Licking his lips, Gosling left his cabin.
He would not think anymore.
That was the way it would have to be from now on. No thinking, no theorizing, no wild guesses. Whatever was happening here would have to take care of itself. The wheels were spinning now and he’d just have to wait and see where they took him. Took all of them.
But, again, that damn voice, sharp and cutting in his head: You know very well what you’re avoiding here, Paul. You know very well. You’ve heard about things like this from sailors too drunk to know better. In books. On TV. You’ve heard about strange seas like this. Places where compasses spin and technologies die a hard death. Where nothing is right. Where everything is wrong.
Dead Sea.
“Dead Sea” not as in the Dead Sea itself, but as in a phenomena which has been reported since men began sailing the seas. Strange becalmed bodies of water where everything suddenly goes insane. Where men kill themselves rather than face the reality of what has happened to them. The Bermuda Triangle. The Devil’s Sea. The Sargasso Sea. Ship’s graveyards. Maritime dead zones few return from.
He shook his head. No. Absolutely not.
I will not accept this.
He started walking again. Moving blindly, not seeing anything. The gears of his brain were revolving madly now and it was all going so fast he could make no sense of any of it. And he didn’t want to. He didn’t plan on touring the ship, but this is what he did. He walked the decks from the stern to the bow, visited the boat decks and checked the equipment stowed on the spar deck. He checked hatch covers and derricks. He went up to the pilothouse, made sure Iverson was steering the ship with his hands and not his feet, staying true on course. Then down into the lounge and messrooms, crew’s hall and forward cargo holds. He walked aimlessly, lost in thought. He hadn’t planned on making the galley his ultimate destination, yet, somehow, he knew that’s exactly where he was going.
The night kitchen.
It was kept running even in the wee hours, for there was always someone on duty or out on watch that needed a meal or a hot cup of coffee. Gosling walked in there, found Bobby Smalls, the second cook and one of the new porters on duty. They nodded to him and Gosling nodded back. The porter was filling Tupperware containers with cold cuts, pickles, cheeses, and veggies for late-night sandwiches for the dog watch crew.
The chief steward was the head cook, but the second cook did all the baking and prep work. The porters handled clean-up and serving.
“Fog thinning any?” Smalls asked, as he kneaded a huge glob of dough with his fists.
“Not yet,” Gosling told him.
The porter arranged condiments on a serving platter and headed off to the crew’s mess with them.
Gosling walked around the kitchen. The stainless steel counters gleamed and the tiled floors smelled of pine cleaners. He examined the rows of shining stoves, peaked aft into the pantry, ran a hand along the cool steel door of the immense walk-in freezers. He rummaged through cupboards, scrutinized foodstuffs, stared into drawers of cutlery.
“You need something, First,” Smalls said, without looking away from his dough, “ya’ll let me know.”
Gosling smiled. “I don’t need anything, Bobby. Just restless.”
Smalls was in his fifties, thickset with a graying crewcut and shaggy sideburns that angled up to his cheeks. Almost muttonchops, but not quite. Gave him the look of a Victorian London cop, but his West Texas twang quickly erased that.
“Sure, we’re all restless here, we’re all thinking things,” Smalls said.
“You knew Stokes, didn’t you, Bobby?” Gosling said, trying to sound like he was just making conversation. “The kid who-”
“Sure, I knew him. He was a good boy. This was only his second run. But, yeah, I knew him.”
“He ever seem… well, funny to you?”
“Funny? You mean could he tell a good joke? Yes, sir, that kid had some mouth on him.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Gosling said.
Smalls nodded. He still had not looked up from his dough. “You mean, do I think he was crazy? Prone to nervous breakdowns? The heebie-jeebies? No, Mr. Gosling, I do not. He was as balanced as any other, I figure”
“Yeah, I figured that, too”
Smalls began pressing out his dough on the floured stainless steel table. “Funny that fog out there. Thick like that, shiny like that. Haven’t seen anything like it in years.” That gave Gosling pause. “You’ve seen this before?”
Smalls did look up now. His eyes were gray as puddles on concrete. “You telling me you’ve spent a lifetime sailing the Atlantic and you never came across anything funny out this way?”
Gosling wetted his lips. “Maybe once or twice. Minor things. Bad compass deviation… things like that. Atmospheric problems, you’d call them.”
Smalls didn’t look like he believed that. He went back to his dough, rolled it out with firm strokes of the rolling pin which was almost as big as a baseball bat. “I been on these waters going on thirty years now. Years ago, I was a deckhand on a bulk freighter. The Chester R. We were bringing a belly full of grain out to Bermuda from Charleston. About an hour out, we made radio with Hamilton. Same old, same old. Then we sailed into this fog… a lot like we got out there. It was a real mother, that fog. Thick, smelled funny, had a weird sort of shine to it.”
Gosling’s throat was dry. The comparison was pretty accurate so far. “What happened?”
“The sort of things that happen in these waters when some of that yellow fog swallows up your vessel — you know, our compass began to spin, we couldn’t find our heading. RDF went toes-up, LORAN was all tittywonkle,” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Yeah, we were spooked pretty bad. The lot of us. Radio was shit, nothing but dead air on VHF and side-band. Radar kept showing us things that were there, then gone. This was the days before GPS, but I don’t think it would have mattered. You think so?”
Gosling said he thought probably not. “How long were you in it?”
Smalls shrugged. “About an hour, according to the chrono. We were sailing blind all that time. We missed Bermuda even though we hadn’t changed our heading. A few degrees could have made us miss it, you know, could have put us on this side of the Azores we kept it up. But that’s not where we ended up. When the fog died out, we weren’t anywhere near Bermuda and we sure as hell weren’t out in the middle of the Atlantic steaming across the pond like you might think. No sir, we were due north of the Leeward Islands down in the Caribbean.”
Gosling said, “You telling me you were running east and ended up a thousand miles south of your last position? And within an hour?”
“That’s what happened, all right.” Smalls began cutting biscuits out of the dough with an aluminum cutter. “Hard to believe, ain’t it? Well, ya’ll imagine our poor captain trying to explain a navigational tanglefuck like that to the ship’s owners. Wasn’t pretty. Guess what I’m saying here, First, is that you start playing out in the Sargasso like we are and the stars are right, conditions favorable for funny business, and you run into what we’re running into. Folks these days, they call it the Bermuda Triangle and what not. But I’m old school. Sargasso to me. The Sargasso Sea. That triangle they bullshit about just touches the southern edge of the Sargasso, but most of those ships and planes that have trouble are really in the Sargasso. I should know, on account I was on one of them.”