He pressed his hand into the gap and touched soft, lustrous hair that made the air catch in his throat. He had never felt anything so pleasing. The tactile sensation made him grow hard.
He reveled in it and when the teeth sank into his palm, he barely even cried out.
11
Charlie came to himself some time later crawling up the corridor back to the captain’s cabin through a weave of blackness that was so unbelievably dark that it seemed to hurt his eyes. He still had the flashlight, but it would not work. Gradually, he pulled himself to his feet and stood there, tottering from side to side. He didn’t even try to think because that seemed to hurt his head as much as the bite hurt his hand.
It was still throbbing and he could feel the crusted, dried blood over his fingers and down his wrist. The knowledge of this and the very real fear of the thing that had bitten him, mired him in terror. It was like being immersed in ice water.
With a cry, he ran up the companionway stairs and down the corridor above, around the bend, and to the captain’s door which was still standing wide open, the lantern burning in there, guiding him in.
The door was wet. It was glistening with beads of liquid that slowly ran down its face. Urine. Yes, she had marked her territory. She had sprayed piss against the door.
He locked it and cleaned up his bloody hand.
There were deep, ragged bite marks in his palm and on the top of his hand as if he had been gripped in the jaws of a wolf. He cleaned it up the best he could and tore strips of material from the bed sheet and wrapped it securely.
A love bite, just a love bite.
He sat on the bed, but he did not think.
He did not do anything but stare at the wall.
There was nothing else he could do.
But wait.
12
Later, he stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes and smoked.
He had no idea why he had gone after the box or why he had stuck his hand inside it. Whatever madness had been in his brain seemed to have vanished now like a bout of the flu.
She lured you and you went. That’s what happened.
She?
Yes, she. It was female. He knew that much. Lonely and desperate.
You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you’re determined to spend the night here, then stay in this room or go up on deck, but don’t wander the corridors.
Now that was sound advice, but he had the worst feeling that he would not be able to follow it because it was almost as if he were no longer making the decisions but someone or something else was making them for him. The box, he kept thinking. That damned box and what’s in it. His hand was swollen now, it throbbed with a dull ache. It was itchy like his finger. He knew he should walk out now and get some medical attention, but he could not seem to move.
Rest, first some rest.
He butted his cigarette, trying not to think of haunted houses filled with crawling, hungry things, but it seemed he could think of nothing else. Like maybe he wasn’t thinking it at all, but the images were being placed in his head. Leaning walls and bowed ceilings, plaster rot and rat droppings, empty corridors and worm-eaten four-poster beds threaded with cobwebs… insects slipping from crevices and cracks, spiders mending webs, flies buzzing and filling the air—
All right.
Enough.
This was all beginning to feel like a bad trip, like his brain was wrapped in discolored cellophane. His mind was not working the way it should and he was painfully aware of the fact… yet, he felt helpless to do anything about it. Maybe it was the air in here or something seeping up from the holds below. Who knew what kind of chemicals were down there, what toxic substances were leaking and fuming? Jesus, maybe he was being poisoned. Regardless, something surely wasn’t right here.
He stumbled over to the porthole and sucked in some warm, salty air.
His mind stabilized right away and he could think. But as it did, he found himself just beat, dead-tired. That was the ticket. Go to sleep and wake in the morning and it would all be over with.
“That’s what I’ll do,” he said, refusing to hear echoes or look at that weird wallpaper. “Enough of this baby-ass shit. I need sleep, that’s all.”
He pulled the coverlet aside and then the sheets, slid in between them. It felt cool in the cabin, almost chilly and dank. The sheets and blanket felt warm. Yes, nice, very nice. He realized then, after five minutes or so beneath them, that he kept telling himself this, making himself believe it. But the reality was that they did not feel right, nothing in the room felt right. There was something warped about the goddamned cabin, something unnatural. It did things to you, made you think things and feel things you had no right to think or feel. Just crazy, batty shit circling in your head. Things that made no sense whatsoever on the surface like the ranting of a madman, but underneath… well, yes, underneath they made all the sense in the world, a tilted and demented sort of sense possibly, but sense all the same.
C’mon, man, would you knock if off already? You’re really starting to scare me with this raving.
But, Charlie knew he was not raving, not really. It was the room that was raving. It was doing things to him, planting dark and crawling things in his head that were hatching like worms from moist, snotty clusters of eggs laid deep in his brain. He could almost feel them in there, burrowing and tunneling, chewing away at his sanity and resolve until nothing really made any sense and the less sense it made, why, the more sense it made. Did that sound right or was it just impossibly fucked-up and convoluted? He couldn’t really be sure. He was in the captain’s cabin, lying in the captain’s bed, breathing the captain’s air and looking at his wallpaper and his dust and his webs and feeling things moving around him or inside him and maybe both at the same time.
Charlie sat up, clutching his hands to his head.
What the hell was going on here?
His head didn’t feel right; nothing felt right. It was like everything was mixed up, running, blending together… his thoughts and consciousness and sanity and willpower and identity, all of them mixing inside of his head like one of those crazy hallucinogenic pictures you made at a county fair, dribbling paint onto a spinning card until all the colors were swirled together in some vibrant spiral. It wasn’t right, none of it was right. His head was pounding, sweat running down his face.
He became aware of a sound, a pained sobbing and he realized that it was his own voice. He was weeping openly and he couldn’t seem to stop. His head spun with vertigo and his guts flip-flopped with nausea. He wanted to throw up, to scream. He was seized by an inescapable sense of melancholy and loss and anxiety. His mind didn’t make sense and his senses were reeling with something he could not identify. It was like a thousand black birds were shitting in his mind at the same time, oh Jesus, the despair, the horror, the madness of it all…
You need to get out of here now.
Yes, certainly, only he couldn’t seem to remember why.
He knew the sheets were clean and so was the blanket, but they no longer felt clean. They felt dusty, dirty, moth-eaten. Not sheets but dead skin, dry and flaking, and he was lying beneath it, feeling its scales and mold. And the coverlet… it was not freshly laundered linen, it was something else. It was a cocoon. A warm and webby cocoon. It was like being wrapped up in a living placenta and he could feel the things that had spun it nearby, edging closer and closer.