and tell you something crazy?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But the curtains stay closed. I ain’t ready for the daylight yet.” Rex said, picking his boxers out of his ass as he walked back to his bed. He gestured vaguely at the chair by the window as the door clicked automatically shut behind them.

  Mychael sighed deeply and said, “I really don’t know where to start, bro. I think I’m losing my shit. I really do.”

  Rex’s eyes opened wide and he smiled.

  “Welcome back to the mainland for the first time. It happens your first time back. A few weeks in the Bering is a lot like a tour in Vietnam- you spend all that time on edge, scared, freezing. It’s constant adrenaline. You’ll need a couple of days to get reacquainted with yourself and a normal schedule. No biggie, man.”

  Mychael stared with a glazed expression and rubbed his face. He sighed.

  “I get what you’re saying,” he said patiently, “but it’s not some fisherman’s form of PTSD. Something happened to me while we were over Zhemchug. It happened while I was sleeping.”

  Rex barked a harsh laugh that turned into a hacking cough as he fought the first drag of his cigarette. Once the coughing subsided, he glared at Mychael.

  “Don’t you go talking any crazy shit around here, good sir. Captain Jack likes you, and he’s gonna ask you back for the King season. You realize how good of a gig this is, don’t you?”

  “You know I do. I fought my ass off to get here” Mychael replied.

  Rex smiled warmly.

  “Good” he said. “My advice? Don’t go talking to anyone else about this, whatever it is. I hate to cut you off without hearing your story, but Captain Jack is really superstitious and he hears everything. Just let it go.”

  Mychael was ready to argue, but the look in Rex’s eyes stopped him.

  “You’re right, man. I just need to shake the jitters. Thanks for listening, brother.”

  “I’m just looking out for you, dude.”

  Mychael left Rex’s room perplexed and frustrated that the man who had quickly become his best friend aboard the Sweet Maria would shut him down without even hearing what he had to say. Throughout the day, it vexed him.

  In the evening, he set out in search of the big Aleutian, Rodney A’Tani.

  Rodney, however, found him. He was waiting in Mychael’s room when he returned from his dinner.

  “You really ought to lock that door when you go, bruddah. I could’ve been a serial killer. You’ve gotta be more careful.” The big Aleutian laughed his booming laugh but did not rise from his chair by the window.

  “I’ll take my chances” Mychael replied.

  Rodney pointed to the bed. “Take a load off. I need to talk to you. Captain Jack, he send me down to find you and corner you.”

  How does he know already? Mychael wondered, sitting.

  “If you don’t already know, Captain Jack wants you to stay on as a regular deckhand. You made it, kid. I think the old bastard really likes you.” He smiled as he finished with the air of someone bestowing a great favor.

  The words sank slowly into Mychael’s brain. He smiled.

  “I’m in? A full-blown deckhand just like you and Rex and Barry and Billy and Joe and Randy?! You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

  The big, booming laugh. “No, bruddah. You got it. You’re one of us!”

  “Holy shit!! Fifty grand in my pocket and a steady gig on the best boat in the fleet? Man, I could kiss your big, ugly ass” he said through a smile that felt permanent.

  “Do that shit and I’ll knock you out. No playin’. It ain’t that cold outside.”

  The two men shared a laugh, and Mychael poured them both a glass of the high dollar Uigeadail Scotch that was left over from last night. As he handed Rodney the glass his shoulder throbbed painfully. It felt like there was movement beneath the skin.

  Mychael began apprehensively. “Rodney, I need to tell you about something that happened to me while we were over Zhemchug. At least I think it did. I’m not sure. Or, at least, I wouldn’t be sure if I didn’t have the proof that something happened to me.”

  “You don’t sound sure of much.”

  “I know what I can see and touch and feel.” He pulled his hoodie over his head and yanked down the shoulder of the tee s
hirt underneath.

  Rodney flinched back and hissed through his teeth.

  “Oh my God. That’s fucking gross, bruddah. Really gross. How the hell did you do that?”

  Mychael reached into the nightstand drawer and pulled out the crossdagger.

  “It’s a crazy ass story. Just bear with me. I promise you I am NOT crazy.”

  Rodney’s eyes widened as Mychael told him the whole story, starting with his crazy dream and ending with his discovery of the crossdagger in the pot stacks and his festering wound.

  Rodney sat in silence for a few seconds after Mychael had finished. He stared at Mychael with a look that was equal parts pity, fear and anger for what seemed (to Mychael) like an eternity. Finally, he let out a long sigh.

  “You talk to anyone else about this?”

  “Shit, man. Yeah. I tried talking to Rex and he went cold on me….treated me like he was some pissed off Daddy trying to protect me. What gives?” The look in his eyes was pleading and edgy.

  “I’m gonna talk for a minute and I need you to listen. I need you to listen real good.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir, greenhorn, I work for a living” he said with a hint of his jovial grin, there and gone. Then he became serious again. “What I got to say is deadly serious, and you ain’t supposed to know about it. Rex ain’t even supposed to know about it, but Billy can’t keep his fucking trap shut.

  “Opilio season five years ago was the last time we went out over Zhemchug. Did you notice how none of the other boats in the fleet will go near that deep ass canyon? That’s because it has a black mark on it. My grandfather called it Ip liczba pojedyncza mnoga.”

  “What does it mean?” Mychael asked.

  “Home of the demon. Grandda would never name the demon. He said to do so gave it power. He also called the Zhemchug blm bez liczby mnogiej. Hell. Now, I’m not the spiritual man my Grandda was, but I know that place swallows people up. It begs for sacrifice. Five years ago, it got a sacrifice, and we haven’t been back since.