Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  KINDLE EDITION

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  Sargasso

  copyright ©2012 by Russell C. Connor

  All applicable copyrights and other rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, for any purpose, without the express, written permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  This is a work of fiction. While some names, places, and events, are historically correct they are used fictitiously to develop the storyline and should not be considered historically accurate. Any resemblance of the characters in this book to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Also by Russell C. Connor

  NOVELS

  The Jackal Man

  Race the Night*

  Whitney

  Finding Misery*

  Sargasso*

  Good Neighbors

  Between

  Predator

  COLLECTIONS

  Howling Days*

  Killing Time*

  THE BOX OFFICE OF TERROR TRILOGY

  Second Unit*

  Director’s Cut

  EBOOK ONLY NOVELLAS

  Outside the Lines*

  Dark World

  Talent Scout

  Endless

  Mr. Buggins

  The Playground

  THE DARK FILAMENT EPHEMERIS

  Volume I: Through the Deep Forest

  Volume II: On the Shores of Tay-ho

  Volume III: Sands of the Prophet

  Volume IV: The Halls of Moambati

  *Indicates Dark Filament Ephemeris supplementary connection

  PRAISE FOR RUSSELL C. CONNOR’S WORK:

  GOOD NEIGHBORS

  Silver Medal Winner: Independent Publisher Awards

  Bronze Medal Winner: Readers’ Favorite Awards

  “Connor’s ability to richly develop each character and plot thread is fascinating even when the horror is reserved…the constricting pressure as the dread piles on makes this book hard to put down and even harder to go to sleep after reading. This is a great novel…”

  -David J. Sharp, Horror Underground

  SECOND UNIT

  “Intricately plotted and vividly layered with suspense, emotional intensity and strategic violence.”

  -Michael Price, Fort Worth Business Press

  “Drips with eeriness…an enjoyable book by a promising author.”

  -Kyle White, The Harrow Fantasy and Horror Journal

  FINDING MISERY

  “Major-league action, car chases, subterfuge, plot twists, with a smear of rough sex on top. Sublime.”

  -Arianne “Tex” Thompson, author of Medicine for the Dead and One Night in Sixes

  THE JACKAL MAN

  “Connor delivers a brisk, action-packed tale that explores the dark forests of the human—and inhuman—heart. Sure to thrill creature fans everywhere.”

  -Scott Nicholson, author of They Hunger and The Red Church

  CONTENTS

  Transcript

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  PART VI

  PART VII

  PART VIII

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Radiolog transcript between US Coast Guard vessel Miami 18 (crew of 8) and privately-owned houseboat Holy Mackerel, registered to Farhad Iravani (believed to have 5 passengers onboard)

  June 18, 1984, 14:33 Eastern Time

  Holy Mackerel (HM): Mayday, mayday, mayday; this is the Holy Mackerel! Any channel receiving, please respond!

  Miami 18 (M18): Attention crew of the Mackerel, this is Coast Guard cutter Miami 18. We read you. Over.

  HM: (sounds of cheering) Oh, thank god! My wife and I have been broadcasting for two hours! I thought we were too far out for anyone to receive us! Over.

  M18: What seems to be the problem? Over.

  HM: I do not know sir, something is wrong with our damn engine. We are dead and drifting! Over.

  M18: Can you confirm your location, Mackerel? Over.

  HM: Looks like…81 degrees west by 25 degrees north. Do you copy that? Over.

  M18: We copy you. We’re twenty minutes out from your position. Just stay calm, sit tight, and we’ll get you folks towed back stateside, all right? Over.

  HM: Bless you good sir, my wife and children—(long burst of static, timed at approximately 1:43)—going on?

  M18: Mackerel, we didn’t catch that last transmission. Please repeat. Over.

  HM: Your signal faded, sir. For a moment, we were picking up another broadcast. Over.

  M18: What was the nature of this broadcast? Over.

  HM: It wasn’t English, it sounded foreign. It was…very unsettling. I attempted to reply—first in English, then in Farsi—and when it responded, it told me only ‘Go.’ Over.

  MI18: Wait, we need a clarification on that. Do you mean this other transmission answered you in Farsi? It actually spoke the language? Over.

  HM: Yes, and then…dear lord.

  M18: Mackerel? You still with me? Over.

  HM: There are other ships out here. They all seem to be adrift also. O-over.

  M18: I’m still not sure we’re reading you correctly, Mackerel. What kind of ships? Over.

  HM: Some sailboats…a few fishing vessels…(sounds of excited shouting)—very old, like something from the Middle Ages!

  M18: Mackerel, stay clear of any vessels in your area. This region is notorious for smugglers and pirates. They congregate in international waters to make contraband exchanges. We’ll be to you in fifteen minutes. Over.

  HM: We are about to drift into one of them…hold on, children! We bumped against one, but we are fine! And there is some kind of blue beacon flashing to the north!

  M18: What the…? Mackerel? Over.

  HM: Oh no, oh my Lord, no! Amira, get the children back! Look out! (running footsteps, screams) Help us—under attack—!

  M18: Mackerel, what’s going on? Has someone boarded you? Over.

  HM: —came from the other boat—

  M18: Who has boarded you? (aside) I know, but their goddamn mic must be stuck open!

  HM: (growling noise followed by a scream; loud, building static)

  M18: Come in, Mackerel! Anyone on board, please respond!

  HM: (loud mechanical noises followed by roar)

  M18: Shit, what the hell was that? (Miami 18 switches channels) Base…this is 18. We…we just saw a blue flash on the horizon ahead, bright enough to light up the entire sky. It looked like a nuclear explosion, for Christ’s sake. The water out here has gotten rough and we’re all feeling a little seasick suddenly. We’ll proceed with caution. Over and out.

  No trace of the Holy Mackerel

  was ever recovered.

  1

  The squinty bartender put two frosty beer bottles on the bar, along with a fruit-juice-heavy concoction adorned with a pineapple slice and a plastic umbrella. His breath, blowing over the three or four yellow teeth left in his head, smelled to Eric like a potent mix of dead fish and the contents of the shelves behind him. His skin was leathery from lifetime exposure to sun and sea air, his nose bulbous, pockmarked and straining against the boundary created by the beady eyes above.

  This, Eric Renquist thought, is the kind of local you meet when you go slumming off the guidebook.

  The old man looked up from his wares and asked, “You kids ain’t headin
out Sargasso way, are ya?”

  Tension straightened Eric’s spine. He gave one furtive glance around the dank seaside bar before answering but had no idea what he was looking for. Suspicious bulges under clothing? Eyes that stared back a bit too long before dropping? Earpieces, maybe, like something from a cheesy cop TV show? For a guy used to being the center of attention, remaining inconspicuous was a new way of life for him. But his father’s lessons in caution had sunk into his head a lot deeper than anything he’d learned at Penn U the last four years.

  Which was not, admittedly, all that much.

  As far as he could see, there was nothing to get nervous about. The other patrons—most of them as homely as the bartender himself—were too busy getting shitfaced in the warm Caribbean air to notice him. The bar was only three walls and a thatched roof, with dining tables arranged on a patio beyond the shade of the interior, overlooking the beach and the bustling panorama of the Nassau docks. Out there, the sun was scorchingly bright, but in this dive the only lighting was over the bar; it turned every wrinkle and fold of the ancient man’s face into fat black lines. From somewhere back there, static-laden speakers pumped a bass-heavy Calypso remix of Will Smith’s “Miami”.

  Eric leaned toward the old fart across the bar. “How’d you know that?”

  “Heard you and your friends talkin earlier.” His accent sounded like a mish-mash of Cajun, Irish, and the local Bahama patois.

  “So what if we are? What’s it to you?”

  He shrugged. “Just a warnin, friend. Bad time for it, s’all.”

  “Oh really, old timer? And why’s that?”

  The bartender made a business of wiping out some used mugs. “Air feels wrong out there. Like it’s fulla electris’ty.” Each syllable of this last word was sounded out carefully. “Strange things happ’n when tha air gets like that. Trust me.”

  Ah, so he wasn’t really prying, just looking for an excuse to yammer. Eric slung a leg around the closest bar stool. “Sounds like you got a Triangle story.”

  “Aye. A story.”

  “Unburden yourself, brother.” Eric caught the eye of a native goddess with tightly braided cornrows at the other end of the bar. He winked before remembering he was wearing sunglasses.

  “Nearly ten years ago,” the old man began, still cleaning glasses as he spoke, “my son and his wife—pregnant she was, with their first child—they set sail for tha Florida coast. He’d just bought hisself a new yacht, christened tha Fam’ly Way, and come down here ta show me. They left from yonder port, same way you ‘bout to. A perfectly calm day, nary a cloud in tha sky, but I amember thinkin tha air felt wrong then, too. Almost like…you could taste it on your tongue. Kindly bitter.” He smacked his lips to illustrate this. “Few hours later, ‘nother ship picked up a distress call less’n four miles from their position. I spoke ta tha guy who heard it later on, and he said my boy was babblin ‘bout monsters, and lights in tha sky. Said…said he sounded terr’fied.” The bartender seemed to wind down as he said this last, his rag freezing in mid-wipe as he stared off into memory. Gathered tears made his dull eyes look gummy. “By tha time they got there, just thirty minutes later, tha seas had got rough, even though there still weren’t no wind. But my boy…he was gone. They never found him, his wife or tha Fam’ly Way.” He inhaled sharply as he came back to life behind the bar.

  “Okay, my man, I gotta know.” Eric hopped up, gathered the drinks, and tossed a twenty on the bartop. “Do you spin that moldy old tale for everyone stupid enough to come in here for a drink? Complete with tears and everything?”

  “I…I don’t…”

  “Seriously, it’s a good story. Only problem is, I’ve read just about every book written on the Bermuda Triangle, and I’ve never heard of any boat called the Family Way.”

  The bartender tucked away his pain, wiped his eyes with the bar rag, and said defensively, “There ain’t enou’ books in tha world to talk ‘bout every person Sargasso’s swallowed. Gets mighty repe’tive, I guess. But I know it’s true.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do.” Eric gave a last smirk and strolled away.

  The bartender watched him weave across the bar into the sunlight, back to his table where three other early twenty-somethings sat, one of them a buxom blonde all but popping out of her string bikini. He’d seen more rich young men with musclebound bodies come through here than he could count, all of them obnoxious, all of them thinking the world had been created solely for them to carry around in the back pocket of their designer khaki shorts.

  He shook his head, jowls jiggling, and took the next drink order.

  2

  As Eric came back from the bar, Justin Bushe recognized the smug smile on his friend’s lips all too well. It meant he’d handed someone their ass, gotten to feel superior to another human being if only for a few seconds. Eric used to get the same look on his face daily in high school, a sure indicator there was an underclassman somewhere whose wet head now smelled like the hormone-riddled piss of a hundred teenage boys.

  “Beer for the bro,” he said, handing Justin a bottle as he slid into the unoccupied plastic patio chair beside him.

  “Thanks, man.” Justin saluted with a finger.

  “Rum sunrise for the hottie.”

  On the other side of the table, the girl Eric had introduced to Justin and Amber only as ‘Cherrywine’ giggled, creating a low-grade earthquake of bouncing flesh on her chest. Her pink bikini top barely had enough material to cover her nipples. She accepted the drink, popped the straw between collagen-thick lips, and sucked down half of it in one pull. “Yummy!” she cooed. “Thank you, baby!”

  “And a great big, fat nothing for the killjoy who brought a fucking library with her.”

  Across from Justin, Amber didn’t even look up from her textbook as she said, “Eat a dick, Eric. I told you if I came, I was going to study.”

  “Woah, nice mouth on your girl over there! Just told me to eat a dick!”

  Justin shrugged. “And yet you’re still talking. If you can get a word out around a mouthful of manmeat, that usually means you’re doing it wrong.”

  “You would know, bro.” Eric leaned back in his chair, the unbuttoned sides of his designer guayabera flopping open. “I’m just saying, what’s the point in coming if you ain’t gonna enjoy it?”

  “Life doesn’t stop when you have a party.” Amber looked up now, eyes flashing beneath the rim of her ball cap, and Justin recognized the look on her face too. “Some of us are taking real classes, not just wasting Daddy’s money.”

  “Screw you, I did awesome last semester!”

  “In what, Coloring Inside the Lines? How much does the professor charge for an A?”

  Eric’s expression darkened. Justin rushed to distract him before a war broke out, pointing the neck of his beer at the bar. “What was that about?”

  “Who, the bartender? Old bastard was just yanking my chain. Telling boogeyman stories about the Triangle.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, warning us not to go out. Said the air was bad or some crazy shit like that.” He took a swig from his bottle. “Only thing bad around here is this stuff. Shoulda stayed at the hotel bar. Don’t know why I let you bring me to the cheap places.”

  “Because the cheap places are all I can afford, asshole.”

  “I said I was buying!”

  “Is it…is it really dangerous?” Cherrywine twisted a lock of curly blond hair around one finger as she spoke.

  “The beer? I think I’ll live, babe.”

  “No, the Bermuda Triangle! I watched this movie where all these ships went missing for a while and then, when they came back, everyone was a ghost!”

  “That’s called fiction, sweetheart,” Amber muttered.

  “It is?” Cherrywine frowned at her. “I thought it was called Death Ship. But anyway, I don’t wanna go if people really disappear out there!”

  “Relax, it’s all bullshit.” Eric brought a leg up and rested it on the tabletop, al
most spilling Cherrywine’s drink.

  “How do you know?”

  “He did his end-of-year science report on it in the ninth grade.” Justin grinned at Eric. “You used to be fascinated by the most morbid stuff back then. Remember when you went on your serial killer kick and started drawing all those bloody pictures? The school nurse told his mom he was ‘disturbed.’”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Eric held up an open hand, as though trying to slap the words away. “The point is, once you really start digging, most—not all, but most—of that Triangle stuff is just a buncha crap. People tell stories to explain away wrecks and piracy, just like the shit that bartender tried to feed me. And the more they tell them, the bigger the legends get.”

  “Gotta be something to it,” Justin argued, actually interested in the topic now. He could remember Eric’s little fascinations when they were kids, the glazed sheen to his eyes when he found Justin before school and described whatever disaster or gory accident he’d read about online or in the nonfiction books he checked out from the library. Back then, when all they had was each other, and popularity was a distant concern, Justin hadn’t thought this was strange at all (still didn’t, considering he now knew who Eric’s father was), but as his hobbies started to make him look weird to their teachers and classmates—in other words, when he started getting tackled the hardest in football practice, and girls began avoiding him like the plague—Eric’s interest in the macabre suddenly faded away. Now, hearing him talk like this, Justin wondered if they’d actually just been hidden away. “I mean, what about that old ship they found abandoned from the 1800’s? What was it, the Mary Celeste? We learned about that in school, for god’s sake.”