King Kong

by Christopher Golden

  “Message for you, skipper,” the man said.

  Englehorn read it quickly, his brow furrowing deeply.

  Bad news.

  Preston didn’t like the fog, and after so many perfect days and nights out on the ocean, he would have expected not to mind so much. But it was claustrophobic enough on the ship, in the corridors or down in the hold. The fog made it just as bad on deck. Plus he was still smarting from this morning’s brutal tongue-lashing.

  He needed a drink.

  Now he stood in Mr. Denham’s cabin—the night and the fog outside the porthole windows—and smiled softly to himself as he poured two glasses of scotch. Denham was holding the new script pages loosely in one hand, staring off into nothing. Preston offered him a glass.

  “No, not for me,” Denham said, waving him away. “I’m off it. Can’t afford to get smashed.”

  Surprised, Preston studied the man. Obviously, whatever was troubling Denham went deeper than just script pages.

  “Preston, when I ask you to do something,” Denham began, then faltered a moment. His expression was inscrutable. “Have I ever said ‘Please?’ ”

  “No,” he replied after a moment of reflection. “I don’t think you ever have.”

  On the table, next to Denham’s drink, was the map. A finger of dread traced its way down Preston’s back as he glanced at it. He reached out and picked it up.

  “But that doesn’t mean I take you for granted, right?” Denham continued.

  “Right,” Preston echoed, distracted by the map.

  Still lost and distant, off in his own mind somewhere, Denham absent-mindedly picked up Preston’s scotch from the table, apparently having forgotten that he was “off the stuff.”

  “Because you know…I would never jeopardize your personal safety…or the safety of anyone on this ship.”

  Preston was no longer paying attention. All of his focus was on the map. He’d noticed something written in a strange, barely legible script.

  “Carl,” he said quietly, “have you seen what’s written here?”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” Denham muttered, staring into the scotch, swirling it in the glass. “I would never betray a friend.”

  “Kong…” Preston read, recalling the warnings of Hayes and Lumpy that day in the mess room. “It says, ‘Kong.’ ”

  “When all this is over, I’m gonna make it up to you,” Denham said firmly. “I swear.”

  The director gestured for him to drink up, but Preston ignored him. He stared at Denham, unnerved and growing deeply worried. He’d thought they were talking about two entirely separate subjects…but now he wondered if perhaps they were talking about the same thing after all.

  “Carl, what are you really looking for?”

  Denham downed the scotch in one gulp.

  “Carl?” Preston prodded, his dread growing deeper with every breath.

  Denham opened his mouth to speak. Then his troubled expression turned to one of anger. For an instant, Preston thought the director would be cross with him again, but then he felt it, too.

  The thrum of the ship’s engines had begun to die down. To slow.

  Denham stood abruptly, face etched with fury and panic and shock.

  “We’re turning around!”

  10

  DREADFUL EXPECTATION HAD CURLED up into a tight ball within Denham’s gut. He stormed up to the wheelhouse, riding a surge of fury and desperation. Nothing was going to get in the way of his making this picture. Carl Denham was a man out of options. If he came back from this voyage empty-handed, he was finished.

  His hands shook with the desire to hit something and his skin prickled with horrid anticipation as he marched to open the door.

  When Denham burst into the wheelhouse, Englehorn was at the helm. The tightness in the director’s gut turned to ice, for he knew that the captain himself had ordered the reversal of direction. The first mate, Hayes, and the radio operator both looked up warily as Denham stood glaring at their skipper, chest rising and falling with each angry breath.

  “What’s going on, Englehorn? Why are we changing course?”

  The captain’s expression was blank, but hard. He handed Denham a cablegram. “It’s from the bank. They’re refusing to honor your check.”

  A spike of panic went through Denham’s heart and his pulse quickened even further. This wasn’t going to happen now. He wouldn’t allow it.

  He made a show of reading the message, though Englehorn had already told him all he needed to know.

  “Look, it’s a stupid mistake!” he said.

  Englehorn’s nostrils flared. Curtly, he spoke one word. “Outside.”

  Denham felt the corners of his mouth twitch as if he might smile, but it was hysteria, not amusement. This was not going to happen. Englehorn led the way out onto the narrow bridge that ringed the wheelhouse. The fog had grown thicker and the wind was whipping against them. Denham glanced around, but there was no one to overhear them. No one but the boy, Jimmy, up in the crow’s nest high above, and given the glimmer of illumination up there, it was clear the kid was busy reading something by flashlight rather than doing his job.

  With a grunt of anger, Denham pushed his black, unruly hair away from his face and glared at the captain.

  “There’s a warrant out for your arrest, did you know that?” Englehorn said, quiet, reserved. “I have been ordered to divert to Rangoon.”

  Denham felt the blood drain from his face. He shook his head. No way.

  “Another week, that’s all I’m asking,” Denham said. All his life had been one negotiation after another. This was no different—it was only the consequences that were greater. “I haven’t got a film yet. I’ve risked everything I have on this.”

  It wasn’t quite pleading, but it was as close as Denham’s pride would allow him to get.

  “No, Denham. You risked everything I have,” Englehorn replied scornfully.

  A strange calm settled over the director, as though he were sailing into disaster and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “Tell me what you want? I’ll give you anything.”

  Englehorn gave him a look of cold, detached indifference.

  “I want you off my ship.”

  In the mess room, Jack poured Ann a cup of coffee. His stomach knotted in revulsion as the thick, steaming, black sludge plopped from the pot into the mug. He passed the mug to Ann a bit reluctantly and watched in fascination as she took a sip. The grimace she made at the taste came as no surprise.

  “Too hot?” he said hopefully.

  “I think it’s just taken the enamel off my teeth.”

  Jack raised his own mug in a mock toast. “Here’s to drinking bad coffee in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

  Ann arched an eyebrow. “Happy days.”

  Lumpy had been puttering around the galley and Jack had wrongly assumed he couldn’t hear them.

  “Throw it out!” the cook called as he entered, carrying a huge bucket of sloshing liquid. “We’ll restock the perishables in Rangoon.”

  Jack frowned. “Rangoon?”

  “Very tropical,” Lumpy said. “You’ll like it there.”

  Ann wore a puzzled expression that Jack figured was a mirror of his own.

  “That’s where you’re getting off,” the cook explained as he dumped the bucket in a slop sink. “The skipper thinks Rangoon is the ideal place for Mr. Denham to finish his film. You couldn’t have picked a nicer spot, providing you stay indoors and you’re sensibly armed.”

  Alarmed, Jack glanced at Ann, whose face blanched as her mouth opened silently. Lumpy seemed not to have noticed the effect of his words. He hefted a crate of cabbages and headed for the door.

  “Mind you, it’s not getting into the place that’s hard. It’s finding a safe passage out…good luck with that,” the cook said, and then he was gone.

  Jack reached for Ann’s hand, certain she was thinking precisely the same thing that he was.

  It w
as time to have a little chat with Carl.

  Jack stood on the deck of the Venture, the night closing in around him. The ship sliced through black water with an almost conspiratorial whisper that was audible above the rumble of the steamer’s engines.

  He stared at the map in his hands, at the crude drawing of an island. The writer and Carl had a friendship going back many years, so because of that, Jack was trying to figure out a way to look at their present situation and not want to slug Denham.

  “Englehorn’s in on it!” Carl raved, wildly pacing. “That bastard German! Him and the bloody Norwegian!”

  Jack scowled at him. “What Norwegian? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The fella I bought the map off—the skipper of a freighter. He picked up a castaway. The guy was barely alive, the only survivor of a shipwreck. Before he died he gave the Norwegian skipper that map. I’m telling you, Jack, they’re trying to get rid of me! They’re gonna dump me in Rangoon and claim it for themselves!”

  “Claim what?” Jack said, throwing up his hands. “For Christ’s sake will you listen to yourself? You dragged us all out here on the pretext of making a movie—”

  Denham snatched the map from his hands.

  “This is the movie, goddamn it! Do you have any idea how huge it could be? The last remnant of a dead civilization. It’s gonna vanish, Jack! This island is sinking…it’s gonna disappear from the face of the Earth! Don’t you get it?”

  For just a moment Jack was intrigued by the idea. If Denham was right, if this was some ancient civilization about to be lost beneath the waves like some miniature Atlantis, it would be an extraordinary find—and a once-in-a-lifetime backdrop against which to shoot a picture.

  But his interest was swallowed by anger.

  “No,” Jack said. “No, I don’t. You know why? You never told me. Buddy…pal…friend?”

  “Damn right, I didn’t,” Carl replied, expression hardening. “You think I was born yesterday? I learned this business the hard way. No one had the guts to back me, so I backed myself.”

  “On the basis of what? A scrap of paper?”

  Denham grew quiet. He held up the map. “This is real. It exists.”

  Drawn in by the man’s certainty and overwhelming charisma, Jack took the map from Carl again, held it up and stared at him. A shudder went through Jack, though he couldn’t have said why.

  Then he looked at Carl, eye to eye. “Then perhaps it’s not meant to be found.”

  Anger still burned in Captain Englehorn, but as he stood in the wheelhouse, peering out into the night through moisture-spattered glass, he found he had other, far graver concerns. His first indication of real trouble came when he glanced at Hayes, who was at the wheel, but bent over to peer at the ship’s compass.

  Englehorn didn’t like the nervous expression on Hayes’s face. Not in the least. It wasn’t like the man at all.

  The captain moved to the compass and looked down. Its pointer was swinging wildly to and fro as though the ship were caught up in the midst of some magnetic storm, with lightning throwing it off.

  Englehorn took the wheel from his first mate. “Check our position, Mr. Hayes. Use the stars.”

  Hayes picked up a sextant and stepped through the door out onto the bridge, little more than a narrow walkway around the wheelhouse. He looked up at the sky and his face hardened with concern. Watching him, a tremor of apprehension went through the captain.

  Hayes ducked his head back through the door. His facial expression was nearly as ominous as his tone.

  “There are no stars, captain.”

  The captain handed the wheel over to another crewmember, Pierrault, and stepped out to join Hayes on the bridge. He kept a grim, stony façade, but his heart had begun to hammer with alarm. The ship, and all aboard, were his responsibility.

  Englehorn stared into the murkiness ahead, wondering what, precisely, they had sailed into.

  Denham leaned on the rail, looking out to sea, the map clutched in his hands. He was so lost in his thoughts that he barely noticed Jack pacing in frustration, the thick fog rolling in. Now, though, the writer came striding back toward him.

  Jack called his name, but Denham didn’t stir. His friend’s voice seemed far away.

  “Carl! Hey, Carl!” Jack said, getting his attention at last. “What happened? What the hell is going on?”

  Denham was about to respond, but he glanced down at the map again. That dark smudge on the paper caught his eye. He rotated it in his hands, studying it more closely.

  And in the scrawl of barely legible words on the map, only one gave him pause.

  Kong.

  Beside it there was that image. With a little imagination, and perhaps the superstitions of sailors working on his mind, it did look like a face: the terrible, snarling, bestial face of a gorilla.

  His fascination was interrupted by the foghorn blaring up on the bridge. Slowly, Denham glanced up from the map, a spark of hope fanned to life in his chest. As he looked up, he saw Jack’s concern: the thin mist that had lain on the surface of the water was being enveloped by a much larger, denser bank of fog, like one cloud swallowing another. This new fog bank was a wall of gray-white roiling above the inky water—and already the prow of the ship was disappearing inside.

  Another blast of the foghorn echoed across the ocean.

  At the wheel, Englehorn barked at Pierrault. “Station the for’ard lookout, and get me the depth by lead line!”

  The helmsman hurried away. Englehorn’s pulse was racing as he tried not to imagine the Venture bottoming out on some reef or shoal. The compass wasn’t working. They could see nothing at all in the fog. And he had already heard the stories of the island Denham had wanted to bring them to…of the fog that shrouded it and the men who’d died when their ships were scuttled on the rocks.

  He couldn’t think about it. His crew would drop lead lines, measure the depth of the ocean bottom that way, and he would keep his ship out of shallow waters. No other choice.

  “Reduce speed, steerage way only,” he ordered.

  Hayes swung the levers on the telegraph. “Dead slow ahead, both,” he replied, and the engines went from growl to purr.

  They were blind, now, but they were still alive. Still running.

  Jack gazed around the deck, still astonished at the thickness of the fog and the utter lack of visibility. He could barely see Denham in front of him, or the door that led belowdecks. Sailors hurried all around him, shouting to one another in the jargon of their occupation, half of which he didn’t understand. One of the men threw a line overboard.

  “Thirty fathoms! No bottom!” the man cried into the echoing fog.

  Preston came out the door onto the deck, the fog caressing him. He looked like a drunken man, staggering a bit, staring around wide-eyed. Jack expected his expression was no different.

  Hayes discovered he was holding his breath, and took a sip of air, exhaling slowly as he stared out at the fog. It slid over the windows of the wheelhouse like some preternatural thing, as though they were not so much sailing through it as being consumed by it.

  Anxiously, he turned to Captain Englehorn, whose grip on the wheel was white-knuckled.

  “You should stop the ship,” Hayes said, biting off each word. It was the smartest course—they could wait out the fog, or wait out the night, but with both, they could not proceed without risk.

  And he knew the tales of the island as well, and the men who had died in a fog so much like this.

  Englehorn spun the wheel. “Fifteen degrees port.”

  Hayes silently urged him to listen to reason.

  “We’re getting out of here, Mr. Hayes,” the captain assured him. “We’ll find clear conditions.”

  From out on the deck, the shout of a crewman rang clear in the fog. “Twenty-five fathoms!”

  Cursing, Hayes rushed out of the wheelhouse onto the bridge and looked down at the sailor on the deck with the lead line. There was a wild look of fear in the crewman’s
eyes.

  Driscoll and Denham were also down on the deck looking around, anxious and helpless, as the crewmen rushed around them. A ripple of bitter fury went through Hayes. It looked like Denham was going to get what he wanted after all. The director walked away from his writer, pushing past his assistant, Preston, as he went.

  “We have seabed!” the sailor with the lead-line shouted. “Twenty-two fathoms!”

  Hayes turned and rushed back into the wheelhouse. “We’re shallowing!”

  Englehorn only stared ahead at the thickening fog, despair in his eyes. He started to spin the wheel. “Twenty degrees starboard!”

  “Captain, you don’t know where the hell you’re going!” Hayes shouted.

  Englehorn glared at him. “Get me another reading!”

  High in the crow’s nest, Jimmy had put aside Heart of Darkness and his flashlight the moment they’d entered the dense fog bank and the horn had blown. No use trying to read now. And now with the shouting from below, he knew something had gone terribly wrong.

  He peered into the fog, trying to make out anything ahead. Nothing. Just gray, damp mist roiling in the darkness.

  And then there it was.

  Jimmy leaped to his feet, terror seizing him. In that moment, heart hammering in his chest, every childhood fear he’d ever entertained came back to him, every monster who’d ever lurked under his bed. For out of the fog loomed a huge face, carved of rock, glaring down at him with utter malice.

  No, not just a face. Something else. Impossibly huge.

  “Wall!” he screamed. “There’s a wall ahead!”

  11

  WHEN HE HEARD JIMMY’S panicked shout, Lumpy was sitting on the deck in the fog, scrubbing mold off of a basket full of dodgy-looking vegetables. If the sailors moving past him in the dark got a good look at them, they wouldn’t have touched a vegetable for the rest of the voyage. That was saying quite a bit, considering these gents weren’t the most discerning when it came to their cuisine.

  Lumpy chuckled to himself in amusement at Jimmy’s alarm. He knew they were in shallow water—all the shouts from the crew had told him that much—but a wall?