And the monster was revealed.
“Oh, my God!”
He shook the boathook and she jumped awake. “Robin! Get below! Get Weary and Hood. Now!”
Jesus! How could he not have known? How could he not even have suspected? The wind, the mist, the spume, everything, not blown but sucked. Sucked into the roaring, thunderous gyre of it. Sucked to whatever eternity awaited at the other end of it.
Robin dropped the boathook on the cockpit sole and started to run below — when she caught her first glimpse of its broad white shoulder whipping into its flat black cloud-base head. With wondering eyes she traced the sinuous, sinister curve of it down, down inexorably to the broad foot, wreathed in madly dancing spray. And suddenly she became aware of just how solid the air felt streaming so rapidly past her; and how swiftly and forcefully it was taking Katapult along with it.
“Dear God!” she breathed and hit the cabin door.
It was dark and hot, quiet and still — a numbing contrast to the increasing bedlam above. Once through the door she had to force herself to further motion. An outrageous idea came that she could just curl up down here with the men she had come to fetch, pull the blankets safely over her head, and hide…
She hit the light switch.
Both men had collapsed on the long bench-seats on either side of the central table without even bothering to open out the bunks. Neither one stirred at the sudden brightness; they were insulated by exhaustion from light as well as from the ungainly motion of the yacht and the growing din of the wind. Weary was closest. Without further thought, she ran across to him on suddenly unsteady feet.
He was lying, fully dressed, on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, laid out like a dead man. Two strides took her up the length of him and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wake up!” she called. His headband was crushed into his long right hand like a child’s security blanket. His curly hair fell forward in a cowlick into his restless, sleeping eyes. “Come on!” she insisted, shaking him with all her might. “Wake up, damn it!”
And his eyes flew open.
She had never seen anything like it in her life. The eyes opened, deep blue and every bit as fathomless as the waterspout outside, sucking at something inside her with the same relentless intensity.
His hands were on her shoulders just as hers were on his, shaking her as she was shaking him. And he was screaming at her as well, screaming as his body shot upright. She had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes. “Who am I?” yelled Weary at her.
There was no knowledge in those eyes, no recognition. Nothing. They were the eyes of a terrified child, one who does not even know why it feels fear. “Who am I?” Weary screamed. And Robin was stunned, rendered completely helpless by the shock of it.
Weary was sitting completely upright now, shaking his head from side to side. The hair flew out of his eyes to show his forehead, high, white, pinched in impossibly at the temples.
No. Not pinched in. Crushed in.
She was unable to tear herself away from his demented gaze. The last thing she saw before Hood hit her, out of the corner of her eye, was Weary’s left temple, caved in to a shadowed hollow, starred with bright red scar tissue.
As soon as Robin leaped into action, Richard turned, too. The lifeboat began to pitch severely as soon as the boathook was free, hurling itself back against the bow rope like a willful puppy fighting a leash. The movement made it hard for him to work, but he refused to give up even now. Brutally, for time was too short for him to show proper respect, he heaved the sternmost bodies away, uncovering the lockers. His eyes still busy among the filthy, oozing, twisted pile for any scraps of information, any telltale personal possessions they might have brought with them. More than one dead fist clasped a worn Koran, but that was all. He heaved them aside and tore the doors open. The stern lockers revealed nothing more than a bilgelike well reaching down to the keel, full of seawater, blood, and excrement. He straightened.
The great white whiplash of the waterspout seemed to leap toward him as he moved. The wind howled louder, plucking back stinging spray from the white horses that suddenly surrounded him, its strength roaring up the Beaufort scale with inconceivable rapidity. Hell! Where were Weary, Hood, and Robin?
He turned, spreading his feet to gain stability, and then a hand grasped at his leg.
Hood hit Robin in a sort of American football charge, knocking her back onto the seat. Then he was sitting opposite Weary where she had been. He was saying something in a repeated, gentle monotone, voice lazy and hands busy. “You’re Doc,” he was saying. “It’s okay. It’s cool. You’re Doc and you’re all right.” As he talked his fingers loosened the Australian’s grip on the sweatband, easing the bright elastic toweling free.
“It’s fine, Doc. No sweat. You are Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen…”
As soon as the sweatband was clear, he began to stroke Weary’s hair back as a mother does with a child, as a horseman soothes a frightened foal. The forehead he revealed was huge, bone white, almost false.
Jesus Christ! thought Robin, it’s…
And then it was gone. Hood was fixing the sweatband round Weary’s head, hiding the hideous scars at his temples, concealing the huge bulge of that forehead. And suddenly there were two voices reciting the simple catechism, “Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight.” And Hood was turning toward her while Weary’s hands went to that huge, wounded head of his.
“What’s up, doll?” The light normality of his tone shocked her back to reality more quickly than anything else could have done.
“Waterspout, dead ahead,” she said.
Richard actually cried out aloud with shock, his own left hand reaching down at lightning speed, closing over a cold, hard hand. One of the corpses, moved by the rocking of the boat, had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard’s clothing. The material of his trousers twisted through a frozen, insensible grasp. The very movement of something as cold and clammy as this caused him to step back with revulsion.
The last body tilted over, raising its hand in a bizarre simulation of a cheerful wave. The next man to him, unseeing eyes fixed on Richard’s, seemed to revive too, as the whole boat, unbalanced by Richard’s abrupt movement, rocked. Richard fell to his knees. And the moment that he did so, something caught his eye. At the bottom of the pile of corpses lay that of a slim figure — almost a boy, hardly a man. Most of his head was missing, but his body was unmarked. It was hunched over, with its back to Richard, but it suddenly stood out from the rest because it was wearing a uniform jacket. Not a deck officer’s or an engineer’s, Richard tugged the khaki shoulder, but the corpse refused to move. Richard glanced over his own shoulder, suddenly desperate. The waterspout was getting too close for comfort and there was still no sign of Robin, Hood, or Weary. He tugged again at the dead man’s shoulder.
The body abruptly turned over as if giving up the fight. In the sodden breast pocket was a blotched white radio message. Richard knelt carefully, angling his body to give maximum protection from the wind, and opened it to look at once. It was written in sinuous Arabic script, as impenetrable as the writing on the crates in the dead ship’s hold had been. But the layout of the flimsy form was familiar enough. There was a space where the name of the ship should be entered. A space for the time. A space for the message. He glared at that first space with almost manic intensity, willing the strange curves of the writing indelibly into his memory. It was nothing more to him than a pattern of lines and dots. But it had to be the name of the doomed ship. The radio officer on every ship he had ever heard of filled in these forms in exactly the same way. This had to be the name of the ship. Then another thought sprang into his mind. If this was the radio officer, then…