Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

by Joe Hart

  As soon as there was enough light, Will and I surveyed the damage. The mainmast had broken off, like I said, and swung down like a missile. I could see the splinters around the inboard engine housing, and when I looked closer my fears were confirmed. The mast had smashed several components on the top of the engine to pieces. I tried starting the motor anyway and received nothing but a harsh grinding growl for my efforts.

  I inspected the rest of the ship for other damage. I couldn’t find any other structural problems, except for in the sleeping area below deck. There was something sticking out of the floor near the bed that I slept on at night when the sea was calm. It was a spear of pearly gray material about two and a half feet long that ended in a sharp black tip. I touched the object, and it felt smooth and actually somewhat soft in a strange way. It was lodged solidly in the hull, and no matter how hard I pulled, it would not move. I think it’s some sort of strange coral formation that must have broken off in the storm. Somehow it got blasted through our floor. Could we have been near a reef that was unmapped and hit this thing? For now it’s not leaking around the edges, but I’ll keep a close eye on it just to be sure. One strange thing: Will doesn’t like it one bit. He stopped at the door to the cabin area and wouldn’t take another step inside. He even growled at it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him growl before.

  For now I’ve reset the beacon and tried the emergency radio to call for help. There’s nothing but static, but I’m sure I’ll get something soon. The day is pretty clear and we’re just adrift on the unending blue waves. I’m guessing we’ll hear the sound of airplanes and helicopters shortly, and this will be my last real adventure. I guess getting off of a rescue chopper and proposing is almost as cool as stepping off a ship after sailing across a sea. Almost, but not quite.

  2/7/11

  Still here. I’m actually a little surprised. I slept lightly through the night, thinking that any minute I’d wake to the sound of steel blades cutting the air and the sight of a friendly dude in a wetsuit rappelling down a line onto the deck of the boat. Neither happened. Instead I woke to the sound of Will growling again. He was standing at the threshold of the bedroom, staring at the coral thing poking out of the floor. His ears were actually lying back against his brown skull, and I could see some little white teeth below his upper lip. I had to laugh. He’s just not an intimidating dog. I guess he doesn’t like the smell the thing’s giving off—kind of a musky fish odor that reminds me of some sushi restaurants I‘ve been to, and not the good ones! It’s not really potent but just enough that you notice it above all the other scents of the sea.

  I cooked a simple breakfast of oatmeal and ham for us over a butane grill on the deck. Will especially enjoyed the ham. I’m guessing the rescue planes are maybe having a little trouble narrowing down our location. It is a big-ass sea after all. I went to check our GPS this morning, but the power is completely out. The batteries drained somehow since yesterday, and there’s not enough juice to even turn on the computer console. I’m guessing something short-circuited during the storm, but I can’t be sure. My handheld GPS is a little funky too. It’s showing us ten or eleven miles from where the storm hit us two nights ago, and normally I’d think we had gotten pushed that far with the wind and drifting—except we’re ten miles in the opposite direction that the storm went. It’s almost as if we traveled against the wind and currents.

  Will and I spent the afternoon fishing. We had tried it a few other times during the past month but not with real enthusiasm. Now I’m starting to think it would be wise to limit our non-perishable food consumption if we can. We have enough provisions for the foreseeable future (forty-five days), so I’m not really worried, but it would be nice to save as much as we can.

  I’m not panicking yet. The beacon is still running (it actually has its own lithium battery built in), but I’m starting to wonder why we haven’t even heard a plane yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I can feel a little unease beginning to creep into my stomach like cold oil. Will seems to have noticed. He’s staying right by my side no matter what. Seeing the soft love in his brown eyes comforts me.

  I caught a decent-sized grouper just as we were going to pull the line in and have some peanut butter for supper. The fish barely fought, which was strange. It came up from the water like it was stunned. I wonder if I caught him while he was half asleep! Regardless, he’ll make a nice supper over the grill, and I think I’ll pop open a bottle of the Merlot I brought to celebrate with. Hopefully by nightfall we’ll see some sign of a rescue mission in the dark sky.

  2/8/11

  I woke up to thumping under the hull last night. I had drank a little too much wine, but I figured what the hell, it’s not like there’s a sail to watch or any way to avoid a collision if we run across something out here. It must have been a few hours after I fell asleep/passed out. I woke to a deep thumping and a vibration. I tipped off my bed and landed solidly on the floor, not really knowing where I was or what century I was in for that matter. After a moment of getting my bearings and realizing what had happened, I felt and heard it again. It was a deep thrumming sound, like a diesel engine in a well-insulated building. It reverberated in my chest and actually made my palms, which were pressed to the floor, numb. In the almost nonexistent light, I could see Will’s eyes staring at me from the doorway. He didn’t seem impressed with the recent performance of his master, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. I shook my head to clear it and then was instantly scared. What if the vibrations and noise was a tsunami? What if I was right over the top of a major aquatic earthquake? The boat would be snapped in half, and I’d be sent reeling in the aftershock of a hundred-foot wave. Then reason began to poke its head into my little room of crazy and I calmed down. Even if it was a tsunami, there wouldn’t be much effect this far out at sea. The wave that would reach epic proportions when it hit shore wouldn’t be more than another swell on the surface to me out here.

  I was still calming my racing mind when my vision landed on the coral thing on the other side of the room. For a few seconds I stared at the long graceful shape and tried to blink the sleep from my eyes. For a moment it seemed that the straight line of the coral had bent into a half-moon shape and was nearly touching the floor of my room. I watched for another couple of seconds, and I could’ve sworn the thing twisted slightly toward me. Right about then I realized there was an emergency flashlight hanging a foot from my right hand. I reached out and grasped the knurled handle of the heavy plastic barrel and pulled it from the wall. I fumbled for a moment in the dark and finally found the button to turn the thing on. I shined the light over to where the coral was poking/prodding the floor and just stared for a few moments. The coral was standing straight up like it had always been. I kept the light on it for over a minute, and when there was no movement from it, I grabbed my pillow and blanket from the bed and went up to the deck to sleep.

  I’m sure, now in the daylight, that I was drunker than I thought and I was seeing things in the dark. I’m sure that’s what it was, but I’ll be damned if I can get myself to go back into the same room with that thing.

  I threw my handheld GPS overboard. The thing was thoroughly screwed up. It was saying we were about thirty miles to the south from where we had been the last time I checked. There’s no way we could’ve traveled that far in twelve hours.

  I started building a sail this afternoon too. I rigged it up out of the jib sail (the main somehow came loose from the mast when it broke and floated away in the night) and the boom. It’s makeshift at best and only about six and a half feet high, but it is catching wind, so that’s good. I still have my compass, and I’ve locked it on dead west. I’ll run into some sort of land sooner or later. I’m not giving up on a rescue, but I have to do something. Our food won’t last forever, that’s for sure, and neither will my patience.

  There were a few more stunned fish today too. They surfaced around the boat as twilight was coming on. There were groupers and several tuna, along with some exotic-looking fish w
ith long snouts I’ve never seen before. They all just kind of half swam, half flopped on the surface of the ocean. I’ve never heard of fish acting like that before. I’m guessing it’s some sort of spawning ritual. What the hell do I know about fish anyway?

  2/9/11

  I think I’ve just had a run-in with some sort of deep-sea animal. It was literally the weirdest experience of my life. Will and I were sitting on the deck this morning after having some leftover grouper and crackers when I heard something thunking on the side of the hull. Immediately, the spear thing in the downstairs cabin came to mind and I chided myself for being silly. I walked over to the edge of the boat, and there was this blackish-gray ball floating in the water. It was about the size of a softball with little greenish nubs poking out from its surface every few inches. I watched it floating there in the water and wondered what the hell it could be. I thought maybe it was some sort of turtle since it sounded really hard, but it didn’t seem to be moving. I went and got a net from down below and scooped it from the water. It was heavy; I hadn’t expected it to weigh so much. I’m guessing it weighed a good ten pounds, if not more.

  I flipped the thing out onto the deck, and it rolled around a little bit, making a weird hollow clunking sound as it went back and forth. Will backed all the way across the deck as far as he could go from the thing. He must’ve been able to smell what was inside. I sometimes wish I had the senses that he has; they would keep me out of some shit, that’s for sure.

  Well, I figured I’d see what was inside of it. Isn’t that human nature at its most basic? Pandora syndrome, I always called it. Anyway, I went below deck again and grabbed a hammer from the toolbox down there and came back up. The ball was still clunking on the deck, and I had to hold it steady with one hand while I raised the other with the hammer. I whipped the hammer down as hard as I could, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

  As soon as the hammer connected with the sphere, the fucking thing opened like a jack-in-the-box. The shell didn’t shatter like I expected it to when I hit it with the hammer—it unlocked. It was like a 3D puzzle coming apart. Jagged edges opened up and the whole ball suddenly unfolded out into some sort of animal. It had a long tail that stretched out behind it and four fins with hooked claws attached to their ends. The head was hidden under the outer edge of shell, but I could see two white eyes under there looking at me and a lower jaw that jutted thickly down from the face. It kinda resembled an armadillo, but the tail was flat instead of round and shaped like a double-bitted axe.

  The freakiest thing about it was how it moved. As soon as it unrolled from the ball, it skittered a few feet away on the deck and sat looking at me as if it was waiting for me to hit it with the hammer. I could hear a high-pitched squeak every few seconds and realized it was the thing’s breath whistling in and out of whatever godforsaken mouth or nose it had. I was pretty much awestruck as I sat there with the hammer still clutched in one hand and the other braced on the decking. Meanwhile, Will was raising hell a few yards behind the thing. He was barking and snarling like I’d never seen a dog of his size do before. Foam frothed at his lips as his teeth snapped together, and if I hadn’t gotten him his booster of rabies shots a few months ago, I would have sworn he was in the final stages of the disease.

  I watched the little critter for a few seconds before I started to move cautiously to a standing position, talking to the thing the whole time—“Hey, buddy, where’d you come from? You’re okay.”—shit like that. I realize now it was waiting. Waiting for me to make a move.

  As soon as I took a step closer, the little fucker scuttled forward and whipped its nasty tail around and buried it in my calf. I didn’t have time to move or cry out. It immediately pulled its tail free from my gushing leg and swiveled around for another strike. At that moment I did the only thing I could think of: I threw the hammer at it. The stainless-steel tool bounced off the thing’s shell like a pellet off a car. I don’t even know if it noticed. It pulled itself forward on its clawed flippers and finally its head came into view.

  Now, I’ve never seen an actual snapping turtle strike at something before, but I’m guessing it would look something like what this thing did. The head and neck stretched out from under the shell in a coiling motion. The head was oval-shaped with lots of shiny black bumps on the crown. It reminded me of a crab’s shell, only dark instead of the red you normally see in a restaurant. The neck slimmed down to about two inches across, but it came out nearly a foot. I just barely got my foot jerked back before I heard the sharp snap of teeth coming down together as it bit the air where my flesh had just been.

  Well, needless to say, I’d had enough of these shenanigans, and I grabbed the next thing that was closest at hand, which was a ten-foot-long aluminum oar for the rowboat. In one motion I spun the oar off the rack it was sitting in on the toe rail and swung it in a sweeping motion. Apparently the thing didn’t have the best peripheral vision, because I caught it broadside and sent it sailing through the air off the side of the boat. Just before it hit the water, it curled back in on itself and locked tight, back into the original ball shape. When it hit the water, I limped over to the rail and searched for the little bastard, but there was no sign it had ever even been there, not even a solitary bubble rising up toward the surface.

  So, here I sit now writing this. My calf has been disinfected and bandaged, and I have my flashlight and flare gun handy to my right. There’s a slight wind that’s picked up during the afternoon, and I hope it pushes us out of these waters. I’m anxious to leave our little friend far behind. I hope he sunk to the bottom and fucking cracked under the pressure of the ocean. Although it looked like that’s exactly where it had come from, down deep. I have a feeling I may not get a lot of sleep tonight.

  2/10/11

  There’s no rescue coming. The beacon went dead today. It’s been running steady for four days, and I think the battery just finally gave out. I don’t blame it. I’m guessing it figured if no one has shown up yet to rescue my rich dumb ass, then no one is going to.

  Last night I heard the thumping and felt the vibrations again. There’s something wrong and I don’t know what it is. I could hear something down in the cabin earlier today, but when I went down there to listen, the sound stopped. It was a scraping sound, like something rubbing on the floor. The thing in the bedroom is still there. I don’t know what to make of that anymore either. Anyway, the ocean’s calm except for a breeze out of the northeast. But from all I can tell, we’re moving in a southern direction. I’ve quit trying to figure this out.

  My leg’s infected too. The little bastard of a sea creature must’ve injected me with something. The wound opened up last night and bled a little. When I changed the bandage this morning, the cut was puckered like it had been soaked all night in water and the area around it was black for about three inches. I’m not sure what to do. I poked through the first-aid kit again and found some antibiotics, but I’m not sure what dose to give myself, so I just injected a small amount right around the wound.

  There’s something else too. There’s a whole lot more fish coming to the surface around the boat now, and they aren’t stunned, they’re dead. I’m starting to get scared. I’m beginning to think that I may not get through this alive. What a fucking stupid thing to do. I should’ve just gone with Gale to Japan. Fucking storm.

  Will and I are sitting on the bow of the boat, just kind of wondering what the next move is. I’ve still got my flare gun ready, so I guess there’s that. I haven’t totally given up yet; there’s always hope and faith. What was the quote by that famous spiritualist/philosopher? You can have faith without hope, but there is no hope without faith. Yeah, that’s well put, but I feel like I’m having a shortage of both.

  2/10/11? 2/11/11?

  This will be my last entry. I’m writing this not for me but for everyone else on earth. For Gale and for the children she’ll have someday with another man. This is a warning.

  Will and I must have fallen asleep in the late-afternoo
n today, because I woke up and it was full dark. Another storm blew up from the west with lots of lightning and thunder. I was soaking wet by the time I realized it was raining and I grabbed Will and tried to make my way to the other end of the boat to get below deck. My leg had gotten worse from when I had fallen asleep, and I was limping hard down the length of the boat—the pain was shooting all the way up my thigh by then. Just before I had gotten to the entrance to below deck, lightning flashed out like a strobe and lit up the surrounding sea like a stage under a spotlight.

  For hundreds of yards around the boat I could see nothing but the tops of bobbing black circles in the water illuminated by the light. There must have been a hundred thousand of the creatures floating in the water surrounding the boat, and they seemed to be all sizes. In that instant I saw some that were close to the same size of my visitor from the day before and many that must have been four feet across. Beyond the floating creatures there were thousands of dead fish of all shapes and sizes lying in ring after ring, expanding out beyond where my eyes could see. I did spot a killer whale’s unmistakable black-and-white belly floating amongst the smaller bodies, along with what looked like a giant squid, although I couldn’t be sure.

  At that point lightning flashed again and a particularly high wave washed over the Wind Clipper that made me put most of my weight on my bad leg. It didn’t hold me and I tipped overboard. I managed to drop Will on the deck as I fell, and the last thing that I heard before I smacked onto the hard bodies of the creatures was Will’s yelp of pain as he hit the deck.