Looking at it, thinking of what was wrapped up in his pocket, he felt his mouth go very dry. “You suppose… you suppose Stokes sliced himself open with it?” he asked, though he did not believe it for a moment. Not now and maybe not before.
“Dunno,” Marx said. “Could be. Could be how it happened.”
Marx was a big fellow with a head bald as a mountaintop and a thick gray beard, ZZ Top style, that hung down to his chest. There was a Harley tattoo on his left forearm and an old Molly Hatchet insignia on his right. He looked very much like a biker and very little like a freighter engineer. But he was the Chief and he was the best.
Hupp, the first assistant engineer, was the only other person in the Engine Control Room. Years ago, there might have been a dozen men, but these days with advanced computer controls and desktop interfaces, it didn’t take many men to man the station. The room was pretty much wall to wall video screens and computer terminals, monitors featuring displays of various systems. Most engine room functions could be manipulated by merely selecting the diagram of the system via touch screen and highlighting it, bringing up its menu.
Morse came through the door. He nodded to Gosling and Marx, went over to Hupp at his console. “You went in that tank with Stokes and the other man. What happened?”
Hupp went through it all for what seemed the fiftieth time in the past few hours. “I cleaned some weeds out of the intake… Stokes, he was behind me, he said there was something in the water. Fish, I figured. We’re always sucking fish through the screens, Sir, nothing new there. Well, we must have pulled in a lot of weeds because the mud box was full of them…”
Gosling just listened, hearing it now for the second or third time himself. The ballast intake was fitted with a grid to filter out large objects and a finer screen in the mudbox for the removal of smaller objects.
“… I replaced the screen and… well, Stokes said something brushed his leg. Something like that. I didn’t think much of it. Well, he took out his knife and slashed at something in the water… I don’t know what… and I told him to quit fooling around and lend a hand. We were replacing the second screen. You know how they rot away. Anyway, Stokes cut himself with his goddamn knife and… well, couldn’t have been more than a few moments later he started screaming and thrashing. He yanked off his coat and threw it at us, then he stumbled into the water, thrashing around. Before we could get to him, he was up and out of there. That’s all I know.”
Morse just nodded. He turned to Gosling and Marx. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a look in that tank.”
Down to the pump deck they went, pausing before the service hatch to the starboard aft ballast tank. There was a strong smell of stagnation and dank saltwater about it. The hatch was secured with a couple dozen bolts. Marx put a ratchet on them and they creaked at first, his muscles bulging, then they came loose easily. It hadn’t been that easy when Hupp had removed it. The bolts had been rusted in place since the last time the ship was serviced and they had to use an air ratchet to get them loose.
When Marx was down to the last few bolts, Morse said, “I’m thinking about what Hupp said. About how Stokes had cut himself. Maybe he got blood in the water and maybe it attracted something.”
It was a leap, but considering what had happened and what was happening, not much of one. Gosling thought it over, his brain churning up nasty images of creatures that could smell blood in the water: sharks, piranhas, other things he didn’t want to think about.
Marx loosened the last two bolts and Gosling helped him lift the hatch free. The stench of stagnation and cloying wetness was stronger now, wafting up from the depths of the ballast tank. It reminded Gosling of tidal pools and stranded marine life. Morse and he donned the rubber chest waders Marx had set out for them, yellow hardhats with highpower halogen lights strapped to them.
“You hear any funny business down there, Chief,” Morse said. “Feel free to send in the Marines.”
Marx offered him a sly grin and handed both men gaffs, being it was the only thing resembling a weapon that engineering could come up with on such short notice. They were basically meat hooks screwed onto the ends of broom handles.
Without further ado, Morse clicked on his light and slid through the manway, his rubber boots finding an uneasy purchase on the slimy iron rungs leading down. One step at a time he descended into the murk and Gosling was right behind him. The ballast tank was huge, about the size of a basketball court. At the bottom of the service ladder, Morse’s boots slipped into the brown, stinking water. It came up past his hips.
Gosling eased into it, feeling the dank chill of it wafting around him.
“How’s the water down there?” Marx called from above.
“Nice,” Morse called up to him. “Strip down to your skivvies and take a dip with us.” Marx chuckled from the hatch above, his voice echoing around with an eerie resonance.
No, there was nothing funny about the sound of that laughter and standing in the sluicing brown water, it was even worse. Gosling hadn’t been down in a ballast tank in years. Not since he was a deckhand and had to clean them out. Even when they were drained, there was still a foot of oozing sediment that had to be hosed out. And right then, Gosling could feel the muck with each step he took. Every movement made was amplified by the cavernous tank, coming back at them with volume. The darkness was thick down there, a mist wafting off that filthy water. A few dead fish and bits of weed floated on the oily surface.
They played their helmet lights around and there was nothing to see but water and silt built up on the walls.
The stench was stronger now, almost overpowering. Like decay and brackish swamps, putrescent mud. Water was dripping. The air close and clammy.
They started off and Gosling could feel the breath in his lungs, the papery rustle of his heart. He’d never been prone to claustrophobia… but he was feeling it today. The tank was like some immense, submerged casket, the air thin and moist, all that brown, smelling water like some heady organic soup drained from a primordial, subterranean sea.
Morse led them forward, the beams of their headlamps bobbing and jumping, creating vast shadows and murky forms that rose from the mildewed water.
“See anything?” Morse asked and his voice sounded dry, airless.
“Not a damn thing,” Gosling said, panning his light looking for… he did not know what he was looking for. But maybe something that could smell blood in the water, something with teeth.
Morse stopped. “You hear something?” he said.
Gosling just shook his head, sucking that charnel mist into his lungs. He listened and heard only the drip of water from some intake pipe. He scanned his light back and forth. Grotesque, huge shadows crawled around them. Clots of weeds drifted past, a stray cigarette butt.
“What did you hear?”
Morse just shrugged, looked like he wasn’t going to say anything at all and then, almost in a whisper, he said, “Funny… sound. A sliding, swishing sound… but just for a second there. Behind us maybe.”
They put their lights back there and there was nothing but a few stray fish floating belly up. Morse motioned with his gaff and they moved forward, stepping carefully now. The water had been calm before, but now there were ripples and secret currents. Gosling was wound-up tight and he figured Morse was about the same.
“There,” Gosling said. “What the hell is that?”
It was something floating in the water, just beneath the surface. It could have been a large patch of weeds or maybe a scum of filth, but neither man thought so. They stood there looking at it, then at each other, then slowly — very slowly — they moved toward it. Whatever it was, it began to move and bob in the wake they created. Morse reached out with his gaff, his hands so tight on the handle that Gosling could hear his knuckles popping. In the splash of light from the first mate’s helmet, Morse’s face was sallow and lined with shadow. He looked confused, frightened maybe. There was no reason for it, not yet, but it was in both of them, chewing away at something vital and important within them.