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“I’m too sober for this.”
Alex didn’t even bother lifting his head from his hands. “You literally don’t drink.”
“Yeah, well…” Brad frowned, staring down at the strip of deck between his feet. The heat of the early-morning sun baking the back of his neck, the salt of the air in his throat, the chaos of the night they’d just endured…it was all adding up to be just a little too much, frying each of his internal circuits one by one. “Maybe I should start.”
There was a quiet clink, nearly imperceptible from over the hum of the Duke’s engine and the slap of the waves. “I feel ya on that one, broseph.” Conrad wedged the bottle against the edge of his seat, lined it up just right, and popped the cap before lifting it in a toast no one returned. “Here’s to our blossoming alcoholism.”
“Connie,” Julia warned, sounding more exhausted then exasperated.
He heard her of course, but soldiered on all the same, “May it bring us some kinda peace in the coming days.” Beside him, Fliss raised her own beer; the necks of the bottles momentarily crossing into a lopsided X, the glass tapping with another unimportant sound before they both took considerable swigs.
‘Relief’ was a word each of them had floated in their own minds. Floated, and then promptly rejected. And that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, did it? They’d survived, they’d escaped; last night was a bad dream that was already slipping away from them, trickling out between their fingers like seawater through cupped palms…they should’ve been relieved. But bruised and bloodied as they were, covered in grime, slime, soot, and salt, the monstrous shape of the Ourang Medan still impossibly large against the skyline, it was difficult to exhale.
This was the part in the horror movie where the killer sprang back to life, after all, where the heroes turned around to see there was no corpse behind them, just a trail of footprints that slowly trailed off to nothing. Maybe the Duke would somehow end up ramming into the hull of the freighter again, driven by some supernatural current. Or someone would come limping up from the cabins down below—Danny, eyes lifeless and bulging, body bloated with water; Junior, the gaping exit wound in his head showing all the bits pulsing inside his skull; Olson, still screaming, lips pulled back in a snarl, hammer held tightly in hands ravaged by rigor mortis. Worse yet, at any moment that mist could rise up from the ocean like fog, a discolored miasma that would seep into their brains and force them to tear each other limb from limb.
And sure, okay, this was real life and not a horror movie, but a lot of things had happened in the past few hours to make the impossible feel awfully plausible. A lot.
“It’s so…weird.” Alex kept his head down, his hands forming a sort of net for his forehead as he braced his elbows on his knees. His thumbs had pressed hard enough into his temples that they actually seemed to be divoting the skin.
“The award for understatement of the year goes to…”
“No, I mean…I mean it’s weird that none of us saw the same thing.” He did look up then, eyes moving to each of them in turn, his gaze positively clinical in its intensity, “You’d think there’d be some kind of overlap, but…” The corners of his mouth turned down. “You two were with me when I found that messed up body in the coffin—”
Julia shivered despite the sun. She reached up to rub the chill out of her arms and was almost surprised to find her skin slick with sweat. “Yeah. Yup. Not about to forget that anytime soon…”
“Mhm, oh, thanks again for that, bee-tee-dubs.” After taking another long drink, Conrad tipped his bottle in Alex’s direction. “It’s just really not a tropical adventure until someone desecrates a grave in front of you.”
“Connie.”
“No, no, seriously, when I agreed to this trip I was super interested in getting a good whiff of your guy’s character, JJ, and honestly? Can’t say I was disappointed. Prescribes me aspirin older than Dad, pushes open mysterious coffins to check out what’s inside just because, stabs pirates with manicure scissors…” He shrugged, letting the bottle dangle between his knees for a moment as he stared off into middle-space, “Still better than your last boyfriend, but…”
Brad cast an uneasy look over his shoulder to the mammoth shape of the Ourang Medan. “Look, how’re any of us supposed to know what subconscious crap is going on in our heads half the time, I mean, right? It’s probably not that strange that we all saw different stuff…”
“I’m just saying that the fact three of us saw that body but then only one of us saw it…” He was a little better than Julia when it came to keeping himself from shuddering, but not by much. “…like, walking around, it’s weird. If it freaked all of us out, then why did only I see it?”
Fliss had been quiet since she’d felt the motor roar to life beneath her feet, more out of some inane, childish fear of jinxing their situation than anything else. Part of her worried that talking about what had happened would make it realer, somehow, more solid, an actual event instead of a nightmare that would dim and soften with time. But she was tired and her stomach was empty and the beer was loosening things she’d hoped to keep sealed up tight. “Brad’s right—there’s no use trying to pick it all apart. Manchurian Gold does what it does.” Her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug as she brought the bottle to her lips again, “I don’t think any of us are going to be able to figure it out now, decades after the fact.”
“I still think—”
“Hey, you heard the captain: Case closed. Diagnosis? Who the fuck knows. Treatment? Take two disco-era Advil, get sloshed, sleep the sleep of champions, and then pretend like it didn’t happen.” He sucked his teeth when Alex shot him a particularly withering look. “Hey, I also agree with Bradical, mk? Guy’s got a good head on his shoulders. Look, not for nothing, but I’m not, uh, let’s say ‘especially frightened’ of sexy sailor girls and old biddies, okay? In fact, I’d be willing to go on the record as saying they’re probably the two demographics I’m the least scared of, and yet…” Conrad spread his arms wide, “Here we are. Like, I get it man, really, I do, you wanna dissect this shit so you feel better about it, but it’s nothin’ doin’, my guy.” In one swallow he finished what was left of his beer, immediately reaching down into the crate at his feet for another, “Shit’s fucked!”
“Yeah…it’s a good point, Alex.” Julia sighed as she said it, almost as though agreeing with her brother physically pained her. “I mean…I saw you, so…”
“Wait, you saw Alex?” Brad sat up a bit straighter, “Was his head all caved in?”
“Wait…wait, what?” He turned from one to the other, staring between them wide-eyed. “Head caved i…excuse me?”
Julia grimaced, leaning forward so she could see Brad without Alex being in the way. “Ew, what? No. Ew! No, he was just like…wrong.”
“That’s nuts, I saw him too! But like I said, uh, with his head all…” His hand gestured abstractly around the left side of his face. “Super gross. Incredibly upsetting.”
“Oh, yeah, no, I just watched him drown himself.”
Alex reeled back, the rail of the deck the only thing keeping him from falling backwards into the water. “What th—I see a horrible mutant…thing, and you two see me? Gee, thanks.”
“To be fair, I saw Fliss too.” Brad glanced over to her with an apologetic look that she merely waved off.
“I saw you. Well…you were sort of…” She tilted her head from one side to the other, clearly trying to weigh her words, “A ghost? Or...something. It was very strange.”
“Huh. Well you were wearing a different colored tank top.”
“Uh…?”
There was no stopping the snort of laughter that escaped Conrad at that. “Ah, perhaps the true terrors were the fashion mistakes we made along the way, huh?”
The lot of them shared a laugh at that, low and quiet though it was. Laughing felt good, yeah, but it still felt wrong, like speaking too loudly while walking through a graveyard. It fizzled out just about as quickly as it began, leaving them in relative silence, save for the screaming of the gulls overhead and the sound of the Duke cutting through the waves.
“There was the old guy in the bowler hat too, I guess,” Julia mumbled, fingers absently tracing the bandage on her leg, avoiding its dark, bloody center. “He was incredibly creepy. Good luck figuring out what part of my brain that was…” Her eyes flicked up from her leg and her voice trailed off.
Whatever levity they’d managed to scrounge together between the five of them hadn’t just sizzled out—it had been summarily murdered, chopped into chum and thrown into the ocean to feed the finned things following them in the Duke’s wake. They all stared at Julia with varying degrees of horror, eyes wide and mouths open in small o’s of dawning understanding.
“O-old guy in a bowler hat?” Brad asked, the first among them to find his voice again. “What do you—”
“Yeah, I don’t know? He was just this like…pale old guy wearing a hat and—”
“A long overcoat.”
She whipped her head around to Fliss, the breath catching in her chest when she finished the sentence for her. “Whoa, I…yeah? How did you know—”
With the hand that wasn’t holding his beer, Conrad pointed to his own side. “He had a pocket watch,” his voice was uncharacteristically flat as he said it, turning and looking to Fliss as though for some sort of confirmation. What he found there was more wide-eyed shock and little else. “The super old kind. On a chain.”
“And he just kept…” The knuckles of Alex’s hands had long-since gone pale from how tightly he was holding onto his own knees.
“Smiling.”
They said it at once, an eerie unison that would’ve no doubt seemed practiced to anyone unlucky enough to overhear them. There was no way for them to know, no way for them to be sure, but in that instant all five of them understood there had been a terror they’d shared, a peculiar folie à cinq, if such a thing existed. And while they couldn’t (and likely wouldn’t ever) comprehend what exactly that meant, it was hard not to recoil in revulsion, in horror, only then understanding the gravity of the calamity they’d been spared from.
Slowly, fearfully, they each turned to the Ourang Medan, now little more than a speck on the horizon, a bump of black against the brilliantly blue sky. The nightmare was almost over, the ship almost gone from view…and yet it was impossible for any of them to shake from their minds the image of a man standing at the bow of the freighter, tall and grim and ancient, the tails of his dark coat flapping in the morning breeze, pale eyes glimmering with something horribly akin to amusement as he too watched them become smaller and smaller in the distance. He’d bring his hands together in a polite golfer’s clap, the smack of his leather gloves somehow reproachful despite the smile on his face, and it would only be the wrinkles around his eyes that made it clear he wasn’t half so pleased as he’d have them think.
Conrad pushed the crate of beer towards the center of the deck and they each took a bottle a little too quickly—even Brad.