He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He was an empty, soundless void inside. He was staring at that awful wallpaper and seeing things moving in it, leggy forms dragging themselves in and out of it. Transparent things you could only truly see if the light was angled properly and then only a suggestion of their morbid outlines.
As he scratched at his hand, he wondered if this was what those sailors felt after the thing in the box got Heslip. When he closed his eyes, he could see them: hollow-eyed, damaged, and silent as they got in the last remaining lifeboat and sailed away from the Addams, never to be seen again. That was the end of the story. And as he knew that he also knew that Arturo had lied to him. The Coast Guard reached the conclusion that there had been violence and possibly murder aboard the ship. The missing crew and the bloodstains they found reinforced that. The Coasties conducted a protracted investigation but never arrived at a conclusion. If there was something unnatural on the Addams, they never found it. But, then again, maybe they weren’t looking in the right place.
Charlie thought: You can’t look for it like you look for a lost dog or a runaway child or even a dangerous animal. You have to seek it with your mind, feel for it with your instincts. Once it knows you, once it trusts you, then it will show itself as it showed itself to Virginia who fed it table scraps and even foil-wrapped sweets, mothering it like a starving waif.
“But then they killed her,” he said aloud. “And all that did was piss it off.”
Charlie laughed at the very idea, thinking of Arturo and his plans to put a crew about this fucking mortuary. What a fool, what a prize fool that wop was.
He only stopped laughing when he realized he could no longer remember what Arturo looked like. Now wasn’t that funny?
He got out of bed.
This was the breaking point. Right now. He either manned up and spent the night or he packed up his stuff and went on his merry way with his tail tucked between his legs. And, of course, if he did that, Arturo would know it. Those guys in the van would call him right away. And Arturo would let it slip. Everyone would know that Charlie Petty had no balls, that he was afraid of spooks. He’d never live it down. Never.
Which, of course, brought him back to Arturo and his reasons.
He could not get past the idea that Arturo knew he was banging his wife and that this had little to do with a $50,000 debt and everything to do with breaking him, exposing Charlie Petty for the gutless heap he was beginning to suspect he indeed was. Arturo wanted to de-ball him and if he succeeded, Charlie’s reputation as a stand-up guy would be forever marred. A professional gambler existed on his nerves and when he lost them, he was no good to himself or anyone else.
Leaving this tomb does not make you weak or gutless. It makes you smart.
Maybe. But it didn’t really matter what Arturo thought or what he was trying to prove, if anything, what mattered was how Charlie viewed himself. If he began to think he had no guts, soon enough, he might begin to believe it and then his card playing days were all done with. That was what he risked by walking away from this now. He honestly believed that Arturo knew more than he was saying about the Yvonne Addams. He knew damn well there was something very bad about her. It was beyond mere sailor’s superstitions. Whatever haunted this goddamn ship was the real thing and he knew it. Maybe he was on the level about needing Charlie to spend the night there so he could a get crew aboard. And maybe he knew that Charlie had a thing with Pam… but what it came down to was that he was using this as an opportunity to break him.
And I won’t be fucking broken.
There. That felt better. Charlie felt like he had his guts back. And since he had his guts back, it was time to think rationally and accept the fact that he was in danger. He needed to leave… yet, even with all he’d been through, the idea of tucking his quivering tail between his legs was unacceptable.
Somehow, it was cowardly.
But wait, just wait—there was an obvious solution to all these questions or at least some of them. He had his cell. He had Pam’s number. He’d call her. Together, they could hash this out. Maybe Arturo had told her something about the boat and maybe she was suspicious that he knew about her lover. Together, they could figure it out.
Charlie sat down at the desk with his cell and gave her a ring.
He was so excited to hear another voice that his heart pounded and his hands shook. Pam usually picked up right away or she didn’t pick up at all. The phone seemed to ring and ring, echoing in his head so loudly it seemed like it was echoing down the corridors of the ship, bouncing off bulkheads and up ventilation shafts.
Her voicemail kicked in.
“Dammit,” he muttered.
He tried again. Nothing. Out of frustration, he tossed the phone. It bounced off the bed and landed on the floor. It beeped, then beeped again.
He picked it up, put it to his ear. This is what he heard:
“You’ve reached Charlie, but I’m out. You can look for me, but you can’t find me. I’m in a secret place that nobody knows. Check the corners and the cracks and the dust on the closet shelf. I’m not alone. There’s someone else with me, someone very old, very wise and very jealous. I can’t tell you who it is, only that they’ve been here a long time, hiding by day and creeping by night. I believe plans have been made for me. I believe my mind is gone to soft rot. I believe my soul is being eaten. I believe that my cage has no door. I believe in the bones inside me when nothing else is left—”
He was shaking with terror and rage. His voice, but he had never recorded anything like that. He dialed 911. This was enough. This was more than fucking enough.
Click. Bing. Connect. “You have reached Charlie, but I’m out. I’m sinking into the floor and the walls have teeth—”
He threw the phone.
The door.
If he did not get out that door right now, he never would. He felt sick to his stomach. Waves of nausea rolled through him, his brain seeming to swim in his skull with vertigo. His mouth was dry. His hands were shaking. He stood up and his legs would barely hold his weight.
Get to the door! C’mon! If you don’t get to it now and get out of here, you’ll be trapped in this fucking hulk forever! Move! You have to fucking move!
And he tried. Oh, how he tried. He made it maybe three steps—clumsy, faltering toddler steps—before he went down on his knees. Instinct was driving him. Pure, hot-blooded instinct because his conscious mind was incapable of directing his body to perform even the most basic of functions. He crawled towards the door and even simple locomotion like that seemed impossibly complex, his brain short-circuiting in his head.
He looked over at the rocking chair and Virginia was sitting in it… or at least, the entity he believed to be Virginia. She wore the gray, rotting, water-stained tarp they had wrapped her in before pitching her corpse overboard. Her face was a white globular oblong mass, swollen and distorted and disfigured as if it had been beaten to the point that the bones beneath it had all been broken. Her nose was twisted off to the side. One black gelid eye was pushed back into a tunnel-like socket, the other drawn down towards her cheekbone as if the orbit that held it had been shattered. She grinned with a mouth that was a lopsided hole. At her feet sat the box.
Charlie knew she had brought it for him.
It was a gift.
There was something inside for him.
He shook his head. No, he didn’t want what was in there even if it wanted him. The lid opened and two gnarled gray hands that looked very much like rat claws emerged. There were sharp hair-like bristles growing from the back of them.