Dead Sea

You could guard against it and fight it at every turn with drugs and disinfectants and healing bandages, but you only beat it back into the shadows. And it was there, in that damp and sullen darkness, that death grew like a tumor, reached out and clutched, squeezed, became something huge and hungry and inevitable. Breathing toxins and fevers. Its cold fingers were iron once they had taken hold and no man could hope to pry them loose. You could try, but death only grabbed that much harder, recognizing its own and determined to take what belonged to it. And it would not stop until life had been uncorked and spilled to the floor and there was only darkness, a whispering darkness that pulled you down and down…

When Gosling died they wrapped him up in a waterproof tarp from the raft and had Chesbro quote some scripture over him. It was the best they could do. Elizabeth managed to keep her Aunt Else out of the entire affair and that was a good thing. Because George was taking it hard, was feeling Gosling’s death like his insides were filled with tacks and ground glass. Whichever way he turned, he hurt and hurt badly. And had Aunt Else laid into him about his negligence as captain of the ship, he would have shared some of that pain with her, he knew. Said things to her that would have waxed her lips shut forever.

They performed the threadbare service out on the deck by lantern light. It was a grim and disturbing affair, those lanterns flickering and shadows jumping and that fog pressing in like corpse-gas.

Then Gosling was put over the side in his weighted shroud. At first, he just languished on the weed and George thought, with a terrible sinking feeling inside him, that the body would never sink. It would lodge itself right there and make him look at it day by day. .. but then, slowly, it melted into the weed and the last remains of Paul Gosling, first mate of the Mara Corday, sank from view and something in George sank with them.

As George watched the body disappear, he kept thinking: Message in a bottle, message in a bottle.

14

When Cushing saw the boat, it took his breath away.

For one crazy, reeling moment he thought it was bearing down on them, a ghost ship coming at them out of the weed. But it wasn’t moving. It was just dead and vacant-looking, another derelict caught in the creeping weed of the ship’s graveyard. Ribbons and filaments of mist were rising from its decks and derricks as if it were exhaling pale swamp vapors. It was an old wooden purse seiner with a black, scathed hull and a white wheelhouse that had gone gray and dingy with mildew. Her prow was sharp, looked like it could slit open the underbelly of the weed quick as a razor… but beyond that, it was simply dead.

Forgotten.

Abandoned.

Cushing saw it there in the fog and he could tell right away that Elizabeth wanted no part of it. The way she looked at it and then at him, told him that this vessel was shunned like the neighborhood haunted house. And it did look haunted. More than just empty. Occupied somehow, but not lived-in.

Day had broke now… what day there was in the Dead Sea… and Cushing had joined Elizabeth on one of her little expeditions in the graveyard. She had shown him the old barge where she tended her gardens, the freighters which had more fresh water in their tanks than you could drink in a lifetime. And now, there was this old fishing boat, a sixty-eight footer of the sort that had not been seen in years. Cushing was willing to bet her keel had been laid back in the 1920s.

“We should get back,” was all Elizabeth would say.

But Cushing had no intention of leaving. He was standing there in the scow with her, one of the flat-bladed poles in his hands. “Tell me about that boat,” he said.

“Just another wreck.”

“No, it’s not. I can see it in your eyes… this one is different. What’s its story?”

She just stood there a moment, like maybe she was trying to come up with something good that he would believe and would get them out of there and back to the Mystic. Finally, she sighed. “It’s… it’s where the Hermit lives. It’s his boat.”

“The Hermit?”

She nodded. “Some old man. He was here when we first got here. He doesn’t like people much. He has a gun.”

But, for some reason, Cushing wasn’t buying that. “Have you ever talked to him?”

“He’s crazy.”

“And he was here when you got here?”

“Yes.”

Which, of course, added fuel to Cushing’s time-distortion theory. If Elizabeth and the others had arrived here in 1907 and this boat was already here, something that looked like it couldn’t be any older than the ‘20s, then it all came together, didn’t it? This fishing boat was built much later than the ship that had brought Elizabeth’s people to the seaweed sea… yet it had arrived before them.

“I want to board her,” Cushing said. “I want to talk to this Hermit.”

“Mr. Cushing, please…”

“You don’t have to come.”

Cushing smiled.

Elizabeth frowned.