by David Reed
Without another thought, I searched my duffel and found a silver dagger and a book of spells, neither of which I had packed. The fact that I didn’t find them in my bag until over a week after I had left Sioux Falls should tell you how often I was changing my clothes—it was a dark and smelly time for me, I ain’t proud of it.
I took the hex bag, spell book, and dagger to the top deck, where huge waves were crashing over the cargo containers. Yoshiro and a few of the deck hands were lashing lifeboats to the deck, just in case the ship took on water and we had to abandon it. Hundreds of miles from shore, that idea didn’t warm my heart, but I had a mission to accomplish. I got as close to the ship’s edge as I could without getting swept overboard and threw the magical bullshit into the water.
It felt like there should have been more fanfare to the moment, a trumpet blasting or a burst of light as it hit the water . . . a big splash, at the very least, but there wasn’t any of that. The stuff just disappeared into the waves, never to be seen by man again. A small amount of the weight on my shoulders lifted, but the majority remained. Yoshiro and the deck hands looked at me like I was crazy, then went back to their work.
Below deck, I tried to get some sleep, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even stay on my bunk with the rolling of the ship in the waves. Instead, I sat, played cards with a deck the room’s previous occupant had left behind, and thought about how different my life was now than a week and a half ago. Then I barfed from seasickness. Life ain’t pretty.
In the morning, I dreaded going to the mess. More broiled fish and seaweed. As I shoveled a helping onto my plate, the chef appeared from the galley, smiled at me. She was a lady of about 65, which explained why I hadn’t seen her fraternizing with the rest of the crew (the savages) the day before. She musta been able to read my expression, because she took my plate and dumped the food. Told me that she’d get me something I’d like better—if she had anything else back in that galley, it wouldn’t be hard for me to like it more than seaweed.
When she came back, the plate was heaping with scrambled eggs and bacon. The woman was my savior. She spoke a bit of English, so we got to know each other over breakfast. Her name was Keiko, which had a nice ring to it. She’d been on Nishigo Maru a few months, but had been at sea her whole life. Her father was a deep sea fisherman, and often took his children out on his extended fishing trips. She was the sort of gal who could really tell a story, and I listened to her talk for hours. With the breakfast rush over, neither of us really had much to do on the ship until lunch, so we compared life stories. I left out the most recent chapter of mine, since I didn’t want to be thrown overboard for being a raging lunatic.
That conversation felt like the first human thing that’d happened to me since Karen died. When I went down to the engine room afterwards, I musta gone ten minutes without thinking about how godawful life was.
Yoshiro came to my quarters that night, whiskey on his breath. Probably around two A.M. He told me that men were going to come and ask me some questions, and that I needed to tell them the truth. Not having a clue what he was talking about, I smiled politely and closed the hatch in his face.
Ten minutes later, two burly-looking men opened the hatch without knocking, let themselves in. One of them had a holstered pistol, the other was intimidating enough unarmed. They spoke rapidly to each other in Japanese, which I didn’t understand a word of. When they finally turned to me, they narrowed their eyes and spoke like they were talking to a child.
“Where is Tamuro-San?” they barked. Tamuro was the skipper’s name. Apparently, they’d gone to his quarters to report on a typhoon warning ahead, but he wasn’t there. They’d searched the whole ship, there was no sign of him. Everybody on board knew Yoshiro was too big of a drunk to stage a mutiny, so all eyes were on the foreign guy who just came aboard.
My first reaction—maybe I had been the cause of his disappearance. Maybe that demon had burrowed back up from hell or wherever it went and followed me here. Not that I could tell my two muscle-y Japanese interrogators that. I pled my innocence every way I knew how, but they didn’t buy it. They didn’t have any proof, either, so for the time being I wasn’t getting locked in the brig.
Early the next morning, I went to the mess hoping to see a friendly face. Keiko already had my plate of eggs ready. She was like my mother, but, you know, nice. I told her what had happened the night before, and she was sympathetic. She suggested I watch my back around the rest of the crew, since they were all fiercely loyal to Tamuro-San. If they thought I was the one who offed him, well, I’d have trouble. As I heard other crew members coming down the corridor towards the mess, I made a discreet exit. No sense starting anything over a plate of eggs. I passed a few of the crew in the hall, and they just nodded at me, warily. Not angry, just suspicious.
Yoshiro, on the other hand, would have killed me if he thought he could get away with it. He was sure I’d repaid the skipper’s kindness with violence, and since he was now in command of Nishigo Maru, that meant trouble for me. I made a mental note to avoid him, but there’s only so many places to hide on a tin can. The next two weeks were going to be rough.
I felt an obligation to look into Tamuro’s disappearance. If it was related to the demon, I needed to do something about it. Rufus had told me the basics about exorcising a demon, but I’d thrown the book he’d given me overboard. Seemed like a stupid move once I needed it. After searching the ship for traces of sulfur and cold spots, I realized how foolish the whole thing was. More than likely, Tamuro just got drunk and fell off the top deck. Working on a ship like that wears on a person, that was plain as day. I woulda predicted that Yoshiro’d be the one to pull that move, but everybody’s got their demons. Well, demons in the metaphorical sense. It’s hard to use that phrase when often you mean it literally. When I didn’t find any evidence of supernatural involvement, I gave up and spent the rest of the day holed up in my bunk. No use stirring the pot by sticking my nose in the engine room.
I met up with Keiko after dinner, heard more stories about her family. It was calming to hear about someone else’s life, especially one that was so different from mine. She knew all of the Japanese folklore about the sea—an extensive topic—and could go on for hours about it. I heard about this mythical sea serpent Ikuchi, which used to harass ships sailing between the Japanese islands. Hadn’t been spotted in years, so of course the prevailing wisdom was that it never existed at all—that it was just a myth the fisherman cooked up to pass the long hours at sea. Since my encounter the week before, I was much more willing to accept the existence of the otherwise unbelievable, and that included sea monsters. Ikuchi could still be out there, keeping a low profile, waiting for the day when it was again safe to come to the surface. Or maybe those fisherman just saw a big whale. Either way, it was a welcome diversion.
Though I mighta been content to listen to her prattle on, Keiko wanted to hear my stories, too. In particular, she wanted to know how a guy like me ended up on a Japanese cargo ship thousands of miles from home. I guess you can take the boy out of South Dakota, but you can’t take the South Dakota out of the boy. I told her as much as I could stomach, that my wife had been killed and that I couldn’t bear to stay in that house any more. I told her how much I loved Karen, how it was hard to imagine myself growing old without her. Funny thing is, “Old” to me then was how old I am now. And now, well . . . hunters don’t get old. We all die young. So I guess that means I’m still young.
I could sense that Keiko was uncomfortable with my story—who wouldn’t be—but I’m grateful she didn’t ask me any hard questions. Some people in her situation would have suspected that I was on the run for less sentimental reasons than what I claimed. Hell, if someone told me the same sob story, I absolutely would assume that they’d killed the wife in question and hopped on the boat to Japan to avoid prosecution. All Keiko wanted to know was whether I thought I’d see Karen again. I told her that I really hoped that I would, but that was all I could say for certain. Lit
tle did I know that I’d be seeing Karen again on earth, and that I’d have to go through losing her all over again—that I’d have to kill her all over again.
As I was getting ready to turn in for the night, Keiko offered me a swig of some rice wine she had secreted under her bed. It was potent stuff, stronger than whiskey. I don’t think you could even legally call it wine, so much as turpentine that gets you drunk, but it was better than being totally sober.
The last thing I wanted to do was tell her about the demon, but when liquor and grief mix, they’re a potent combination. Between two and three sheets to the wind, I started talking and didn’t stop. I got all the way to my paranoid fear that the demon had followed me onto Nishigo Maru before she held up her hand, told me she had to rest.
Back at my bunk, I fell apart. I wasn’t even that drunk, but I don’t remember much else of that night . . . besides briefly considering going up to the deck and letting a wave take me. It wasn’t until I said everything out loud to Keiko that it all became real to me. I couldn’t ever go back to being just a mechanic. Whatever I ended up being, it would have to be a whole new me. A Bobby Singer that’d be a stranger to the man I’d been for decades.
Some time in the early morning, the wheel on the hatch spun and the door slammed open. It was those two burly men again, plus Yoshiro. He hadn’t shaved and looked like he’d been up all night, which in fact he had. Another crew member was missing, this time from the engine room. The engineer had been manning his post alone when he disappeared, and his absence wasn’t noticed until the overheating alarms started to sound on the bridge. With no one at the controls in the engine room, the rotors had been left spinning at maximum thrust for far longer than they were designed. Nishigo Maru was dead in the water.
Since I had been interested in an engine room job, I was again the first and only suspect. Things were starting to get real, and I was imagining myself getting tied to the anchor and thrown overboard. Yoshiro went so far as to hit me when I couldn’t answer the questions to his satisfaction. I told him everything I could, and hoped that they wouldn’t ask Keiko what I’d talked to her about the night before.
When they dragged me to the brig, I was actually relieved. It meant they weren’t going to kill me outright, so things were looking up. The brig itself wasn’t what I’d envisioned, it was more like a closet than a prison cell, with a small metal gate in the door to allow plates of food to be passed in and out. Because the engines weren’t operational, the lights were off in the prison/closet, which made it even more claustrophobic. Yoshiro promised he’d be back later in the day for another round of questioning, so I had that to look forward to.
I sat in silence the whole day, never receiving any of the meals that I felt were implied by the gate in the door. Guess they had bigger fish to fry, since when Yoshiro returned, it was with the news that another sailor had disappeared. Despite me being locked up all day, I was still considered a suspect. They weren’t sure exactly when the guy had disappeared, so it was possible I’d killed him before I was taken into custody. In Yoshiro’s defense, it’s not like it woulda been reasonable for him to expect that something supernatural was at play, but at that point I think letting me out of the clink would have been the decent thing to do.
That night, I had another visitor. Keiko. She brought a bowl of noodle soup, which didn’t fit through the gate in the door. Instead, she passed the spoon back and forth, letting me get enough in my stomach to stave off the hunger pains. She didn’t stay long, but her visit raised my spirits enough to let me get some sleep.
In the morning, Yoshiro returned, this time with a gun. Five more sailors were gone. Yet another was found dead, his throat slit. Whatever witchcraft I was doing from in the cell (closet), he was going to make me stop. I asked him if he thought it was more likely that someone else on the crew had snapped—maybe because of the terrible hours, maybe because of the terrible working conditions, or maybe because of all that friggin’ seaweed on the menu. Yoshiro didn’t find any of that funny.
Whether I truly believed that theory—that another crew member had snapped and started murdering his coworkers—I don’t really remember. It must have been pretty clear that something unnatural was afoot, especially since it was so soon after Karen’s death. What I do remember is Yoshiro sticking his gun through the metal grate and firing off three rounds, all of them ricocheting around the tiny cell. That I didn’t get killed was incredible, that I didn’t even get hit was both a miracle and a testament to how terrible a shot Yoshiro was.
With his hand still reaching through the grate, clutching the pistol, I put every pound of pressure I could on his wrist. I heard it break with a sickening crack, and the gun fell to the floor of the brig. It wouldn’t do me much good on the inside of the cell, but at least Yoshiro wasn’t holding it any more. He ran out of there like a chicken with its head cut off, nearly tripping over the raised lip of the hatch.
Yoshiro didn’t come around so much after that. From what I heard of the outside, things went from bad to worse on the ship as more and more crew members began to disappear and/or be found murdered. I went three long days without food or water, abandoned to starve in the tiny cell, before finally Keiko returned. She told me that half the crew had disappeared, and that Yoshiro was one of them. No one was in command of the ship, no one was even trying to get the engines fixed. They were all just holed up in various corners with guns, waiting for whatever-it-was to come for them.
My head may have been buried in the sand when I first stepped onto Nishigo Maru, but by that point I had fully accepted that something unnatural was happening. If a member of the crew had gone ’round the bend, there would be bodies, or someone would have seen something. I told Keiko as much, and she hesitantly agreed. If I hadn’t thrown Rufus’s book into the storm, maybe it would have given me some clue what we were facing, and what to do to kill it.
Keiko agreed that we had to try to investigate, so she went about finding the key to my cell. She returned an hour later with no key, but a blowtorch she’d taken from the empty engineering hold. I coached her through its use (it was the same model I had for tearing up cars at the salvage yard) and I was finally free.
We went together through the ship, deck by deck, trying to find any clues as to what was haunting the dark corridors. What we found was a lot of water. Water splashed on the deck, water forming trails through the halls, water pooled in places it had no reason to be. Something wet was moving through the ship. Maybe several somethings. When we got to the mess, we found a contingent of sailors barricaded behind an overturned table, one of them holding a pistol. He fired off a shot as we entered the hall, forcing us to retreat back into the corridor. I had Yoshiro’s pistol, but didn’t see any point in returning fire. The other humans weren’t our enemies, even if they thought they were. At the very least, more humans alive meant more potential victims that the ship’s intruder could attack before it got to us, and that helped our chances of survival.
Sticking my head in for the briefest of moments, I tried to talk the sailors down. Told them I was on their side, that we were trying to hunt the thing that was hunting us. They shouted back in Japanese, and whatever they said made Keiko blanch. Mouths like pirates, those guys had. Reasoning with them wasn’t going to work, it seemed. As we left, one of them shouted at me in broken English: “Who are you?” Guess they didn’t get the memo about the foreigner on board. I tried to explain, but the guy just shouted more Japanese. Then something in English about “not one of us.” Not very welcoming to outsiders. We moved on.
Below the engineering compartment was a storage area, which seemed like a decent enough place for something shifty to hide out, so we checked there next. As we entered the cargo hold, I saw something move in the shadows. Like it was slithering. I almost fired my pistol into the darkness, but inside a ship like that bullets ricochet like crazy, so I didn’t take the chance. If I saw what we were hunting in the light, I’d take the shot.
Broaching the topic of monst
er lore with someone is never easy, but it certainly makes the medicine go down easier if you’re in the middle of a crazy situation like that. Once bodies have started to pile up, people will believe anything. Since I wasn’t familiar with sea folklore, I asked Keiko if there were any stories that fit our current predicament. She shook her head, said she couldn’t remember any. Something about the look on her face told me she was lying. I pressed the issue, asked her to tell me more about Ikuchi, that sea creature she’d described a few nights earlier. She hemmed and hawed for a spell, then came clean—it wasn’t Ikuchi, if Ikuchi was real, he woulda eaten the ship whole.
I asked her if there was another option, and she admitted there was. Her father had told her stories about creatures that come up from the deep and steal away men. They can take on human form when they’re above the water, their tails splitting into two legs. They’re called Ondines in the lore, but most people call ’em mermaids. But there was no way that was happening here, she said. That was just a story.
I reminded her what I’d told her about Karen. That a lot of things I didn’t think were real turned out to be fact. Asked her more about the Ondines, but she didn’t know anything other than what her father had told her, and that was half a century ago. If my instinct was right, and we were dealing with a sea creature of some sort, we had to learn more about them. That’s when I remembered Tamuro’s library. A scholar of the sea, he must have had some books about nautical folklore.
On the way to Tamuro’s office, we came across another sailor, this one was only a kid, nineteen years old, max. He was soaking wet, shivering, his hands clenched into a death grip on a handrail. When he saw us, he screamed bloody murder. He’d been through something terrible, and the trauma was still affecting him. We tried to help him up, to bring him with us, but he recoiled from Keiko’s touch, stood up and ran down the corridor. After he turned a corner, we heard another scream. I ran after him, gun raised, ready for whatever was around the corner, but when I got there, the hallway was empty. All that was left was a puddle of water and a streak of blood.
