Dead Sea

Standing there, seeing it in the weed like that, all wrapped up in tissues of mist, it did look like a haunted house jutting from some overgrown, neglected yard. It was big and ghostly and soundless, the wheelhouse windows boarded shut, the bowline hung with a caul of weed. The decks were wreathed with shadows, a mat of fungus growing up over the aft stanchions and winches. There was a lot of wreckage on the foredeck… metal and fused plastic and all manner of debris that were blackened as if by a fire.

Cushing just watched it, let it fill him up. It was just another boat, yet he was certain that it was saying something to him.

“Let’s take a look,” he said.

She shook her head and they began to pole through the weeds until they were close enough that he could grab hold of her bulwarks and pull them along side.

Cushing pulled himself up and over the railing. The decks were moist and slimy and he almost went on his ass. The planking creaked beneath his weight, but held okay. Elizabeth tossed him a line and he tied off the scow to the fencerail. He helped her aboard, but she was very strong and lithe and didn’t seem to need his help. She looked nervous, uncomfortable, something. Her right hand clutched the hilt of the machete she wore at her waist.

“He won’t like us being here,” she said.

Cushing stood there, feeling the boat under him and around him and he was certain that it was empty. There was nothing here but memory. He could feel it.

He moved forward, up around the mast tower, and up the short steps to the wheelhouse door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing.. . just the echo of his rapping knuckles inside, but nothing else. The door opened with a grating, groaning sound. It was dark and grainy inside. He found a lantern and lit it. Better. The Hermit had turned the wheelhouse into his quarters. There was a cot along one wall, books piled on the floor and in shelves. There was a writing desk scattered with papers and a table crowded with old charts. It smelled like an old library in there, like musty pages and rotting bindings.

Cushing went to the chart table.

Most of the charts were of the Atlantic, the Cape Hatteras region. But there was one that was not. It was hand-drawn. He studied it carefully in the lantern’s light. The longer he studied it, the more excited he became. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

Elizabeth looked at it. “Yes,” was all she would say.

It was a map of the ship’s graveyard rendered very carefully in ink. It was very detailed, though uncompleted, and must have taken years. Apparently the Hermit had spent his time exploring the wrecks and he had put all their names down. “By God, look at these names.. . the Enchantress, the Proteus, the Wasp, the Atlanta, the Raifuku Maru, the City of Glasgow… these are all famous disappearances tied in with the Devil’s Triangle.”

“The what?” Elizabeth said.

Cushing just shook his head. “Nothing.” He was going over that chart. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships listed, from old galleons to modern container ships. Many were named, others were tagged as “Unknown”. The Hermit had sketched out where the weed was thickest, where the greatest fields of wreckage were to be found, places nearly impassable on account of the great concentration of wrecks. To what would have been east and west on a normal chart were just labeled UNKNOWN or UNEXPLORED. Some ships and some areas of the weed were tagged with skulls and crossbones.

“What do you suppose that means?” he asked Elizabeth.

She studied the chart. “I can’t say what all of them mean… but this one -” she put her finger on one labeled UNKNOWN BARK – “I think… yes… I think this is the one the squid lives in. In the bottom.”

So, then, that made sense. The skulls and crossbones indicated dangerous places. Other ships were marked with circles. The Mystic was marked thus and Cushing figured it meant that they were occupied. There weren’t many marked such. The Hermit had marked the open channels through the weed, the location of planes including what Cushing thought was the C-130. At the southern edge of the weed, was written SEA OF MISTS. And beneath that, OPEN SEA. In the latter there was a red X. It was large and circled several times.

“This must be where he figured he arrived,” Cushing said. “Probably where the vortex dumped him. I bet that’s where we came in, too.”

There was a dotted line leading from the red X to a smaller black X that was labeled Ptolemy, which must have been the name of the Hermit’s boat and its position in the weed.