The waves on the brown-black sea had suddenly disappeared, and the surface was as smooth as glass. The ship seemed to be speeding up, heading straight toward the black hole in the sky where the sun had disappeared. I desperately wanted to find my way below, back to where my wife waited, where there was light and warmth and food and music and where I would not feel so terribly lonely. We would eat, and dance late into the night on the stained-glass floor of the ballroom, and then we would go back to our cabin and make love.
I looked down, found that my green tuxedo had inexplicably disappeared, and I was naked. I couldn't wander around the ship naked, especially when I didn't know where to go, but my tuxedo was nowhere in sight. I would have to look for it, but I couldn't move. I was growing colder, freezing.
The glass surface of the water around me abruptly began to buckle, crack, and crinkle, becoming ever uglier, a crusted black and brown expanse that heaved and collapsed and heaved again, spewing a foul-smelling gas. I had to get away. I spun around, found that the entire section of the ship behind me had disappeared. I was in the middle of a vast, open sewer that stretched to the horizon in all directions. I turned back, found that the rest of the ship was gone from before and beneath me. I was all alone, ankle-deep in the poisonous, black-brown sludge, and slowly sinking. There was nothing to do, no place to swim to even if I could make my way through the thick, fetid ooze. The bubbling mud came up to my waist, then my chin. I threw my head back, struggling for one last gasp of air before I went under. And then, suddenly, it began all over again.
I was on a cruise ship. .
That's how it went, on and on, over and over, for what seemed like years. When I woke up, I felt so bad that I was almost willing to go back to the world of my recurring nightmare, which was terrifying, but pain-free. I felt about as strong as a sponge with a hangover and couldn't even lift my arms off the bed in which I was lying. There were needles stuck in both my arms and a tube up my nose. I felt the urge to gag, but couldn't even work up the strength to do that. Garth and Mary were at my bedside, and when I opened my eyes, my brother got up from his chair and leaned over me.
"Mongo?"
"Grrrrmph," I said, and promptly went back to sleep.
I was on a cruise ship. .
When I awoke again, the needles were out of my arms, and the tube gone from my nose, but I didn't feel any better. Garth, wearing different clothes, was still at my bedside. He was unshaven and looked like he had a three- or four-day growth of beard.
"You look like shit," I said in a croaking whisper. Just the act of speaking brought up a foul, green and black taste of grease, medicine, and smoke, but it felt so good to be off my nightmare cruise ship in the savage ocean that I kept talking anyway. "You smell too. Do you know how depressing it is to wake up in a sickbed to find a man who hasn't bothered to shave, with body odor and bags under his eyes, standing next to you?"
My little speech finished, I proceeded to have a coughing fit, which brought up more vile tastes, bile, and thick phlegm. Garth supported me with his arm, gently patted me on the back. When the spasm of coughing finally passed, he poured me a glass of water, steadied my head while I drank it down. I drank another, then lay back.
"Some of the doctors here thought you were going to die, Mongo," Garth said simply. "I told them they were wrong."
"What did they think I was going to die of?"
"Oh, the combined effects of a dozen or so maladies. Let's see if I can't recall the highlights of the doctors' diagnosis. How about double pneumonia aggravated by smoke inhalation, severe exposure, and brain inflammation? There were a few other minor items."
"Brain inflammation?"
"I told them you didn't have a brain to be inflamed, but they insisted. You walked out of here with a mild concussion, right?
Well, it's not so mild anymore. All that time you were running around doing whatever it was you thought you were doing, you could have had a stroke at any time. The swelling is down now, but if you look like Mr. America when you get out of here, it's because of all the steroids they've been pumping you full of. The way you've been bouncing around on your head, it's a wonder you've got any uncracked brain cells left. But you never put that organ to much use anyway, do you?"
"Tee-hee. You've got a great bedside manner, Garth. How long have I been. . away?"
"Not quite a week."
"Not quite a fucking week?"
"Take it easy, Mongo," Garth said quickly, putting his hand on my chest and pressing me back down on the bed as I tried to rise. "You're out of danger, but you're going to have to stay here another week at least, and probably longer. I was told not to talk to you for longer than fifteen minutes if you came around. The doctors said you'd probably want to go back to sleep by that time."
"Well, they're wrong again. I don't want to go back to sleep. I have nightmares. What the hell's been happening?"
Garth smiled wryly, chuckled, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling-a flamboyant display of reckless emotion from my taciturn brother. "I'll bring you your reviews in a day or two. You've made two out of three of the network broadcasts, and I can tell you that you're selling a lot of newspapers. That's the good news, if you're a newspaper publisher."
"Aha. Since I'm not a newspaper publisher, my surviving brain cells interpret that to mean there's plenty of bad news for me."
"We'll talk about it tomorrow or the next day. Really, Mongo, I don't think I-"
"Damn it, Garth, I've been sleeping for a week. I promise I'll rest. Just tell me what's been going on. I absolutely guarantee I'm going to get better, because I'm going to find Julian Jefferson and separate his head from his shoulders. That's twice the son-of-a-bitch tried to kill me."
Garth sighed, propped me up with some pillows behind my back, then sat down again in the chair next to my bed. "Too late for that. Jefferson already separated his head from his shoulders for you-at least most of it. He shot himself on the deck of his tanker, presumably with the gun he was using to try to kill you."
"Well, well," I said. I thought about it for a few moments, waiting for some sense of satisfaction that refused to come. "It doesn't make any difference. He was just a drunk doing what he was told, and the person who ordered him to rev up those engines was none other than Chick Carver, our friendly neighborhood sorcerer. Carver was on the tanker that night, because Jefferson called him to report that the local troublemaker was back. He also seriously trashed Tom's boat, then drove it himself down to the salt marshes."
"The captain told you that?"
"Yep."
"You got it on tape?"
"Gee, Garth, I don't. I plumb forgot to pick up my recording engineer before I went chasing after that ship."
"So you haven't got it on tape. Too bad."
"Anybody else aboard the tanker killed?"