It was enough to give a guy the shivers.
You nodded off and you had a dream. That’s all it was. Who can blame you in this fucking morgue? It’s understandable. Just relax. It don’t mean a thing.
Which would have sounded great at high noon with warm sunshine streaming down, but in the bowels of that graveyard ship, it was weak and empty because he knew he had not been sleeping. He had been wide awake.
He pulled off his beer and kept an eye on the cabin around him. Everything looked perfectly normal. Why did he have the worst feeling that something had changed? He sat there, trying to figure it out, and as he did so, the silence and boredom got the best of him and he felt his eyes growing heavy, very heavy.
Well, hell, maybe stretching out on that bed wouldn’t be so bad after all.
He crushed his cigarette out and sat on the edge of the bed, gun and flashlight close at hand. He felt like a coiled wire inside… tense, wrapped too tight. He couldn’t unwind and he wasn’t sure why. It just wasn’t like him; this was a fatal rhythm his body was unaccustomed to. It disturbed him, frightened him even.
He thought: It would be easy to go crazy here, to laugh yourself mad after you got done screaming. Some places just… inspire things like that. Like a bed inspires sleep or a drink inspires calm, this goddamn ship inspires other things.
Why did he keep thinking crap like that? Why couldn’t he just steady himself here? He looked around again, feeling something he could not put a name to. The room looked almost crooked. There was no other word for it. It was crooked like the floors were trying to angle up to meet the ceiling. Even the door was askew like a badly hung picture. He kept looking, everything seeming to tilt and twist and run. A black, oozing shadow moved along the wall and broke apart into strands that seemed to be horribly alive.
There were hundreds of them… no thousands. Like an uncounted number of fine, wriggling wireworms, none of them bigger around than a strand of hair. He should have been absolutely terrified, but he wasn’t. As the room had changed, so had he; as it had become crooked, so had his mind. He reached a hand out and felt the strands touch his skin. They were cool as they ran through his fingers, greasy and silky at the same time. They made his flesh tingle.
They felt… nice, yet a chill moved up his spine because they smelled like rotting seaweed. Trapped in his fugue, he watched them wind up his hand until it was a crawling dark mass of tendrils.
Then he screamed.
9
There were no shadows, no strands. He was holding out his hand into the empty air. Still, he could smell them and feel them wriggling against his palm. Shivering, he brushed his hand against his shirt, trying to wipe that tingling feeling free. In seconds, it had faded and he sat there, itching his finger.
Sweat streamed down his face, pooled under his eyes.
It’s not over and you know it’s not over. Don’t be so fucking naïve.
“Stop it,” he said, breathing very fast. “Just… stop it.”
He had to conquer this before it conquered him. He knew fear. He understood fear. He had faced it down again and again. This was no different. He just had to get a handle on it. He forced himself to regulate his breathing before he began to hyperventilate. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Each time he slowed his respiration until it returned to normal. He kept his eyes shut while he did it. He knew if he saw something, something that shouldn’t be there, that he would panic anew.
Finally, he opened his eyes.
This was so weird, so… uncanny—he hadn’t wanted to use that word because it was one they always used in ghost story books when he was a kid. Things were always uncanny or eerie or unexpected. If he was really being haunted, then bring on the spooks and specters, the flapping shrouds and clanking chains and moaning voices. That was physical, more or less, and he could have wrapped his brain around something like that. This was just too subtle, too… eerie, too personal, if that made any sense.
You are being haunted, Charlie, and you know it. Whatever is here is toying with you. You won’t see any of that B-movie, gothic stuff because that was just shit invented by Victorian writers who were trying to put a face on the supernatural, trying to channel their own fears into recognizable imagery for the masses, hence the graveyards and white sheets and chains and creaking doors and locked rooms and moaning voices at midnight. Their real fears would have made no sense on paper, anymore than yours would. Haunting, real haunting, is a private thing, an intimate thing staged in your own head.
Scratching absently at his finger, he nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered. “That’s it exactly.”
He lit a cigarette, staring at his finger which was red and hurting now. Hell was going on with it? Rat-bite fever or something? He drew off his cigarette, blowing out clouds of smoke that he automatically formed into smoke rings.
Though he tried to fight against it, a black dread settled in his belly. He could almost feel it putting out cold roots that ran up into his chest.
Here it comes again.
Whatever was going to happen, it was beginning now.
It was like cold fingers at the back of his neck again.
It was insane, perfectly insane, but he felt like he was being watched. Stared at by huge, seeking eyes. He felt oddly as if he were sitting up on a stage with a huge audience in attendance. Silently, they stared at him, waiting to see what he did next. Because when they knew what he was going to do, then… well, then they’d know what they were going to do. He tried to tell himself that what he was feeling just might be hidden cameras that Arturo had placed in the walls but he didn’t believe it.
It wasn’t a camera or even a series of them. Cameras were machines. They were neutral, benign. What was watching him was sentient, it was malignant. It had a million eyes.
“Stop it,” he said, scraping his finger against the frame of the bed frantically as if he wanted to peel the skin free.
The sound of his own voice was disconcerting as it echoed out into the empty room. It seemed to bounce around too much before it died like maybe it wasn’t his voice at all, but something else mocking him again. He licked his lips, refusing to give into this nonsense, and said, “What a scene.”
His voice bounced away. When it should have died out, it continued to echo, but shrill and tinny like an old recording.
Just a trick of the acoustics, that’s all it was. What else could it possibly be?
He chuckled in his throat, thinking about those people in horror movies that were always doing the stupidest things. Going down into empty cellars when they heard noises and poking around in attics when they heard footsteps. You’d see them do that shit and roll your eyes and say to yourself, man, I’d never do that! But would you? That’s what Charlie kept asking himself.
The room was getting to him, it was working at his nerves and electrifying his imagination. He was scared and he did not know why. If it had been some dumb horror movie, he would have been the first to tell himself to get out. But he didn’t. And he knew why he didn’t just like those people in those movies didn’t: they couldn’t let themselves. They couldn’t allow themselves to give in to imagination or instinct or any of that; they were reasoning, intelligent creatures and they refused to be frightened, refused to become superstitious natives, gourd-rattling peasants.