by Brian Hodge
I thumb the hammer back.
“… do it, do it, do it….”
As we bob and pitch closer and closer in the darkness, maybe twenty yards away now, our engine burbling like an old man choking on his own saliva, I see the weirdest frigging thing I’ve ever seen — and let me tell you, I’ve seen my share of weird shit. I realize there’s a dark figure, pretty much in silhouette, standing up on the boat, standing near the rear outboard powerplant. I realize it’s him. He’s standing there like he’s waiting for us. Dressed in the rags of a bloody shirt, his stringy, graying blonde hair tossing on the sea breeze, he’s staring at us.
I raise the .357 at him.
“… do it, do it!… “
Now we’re close enough to see the blood. It’s spattered all around the bulwark of the speed boat. It looks like he tried to finger-paint words or symbols all over the seats and the deck, and I realize the glowing light from within is coming from about a thousand candles, and there’s a moldering carcass of an animal near the stern, a dog or a sheep, dangling, flaccid and gutted, over the rail.
I aim at the Freak’s face. The red dot of laser light touches his forehead.
“… DO IT!!… “
The son of a bitch smiles at me. The boats are close enough to spit on each other now. Behind me the GPS is beeping. My scalp is tingling.
The flickering light is shining off the Freak’s face, and I’m close enough to see he’s smiling at me. He’s smiling and I can’t fire.
I can’t do it. I can’t squeeze off a single shot. The trigger is impermeable like a tree trunk planted deep in the earth’s core.
“KILL HIM!!”
I hear the kid’s shriek ring out behind me, and then there’s this black flash of movement. And before I know what’s going on the kid is leaping over the bow of the Sea Ray and vaulting across the ten foot gap between the two boats. I scream at him at the top of my lungs: “BILLY!”
He lands awkwardly on the keel of the speedboat, his feet splashing, the air knocked out of his lungs. The impact makes the speedboat lurch, and sends the Freak staggering backward until he falls on his ass.
It all happens so quickly I don’t even get a chance to make any moves before the Freak is crawling toward the kid. I slam down on the throttle, and the Sea Ray booms, and then it bucks in the water. The gun is still glued to my hand as the Sea Ray rams into the speedboat… tossing both vessels like dominoes… sending me sprawling across the bow… tangling the boats like train couplers locking… but it’s too late now.
The Freak already has Billy in his clutches, and is pulling the kid up into the speedboat. Into the candlelight and sheep’s blood.
The kid screams, and the Freak wraps his gnarled hands around the boy’s neck, and the kid starts kicking and choking and making these weird mewling noises. And I know this is hard to believe but the Freak is smiling through all this. I’m back on my feet by this point and I’ve got the .357 in both hands now, and I’m standing on that rocking deck, gasping for breath, drawing a bead on that prick —
— and I still can’t get one off, I just can’t fire, I can’t do it, my finger’s like the Rock of Gibraltar on that trigger… right up until the moment I hear him speak. And then everything changes.
“What are you waiting for, friend?!” he calls out to me, and he’s staring at me with that sick fish-belly smile, his unblinking eyes locked onto me while the kid’s dying in his hands. And in that one crazy instant in the darkness, as the passage of time seems hang in front of me like a veil, I see something in the Freak’s eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. I wouldn’t exactly call it suffering or pain… I guess the best word for it is torment… as he sneers his words at me: “Are you gonna do it or do I have to gut this dirty little mongrel open like a suckling pig?”
I empty the gun into him.
I don’t really know what I’m doing at that point, I just squeeze and squeeze, the wet blasts popping open the humid air, the sparks like a photographer’s strobe documenting my little moment of truth. The Freak’s head turns to red mist. It’s amazing. His hands still clutch the boy’s neck beneath him long after his face is gone.
Then the clicking noise, and the gun is empty. The Freak sags backward and falls to the deck with a wet splat. My ears are ringing.
The silence seems to close down over us like a great black canopy.
I wish I could tell you the kid made it. I didn’t blubber or anything. To be honest I wasn’t really feeling much of anything at that point. I’m pretty much in shock by that point. But I hated boarding that slimy black casket of a boat. It’s like hopping into a dead shark.
I work in the flickering candlelight, my hands shaking, brain like a frozen stone. I drag the kid’s body over to the rail and pause for a second. His eyes are still open. Like a doll’s eyes. What a god damn waste. I want to hug him. I want to say something but all I can do is toss him into the drink.
The kid barely makes a splash.
The rest of it goes fairly quickly. I toss in the Freak, toss my gun, kick the carcass over the side, and find a plastic gas jug in the aft storage compartment. I douse the bulwark, then hurl the tank into the Gulf. I pull my Zippo out and I’m about to torch the boat when I notice a little silver object lying up on the console by the steering column.
It’s the Freak’s cell phone, the one Ginny rigged with the transmitter bug.
I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it on the boat to burn with the rest of the shit but for some reason I feel compelled to fling the little silver gadget as far as I can out into the open sea. The thing arcs out into the night air, the moonlight flashing on it for a nano-second, and then… plop! The thing lands and sinks.
The guy at the boat yard told us one of the deepest parts of the Gulf is just a mile or so off shore. Said the Tarpin fisherman have to use military depth finders to locate it. I stand there for a moment, breathing hard and fast, soaked with sweat, imagining that cell phone plummeting down and down through that endless black murk.
I imagine it hitting the bottom.
Then I spark the rest of the boat and I’m out of there.
For a while I don’t even realize I’m lost. A wall of humid fog has unexpectedly rolled in but I keep expecting the lights of the coast to materialize like a diamond necklace in the distance. But it never does. My only reference point is the orange spot of that burning speed boat on the horizon behind me but soon that’s gone as well. I guess the thing has finally sunk or maybe just passed out of sight.
I inch along in the pea soup, blind and desperate, the Sea Ray gurgling and sputtering, for another hour or so — like I said, I’m not sure about lengths of time — until finally I realize that the green-toothed, hillbilly asshole put us out with half a tank of gas.
Now I’m running on fumes, and all can do is sit there with my hands glued to that greasy steering wheel, staring at the blanket of darkness in front me. Then the engine gives up the ghost. Now I’m just drifting, the boat pitching and yawing at the whim of the endless black Gulf of Mexico. The air is so thick and humid it feels like gauze on my face.
I think they call it ‘dead calm,’ something like that. Real funny. I’m drifting and drifting, lost in the night, and I’m dead calm. Ha ha, real ironic. But all I can think about in that lapping silence is the fact that the kid is dead, and I finally stepped over that imaginary line, finally committed the act.
The only other thing I can think about, for some reason, is that little bugged Nokia cell phone, plunging and fluttering down, down, down, down… into the darkest, emptiest, coldest place on earth.
And that’s when the little telltale chirping noise pierces my skull.
Look: the truth is I had no reason to believe there was anything weird going on when I heard my cell phone ringing. I’m a freelancer. I get calls in the strangest places, the most inopportune times. I figured it was some sleaze-bag bail bondsman calling about another skip. But when I finally fish through my pockets, find my cell, dig it out, and look
at the caller-ID glowing in the darkness, I jerk backward and drop the phone like it’s a hot coal burning my hand.
“No way,” I utter in the silence, my voice sounding hollow and distant in my ears.
The cell phone continues trilling and vibrating on the deck, creeping across the varnished surface like a beetle, the display sending a tiny beam of sickly light through the fog. I can see the caller-ID number. I can see it. There’s no mistake. I needed to memorize that very same number in order to set up the GPS device last week.
The Freak’s number glows on the little LED screen shivering at my feet.
I turn away from it in a fever of chills. I convince myself I’m just seeing things. My guilty brain has scrambled a few digits. That’s it. That’s got to be it. The cell phone keeps chirping behind me as I gaze out at the wall of dirty grey cotton encapsulating me. If I ignore it maybe it’ll go away. If I just keep staring out at that soupy fog, the thing will stop ringing or my voice mail will pick it up. I’m drenched in sweat and my heart’s pulsing in my neck as I stand there, gripping the rail, waiting for it to stop.
And it does.
The silence that slams down on me is almost worse than the ringing noise.
The faint patter of seawater lapping against the hull is barely audible now above the sound of my ragged breathing. I’ve got that coppery-sour taste in my mouth from all the adrenaline, and I can smell the rank, dead-rot odor of the stagnant tide. The boat is gently pitching, and I’ve got that woozy, twilight feeling you get when you’ve just awakened from a dream — that sense of primal relief with the return of mundane reality.
I turn away from the railing and stagger over to the place I dropped the phone. I kneel down and pick it up. It’s blinking — a little mail box cartoon in the display window. Someone has left me a message. I start to retrieve it but I stop, my thumb poised above the message button.
I don’t want to hear it. Whatever it is. I don’t want to know.
The phone rings again and I jerk like I’ve got a poisonous snake in my hand.
I hurl the little device across the cabin, and it strikes the windscreen, then bounces to the floor in the shadows under the bonnet. I slam my hands over my ears, and bark at the empty night sky — “I’M NOT HEARING THIS SHIT!!” — and I lose my balance as the boat lists suddenly. I fall on my ass. I see stars and I can still hear that thing ringing in the cabin.
“Aw fuck it,” I say and climb back to my feet and then edge my way under the canvas roof. I find the cell phone, pick it up, and thumb the answer button on the fifth ring. “WHO THE HELL IS IT? THIS BETTER BE GOOD!”
My first impression is that the sound is coming from a great distance. A burst of static sizzling in my ear. But under that, a faint voice saying something I can’t quite make out yet. The closest analogy would be maybe an overseas operator speaking some language unlike any language I’ve ever heard. Or maybe an ancient wax-disk recording so full of pops and scratches and crackling noises that you can’t make out the words but that’s not exactly it either.
“Crrrrrhhhhhhhh — ssuh — crrrrhhhhhhh!”
“What!? HELLO?!”
Now maybe I’m in shock or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the trauma of being lost at sea after losing the boy, adrift with my own thoughts after having just committed the unthinkable. In my mind I keep going back to Exodus 20:13 — And God spoke these words, ‘You shall not kill!’ And I keep seeing the Freak’s little Nokia wireless, no bigger than a silver bar of soap, skimming the surface of that obsidian sea where I pitched it, then sinking, then fluttering down and down through the black void, and maybe even coming to rest in the silt at the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.
And now maybe all this overactive imagining has basically snapped my wig, popped the fuse of my sanity like a light bulb flaring out.
But I swear to God I can hear a familiar voice between those bursts of static.
CRRRRRRHHHHHHH - somebody - CRRRRRHHHHHH!
“What?! Who is this goddamnit?!”
CRRRHHHH - therrrre’s sssomebody - CRRHHHHHH!
“Somebody? Somebody-what! Somebody-WHO?!”
CRRRHHH — there’s somebody here — CRRRRH!
“Okay, whatever, there’s somebody there, but where’s there, okay, and while you’re at it why don’t you tell me just who the fuck this — AAHHHHH!”
All of a sudden there’s this terrible, watery shrieking noise coming over the line, but it’s not exactly a scream, it’s more like a howl, like something other than human is roaring on the other end of the line, and I just let out a yelp and hurl the phone into the sea.
The little thing skips a couple of times across the glassy surface of the water, then vanishes, and I’m assuming it’s sunk, you know, I’m thinking the thing is long gone. And I’m catching my breath, leaning back against the bulwark, pretty frantic by that point. I’m thinking about getting out of there with any means necessary, maybe using a piece of the boat as a paddle, or finding something to use as a signal, when all at once I see the little silver device floating alongside the boat in the gentle lapping water.
That telltale chirping sound has started up again, and I don’t even have to look to know what number is flickering on that caller-ID display.
“Heh heh heh heh heh, go to hell, go to hell, nobody home!” I’m raving now in a sing-songy rant, my voice sounding mechanical and garbled in my ears. “Nobody home, nobody nobody, just reading my bible, thou shalt not kill… nobody hommmmmmmmme!”
The thing keeps ringing.
I can’t resist. I wish I could tell you I could. I wish I could say I resisted leaning out over the keel and fishing that thing out of the water. But then I’d be a liar and I’m only good for one mortal sin at a time, if you know what I mean. So, anyway, what I do is, I reach down and pluck that thing from the black lapping waters, and it slips out of my trembling wet hand, plop, and I reach down again and finally I get a good grip on it and put the dripping thing to my ear and scream: “WHO THE HELL IS THIS?!!”
And what I hear coming out of that phone, and what I hear in the distance, in the darkness… well, let’s put it this way: that’s when things go from bad to worse.
I need to take another drink before I tell you the next part, the last part, the part about the water. And the voice. And what happened then.
Okay, here goes: I’m standing there hanging over the water with my heart slamming in my chest and my ear pressed to that dripping cell phone and I hear that wet, hoarse voice piercing the static on the other end of the line: “CRRHHH — there’s somebody down here wants to - CRRRRRHHHHHHHHH!”
I’m about to scream another series of obscenities when I realize I’ve been hearing another sound off in that empty, black distance for quite a while now and haven’t even realized it. But something out of the corner of my eye catches my attention then, a blinking light off to my right, on the floor of the boat, a faint beeping sound.
I don’t put the two things together at first, but when I suddenly realize what I’m hearing out in that fog, and what I’m seeing on the floor of the boat, my heart jumps in my mouth and all my sweat turns to ice.
The GPS receiver.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t don’t do this to me,” I mutter with whatever breath I have left, and I go over and snatch it up with my free hand. Now I’m standing there on that rocking bucket of rust with my knees wobbling and heart thumping and that GPS in my shaking hand and the cell phone glued to my ear.
“CRRRRRRHHHHH - there’s somebody down here wants to talk to you - CRRRH!”
I can see the tiny glowing dots on the GPS again. I see one of the dots moving.
Which brings me to the noise I’ve been hearing. Very faint at first. Like I’m feeling it more than hearing it. But there’s something massive out there, gathering energy, moving toward me. Like a fold in the fabric of the ocean rolling toward my boat.
And I look down at the GPS again, and I see that little glowing spot moving across the little s
pider web of a grid toward the other one, the stationary one. Impossible. Right? I’m just saying. Totally impossible. But here it comes, the little dot moving toward me. And I’m dumb with terror right then, backing away from the rail with the cell phone still pressed to my ear.
CRRRH — there’s somebody down here wants to talk to you! — CRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
Okay, this isn’t easy, describing it, reliving it, but I’ll give it a shot, I have to, I owe it to all of you. You’ve seen submarines when they rise to the surface? Or you’ve seen films of submarines?
First you just see that vague disturbance in the ocean coming toward you, just a nauseating kind of folding in of the water that seems to gather as the gigantic sub starts to materialize from the deep. Then the water begins to implode into itself as the sub emerges with a great torrent of sound and backwash.
This kind of thing had been building out there in the fog for what seemed like hours, a kind of low, vast rumble, and that shadowy undercurrent that I’d been sensing, and now it was approaching, coming up from the depths, and it was huge — Huge! — like a mountain rising out of the Gulf.
“No Jesus no fuck,” I’m backing away on trembling legs and I finally fall down the steps into the shadows of the cabin, dropping the gadgets, seeing stars.
Now maybe this is how those poor son of bitches felt in Moby Dick when that monster came out of that black void, a vast monolith under the surface, displacing a black glacier of sea water as it rises toward you. But I start shrieking like a baby on the floor of that dark cabin, curled into a fetal position, my brain a mess of tangled panic, sparking like an overloading switch board.
Whatever it is coming out of the sea, it reaches my pathetic little boat on a great WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHOMPP! of air pressure collapsing and the seams of the universe ripping apart, and I can’t describe that last sensation before I blacked out. I’ve tried to put it into words. I can’t do it. Best I can manage is that the ocean itself opened its mouth, a great chasm of festering black bile, a raging aperture of rotting fangs and teeth and poison, and it swallowed me, and that was all.
