June 1983
The sound is coming from the closet behind the ship’s engine room. A thud that echoes into a high-pitched metallic whine so acute you can feel it bouncing hard into your spine.
Plunk, it goes.
Then again, plunk.
A steady rhythm. I walk towards it slowly. Sweat itches the tip of my nose and I wipe hard with a moist sleeve.
Plunk as the ship creaks around me, a moaning that protests against the heat, the sound of something waking. The closet door is open, hinges stuck from humidity keep it still.
Plunk as I get closer.
Plunk
I turn the corner and look inside. The room is dark, a sharp triangle of light from the doorway cuts diagonally through the shadows.
Plunk. Daniel sits in the corner, his face and right side lit. He looks bored, eyes almost dead as he stares at the dark wall to his left. I can see the acne on his cheeks from the doorway. He moves.
Plunk. More acne appears, splashes. My pupils dilate, open themselves to the dark on the floor. Daniel’s holding something, a club of some sort. Acne doesn’t splash. I look down.
Plunk.
Blood.
Plunk.
A pool of blood crawling towards me. I look up again as Daniel moves.
Plunk.
His leg. Cut clean through at the knee somehow.
Plunk.
This time I see the end of his tibia hit steel wall. The sound reverberates, accompanied by a squelching. I look back down at the stump that was his leg.
Plunk as an artery pushes out blood. Rhythm. I take a step back.
“What the fuck,” I whisper. Daniel looks up. He smiles. A final, harder plunk. He stares at me, eyes dead as he starts laughing. From his mouth a high-pitched crazed laugh that gets louder and louder until it turns into a single lung-cracking scream.
Have ye ever heard of the doldrums? The windless dead, heat and salt stuck to yer skin so deep ye want naught but to claw it off. Nothing t’do. Boredom comes, and the water goes quick. Gone soon, the food as well. Drink’s what little left. Drink to keep the sailors calm. Drink to keep away th’insanity. Waiting. All’s we can do is wait. Wait and pray the devils let us go. Bring back the wind, they will. But when? Aye, that the question be. When. One week? Two? A month at sea unmoving’s ‘nough to get to ye. Enough to take a man and make him violent. More to fear than just a sailor’s dying mind, in that windless desert there be. Twixt windless still water the veil lifts and Hell itself comes to ye. That be the thing to fear. That be what stops a sailor’s bar, raucous with drink, dead silent at the mention of the doldrums.
— HN Whitman
My great grandfather’s words, written nearly one hundred years before that fourth voyage of mine aboard the Penguin’s Delight, were on my mind as I watched the Washington coastline fade to blue. Next to me, the Penguin’s cook, a bear of a man with sleeves colored with various tattoos named Pete, leaned against the rail and breathed in the sea spray.
“Will you look at that,” he said, nodding at a large brown bird floating in the wind above us. “Captain’s gonna love that.”
“Albatross?”
“See if he follows. Good luck if he does for a couple hours.”
I nodded and looked up at the discolored white and light blue paint of the cockpit, a long streak of dark red rust had already set in, flowing down from its steel roof as it did in so many of the ship’s nooks. Barely even ten years old at this point, and already showing more battle scars than any other fishing vessel out there, the Penguin’s Delight. Her captain had come out of the cockpit and was standing with the door open behind him, eyes fixed on the albatross above us. He stood in silence, wearing an old yellow fishing coat and a dark red knit beanie, both of which he claimed were lucky. On his shoulder, his black cat, Pearl, using his long beard and hair almost as camouflage, watched me with green eyes.
I’d been fishing for over five years by then and had yet to meet a more superstitious crew. Our last trip had been called short when the engineer and first mate, Oli Penn, had very nearly thrown one of the deckhands, a kid named Will, overboard. It’d been a quiet night, with everyone asleep except for me and this kid. We’d been working on deck, sweeping up some fish guts from our past haul, when the kid had started whistling. Next thing I know, Oli had burst out of his quarters with a bottle of rum in hand and screaming that Will was going to get us all killed. Before I even knew what was happening, he’d narrowly missed the kid’s head with the bottle and had him held over the railing, screaming at him to never whistle again.
“Lore says it takes the wind out the sails,” Pete had told me after we’d managed to wrestle the shocked deckhand back to safety and away from Oli. “But more than that, it wakes the sea, makes her angry.”
“Bit of an overreaction, though, right?” I’d say, thinking about how drunk Oli had been.
But Pete had just shook his head. “We don’t want a storm on us, do we?” Had been all he’d said. Isaac had immediately turned us back home, saying just about the same thing. Poor Will was gagged with an old rag until we made port, and I never saw him again.
That wasn’t the only strange thing I’d ever hear Captain Porter, Oli, or even Pete insist on. Bananas were strictly prohibited, as was saying goodbye to anyone once we were standing on the ship. And while I’d been terrified of finding myself in the same position as Will, I realized quickly that I’d be safe from their wrath as long as I followed the rules. Besides, as far as I could tell, this ship was the best paying vessel anywhere, and that was all that really mattered. Some sailors and fishermen might go on poetic rants about freedom and adventure, but the truth is that anyone that isn’t kidding themselves knows that there are really only two reasons you’d ever subject yourself to a life like this: insanity, or money, and there was a lot of insanity going around the Penguin.
The albatross banked left, suddenly turning away from us. Captain Porter, who’d been watching the animal the entire time, frowned, and walked back into the cockpit, slamming the door behind him. Three months at sea, my longest voyage ever. Three months and I’d just spent the better part of the last four hours loading supplies into the ship with Pete and his son, Daniel. Enough for seven months at least, more than double the time we’d be out there in theory. More time than my wife would be pregnant.
“What’s on your mind, Franky?” Asked Pete.
I shook my head.
“Doldrums,” I said. Pete nodded.
“The captain speak to you about it?”
He had and he hadn’t. A few weeks before we’d left port, Isaac had walked up to me while drunk at a bar. He’d gone on an extremely long, barely coherent talk about the dangers of the trip. He’d gone on and on about the doldrums, about getting stuck, about spending months in waters that didn’t move. He’d asked at the end if I was willing to bet my sanity for some extra cash and I’d agreed. But doldrums? I’d read about how they worked before, how the differences in temperature between the water, the surface, and the air above would sometimes cause wind to go straight up. It had been a problem for sailboats for hundreds of years.
“I don’t understand,” I told Pete. “We have an engine.”
Pete shook his head and shrugged.
“No wind, no waves, no currents, no sound,” he said. “That’s not the problem, you see? That’s a symptom.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you get sick and you feel bad. Body aches, throat gets sore. That’s not what’s wrong with you. What’s wrong is you got a virus inside you that’s taken a hold of you.”
I nodded.
“Same thing for the doldrums, lad. The wind was just what they needed to take away to get ships stuck. No wind is a symptom, not a problem.”
“They?”
“Yes, and you best hope we don’t get stuck too.”
My boat is my cell. There is something to be said about the cold, lifeless claustrophobia that grips the heart of those who find themselves standing on a few planks of wood and steel. Out there in the open blue of the world, horizon keeps the keys. Out there, out there where there is nothing but salt and wet and faces that grow far too familiar, the lines between freedom and imprisonment are blurred. Some find out too late that they can’t handle the emptiness, the loneliness that holds them during those nights when the sky is full of stars. It’s that tedium in the void that drives us to insanity. Nothing to do for hours on end except chug along over waves and waves, a repetition of movement that becomes mind numbingly boring.
For two weeks it was all the same. The Penguin’s Delight bobbed up and down, fighting its way south at a steady pace while her five occupants swapped stories and drank. No fishing until we reached the albacore in the South Pacific, was what Captain Isaac had said, and so we sat around playing cards and listening to Pete talk.
“What’s the deal with the gulls?” I’d asked one night after we’d all had our dinner. We were sitting around the small table where we usually ate. Oli, whitening stubble over a strong chin, had been noodling on his mandolin when he’d stopped at my question and looked over at Isaac, who’d been sitting off to the side on a chair, watching the sea out of one of the windows.
“You want to take this one, Captain?” Oli said. “Teach ol’ Franky boy here a little something?”
But Isaac only smirked. A small meow from Pearl had gotten his attention as the cat jumped up on his lap and took from him a small piece of fish he’d saved from dinner. Oli shook his head looking disgusted.
“Don’t know how you people do it,” he said.
“What, eat fish?” I asked. Oli laughed and nodded.
“But you’re a fisherman,” said Daniel from the sink where he was washing the night’s dishes.
“You don’t shit where you eat,” said Oli, and with that he stood, sang a verse from some song I’d never heard about a girl that had been left back home and walked out of the room laughing. I looked over at Daniel who was still shaking his head.
“A fisherman that doesn’t like fish. I don’t get it,” he said under his breath.
“No one does, not with Oli,” said Pete. “Captain and I have been sailing with the guy for over a decade and we still don’t.”
“Strange fellow, he is,” said Captain Porter. “And they’re the souls of those that died at sea, Frank.”
“Seagulls?” I asked.
“Aye.”
“Wasn’t that the albatross?”
Captain Isaac shook his head and scratched at Pearl’s ears. Pete took over for him.
“Daniel, you know the answer to that one, don’t you? I think I’ve told you more than once before.”
“It’s both,” Daniel said. He finished drying a final plate with a cloth and walked over to us. “But I don’t know too many stories.”
“Aye, the kid’s not listened to me enough. Shouldn’t be here if you ask me,” said Pete. “But there was no convincing him otherwise.”
Daniel, who was just as tall as Pete but much skinnier, shook his head. He said nothing else, letting his father continue speaking.
“You ever been down to Point Nemo?” Pete asked me. I shook my head. This would be the first time I’d ever crossed the equator, and Point Nemo was far into the South Pacific.
“Know what it is, though?”
I nodded. The most remote point on Earth, farthest you could get from land in any direction, something like 1600 miles to the closest island, I thought.
“Captain, Oli and I have been there more than a few times, haven’t we Cap?” said Pete.
“A fair share for us all, yes,” said the captain.
“There’s nothing there, you know,” Pete continued. “Nothing but water. No fish. No life. Nothing but the deep. We’ve all heard that something’s down there, but what? That no one knows.”
“Kraken,” said Daniel, half laughing. Pete looked at him with a serious expression.
“Boy, I’ve taught you better than to be trifling with this sort of shit.”
“Right, look. Here be monsters, no?” Said Daniel as he turned to look at me. “This is all just old-world superstitions. So much of this stuff has serious rational explanations, you know? It’s not all monsters and luck.”
Pete sighed. Isaac watched Daniel from the window, an eyebrow raised.
“That thinking will change,” he said. “No need for believing when you see what can’t be explained with your own eyes.”
“But it should have an explanation, shouldn’t it?” said Daniel again. “Or at least, I think it should.”
Pete nodded and spoke, “that’s why I brought about Point Nemo. You think of me as someone that believes in the old sea tales, you think of Isaac and Oli as crazy men who believe in old superstitions, but that’s not what we are. We don’t know what the things we’ve seen mean. We know what our predecessors have given as theories. The seagull is the soul of a man that’s died at sea, that’s what we’ve been told for years. It doesn’t make sense to equate one with the other, that much I agree with you, but when you’re in the middle of nowhere, when you find yourself in Point Nemo, thousands of miles away from land in all directions, and suddenly a gull flies over you, what then?”
“You saw a gull at Point Nemo and never told me about it?” asked Daniel.
“More than once,” said Captain Isaac nodding.
“How far can a gull fly?” Asked Pete. Daniel shrugged. “Not more than sixteen hundred miles, I’ll tell you that. Not without a break, not without food, not without water.”
“So what was it doing out there?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” said Pete. “But the last time we saw one so far out it coincided with a horrible shipping accident that lost five men to the sea. Five men, five gulls we saw that day.”
“What does one have to do with the other?” Asked Daniel.
“They came from that direction,” said Isaac. “Mayday came in on the radio. A few hours later we saw the gulls flying from there. Five of them side by side.”
“The souls of men that died at sea,” I said to myself. Both Pete and Isaac nodded.
“What other explanation than the one that’s always been said?” Asked Pete.
“Coincidence?” Asked Daniel.
“Maybe,” said Pete. “But out here, out here there’s not a lot of room for coincidences.”
Daniel and I were on the Penguin’s stern. The engine vibrated underneath our feet, the propeller creating a long line of white foam that stretched off into the distance. It was sunny, a huge forest of white puffy clouds to our right hung over the horizon. The cold of the northern Pacific had gradually gone, turning to a hot and almost unbearably humid air that somehow made everything feel sticky.
“He wasn’t particularly happy that I came along,” Daniel was saying about his father, Pete.
“I mean I’m sure the guy had his reasons.”
Daniel nodded. “For sure, I mean I get it. It’s dangerous work. We all know it.”
“So why do it if you don’t have to?”
Daniel shrugged and leaned his back on the railing. “I don’t know. Probably because it’s exactly what he didn’t want.”
“Right, so teenage rebellion?”
“Not exactly, I mean I couldn’t see myself working in an office, is all.”
“There’s other jobs out there that aren’t life threatening and aren’t in an office.”
Daniel laughed, then said, “yeah, but none of those were staring me in the face.”
I laughed too. Daniel and Pete had spent the entire trip arguing with each other. Pete still insisting that his son shouldn’t have come, angry at times with the captain for letting him, even angry at me every so often as an extension of Daniel himself. It had all gotten worse with the rising temperature. The closer we got to the equator, the closer we got to the doldrums, the more tense and nervous the atmosphere aboard the Penguin’s Delight had become.
“He thinks its his fault you’re here,” I said.
“I know that too. Been trying to convince him, but you know what he’s like. It’s like everyone here and their seagulls. Once they have an idea in their heads, there’s nothing to do about it,” said Daniel. He reached into his pockets, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He inhaled deeply before he kept speaking.
“I don’t know, man. You hear some of the shit Oli says sometimes when he’s especially drunk?”
I nodded. Some of Oli’s stories were hard to believe, and in a sense even more so now that we hadn’t seen anything particularly supernatural so far. Still, I couldn’t help but feel some amount of nervousness about these waters, and I didn’t really feel like speaking about it very much. So I left Daniel alone on the back of the boat and went in search of the captain. Maybe he’d have a few words for me that might calm my nerves.
I walked up the stairs and into the cockpit. Captain Porter, beard longer than ever, black curly hair flowing everywhere, was standing shirtless at the wheel. Pearl, who was lying on top of the console, announced my arrival with a quick little meow and the captain nodded at me as I walked in.
“How are ya, Mister Whitman?” He asked.
“Good, I guess,” I said.
The captain smirked and shook his head. “Nervous, too, I’m guessing?”
“How can you tell?”
“We’ve been sailing for near three weeks and it’s not until now that you come up here.”
I supposed he was right. I hadn’t had a reason to come up here the entire time.
“My grandfather was a sailor too. He had a journal where he wrote about the doldrums,” I said. Isaac nodded but said nothing else. I looked ahead, watched the Penguin’s prow bob up and down with the waves.
“He didn’t say anything particularly nice about it.”
“Well you’re right on time. You see out there?” Asked the captain.
“Where?”
“Ahead of us. See how there’s movement? Currents?”
“I do.”
“You see right after that? Completely still.”
I squinted hard. Far off in the distance, the ocean suddenly went still. So still that you could see clouds reflected on its surface.
“Is that it?” I asked.
But again, the captain didn’t say anything. His face was serious but calm, completely glued to the still water ahead.
“Can’t we go around?” I asked. But the captain only shook his head. He reached over the wheel and patted Pearl’s head seven times, then put his hand on the ship’s throttle and slowly inched it forward. From behind us I heard the engine roar louder, and then a sudden static from the radio as Oli, no doubt in the engine room, called in to confirm what was going on. Isaac grabbed the radio.
“Let her purr, we’re in the thick of it now,” he said. I watched Pete suddenly come out of the kitchen below us and run forward. He stood on the bow, looking in the same direction we all were, watching as we came closer and closer to the stillness. I watched Pete kneel, a rosary in hand as he prayed.
“Bloody lot that will do,” said Isaac. I looked at him and he shrugged. “No god anywhere is going to help us out of this one.”
As if on cue, I watched Oli rush towards the front of the boat, laughing wildly. He stood up high on the bow’s railing waving maniacally at the incoming doldrums.
“He’s insane!” I yelled. Captain Porter smiled and nodded as Oli turned, ran hard at Pete, swiped the rosary from his hands and threw it as hard as he could overboard. Pete shook his head, resigned as Oli danced back to the front of the boat. I could barely hear his whoops and hollers over the sound of the engine and the wind, but I knew they were there.
“Sometimes I think it’s his complete disregard for his life that keeps us all safe,” said the captain as he watched more of Oli’s antics. “Here we go.”
Captain Isaac took in a long breath as the ship blew past the final wave. The ship’s rising and falling stopped immediately, replaced by a perfectly smooth ride. I stepped out of the cockpit to feel the wind in my hair and get a better look around. There was nothing but still water ahead of us, its surface so completely motionless it was like we were on the surface of an enormous mirror. I looked behind us, searching for the mirror’s edge, that place where we’d broken through the waves. To my horror I saw nothing. The waves the Penguin had been cutting through only seconds ago were gone, replaced by a completely smooth surface. I looked back into the cockpit.
“The waves behind us!” I yelled. “They’re gone!”
“Aye, they’re not going to let us through this time,” he said. I was about to ask him what exactly that meant when the engine suddenly cut off. There hadn’t been any warning. The thing hadn’t even tried to stay on, one second it was loud as can be, and the next there was nothing but the sound of water splashing off the hull. Captain Isaac exhaled, gave Pearl a couple of pats on the head, then looked me in the eye.
“Welcome to the doldrums,” he said.
Nothing. That was all there was for the first two weeks. We were floating, suspended and unmoving in water so still it felt as though we were being held in some impossible space between the surface and the air. Beyond the ship, the water mirrored the sky above so perfectly there was no horizon, nothing to distinguish water from air except the tiny ripples the Penguin’s Delight would occasionally make as it shifted with our movement. There was nothing to look at around us, not a cloud during the day, or stars and moon at night. I learned very quickly not to look past the ship’s railing, it was the only thing that I could do to keep away the overwhelming feeling of smallness, of insignificance that would immediately take a hold of you whenever you looked out into the nothingness.
But there was more nothingness to be found inside the ship. What little we had to entertain ourselves, cards and booze, books and games, quickly lost their interest. Pete’s stories became repetitive. There was nothing to say. Nothing happening. Nothing. Soon the ship was quiet, a maddening silence that burned in your ears. Quiet except for the occasional shift of wood and metal, and the clinking of emptying bottles of rum.
Then on the thirteenth night, the whispers came.
Every day we had gathered in the cockpit, right as the sun fell into the sea, to watch the captain try to turn the engine on. This night, just like every other, there wasn’t ever a stutter, a single sound anywhere that might indicate that our boat was trying to turn itself on. I looked over at Daniel who was suddenly acting strange. He was shaking his head, opening and clothing his mouth.
“No,” he said, then again. “No.”
Everyone else turned to look at him, resigned.
“There has to be something.”
Pete raised a hand, placing it gently on his son’s shoulder. Daniel shook him off, hard.
“How is any of this even fucking possible? Why the fuck haven’t we even radioed for help?”
“No use trying,” said Captain Porter.
“Bullshit.”
“Here,” said the captain. He stepped aside and let Daniel stand in front of the console. We watched him fumble over the knobs and buttons, desperation growing as he turned every switch, and began slamming every button in front of him with a fist. I expected the captain to stop him, but he stood still, watching.
“Daniel,” said Pete. “You need a drink.”
“I don’t want a fucking drink, I want to fucking move!” He said.
Oli smirked and shook his head. He was about to say something, but the second he made a move Daniel was on him.
“This is all your fucking fault!” He shouted as he let his fist fly. Pete managed to jump in front of his son immediately, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him back as Daniel screamed.
“He’s the fucking engineer! Why the fuck isn’t the engine working, you fucking asshole!” He continued as Pete moved him towards the door. Daniel grabbed at the door’s frame, trying hard to pull himself back inside the cockpit.
“I’ll fucking kill you, you piece of shit!” He said, keeping himself steady as he channeled his rage, flinging insult after insult at Oli. But Oli was leaning on the console, laughing. Nothing Daniel had said had seemingly affected him. Then he suddenly stood upright, moving his head wildly around in search of something. I blinked, confused, realizing that Daniel had stopped his insults and was now leaning against his father, unmoving.
It came suddenly. A low hissing breath right behind my ear that sent chills thundering down my spine. I turned immediately, but there was nothing but the wall of the cockpit behind me. I looked over at Captain Isaac who was standing on edge.
It suddenly dawned on me that I had never seen this man show any sign of terror, not when we’d left, not on any of our previous voyages, not when Oli had nearly drowned Will, not when the albatross had disappeared when we’d left port, not even when we’d finally gotten stuck in the doldrums. He’d been completely calm the entire time, had made this entire experience seem like just a minor inconvenience to him. But now? Now I could see actual fear in his eyes. I could see them almost shaking, tearing up even as he blinked a couple of times in quick succession. And suddenly his terror was taking hold of me. Whatever this thing was, whatever had just whispered in my ear, it was something that had very nearly sent a man I thought was unphased by everything, into a panic.
I thought back to my grandfather’s words for the first time in months. The veil lifts and hell itself comes, he’d written. Pete himself had even mentioned something evil holding us here. Was this it?
The whispers continued. They circled us, surrounded us, played with us. I realized I couldn’t understand them at all. I could hear my mind screaming only one thing at me, run. And so before I could even understand what the hell I was doing, I was pushing past Pete and Daniel, right into the warm humid air of the doldrums.
The whispers followed me. They kept on me until I reached the back of the boat, almost like if they were holding on to me. Nothing helped. Nothing made them go away. Sticking my fingers in my ears changed nothing. I could still hear them, still feel a humid breath as it crawled deep inside my ear and stayed there. I lay on my side, closed my eyes, and screamed, trying as hard as I could to make the sound go away.
I screamed until my throat was sore, maybe even bleeding, and only stopped because Oli appeared in front of me and grabbed my arm. He pulled me up to my feet hard and suddenly screamed as loudly as he could in my face. I blinked and I felt his hand as it slapped me hard.
“You’re alright, they’ll be gone soon,” he said.
“I, what, how do, wh-” I said as he slapped me again. I exhaled, trying my best to ignore the whispers around us. That’s when I noticed that Oli was bleeding.
“What happened?” I asked, pointing at a cut on his shoulder, right over his clavicle.
“Daniel came at me with a knife. Managed to wrestle him off. He ran away.”
“Daniel did that?”
“He ain’t himself. We had to lock him up in a closet next to the engine room.”
I nodded. “Is he okay?”
Oli shrugged.
We gotta find him.”
“Where’d he go?” I asked. Oli rolled his eyes and shook his head. I nodded. It was a dumb question. I followed Oli back to the cockpit where Captain Isaac was standing, frantically speaking into the radio.
“Oli’s got him,” he said he looked at me. “We thought Daniel might have gotten to you.”
“Gotten to me?” I asked. Captain Isaac nodded.
“Doldrum sickness.” The captain said. “We need to find him before something bad happens. Pete said he was going to go look for Daniel in the freezers. You two go check the engine room.”
The sound of Daniel’s hysterical laughing was accompanied by more plunks as he resumed smashing his own leg into the wall. I turned away as I felt the sudden and familiar acid taste that comes right before you puke. Legs shaking, I just barely managed to get out of the closet before I fell to my knees and vomited rum and bile all over the hall outside the engine room.
“Where’s the knife?” I could hear Oli saying from behind me. He’d walked in after me and was looking everywhere for the weapon Daniel had used on him, and presumably, to cut his own leg off.
I looked up at Oli. He was looking around so calmly it reminded me of Captain Isaac’s words from just a few weeks ago. That Oli was absolutely insane, seemingly undisturbed by any of what he was seeing, might really turn out to be a good thing. He turned and looked at me, asked about the knife and I looked around the floor, forgetting I wasn’t even inside the room with Daniel. There was nothing, of course, just a small pool of my puke against the wall. No blood anywhere. Daniel had gotten to work inside the closet.
Oli repeated his question once again as he inched in closer to the door.
“Danny boy?” He said. “I’m coming in, alright?”
Daniel’s laughter immediately stopped. For a moment it was quiet. Oli stepped into the shadows slowly. Then screams. Screams from Daniel, silence from Oli. I could hear the whispers again, getting louder, deeper, in my ears. I watched the shadows inside the closet moving. Then Oli’s voice from inside screamed for me to find Pete.
I stood up immediately and ran. Up the stairs, out into the open air, darkness suddenly holding me as the whispers followed. They sounded different now, slower, almost seductive. I stopped and looked out far past the railing, far into the black. Something in the distance grabbed my attention. Out there over the water, a faint light. It was just a small glimmer, nothing more. Was it getting closer? Had the captain somehow managed to call for help during all of this? I squinted hard. It was impossible to get a better look, but it seemed to be pulsing, almost like a beating heart of some sorts or a very distant star. Only it was clearly bigger, and clearly closer. Had it gotten closer? It seemed to have. It seemed to have been moving towards me, and then suddenly away from me for some reason. I blinked. Looked hard again at the little light and reached my hand out to investigate.
“Frank!”
A hard pull from behind and I was on the floor. It was quiet again. The whispers had been so loud only seconds ago, and… I blinked again and looked around. I was lying next to the railing, the door I’d come out of some fifteen feet away. How the hell had I gotten all the way over here? I couldn’t remember moving my feet. Pete stood up. He extended a hand, and I took it.
“What the hell were you doing?” He asked.
I looked out again at the void of the doldrums for only a second. The light I thought I’d seen was gone. I shook my head and breathed.
“I don’t know,” I said. I remembered Daniel and Oli and immediately told Pete who took off in the engine room’s direction. I followed closely behind.
When we finally reached Oli, he was leaning against the wall and covered in blood. The second he saw Pete he stood up and ran straight towards him, grabbing him hard and screaming at me to pull him out of the engine room. Tears fell down my eyes as I heard Pete screaming in agony and rage, an immediate understanding of what had happened falling on his shoulders.
We dragged Pete kicking and screaming back to his room. Oli managed to get him on the bed before he pulled me out of there and closed the door behind me, but not before I saw Pete, tears in his eyes, rocking back and forth in desperate grief.
“What the fuck happened?” I asked.
“Fucker tried to stab himself in the neck,” said Oli. “Well, no, I wouldn’t say try.”
Then he grabbed me again and motioned for me to follow. I stood still, nodding my head towards Pete’s door. For a moment I could see a hint of frustration in Oli’s eyes, but he nodded. He pulled out a radio from his pocket and told the captain what had happened. When Isaac said he was on his way down, Oli motioned for me to follow him.
“You need to see something,” he said. Slowly, I followed him down to the engine room, past my vomit, and into the closet. Oli flipped a switch and light flooded the little room. It was almost entirely covered in blood, the floor a massive puddle of red, the walls splashed up to the ceiling. I covered my mouth for a second and exhaled.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s got nothing to do with it,” said Oli. “Notice anything missing?”
And I blinked again. Daniel’s body was gone, a clear path of blood lead out of the room and back up the stairs towards the deck. Only the knife was visible on the floor.
“Wasn’t he…”
“Dead?” Oli finished for me. I nodded. Oli continued speaking.
“He was. It doesn’t matter. If the whispers come, they take someone. Some way, somehow, they always take someone. You understand?” He asked.
I nodded.
“We didn’t lock him up in here with a knife,” said Oli as he picked up the blade and wiped it clean. “We’re not fucking stupid.”
“So how did he get it?” I asked. But Oli just cocked his head and walked out of the engine room, back towards Pete’s room. And in the distance, past Pete’s desperate mourning wails, I heard the faint sound of a splash in the water, as if something had jumped overboard.