Row Charon Row: Part One
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five)
Dean’s flashlight blinked and went out. He smacked it against his thigh a few times until the light came back, shooting out over the water, reflecting off swirls of fog and the special Washington brand of drizzle, the kind that didn’t fall as much as it hung suspended in the air. The light also hit a buoy painted reflective red, bobbing up and down on the waves.
“I found another one.”
Sam looked up from studying the map. “Nice. What’s with your flashlight?”
Dean took the EMF meter out of the bag at his feet and flipped the switch. Nothing. The arrow stayed pointed at zero. None of the lights flashed. “Could be that someone forgot to change the battery.”
“I wonder who that might’ve been.” With a hooked pole - a gaff, Dean reminded himself, not wanting to sound like an amateur - Sam grabbed the buoy and dragged it closer to their boat. “Here, take the map from me.”
Dean accepted the map automatically, not paying much attention. The EMF meter stayed silent in the bag. He readjusted the bag with his foot, wondering if he should move the meter into his pocket, in case it got splashed. Seawater would probably destroy the thing. But if it was in his pocket, he could miss a small spike of EMF activity. Whatever was happening with the flashlight was making him nervous, even if Sam’s seemed to be fine.
“Sam, are you positive those guys told you sea monsters didn’t give out EMF? Did they specifically say so?”
“Dude, why would they? They’re monsters. You tell me if that makes sense.”
It didn’t. And the EMF meter stayed quiet. “Yeah,” he said. “But.”
Sam finally managed to grab the red plastic balloon and turned to look at Dean, eyebrows knit together. “What’s up?”
“Heebie-jeebies, man, I don’t know.” Dean tried to scratch his scalp, forgetting he had a hat on, and his fingers bumped against wet wool. He pulled his hood up. “A goddamn dying battery is ruining my sea monster hunt.”
“Please don’t cry.”
Dean kicked his foot and Sam grinned from under the hood of his raincoat. At night, in the fog, Dean couldn’t see his face well except for when the scarce light caught on his teeth or his eyes. Like a shark, Dean thought, lowering his head under the pretense of studying the map to hide his own smile. When Sam was in a good mood, he smiled like a shark, full of teeth, ear-to-ear.
Sam pushed his sleeve up and stuck his hand in the water under the buoy, wincing at the cold. He lifted out a wet chain and pulled it into the boat and into the ray of the flashlight rolling on the bottom near his feet. On the end of the chain was a plastic bag of Doritos which Dean personally painted black three days before so it wouldn’t attract the fish with its shine.
“Wear the glove,” Dean said, watching Sam trying to work the spasm out of his hand.
“It’s uncomfortable.” But he at least found the long rubber glove and set it next to him.
They studied the chip bag, looking for punctures, but it was intact and still full of what those two guys swore was sea monster crack. Dean marked the map and Sam dropped the bait back it and pushed the buoy away from the boat.
“Willy and Dylan did say this was far too close to the shore for sea monsters.” Sam swiped a strand of hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist.
“And yet there are eyewitness accounts.”
“One fisherman,” Sam said, but he started the boat’s engine.
Dean made sure the EMF meter was protected from the spray when they started moving. “Don’t fuck with my sea monster hunt!” he yelled over the engine, and Sam flashed him another smile over his shoulder. “Yeah, you want one just as bad as I do,” Dean said quieter, knowing that Sam won’t be able to hear him.
They had just finished a job a week ago but stuck around to rest and check out the sights. They didn’t often get a chance to go all the way down to Washington coast - plenty of things here to go bump in the night but not many people to be bothered by them. The area was one of Dean’s favorite in the country. Out here, the beaches were always freezing and deserted, cloaked with thick fog in winter, with entire tree trunks washed ashore and piled along the tide line. More skeleton trees fringed the banks. Here, the Pacific sat like the end of the world. It was a cold and lonely place with its own special beauty.
Even if it rains all the goddamn time, Dean added silently, wiping water off his face.
They were eating dinner and having some beers in a local bar when they heard a fisherman talk about the monster that he fought off with a fire axe when it tried to steal his son off the boat. Sam knew two guys who hunted out at sea, who had assured them that sea monsters didn’t typically come close enough to the coast to be noticed from tiny privately owned crabbers. They didn’t like shallow water, the crabs and the squid. They liked halibut and tuna, the big fish to really fill their bellies.
Dylan and Willy told them to stay put until they returned from sea to help, which, all right, was reasonable. What they could do, meanwhile, was check the fisherman’s story, to see if there was indeed a sea monster in the area. Doritos made excellent bait, they were told.
Dean really hoped this hunt wouldn’t turn out to be a bust.
There was another reflective red balloon rocking on the water, and Sam steered their borrowed boat toward it. Something caught Dean’s eye to the left, some flash of light in the fog in the opposite direction from the docks. It looked like a large boat, either sitting at anchor or moving very slowly. Dean tried to estimate how far it was or how big but gave up, having no reference point.
“There’s someone out there,” he told Sam when the engine was shut off again.
“Where?” Sam squinted at the silhouette of the boat. “Coast Guard, maybe? Or fishermen?”
“Aren’t they supposed to blow the fog horn or something?”
“I don’t know, man, I’m getting this shit from the movies, just like you.” They snickered. Sam made a swipe for the buoy with the gaff. “Check our position.”
Dean pulled the GPS unit out and checked it against the map. He double-checked it. According to the coordinates, he and Sam had covered hundreds of miles of open ocean water in the last ten minutes and were somewhere far off Dean’s local nautical map and probably in the international waters. Dean looked back toward where he knew the shore to be, not visible now. But he could still spot the sea stacks he’d been using for orientation. They made excellent markers - forty-, fifty-foot tall walls of rock jutting out of the sea, with clusters of pine trees growing on tops.
Since the stacks were still there, the GPS unit must’ve been lying. Dean took the EMF reader out of the bag and made sure it was on. It was, and the lights remained black. Did he swap out the battery in it since last time? His large flashlight was still on and shining steadily, and so was Sam’s.
Sam was just pulling up the chain from under the buoy. It kept on coming - black, endless, dripping water. Dean’s hair was suddenly standing on end. It was quiet - was it this quiet before? - except for the soft lapping of water against the boat and the metal drag of the chain over the side.
“Sam.”
The black-painted bag on the end of the chain was empty and ripped into tatters.
Sam held it up. “Look at that. At least our case is not a bust.”
He stopped smiling when he looked at Dean’s face. Dean had his long-range flashlight up and pointed at the bag and at Sam’s chest, the ray extending around him and into that swirling fog. In it, Dean saw with perfect clarity a grey tentacle the size of a young tree break the surface of the sea. It swiped in a wide arc, splaying water. It smacked Sam across the chest, and the next moment Dean was alone in the boat.
Dean was suddenly short of breath as if it was him who got hit in the chest. Large waves rocked the boat and white fizz of air bubbles spread wider and wider where Sam went overboard. Dean went momentarily cold to the fingertips, every muscle freezing. The sea remained black, unbroken. He shone a flashlight across the waves but saw nothing - no head showing, no glimpse of Sam’s raincoat, no brother. Nothing.
Dean did the first thing that popped into his head. He shone the flashlight at the silhouette of the boat and moved his hand in front of the beam. Three short flashes, three long, three short - for SOS. He repeated it, acutely aware of every second he was wasting, thinking, They’re too far, they won’t see it through the fog, there’s no one even watching.
Then he yanked off his coat, put the strap of the flashlight over his wrist and dove overboard.
The water felt like a sledgehammer to the skull. He had forgotten how far north they were, how deep into the winter. It was a massive effort and all he could do at first to not gasp, to not inhale seawater and have the spasms of his own larynx choke him. It hurt - his hands, his eyes, his heart. His shoes were like lead weights. It took another enormous effort to move his arms, to swim and not sink.
I’m going to have a heart attack from the frigid water, came a strangely calm thought from some part of his brain that hadn’t shriveled up in terror. It’s probably below freezing.
A flotilla of tiny air bubbles rising up around him was obstructing his view. Down below was only blackness, and the beam of his flashlight couldn’t break through it, couldn’t reach far. There was nothing there. He searched until his lungs were burning, came up for air and went down again. Up and down, until he lost count. His face felt encased in liquid ice and went numb. Cold was trying to crush his skull. Dean took a deep breath through the chattering of his teeth and dove again.
Iron claws suddenly clenched his heart, and Dean almost opened his mouth to scream and draw in the freezing Pacific. Almost. He grabbed at his heart, and he couldn’t feel his legs anymore, and his fingers couldn’t move to catch the flashlight when it slid off his wrist and sank, its light blinking. Dean thought it was blinking SOS.
Watching the flashlight tumble into the abyss, he realized he had forgotten about the lifejacket under his coat. The initial momentum of the dive brought him down a few feet and he had struggled against the upward pull. But now that he couldn’t fight anymore, he floated up - and further away from Sam. His thoughts were slowing down, only his chest still hurt like an elephant - a sea monster - was sitting on it. All he probably needed to do was turn over, and then he’d be able to breathe.
His heart seized up again, and Dean saw stars. They were cold and terrible over the Pacific, at the end of the world.
Something grabbed the collar of his lifejacket and yanked him up. Dean felt it like the faintest of touches, lighter than a breeze across the back of his neck. He gasped, and all the stars exploded.
~~~~
There was a clock on the wall. It showed 6:20.
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. The bathtub was filled with hot water, and a small convoy of rubber duckies was making its way across, prodded by a child’s hand. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Dean was sitting on the edge of the tub, rubbing shampoo into Sam’s hair. They’ve found the duckies under the sink of the strangers’ house. They were squatting. If you see a crocodile, don’t forget to scream.
You look out for crocodiles, Sammy, he had said. Sam looked up and grinned at him from under his soapy crown, like a shark, full of teeth, ear to ear.
Now duck. And Dean pushed his brother’s head under the water. The duck convoy scattered in terror.
The clock on the wall swam in and out of focus. It grew fuzzy. It wasn’t a clock but the face of the moon in the dense fog over the sea. Sam looked up and grinned at him from under the hood of his raincoat.
“Whoa, whoa,” somebody said.
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. But the boat was empty.
“What was that?”
“What?” somebody said into his ear. Then, to someone else, “Just mumbling. Shhh, buddy, it’s okay.”
I’m in a hospital, Dean thought. The clock now said 6:30. Two faces swam into his visual field and blocked the clock, but neither one was Sam’s. Dean closed his eyes again.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
“I think he’s humming.”
“Where’s Sam?” he tried to say. His tongue was weak and his jaws ached. He tried again, “Sam.” It came out better the second time.
“It’s okay.”
“Fuck you.” Dean opened his eyes again - the electrical light was too bright - and tried to focus on the clock’s face. 6:37. What time was it when Sam went overboard? They were delayed by engine troubles and were still out at sea when the sun set after four. How long were they out in the dark?
His muscles ached - arms, legs, back, abdomen, neck, every one of them. He felt weak and shaky but he could move, more or less. Dean gripped the edge of the bed. His hand slipped, and he tried again.
“Look who’s awake. Hey, buddy.”
That was the same asshole who kept telling him it was okay. He leaned in and put a hand on Dean’s forehead, lifting his eyelids with his thumb. He had a skinny face with bushy eyebrows and a constellation of acne on his cheek, and he smiled just like Sam, wide and sincere and radiant, in a way that made him instantly handsome. Dean leaned away from that smile reflexively, thinking, Something horrible happened.
A grey tentacle the size of a young tree rose out of the sea and smacked Sam across the chest.
Dean jerked violently and tried to get up but his wrist was caught. He squinted up at it, where it was handcuffed to a pipe running along the wall.
“Settle down,” said the one that smiled just like Sam. “Everything’s fine.”
“It’s not,” Dean said. His tongue seemed to be moving a little better. “It’s really not.”
“Thanks, Doc,” said the second man Dean didn’t know, a redhead standing under that clock. He came closer, and the other dude moved to give him the chair and stood aside, hands folded behind his back. Dean shook his head, trying to get his brains to somehow click together again.
Sam went overboard. The thought brought back the echo of that chest pain, like iron claws around his heart. What did those guys say about sea monsters and kidnappings?
The ginger was looking at him like he was a zoo animal. Dean shook his head again. Focus, for fuck’s sake, he needed to focus. He jumped into the water after Sam - that was stupid. He was now in a room that didn’t look much like a hospital, cuffed to a pipe, for reasons still unclear. The tall skinny guy with a smile like Sam’s seemed too young to be a doctor. No, he realized, not a doctor - Doc, a medic. Both of them were dressed like the military, not like hospital staff. And the ginger still staring at him was an officer, going by his uniform.
He had signaled SOS to that boat before jumping into the water. They must’ve been Coast Guard, like Sam said. But the boat was too far. What was the survival time in near-freezing water - ten minutes? They never would’ve gotten there in time.
“What’s your name?” said the ginger.
“Dean Winchester.” His throat felt like it’s been sandpapered. Oh. He’d inhaled seawater. “Can I have some water please?”
The medic - corpsman, Dean corrected himself - moved to where Dean couldn’t see him anymore, and he heard water being poured. He closed his eyes. Life is but a dream, went the stupid song on the loop in his head, now that the light, the room and the Coast Guard guys were gone and he was once again alone in his head. Sam went overboard, dragged down by the sea monster. Despair was the worst of monsters, and if he let it, it would drag him down to the bottom, too. Those hunters that Sam dug up said something about sea monsters stealing people off boats and piers. Dean frowned, chasing the memory. They were talking about the rare occasions of sea monsters coming into shallow coastal waters and kidnapping people. They showed an apparent preference for young men, beautiful women and small kids. That fisherman in town said it tried to take his son.
Someone put a tin cup into his hand, and Dean drank the lukewarm, metallic-tasting water without opening his eyes. The redhead officer said something.
What’s the difference between kidnapping them and killing them, Dean had asked, if they get dragged into the sea to never be seen again?
Despair was the worst of monsters. “What?” he said.
“What were you doing in the water?”
“I was trying to save someone.” His throat closed up on the words and he brought the cup back up to his mouth but found it empty. He bit the rim instead, gently. It helped. “Hey.” A sudden thought struck him, and Dean tried to sit up, failed and tried again, grabbing the wall with his free hand. “Hey, did you guys found anybody else? In the water?”
“No. Sorry.”
Dean handed the cup back to the corpsman. Fuck despair. Sea monsters kidnapped people, so they must’ve wanted them for something. There must’ve been a reason the hunters kept saying “kidnap” rather than “drown”.
“Thanks,” he said. “How about taking these cuffs off?”
He wondered now, belatedly, if he should’ve given them a different name. It seemed ridiculous that the Coast Guard would receive the lists of FBI’s most wanted - the dead ones, too. But then again, here he was, cuffed to a pipe, and the guys ignored his question.
The officer picked up Dean’s duffle bag from the floor and set it in his lap. He opened the zipper and peered inside, looking impressed. He held up a sharpened wooden stake. Dean just raised his eyebrows. It was the oldest trick - to create a silence, which the suspect would be compelled to fill, and Dean was nowhere green enough to fall for that. Next came his backup Glock. The officer studied it with some interest, pulled back the slide, took out the clip and handed both to the corpsman.
“That’s a nice one,” he said.
“I’m glad you like it.” Dean moved his legs a little, as a test, pretending to stretch. All his muscles were still sore and weak but they felt like they’d hold him. He could kick the ginger in the jaw, if needed. He’d figure out the rest later.
The officer looked inside the bag again. “Doc, where’s that thing with the red lights?”
“Right here, Captain.”
It was the EMF meter, and the captain held it up for Dean to see. “What’s this?”
Something pinged in Dean’s chest, a sharp and sudden sense of alarm. “That,” he said slowly, trying to recapture the feeling, “would be my personal property.”
With the red lights?
“I see you have a lot of interesting personal property here,” said the captain, setting the EMF meter down on the bed and reaching back into the bag.
The meter had been turned off. Dean looked back up at the two men, trying to see what he missed in the initial haze of semi-consciousness. Their uniform was familiar but now that he thought about it, he couldn’t place it. Coast Guard wore solid dark blue, and the Navy’s uniform was blue camouflage. But he’d seen somewhere the corpsman’s black pants and denim shirt with a red cross over the chevrons. With the red lights, the captain had said, making Dean’s hair stand on end. Why was the meter going off? Dean eyed the switch. It was within his reach, and the corpsman had set down the gun.
The captain was still looking through the bag, pulling out various monster-hunting paraphernalia. “For instance, this-Goddammit!”
He yanked his hand back, sending a small object tumbling through the air in an arc right before Dean’s eyes - a shotgun shell packed with rock salt. Already seeing it, already knowing what he’d hear, Dean reached for the EMF meter and flipped it on. Its wail filled the cabin, all the lights going off together. The corpsman made a lunge for it. His hand landed on the shotgun shell and he pulled it back with a yelp, just as the captain grabbed the EMF meter away from Dean with a hand that had turned the color of burnt paper.
Something flickered then, and suddenly came the smells of rust, machine oil and rotting seaweed. The paint on the cabin’s walls bubbled up and flaked off the corroded metal underneath, and green scum crawled across the porthole, turning the light in the room a gentle emerald. The thin mattress under Dean disintegrated into dust and ashes.
“What the hell was that thing?” said the corpsman. Like the paint on the walls, his skin bubbled up and turned black and charred. Gone were his hair and his eyebrows and his pretty Sam-like smile, with the lips peeling off his teeth.
They don’t even know, Dean thought. They don’t even see it. And then, I know what’s wrong with their uniform. He’d seen it in the movies.
The captain had a gun drawn and pointed at Dean’s head. “Try something like that again.” Dean could see his tongue moving through the ruin of his face when he spoke. His left eye was gone along with his left cheek, and the bloody bones of his jaw and zygomatic arch shone wetly underneath. His red hair was matted with blood where his skull caved in - must’ve been by flying debris, too messy for a bullet entrance wound.
Dean blinked, and everything was back to normal, except how he still had a gun pointed at his face. The corpsman shut off the EMF meter but Dean’s ears still rang with it. He wondered if the gun was functional or if it also spent the last seventy years in the ocean, like everything and everybody else on board.
He found what was fucking with his flashlight.
~~~~
Sam woke up suddenly when he stopped breathing for a moment. He came up coughing and gasping for air, and the panicked effort to breathe brought mud and sand into his throat. He rolled over, unable to see through the sheen of tears, and coughed and coughed until he threw up bile, trying to breathe through his nose in between the spasms. He could feel a rough rocky surface under his right hand, and he slapped it, hard, trying to focus on that pain instead of the spasms and the feeling of his throat being shredded from inside. Stop it. Stop it, just, fucking breathe.
Taking shallow breaths through his nose, he finally gathered enough control to spit out remaining sand and bile. Gradually, the fit was easing. Sam spat again and rested there quietly for a minute, on hands and knees, making sure he could breathe. He wiped his eyes and mouth, and checked the palm he skinned. It had a few slowly oozing scrapes.
There was a dull but persistent ache in his chest and abdomen. Carefully, Sam pressed along the ribs, feeling for fractures, but the bones seemed to be intact. He pulled up his shirt and studied the wide red stripe running across his chest, like a giant seatbelt bruise. Smaller bruises, dark purple and a lot like hickeys, ran in two parallel tracks around his wrists. They must’ve been from suction cups.
Dean had that whole argument of kidnapping versus murder in the case of sea monsters. I guess now we know they start with kidnapping.
Something splashed in the water very gently, and Sam whipped his head around, feeling his clothes for a weapon. His gun was gone but the knife strapped to his leg was still there. Sam pulled it out and froze, his back to a large boulder, waiting.
The place he was in was a cave with a low ceiling, filled with water except for a narrow strip of silt and sand that Sam was sitting on. The entrance must’ve been underwater. The light - Sam blinked and looked again - the light came from a night shade placed on a natural ledge, something that would’ve been right at home in the bedroom of a child. The shade over the lamp was a maroon bell skirt of a Disney princess who now looked like a refugee of a zombie apocalypse. She was missing an arm and most of her blonde hair, and smudges of green algae covered her plastic skin. The front of her dress was ripped in a way that looked deliberate to Sam, like someone was trying to see her plastic breasts.
Eyeing the lamp, Sam moved along the sandy bank, the knife ready. The light reflected off the water and cast bright spots on the walls and the ceiling, constantly moving. Sam tried to ignore that motion, looking into the water, trying to see if there was any sign of-
The tentacle lashed around his neck mid-inspiration, making his breath hitch, and tightened. Sam fell backward. His fingers slipped off the rubbery appendage when he tried to grab it. His vision swam. His head felt like a stuffed cushion with no outlet for the blood through the collapsed jugulars. He slashed at the tentacle with the knife, half-sure that he was going to cut his own throat. Something yelped, and the pressure was gone. Sam scrambled up to his feet and backed off into the water until it was up to his knee, and spun around. He imagined then, much too clearly, another tentacle latching around his leg and drowning him, and he was back out on the sand in a moment.
There were splashes of green blood on the sand and the lichen-covered stones. Something was there, behind the boulders. A massive shadow, like a clot of congealed darkness had gathered in the deep covered niche. Sam saw it move - out of order with the jumping light spots reflecting off the water.
“I see you.” It came out hoarse and he didn’t recognize his own voice.
Something sighed in the stone shelter - a deep sound somewhere between whooshing and rumbling. Then came a series of clicking noises, making Sam think of an inhuman throat trying to work around speech. It made an unintelligent false start and clicked more, adjusting.
“Drop that,” the thing said. Sam readjusted his grip on the knife. “I said drop it!”
“Make me.”
The sea monster came up slowly, spilling tentacles from the hidden niche - thick ones like electrical poles and some as thin as a finger. They came out like a writhing mass, and Sam lost count of how many there were. A lot of the tentacles bore scars, and others ended in uneven stumps, chewed and torn off by something many years ago, and a few had deep fresh gashes in them - from a fire axe, by the look of them. They filled the tiny cave wall to wall. Sam backed into the water, already seeing that it was no use - there was nowhere he could go to be out of their reach. There were suckers the size of his head on the oldest tentacles. His knife probably wouldn’t even go through their skin.
Two human arms grabbed the top of the boulder, and a thing that mostly resembled a man pulled itself up from behind it. He had a black beard that reached halfway down his chest, and bulging cloudy eyes that immediately fixed on Sam. He was large - but large like a lumberjack, not like a thing that brought down fishing boats. Below his beer belly his skin turned rubbery and became the body of an octopus, with dozens of tentacles.
It was the fucking witch from The Little Mermaid, and Sam realized, too late, that he was going to laugh. He bit his tongue but it broke out anyway, a choked-off burst of laughter, unstoppable like the sand and bile before it. It hurt in his chest.
The sea monster’s face went grey. “Are you laughing at me?”
Sam shook his head, forced the giggles back down and clamped his jaws tight on them. They came back like an explosion. He wondered, distantly, what the hell was wrong with him, if it was the lack of oxygen. But the sea monster was the male version of The Little Mermaid witch. Dean would’ve loved this.
The slap of a tentacle was enough to knock him on his knees into the water, and Sam never even saw it coming. The side of his face went numb and a vein burst in his nose, dripping blood into seawater. Sam shook his head, trying to get rid of the deep ringing within it, while the monster leaned on his folded arms on top of the boulder and waited.
“Still funny?”
Sam ran a hand over his mouth and clamped down on his nose. “No.”
The monster nodded and started readjusting his tentacles around the tiny cave, pushing some up on the wall like a man putting his feet up, getting comfortable. Sam tried to count them again and lost count again, unable to tell them apart in the writhing mass. The upper torso looked human enough, weak enough to kill with a knife, if he could ever get past those tentacles. It didn’t seem likely. The monster, meanwhile, pulled from somewhere in his stone shelter a bag of Doritos, painted black by Dean a few days ago, ripped it open and fished out a chip. He sniffed at it and touched the tip of his tongue to it before stuffing it into his mouth.
His mouth, Sam saw, was full of inhuman teeth, small and hooked and arranged in many rows, like those of a lamprey he’d seen on Discovery Channel. The monster chewed in a strange circular manner, dropping crumbs. Sam could picture that carpet of teeth grinding.
Sam hoped that Dean remembered the conversation they had about sea monsters and kidnappings. He’d be climbing the walls right now with worry.
“So,” said the monster after half the bag of Doritos was gone and Sam’s nose had stopped bleeding. “Take a guess how cold it is in here.”
“I don’t want to guess,” Sam said. It was probably freezing. He was still wearing his hat and warm jacket but the clothes underneath were completely soaked through. He should’ve been hypothermic if not dead by now.
The monster scratched his bare belly. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. But we’ll let it slide since it’s your first day. It’s cold.” He ground another handful of chips into powder with those odd circular movements. “You would’ve frozen and drowned ten times over by now, if it wasn’t for me.”
If it wasn’t for him, Sam would’ve been back on the shore now, eating dinner with his brother. He said nothing.
The monster studied him for a good long time while he finished the chips and licked his fingers clean, sucking them into his mouth. Sam sat down on a rock and waited. He could see, out of the corner of his eye, the nightshade Disney Princess in her ripped dress and knew then for sure that it was the sea monster that tore it and that it was deliberate. He had that look on his face. He didn’t remind Sam of the witch from The Little Mermaid anymore but of Bluebeard. There was an old book of fairytales he looked through in a library one morning, a few days after Dean had told him that monsters were real. Perhaps because everything in that book had a potential to be real, the illustrations seemed all the more awful. Sam didn’t know he still had the memory, but a picture of Bluebeard came to mind now - of a huge man with ruby red lips looking from under hooded eyelids and right off the page at Sam, the same way the sea monster was looking now.
“I think I’ll keep you, after. I collect nice things, you should know. Come on, turn for me, like a model.” He twirled a finger in the air.
Sam didn’t move from his seat on the rock. “After what?”
“After you do a favor for me.”
“The fuck I will.”
“You will do a favor for me.”
Sam spat. The monster’s face went white and then flushed red down to his neck, and he raised all tentacles and smashed them down onto rock, making the cave’s interior tremble. Sam’s hand hurt on the knife’s handle and he forced it to relax, to keep a good flexible grip for a fight - a toothpick against a giant.
“You will do as I say!” the monster yelled, spit flying. “You will go to the ship! You will turn!”
“What ship? I’m not moving my ass off this rock until you let me send a message to my brother.”
This is why, Sam thought, this is why the sea monster reminded him so much of Bluebeard, despite the tentacles and the lamprey mouth. He could’ve been an amalgam of all the wife-beating rapist assholes he and Dean had come across in their work, the ones with a little ghost problem in whose backyards slender bones lay buried, the ones with calloused knuckles. They didn’t know anything, officers, the slut must’ve ran off with a boyfriend. There was that one on a farm in Connecticut that, Sam was fairly sure, Dean strangled with an electrical cord after they’d put his wife’s spirit to rest. Sam never brought it up. If it was Dean, he had a gun he could’ve used. Sam didn’t like to think about it but he understood.
Sam would’ve much preferred to deal with a prehistoric beast, a dinosaur from the depths. He would’ve preferred slime, pale bloated flesh of a drowned slug and teeth as long as his arm. This thing in its screaming rage was entirely too human, and more repulsive than Sam had dealt with in a long while.
The monster’s fit of rage had apparently passed. He smoothed out his beard and his long tangled hair. “Brother, huh? Maybe we can work out a deal.”
“Let me send a message, and then we’ll talk.”
The monster used his crooked teeth to pick remainders of powdered cheese from under his fingernails while he thought. “Fine,” he said finally. “What kind of a message?”
~~~~
Dean could hear the ghosts moving behind the door and behind the wall, on the level below and the level above, so many of them. If he pressed an ear to the wall he heard buzzing of their voices in the metal but couldn’t make out the words. They talked and laughed and went about their daily tasks of moving a rusty ancient shipwreck through the ocean, fully convinced that they were alive and that the Second World War was in full swing.
Hope spring eternal, and despair is the worst of monsters. Dean thought he could relate.
There were faint scratches on the wall over his bed, painted over but half-heartedly, leaving the angular shapes of letters distinguishable from up close. Dean studied them while resting between his attempts at breaking free. I didn’t mean to leave you without a goodbye, some ghost had scratched into the wall. I love you so much. When he got too tired, Dean reread it, rubbed absently at his chest and sighed. Maybe it was the corpsman who wrote it, since this room with locked up medical supplies seemed to be his haunting grounds. Maybe he was thinking of a woman, or a sibling, or a dog.
Dean’s wrist was sore and stung where he broke the skin against the cuffs. With his free hand, he felt the pipe for weak spots he couldn’t see. It had to be rusted through like the rest of the ship. He found a segment that felt promising, producing a higher-pitched sound when he tapped on it. Could’ve been that he already tried it but repeated assault on the same segment might’ve weakened it. What the hell did they make these pipes out of it, to have them hold strong after seventy years of drifting through the ocean?
Dean slid further down on the bed and put some tension into the cuff chain and braced his leg against the pipe, which was when the captain opened the door. It was an awkward moment. Dean gave him the most earnest of smiles and tried to relax and look comfortable, with his leg over his head, his shoulder strained and his wrist bleeding.
The captain raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment on Dean’s position. His head was back in one piece, with both eyes in their sockets once again. He turned a chair around and sat on it backwards. Dean figured it was his cue to take his leg off the pipe and move back up the bunk bed.
“Who were you trying to save?”
Dean studied his face, wondering if he should lie, if he should’ve come up with some explanation for being out at sea at night in the fog. In movies, guys like him were always taken for German spies - and shot.
“My brother,” he said. “He fell into the water.”
The captain nodded and ran a hand through his hair awkwardly. In the wake of his fingers, streaks of blood dragged through his hair and disappeared quickly. “I’m sorry to hear that. Younger or older?”
“Younger. His name is Sam.”
If he was going to say something about praying for either of them, Dean was going to kick him in the jaw and see if his foot would connect or go through. The captain didn’t. He poured some water into the same dented metal cup and offered it to Dean, which Dean accepted after a moment’s hesitation. He suddenly wasn’t sure where the fresh water stores were coming from, but he hadn’t crapped himself to death from the last drink yet, so maybe it was all right. He took a careful sip, watching the captain over the rim. It tasted okay and it felt good on his scraped throat.
“What were you doing out there at night?”
He should’ve prepared a story while kicking that pipe for an hour - except how he thought he might get shot if he was caught lying.
“We were hunting ghosts.”
The captain made a disgusted face. “Hunting ghosts?”
When every cover story fails, admit the truth and watch people crab-walk away from you lest they get the crazy on their shoes. Dean shrugged. “That’s what the stuff in my bag is for.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That gadget with the red lights measures electromagnetic field.” Dean wondered how far he could push it, if the guy knew on some level that he was dead and was going to flip his shit. “It detects radiation emitted by ghosts. It lights up when they’re around.”
“That’s a new one.” He was hiding the tiniest of smiles, which Dean was willing to take for a good sign. “I guess that means the ship is haunted?”
Oh buddy, you have no idea. Push it too far - and the captain would think he’s laughing at him, which is probably where Dean gets shot as a German spy. “It might be,” Dean said, carefully.
“I lived in a haunted house when I was little.”
That came out of nowhere. Dean blinked at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, it was my grandma’s place. I wish she knew someone did jobs like that, hunting ghosts. The thing in the house killed all her chickens one night. It was scared of the cat, though.”
“They usually are.”
The captain rocked on the chair’s two legs, distracted for a moment, probably thinking of cats or who the hell knows what. He didn’t seem particularly likely to shoot Dean, but then again, Dean was still cuffed to a pipe while a sea monster was dragging Sam around the ocean somewhere.
Those guys said ‘kidnap’. All the research Sam dug up said ‘kidnap’, though no one mentioned what it was the monsters did with the people they took away. Well, there was the Japanese porn, of course.
With the lights on in the room, Dean couldn’t see through the porthole, and there was nothing to see out there except for the black skies and black water. All he could see was his own reflection, lying on the bunk bed, and that of the captain, who in the glass looked very dead, pale and bloodless, with so much blood soaking his uniform through. Dean sighed. When he looked back at the captain, he had two eyes in an intact face.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” the captain said.
Dean took a deep breath, held it and let it out slowly. “So,” he said. “You lived in a haunted house.”
“That was a long time ago.” But he looked away, scratching at the bridge of his nose. Dean waited, careful not to break the silence. “You think the ship is haunted?”
“It might be.” Dean shrugged. “Why, have you noticed something?”
“A few odd things, maybe. We seem to be having some radio problems, with some strange music coming through.”
That was probably not a full answer, not even half an answer, but it was something to work with.
“And I must be insane to go skating on your name,” the captain sang quietly under his breath. “And by tracing it twice, I fell through the ice…”
They must’ve been catching pieces of modern radio broadcasts. At least it wasn’t those Video Only commercials. “That’s a good song.”
“I’ve never heard it before.”
“It’s new. It just came out.” He shook his head to an offer of a cigarette. “Listen, captain, maybe these cuffs can come off? Where am I going to go?”
The captain stared at him for a good minute, tapping a lighter against his palm. He shrugged and took a key out of his pocket.
“I won’t wander,” Dean said quickly, thinking that he needed to do just that, as soon as possible and preferably back to shore where he could do something about Sam being gone. Anything. “What’s your name, captain?”
“It’s Darren Leigh. And no, you won’t wander.” The cuffs clicked open, and Dean could finally put his arm down and start working the kink out of the shoulder. The captain held the key up for Dean to see. “You’re a civilian, Winchester. We will drop you off as soon as we get to port, but in the meanwhile, if you get underfoot, you will be cuffed to the pipe the rest of the way. If I think for one minute that you’re lying to me, you will be shot. Understand?”
“Yes sir. You got a little something.” Dean tapped on his own cheek.
The captain swiped a thumb under his eye, smearing a fat droplet of blood that had rolled from under his eyelid. He didn’t look at it.
“Your wrist is bleeding,” he said. “Let’s see what Doc has around here for that.”
Ten minutes later, with his hand cleaned and bandaged, Dean stepped out on deck after the captain. The cold gripped him immediately and made a phantom ache stir in his chest again, in the wake of a memory of being in the water. The night was choked with dense fog, and Dean couldn’t even see all the way to the bow - just the hovering shapes of the gun mounts and, to the side, a thin railing and more black water behind it. Something flickered on the periphery of his vision, far out in the ocean, and was lost again before he could look at it properly. He thought it might’ve been a light.
The captain - Leigh - was standing there in a thin shirt with the sleeves rolled up while Dean shivered in his still wet winter jacket. That didn’t seem to register.
“This here is Morrigan,” the captain said, and there was this something in his voice that made Dean think of the Impala.
The name surprised a laugh out of Dean, which sounded so loud out here that he immediately wanted to bite his tongue. “Morrigan - like the Irish war goddess?”
Leigh wrinkled his nose. “No. Like Ensign Joe Morrigan.”
Dean walked over to the railing and, grabbing it with both hands, looked down. Small waves lolled below, and the cold radiating off them tingled on his face. A three-digit hull number was written on the bow which he couldn’t clearly make out.
Sam, he thought, looking at the water and imagining the terrible abyss below, Sam, there is a goddamn ghost ship in the middle of my sea monster hunt. Sam.
He stepped back. There was rust on his palms where they touched the carefully painted railing.
“What are you doing?” said Leigh.
“It’s fucking cold down there.”
Just then Dean caught, out of the corner of his eye, another flicker of light in the fog. He sucked in a lungful of cold air and held it and waited. It came again - definitely a light, like from a projector, or a flashlight. Dean couldn’t tell if it was a small source nearby or a powerful source further away. The yellow flashes were barely making it through the fog.
Four brief flashes, short pause, two more brief flashes. Dot-dot-dot-dot-stop-dot-dot.
“Hi,” Dean said, once it clicked into a familiar pattern his head, something he thought he’d forgotten. “Hi.”
“Who the hell is that?”
Hi. As kids, Sam and Dean collected communication methods, some from Dad and some they saw on TV and thought were cool, and then some they made up. They could finger-spell and sign the numbers in ASL and they knew the Morse code. Asshat, Sam would signal out their bedroom window with a flashlight if Dean took too long dropping a date off down the street, saying goodbye properly. Asshat, and, Hi. They used to signal more complex messages as well, only these things got lost with disuse. Dean could no longer remember half the sign alphabet and most of the Morse code, and apparently the same went for Sam. But he remembered “hi’. It was such a simple word, like SOS.
Dot-dot-dot-dot-stop-dot-dot. Hi.
NEXT