Avenging Fury

by John Farris

  Cody brought her a glass of cognac. He had to put it in her hand and close the fingers of that hand. She was perspiring, pulses visible in her throat, at her temples. A vein was huge below her right temple, throbbing. Eden had him worried. She seemed to be at critical mass from the emotional heavy lifting. He wiped perspiration from her forehead with the back of his hand, held the glass to her lips. The cognac went down okay. A swallow, two, then a long sigh.

  “You don’t have to tell me any more.”

  “But I do! I knew her name: Delilah. I’ve known it since I was a child. It’s an old, old name cursed and despised for the treachery and evil it embodies. And in my dream I knew her face: because, my friend, Delilah’s face was mine.”

  Eden had another swallow of cognac. A little of it dribbled down her chin and a small drop splashed on the talisman. She stared at Cody with a funereal sadness, eyes smudged like moth-burn on a lampshade.

  “So you see, Cody: I’m the avenger, but also the destroyer, hated everywhere I’m known.”

  “Bull. Your name is Eden. And there’s not a speck of evil in you.”

  “Only half right. I’m Eden the gym rat who learned to live with her bad dreams until they started to come true, Eden who only wants a sane and quiet life and who I think is half in love with a cowboy from New Mexico who, wouldn’t you know, turns out to be a wonderful kisser. Dammit, I am that girl! But here comes my deepest dark secret: there is another one of me, and oh, Cody, I’m afraid of what she’s become, was tricked into becoming by the Magician. Because now one of us is fated to kill the other.”

  OCTOBER 30 • 13° 42’ N, 91° 14’ W • 0350

  HOURS ZULU

  Off the coast of Guatemala, steaming north in a heavy Pacific sea at fifteen knots, the captain of the tanker Culebra, awakened by the A.B. on watch, came into the wheelhouse. His name was Dellarovere, thirty-six years at sea. He went directly to the radar on the nearly pitch-dark bridge 116 feet above the sea and looked at the target north of Culebra’s position.

  “She’s not responding to the radio?”

  “No, sir. Not for the last eight–ten minutes.”

  “Appears to be making no headway?”

  “She’s been set to starboard about a quarter mile since we first noticed her.”

  Dellarovere got on the radio himself. “Calling the vessel approximately thirteen forty-five north, ninety-one ten west. This is the northbound ship ten miles south of you. Over.” He listened. The heavily loaded tanker was rolling nearly fifteen degrees in a quartering sea. There was continued radio silence from the unknown vessel.

  “Crew of damned Greeks,” the A.B. volunteered. Greeks, along with Haitians, were routinely credited by seagoing men as the worst sailors on the planet. The captain glanced at him. The A.B. was going through initial collision-avoidance procedures, using a grease pencil on the plotting head positioned over the ten-centimeter radar screen. The captain, feeling both annoyed and uneasy about the ship that seemed to be adrift in their path, tried the radio again, with the same result. Then he telephoned the bow lookout, who was about two football fields away from the bridgehouse. But there was too much rain for the lookout to report a sighting.

  “Course change, Captain?” the mate asked casually.

  Collisions at sea, in spite of all the sailing room oceans provided, were not a rarity. The size of the ship—for instance, a VLCC like the Culebra, carrying 140,000 tons of crude oil from Maracaibo by way of Cape Horn—had something to do with the chance of collision. The Culebra, at reduced speed in confused seas, was slow to answer the helm. They had not yet invented a braking system for Very Large Crude Carriers at sea. It could take upward of two minutes to achieve full astern in an emergency.

  “Apparently their course is anyone’s guess.” Dellarovere didn’t have to think about it. “Put the ship on hand.” The mate pushed a button to take the Culebra off autopilot. “Bring her port one eight zero. Maintain speed.”

  “One eight zero,” the quartermaster said.

  Dellarovere took binoculars from a locker and used them to look out through one of the spinning glass circles in the window in front of the helm, which offered a clearer view through rain. But there was nothing out there in the dark to focus on.

  “Target eight and one half miles, Captain. I don’t know if ten degrees will do it at present speed.”

  “We’ll want to pass close enough to find out if she’s lost her plant and not under command,” the captain said. Radio silence could mean complete lack of electrical. He ordered the Culebra’s radio operator to be roused from sleep. He would have preferred to stay well away from the unknown vessel. But he could not bypass a distressed ship at sea. She was, potentially, huge trouble. Too much chance of going zero CPA in a force-8 gale. (“CPA” meant closest point of approach. “Zero CPA” was self-explanatory.)

  The A.B. whistled aimlessly and punched up Trial Maneuver on the Collision Avoidance System software. The captain made another phone call, this one for coffee. He raised his binoculars again. They were a little more than four miles from the target on the radar screen when he picked up a momentary pinkish glow nearly dead ahead in the brawling sea.

  A flare.

  ABOARD THE STELLA SALAMIS

  Approximately twenty minutes before the southbound container ship had appeared as a blip on the Culebra’s radar, Tom Sherard was awakened on the cabin deck by what seemed to be every siren and alarm aboard. The ship was rolling deeper than it had been an hour ago, when he’d gone to sleep with a reading light on over his bunk. Not nearly so rough then. A moonlit sky was still visible through his porthole. Now he was pinned against the shallow rail around the bunk on its open side, gripping it with one hand to keep from being thrown to the deck. The light had dimmed as if it were about to go out.

  Sherard didn’t know what the alarms meant. Man overboard, fire below, or some other catastrophe only a fast-developing storm at sea could provide. He had the deep-sink feeling of any first-time seagoer in the midst of a gale: his last meal churning acid into his throat; hair-raising, borderline terror enhanced by the ship’s sluggish responses—complaining, struggling, punch-drunk from rivet-popping blows.

  Sherard was already fully clothed. When he was halfway to the door of his cabin the lights went out. Disoriented in the total darkness, he lost his balance and like a kid in a funhouse with everything awry he slammed against the bulkhead with the next long roll of the ship to starboard. A few seconds later the emergency generator kicked on, adding a saffron glow that cast no shadows.

  The entire house, five stories high, reverberated to a booming of steel against steel on the forward deck. Similar low-light wattage prevailed in the narrow passageway outside. Sherard lurched from wall to wall, tipsy as an old clown in a flickering silent movie. Two doors hung open along the passageway. First mate’s quarters, and the door to the corner room by the steep open stairs to the upper decks that was usually occupied by the chief engineer. If he was already below, then that’s where the emergency was, Sherard thought. But he reckoned that the captain would be on the bridge. The best man to ask about their situation, and if there was any danger. Like the ship going ventral, as old salts would say.

  He started up the stairs toward the wheelhouse, two stories above cabin deck. Holding on to the railing with both hands. During a brief lull of the sirens he heard what could have been pans flying around the galley three decks below. An acrid odor like burned rubber came up from the fire room of the vessel. A sensation of rising heat. He heard no voices of urgent command or shouts of distress, which he accepted as encouraging, in spite of the unnerving clang of steel forward—as if containers had pulled loose from pad eyes and were being thrown around the deck by the storm.

  The Stella Salamis was German built. Captain Riklis, who was very fond of her, had elaborated on her good points: sensitive to the helm even at slow speed, with a sharp bow for riding out rough weather, anything short of a force-12 hurricane. Whatever their problem of the moment, Sherard
knew there would be an almost preternatural calm in the wheelhouse shared by the captain, chief mate, and quartermaster.

  The bow was lifting as he climbed, until it seemed as if he were nearly vertical on the stairs. He lost his footing and clung helplessly to the rails until the bow smashed down into a trough. There was a sensation of traveling precariously sideways for a few seconds. Nearly five hundred feet of hardy steel ship being batted around like a plastic toy in a child’s bath. But the ship rolled stubbornly upright and he got his feet under him, took a deep breath. Then the bow begin to lift again. Sherard looked up at the darkened bridge deck in time to catch a glimpse of a body in free fall.

  Instinctively he reached with his right hand to try to arrest the plunge of whoever had lost his balance up there, bracing for the impact in the narrow stairwell.

  Sherard hooked an arm but couldn’t get a grip, because the arm was slick with oil. Or so he thought until the seaman’s slowed momentum caused his nearly severed, bald head to yaw in Sherard’s direction. He reeked of spilled blood. The arm slipping through Sherard’s grasp was handless. Prongs of bone ends, and then the dead sailor was gone, falling the rest of the way down iron steps, skull hammering the deck.

  For a few shocked moments Sherard couldn’t move. Then he wiped his sticky hand on his cargo pants and continued on to the bridge.

  There were two doors with a passage between them so that at night the wheelhouse would always be dark. In that passage he stumbled across another body. The rubber runner on the floor was coated with gore.

  By then he knew. The Stella Salamis had acquired, in midvoyage and through what supernatural intervention he couldn’t imagine, an Entity in Addition to Crew.

  The door behind him opened to a shrieking blast of squall weather. Guaranteed to freeze the piss and marrow of the most intrepid. He turned in horror, body at his feet, a monster in the mind, throwing up a hand to block some of the webbed glare from a three-battery flashlight.

  “So it’s you,” Captain Riklis said. “I was hoping . . . you would still be alive.” Sherard could barely make him out behind the light. His voice had the cramped breathless quality of a man in considerable pain. “I doubt there is another living soul aboard. So I will need . . . your help.”

  “Lower your light! You’re blinding me.”

  Riklis changed the beam angle, revealing the body on the deck, back of its head missing, most of a gaunt rib cage wetly exposed, ribbons of flesh. He thought it might have been the radio operator.

  “Where is it?” Sherard said. “Where did it go?”

  Riklis blinked slowly, like a man surfacing from a depth of ether, or devastating shock. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll need a weapon.”

  “I have . . . a handgun. But we both know . . . the were-beast cannot be destroyed.”

  They heard an anguished scream from somewhere well below the bridge deck. The captain smiled horridly. “So there may be others still. But the beast will sniff them out. We must hurry while it is . . . occupied.”

  Sherard clung to a handrail as the Stella Salamis rolled heavily, clumsily. With the steering system out of control, the ship had lost all momentum and was taking seas as high as the boat deck. Riklis lost his grip on everything but the Maglite, hit the deck with a pained outcry, and slid helplessly in Sherard’s direction. When he was able to gauge the ship’s pitch and get his feet under him, his trimly bearded face was a study in lost humanity, in the stupefaction of extreme terror. There was a wet blood swath on his blouse, from under one arm to the beltline.

  “Captain, you have to get your ship under command!”

  “Too late. Now you must help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Open the seacocks. The Stella Salamis must never be allowed to make port with . . . that foul thing aboard. Even though it can’t be killed, at least it will be . . . contained. Neutralized. Entombed within a rusting hulk at six thousand fathoms for two or three hundred years.”

  “Bollocks. The were-beast was entombed already, in glass and steel. What makes you think an abyss will hold it?”

  “There is no other way.”

  “There is always a way! First get on the radio and find out if there’s help, another ship, nearby.”

  “I destroyed the radio a few moments ago.”

  In the shaky light, multiple shadows looming around them, Sherard studied the captain angrily. “You bloody fool. Sink the ship, what chance do we have in seas like this?”

  Riklis shook his head wanly. His eyes told that his mind was spinning out of control. A little fresh blood had appeared at one corner of his mouth.

  “But we don’t matter. Please. I was injured. I’m losing blood . . . my strength. We can’t delay.”

  The sirens had stopped. Sherard barely noticed.

  “I’m not helping to scuttle your ship! We may have a monster to deal with, nonetheless it’s flesh and bone and fucking brain matter. I’ve wounded it before! Now I’m finishing the job.”

  “How? You’ve seen it. Enormous. The strength to wrench a lashed-down spare propeller from the deck and hurl it to the wheelhouse windows. Capshaw, Jarkko, they died instantly. Then . . . it climbed the outside of the wheelhouse after me.”

  “I’ll need a flare gun,” Sherard said. “Then gasoline, kerosene—where?”

  “I have a flare gun . . . in my office below. Kerosene is stored near the paint lockers on the shelter deck. But it’s dangerous there. You’ll wash overboard, even with a life-line. Or be battered to death.”

  “Show me!”

  Riklis looked dimly at Sherard. The blood from his mouth had matted in his beard. He nodded, not as if he had real hope, and gestured for Sherard to follow him. Sherard picked up the revolver Riklis had dropped on the deck and looked at it briefly. Smith & Wesson .38. He smiled grimly and handed it back to the captain.

  “Keep it for your own protection. Aim for the eyes if it comes to that.”

  Riklis said something in another language that might have been Latin, then feebly made the sign of the cross. The Stella Salamis yawed and plunged sickeningly into a wave trough. The entire house vibrated like a struck bell as loose containers caromed around the foredeck.

  Open the seacocks? As far as Sherard was concerned, the ship was a goner already. But with luck they all wouldn’t go to the bottom before his showdown with the so-called Great One.

  LAS VEGAS • OCTOBER 30 • 4:05 A.M.

  Eden Waring went barefoot into the condo kitchen to reheat the water in the kettle and make more soothing tea for her parched throat and overworked larynx. When she returned to Cody, who was laid out in the lounger that was designed to pamper his once-broken back, she found that at last she had talked the man to sleep. Eden felt sheepish about it, the outpouring of her recent life and woes, but also strangely blissful, unburdened, much closer to him in this quiet hour. She also had opened the books on her life back home in Innisfall, where for most of her childhood and adolescent years she’d felt like an imposter, dutifully mimicking other girls her age, adopting some of their trivial obsessions and cliquish vernacular, while her mind seethed with the breadth of her occult knowledge. Just trying to fit in and, once she realized how good she could become, to work hard, excel at sports. Softball, tennis, and particularly basketball granted status and popularity. Made it easier to ignore her sometimes-glimpses of that other, alien Eden, sidelined, but observing with cool patience and authority. Waiting for their special time together: graduation day, when Eden Waring was yanked nakedly out of the closet and flash-fried by the media. Awesome was the word. And devastating to her psyche. Had Cody understood? Seemed to. He asked questions that expressed his need to relate the magical and otherworldly to what he’d already observed and instinctively felt about her, affirming the rightness of his uncritical judgment.

  Except for Betts, her foster mother, Eden had never imagined having the confidence to entrust her secrets to another. She was out of words now, but not out of heart. Her heart was
a balloon, one of those hot-air, lofty, cloud-skimming balloons. She sat on the sofa and sipped her tea, yawned occasionally, and studied Cody in his sleep as if every passing moment afforded some new insight, added to her quickening fondness and frank sexual interest.

  She set the cup aside finally and closed her eyes, put a pillow beneath her head. It would not be possible, she knew, for a very long time, if ever. But she had a romantic yearning to go home again. Take Cody with her. It’s just me, Eden. Look what I found! Saying to all of them, He’s a good man and not afraid of me. So what do you have to fear?

  Wishful thinking. A fantasy, for now. But the notion served its purpose, and charmed her to sleep.

  ABOARD THE STELLA SALAMIS • 0420

  HOURS ZULU

  Tom Sherard had seen the movie when he was at boarding school in Nairobi. Age twelve. It was a flawed 16-millimeter print of Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World. Delicious chills and jump-out-of-your-seat scares, classmates spooking one another when the cleverly calculated tension became unbearable. The girls screaming and covering their eyes half the time, when they weren’t surreptitiously holding hands with boys they had crushes on. The Thing. Manlike but huge, a super-strong and intelligent vegetable, it had been chipped out of ice near its crashed flying saucer in a remote Arctic snowscape, then transported by dog sled to a remote scientific facility. Where, wouldn’t you know it, its ice casket was partly melted by an electric blanket. The Thing itself thawed out. The scientists and military personnel inside the sprawling station were hostages to a blizzard outside: nowhere to go, prey for the monster that thrived on—what else—the blood of animals.

  It was that long-ago movie Sherard had had in mind when he tied himself securely to the bolted-down table in the officers’ dining room. Exhausted, as battered as if he’d been in a back-alley brawl from the wallowing of a helmless ship in a gale. The Pacific Ocean and not the Arctic wastelands, but still nowhere to go while he waited for the monster he’d tried to lure, using a loud hailer to be heard above the bellowing thud of containers against the house—probably half of the containers on the decks had come unlashed—and the dull groanings of hull plates, some of which might have been popping rivets at each blow from the huge seas. The radar mast was long gone, carried away by a fifty-foot wave. The house leaked torrents with every steep roll. Water flowed across the galley deck a couple of feet deep at times. Sherard had been soaked for a good twenty minutes, iced to the bone. His hands grew numb as he gripped the loud hailer.