Row Charon Row: Part Two
Bluebeard had a palace on the bottom of the ocean - an architectural monstrosity composed of shipping containers and ship hulls from different eras, stuck together at precarious angles, sealed by clay that Bluebeard had proudly pronounced to be sand, hagfish slime and his own saliva. Down at the foundation, older wooden vessels had rotted and crumbled under enormous pressure. The metal ones held. Bluebeard’s palace was rusted, with corals clinging to it like tumors and the fish sneaking in and out of the flooded halls that were once cargo holds, cabins and dining rooms of great ships. There were dry halls as well - entire ships sealed off with the same grey clay and lit by a variety of battery-operated nightshades and lamps that looked like they came from some cargo lost at the bottom of the sea, much like the Disney Princess from the cave.
After dragging Sam up from the cave to the surface to send the signal, the monster took him back down - and down and down - through the layers of algae and the flotillas of jellyfish, past the tuna and the small sharks that darted out of their way but watched them go down. And down and down. Sam didn’t feel the lack of air, but only for as long as he stayed in Bluebeard’s grip, he was assured. Deep under the ocean, it was hard to keep track of the passage of time, and Sam had lost all sense of it. He couldn’t tell if it took three minutes or twenty to reach bottom. The monster brought him to the palace on the ocean floor, where the light came from construction site projectors positioned on the rocks. Sam couldn’t begin to guess where he was stealing electricity from.
“Welcome,” Bluebeard had said, “to your new home.” And then, through a double door system, he brought Sam inside an old ferry with a couple of cars still parked up on deck, and he left him there.
Inside the ferry there was air, stagnant and heavy with dust. There was also years’ worth collection of junk, piled up on tables and padded benches and on the floor. The light came from a fluorescent lamp, casting strange shadows of the junk piles on the walls. Somewhere, on some table or on top of a trash mountain, sat a children’s bedroom light. Sam could see the stars it cast on the ceiling.
Left alone, Sam walked the perimeter of the hall inside the ferry. Great grey fish went by and stared at him through the windows, their delicate fins quivering. Sam found the stairway to the lower deck, with the hatch tightly sealed, and stood by it for the longest time, trying to decide if he should try and open it. He kicked the hatch - and the sound wasn’t right, like maybe there was water on the other side of it. The outer deck came to mind, with two cars parked on it and populated by fish. He left it alone.
Almost hidden behind a pile of tires was the door to the former snack shop. Sam squeezed through and stood inside, letting his eyes adjust in the poor light. It wasn’t much - just a counter, a display case with fossilized cookies, a cash register, a small oven and a fridge. Maybe they had a kitchen knife around. He could always use another weapon. He climbed over the counter, but either there never was a knife or Bluebeard took it away. Instead, there was a box of Twinkies. Sam stuffed a couple in his coat pocket, to give to Dean later. He’d love them. Give Dean a Twinkie found inside a wrecked ferry on the bottom of the ocean where it’s been for the past seven years, going by the expiration date on the smoothies in the display case - and that’s all he needs for happiness.
There was a chain and lock around the fridge. Sam lifted the lock, rubbed a finger over it to feel for rust in the weak light, but it seemed new, unlike everything else inside the ferry. He tried to open the fridge but couldn’t get more than an inch, with the chain so snug around the door. Inside, the air was even worse than in the main hall. And something large was stuffed into the emptied belly of the fridge. Sam had a pretty good idea of what it was.
He pushed a finger through the crack in the door to feel the object in the dark. What he could reach was fabric. Sam sighed and closed the fridge again.
“Bloody chamber.” That old book came to mind again, with the bloody corpses of Bluebeard’s old wives hanging off meat hooks. The one in the fridge must’ve been old enough for the smell of decomposition to dissipate.
Sam climbed back over the counter and out into the main hall. He pushed a mountain of mismatched shoes off a seat by the window and sat down. A long-nosed shark stared at him through the glass before swimming away. Sam hid the flashlight back in his pocket and put a knife on the seat next to his leg and waited for what would come next.
The ghost ship made no sense. Sam never would’ve believed the story if Bluebeard hadn’t held him in the water and let him look at Dean up on deck through a pair of military binoculars. Dean had looked generally unhurt - Sam let out a long breath - standing next to a man in a bloody Navy uniform on board an ancient shipwreck. That must’ve been the ship Dean saw through the fog. It made no goddamn sense for a ghost ship to be in the area. The chances of a sea monster and a ghost ship randomly showing up in the same area were about the same as winning the lottery and getting killed by a helicopter plunging from the sky in one day.
And yet there they were - the sea monster and the ghost ship, and Sam and Dean managed to get stuck in between.
“Between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Sam said to the giant stuffed gorilla, half-rotten with algae or mold.
Three more sharks came by to stare at him before he heard the pumps working at the double doors. Sam grabbed the knife and sat on the table, from where it’d be easier to move either way. From where he was, he didn’t see Bluebeard but he heard the inner door open and something big dragging itself inside.
“Sam.”
Sam kept quiet. To his right, close to where to door was, an avalanche of canned cat food came down the slopes of a trash mountain.
“Sam. We had an agreement.” Another mountain shook nearby, and the sea monster appeared over its top. “There you are.”
The fish darted away at the sight of him. Water was still running off his hair and beard, and he had a couple of mussels caught up near his ear, like an earring. He made himself a nest among the packets of underwear and smiled at Sam, baring the rows of lamprey teeth.
“Did you like my ship?”
“You need to clean up from time to time.”
“Not this one. USS Morrigan, the one above.”
The one that Dean ended up on. Sam said nothing.
Bluebeard frowned. “I let you send your message.”
“And I’m listening.”
The monster smiled, full of false benevolence once again. “She’s a real cherry, isn’t she? She’s a Fletcher class destroyer, a veteran of Pearl Harbor and Midway, sunk by a torpedo.” He kissed his fingers and rolled his eyes. “One strike, boom, her magazines go up. She’s been drifting since then, every night. Still beautiful, as you could witness.”
Sam remembered the officer standing next to Dean, the briefly glanced silhouettes of sailors by the machine guns. He hadn’t been much interested in anything other than Dean but he did notice the dead, bloody and burned and drowned, manning their posts.
“I’ve been chasing the bitch all month, only she jumps around. She believes those engines still work. It’s hard to set a trap for something that jumps around. She still dreams of that torpedo strike every day at dawn. I tried grabbing her on the bottom, but she resurfaces at sunset. She tore the southern wing off my palace and dragged my excellent 1935 trawler up with her.”
Sam barely heard the last part, with a sudden terror rolling over him until his head was spinning and his spine felt like an icy spike. She goes down at dawn, he thought. She blows up and goes down with her ghostly crew into the freezing waters of the Pacific. She goes down with any living person who happens to be on board. He checked his watch. It was ten at night, ten hours to sunrise.
Bluebeard was smiling. “So I see you understand.”
“What do you want? What the hell do you want from me? Why are you telling me this?”
Bluebeard readjusted his tentacles, making more trash rain from the mountains on the floor and tables. “There is a favor that I need from you. But first, come with me. I want to show you what’s in the fridge.”
~~~~
The captain forgot things. Of all the ghosts that Dean had seen in his life, he was one of the more functional ones, if in an odd half-assed way. There were ghosts who knew exactly what happened to them, full of hate and fury, and then there were the confused ones who lived on a loop, flickering in and out of existence. The captain had a kind of stubbornness about him that Dean liked in a ghost, a determination to get to the bottom of whatever was happening to his crew and his ship. Dean wondered how long Leigh’s time loop was, and how he would explain his own presence on board once the loop restarted. It had been three hours so far.
He was a tough bastard of a ghost but he forgot things - burning his hands on a salt round, asking this question or that, seeing someone say hi in Morse code from the open sea. He didn’t see what was wrong with picking up an SOS from an impossible distance, then showing up to Dean’s rescue in barely ten minutes. He watched Dean shiver in the cutting December wind and still believed they were in the South Pacific. Blood would run from his nose or his eyes or his ears, and he wiped it away like rainwater and didn’t look at his fingers.
The night dragged on and the fog got heavier. Morrigan drifted, with her long-dead engines producing an even ghostly rumble from below. Dean invented plans for getting off the ghost ship, one crazier than the other, and abandoned each one.
“Where am I going to go?” Dean had asked, and the captain shook his head. Dean now had his own personal haunting.
They settled to drink coffee in the captain’s cabin, with all the maps and other papers carefully locked away before Dean was allowed in. It was that or back to his old bunk, to be haunted by the corpsman. Dean would’ve rather stayed on deck, in the cold, where he could see any other light signals, but he was denied that as well. So he sat in the cabin, in the corner where he could at least look out the porthole, played cards with the ghost and worried.
“No wife?” the captain said. It was probably unusual for a guy Dean’s age, for the time he thought this was.
Dean shook his head. “I do kind of-” He paused, not knowing how to finish, thinking of Sam. “Well.”
The captain chuckled, shuffling the cards. Leigh, Dean reminded himself. “Darren Leigh” sounded like someone who went to war and gave his life for his country. “The captain” sounded like something dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, a ghost with no grave and no name left to him.
“Is she beautiful?”
“Something like that. Hair’s kinda stupid. What about you?”
“I’m not married.”
Bye, said the writings on the cabin wall, over and over again, painted over but scratched into the metal under the illusion. Bye bye bye bye bye. Please don’t be sad. Leigh must’ve had someone, somewhere.
The ship’s PA system suddenly burst into a series of clicks that turned into a soft murmur of static, and the two men paused, looking up at the transmitter.
“…coordinates,” it coughed, and then, in Tom Waits’s deep throaty voice signing to a saxophone, “…and all the strings that hold me here are tangled up around the pier…”
“It’s been doing that,” Leigh said. “There is that song again.”
“This is not a drill.”
“Is it going to get the whole crew up?” Dean said.
“They know. It’s been happening.”
“It’s dark in here,” the radio went on, switching voices, sound swimming in and out of static. The last one sounded like it was scared. “Battle stations!”
With a final hiccup, the PA system shut off. Leigh wiped away the bright red blood running from his nose. Where the drops fell on the table, the blood collected in the faint scratches and made them stand out: love you love you love you.
Dean sighed. “Captain. Leigh, listen. I really need to get back to shore. Not that I’m not having fun.”
Leigh, in the middle of lighting a cigarette, snorted out a laugh. He was going to chain smoke his way through the whole pack before dawn, at the rate he was going. Dean leaned forward. “Look, you know what happened with my brother. I have to get back.”
“Please don’t be sad,” the PA system suddenly croaked, making them both jump.
“Fuck this thing. I’m sorry about your brother.”
Dean clenched his fists under the table until his knuckles ached, and waited for Leigh to spit out whatever it was that was bothering him, whatever caused him to keep shifting his eyes away. “So you keep saying. I need to go back.”
“We’re on patrol duty.”
Dean huffed out a breath he was holding. “You’re lost.” Of course they were. They still thought they were patrolling the South Pacific.
“I never meant to leave you like this,” the radio said in Tom Waits’s voice. “This is no drill.”
Leigh was watching him, and Dean couldn’t read the expression on his face. Blood was dripping out of his left ear. Dean was starting to suspect that this happened whenever the radio went off.
“How would you feel about hunting some ghosts?” the captain said.
“What, here? On the ship?”
“Yeah. You can hear what’s happening with our communication systems. We can’t seem to contact anybody. Hell, we can’t return you to the shore until we know where the shore is.”
Dean opened his mouth, realized that he had no idea what to say and closed it again. “Leigh,” he said and stalled again. He needed Sam here, for conversations like this. Sorry to have to tell you, captain, but you and your crew are what’s haunting this ship.
“Come on. Please.”
Dean rubbed a hand over his eyes. Ghost hunting on a ghost ship, by the ghost captain’s request. This was just priceless. Sam would’ve loved it, if only he could be here to appreciate the situation.
“I’m gonna need my bag.”
He got that and the EMF meter, which he shoved into his pocket and out of Leigh’s sight where he’d hopefully forget about it, like he forgot the Morse code signal and the sight of his ship reduced to a floating rust bucket. The gun he did not get. The bag had been packed lightly, which was just as well since Dean couldn’t use any of the real ghost hunting equipment. What would happen if he poured salt all over Morrigan’s deck? Would she sink or break apart? But the salt rounds were gone. Dean studied the bag’s remaining contents, with his personal haint looking over his shoulder. The stuff in the bag was mostly general hunting gear Dean never took out, and two more large bags of Doritos, painted black. So much for a sea monster hunt. He fished out a wooden stake, completely useless for a haunting and therefore safe, and put the bag on his shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
“I can’t let you into the radio room.”
“That’s fine,” Dean said. “We’ll just look around first.”
Out on deck, the fog had gathered so dense it was almost palpable. Dean squinted in it, trying to learn the layout of the deck, and suddenly realized that two ghosts he hadn’t seen before were staring at him from the nest of a 40mm anti-aircraft gun. They saw the captain and must’ve been satisfied because they said nothing as Dean walked below them. It was an uncomfortable thought - of the double gun behind his back with rounds as long as his forearm, manned by two confused spirits. How many pieces, he wondered, would a round from that gun tear his body into - just two, or would he be splattered all over the deck? Dean walked back toward the stern and stopped once he thought he was out of their sight in the fog.
His heart was beating somewhere in his throat, rabbit-fast. “Okay.” He could probably waive the EMF meter around and shake that stake until Leigh got bored with him. “Okay.”
He was alone, at night, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by the dead.
“Winchester.” The deathly pallor was back in Leigh’s face - the grey color of a body with half of its blood volume on the outside. He stood a few paces behind, and Dean couldn’t tell if he was trying to give him space or if the blessed wood of the stake was bothering him. “I like you but what I said to you before still stands. If I catch you lying to me, I’m not going to puzzle over why. You’ll be shot.”
“Well, I won’t fuck with you then. I’m just trying to decide where to start.”
For lack of better ideas, he took out the EMF meter and flipped it on. The thing lit up like a Christmas tree.
“How does this help?”
Dean shrugged. “It tells me there’s a haunt. I guess we’ll find it eventually.”
He put the meter away and continued walking toward the stern, which looked as god a direction as any, with Leigh following a couple of steps behind. Dean definitely didn’t like that silence Leigh had fallen into or that dead paleness of him that, like the blood, seemed to have something to do with moments of higher awareness. Maybe he should run an exorcism for a show.
Something just overboard caught his eye, blanketed in fog - the tiny motor boat he and Sam rented in town, tied to the ghost ship.
“Hey, you guys kept it,” he said, leaning over the railing.
Sam looked up at him from inside the boat.
~~~~
From the doorway of a tiny bathroom, Dean watched Sam peel off his soaked clothes layer after layer. There was barely enough space inside for Sam to move and definitely not enough for Dean to come in with him, so they settled for this, cramped but not touching. Dean stood halfway in the dark hallway, holding a wool blanket he was given, and used his eyes where his hands couldn’t go - for the lack of space and lack of privacy.
He had watched the ghosts search Sam earlier and had stood to the side then as well, doing his own mental inventory. The knife was taken away; a round seashell the size of Sam’s fist, greyish green, rough and ugly as sin, was returned to him. Dean had looked for clues in Sam’s face but Sam just put the shell back into his coat pocket as if it was nothing, as if he normally picked up rocks and big honking seashells for souvenirs wherever he went - like the bottom of the Pacific, for instance.
And now they were in the semi-privacy of the bathroom - whatever the hell it was called on a ship. Leaning into the hallway, Dean could see Leigh standing at the end of it, his back turned to them.
Sam pulled off his jacket and looked around awkwardly for a place to put it.
“Here.” Dean grabbed it from him and was about to dump it on the floor when Sam caught his arm.
“Careful. Don’t break my shell.” The look in his eyes was enough of an emphasis. This was important. Dean set the jacket down on the floor gently, and Sam let out a small sigh.
Leigh’s back was still turned. He gave them enough of a distance to not hear any whispers. Of course, Dean thought, there was the catch that they shouldn’t have to whisper unless they had something to hide.
Sam turned back to the mirror and pulled off his sweater. He was shivering from the cold, and moving with the kind of care that made Dean reconsider his impulse to just jump on him and rub that blanket over him until he was warm again. Sam looked like he was hurting, in more than one joint. When the sweater came off, Dean took one look at his neck and sucked in a sharp breath. There were fresh purple bruises there, like crisscrossing thick ropes. Dean touched one carefully with two fingers, traced them around to the back, brushing his wet hair aside. More bruises stood out on his back - round ones in two parallel tracks, like hickeys.
The shirt came off next. Another thick purple bruise ran across Sam’s chest where the tentacle had smacked him and knocked him out of the boat. Dean winced. “Oh, this one is going to be sushi when we’re done with it.”
“You got that right.” Sam twisted the faucet, but it only coughed up rusty water over his hands. “Dammit.” He took the blanket from Dean, wrapped it around his shoulder and stood there, shivering, staring into the sink.
“Sam.”
Sam took a quick look around the corner, and Dean turned his head to follow. Leigh was still facing outside. He was trying to light a cigarette but the blood dripping from his head kept putting out the light. Dean got distracted by the sight until Sam grabbed him by the back of his neck and pulled him halfway into the tiny bathroom, until they were nose to nose.
“She’s going down at sunrise,” Sam whispered in his ear. His hair stuck to Dean’s forehead, wet and cold. His hand burned the back of Dean’s neck. “She was sunk by a torpedo strike at sunrise, and she still dreams of it every night.”
“Who?” Dean whispered back, into Sam’s cheek. “The ship?”
“Yes, Morrigan. I’m just telling you what I heard.”
“From whom?”
Sam pinched his arm. “From whom the fuck do you think? She rises at sunset and drifts all night until she blows up at dawn. Look at your buddy there. Look at this sink.”
Rust spots had grown in the sink like lichen. They weren’t there when the two of them went into the bathroom. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
Sam moved his moth from Dean’s ear to his lips, unexpected and cold and tasting like seawater. Dean returned it, out of surprise and habit at first, and then a sudden sense of relief and whole lot of something else came like a tidal wave and Dean was kissing him in earnest. The inside of Sam’s mouth tasted like more seawater, shockingly familiar, and seawater was in his hair when Dean put his fingers through it. There was something very deep in him that had thought he couldn’t have this ever again, and now it was coming out like a flood.
Sam’s skin burned under his hands and his lips, and Dean couldn’t tell if Sam was running a fever, or if he was colder than he thought, or if this was his imagining, brought on by panic and relief. He felt strangely numb, too, as if he was touching Sam through a layer of wax. At the moment, he couldn’t care less.
They broke it off at the sound of a metallic bang outside. Leigh threw his lighter across the deck and crumpled a sodden cigarette.
Dean turned back to Sam. “What was that about?”
“Do I need a reason now?”
Dean pointed at Leigh’s shoulder visible in the doorway.
Sam rolled his eyes. “He’s kinda dead.”
“So? I can’t care about his opinion?”
“Dean. Fuck his opinion. We need to get off this ship before sunrise.”
“Okay, let’s just keep it to ourselves.” Sam just narrowed his eyes. “I hear you, man. Wait, sun rises at eight, right?”
“Are you two okay in there?” The blood was gone from Leigh’s face but he still looked very pale. His left eye was drifting a downward, until he blinked and it was in sync with the right again. “We can find you some dry clothes on board.”
“Thank you,” Sam said.
Dean searched the captain’s face for clues and warnings: if he’d heard anything about the ship going down - going down, echoed the words in his head, into the freezing ocean, along with the two living people on board - or had caught a glimpse of, well, incest. But he looked entirely normal, if pale as a sheet.
“Winchester, can I borrow your lighter? Mine keep going out.”
Dean tossed it to him and Leigh caught it in the air, and for a moment there was a look, just for a split second, which Dean would’ve missed if he hadn’t been waiting for it. There was one weighted, aware glance before Leigh hit the striker and bent his head to light a smoke. Oh, he caught something alright, Dean thought. It was pretty dumb - relying on the assumption that he had the hearing of a living person.
“Keep it,” He said, and Leigh gave him a crooked smile and hid the lighter in his pocket.
Sam bent down to pick up his wet clothes, taking extra care with the jacket. The seashell was visibly weighting down the pocket. Right there was another story Dean needed to get out of him soon.
Leigh said, “Walk with me. We’ll find you some dry clothes, and you can check out the lower decks for that-” He stopped abruptly, and Dean heard hurried footsteps coming toward them.
Through the fog came the vague outlines of bones - a skeleton walking closer. Dean saw his dark empty eye sockets and the fog swirling through his ribcage. Quickly, he grew muscles and skin and clothes, torn and bloody for a moment before appearing whole. The transformation took a couple of seconds, and the ancient skeleton became a healthy-looking sailor.
He eyed Sam and Dean, his lips pressed thin. “Captain, Doc Baird said to get you.”
“I’m coming.” He nodded toward Sam. “Find me some clothes to fit this guy.” The sailor melted back into the fog - uniform, skin, muscle, bones. “You’re coming with me.” Leigh paused and gave them both an odd look. “Why are you wearing coats? It must be eighty degrees out here.” But he turned and walked toward the sick bay without waiting for an answer.
Dean stopped in the doorway, Sam behind him, when the captain went inside. A sailor was sitting on that same bunk bed that Dean spent two hours trying to escape. The ghost on the bed was less intact than the rest of them, with the muscle and skin shredded on the right side of his body, except nobody seemed to notice his injuries. He was hugging his knees and hiding his face in them, and Dean saw that he was shivering. The corpsman was sitting on the edge of the bed with him and got up when the captain came in.
“Doc.”
The sailor turned his face enough to take one look at the captain. “Oh god.” He didn’t seem to notice Dean, or Sam lingering behind him in the shadows.
“Talley is all confused,” the corpsman said. He kept twisting a thread over his fingers, pulled off a sheet. “It’s that same thing again. He says he’s dead.”
Great, Dean thought. Their loops were ending. He looked back at Sam and Sam sighed and shrugged.
“Hey Talley.” Leigh kneeled next to the bunk bed and touched the sailor’s shoulder, making him flinch. Dean flinched, too - there was exposed bone where Leigh’s hand landed. “Talley, look at me.”
The sailor shook his head, still hiding his face.
“He thinks we’re all dead, too,” the corpsman added.
The ship’s PA system suddenly came to life with a cough and a crackle, “…Your hair is like meadow grass on the tide.”
Leigh gave it a stink eye. “Talley, everything’s okay.”
One eye showed again. “Jesus, captain. Look at you. Look at Doc. Can’t you see it?”
“Doc’s just fine.” Leigh’s nose started bleeding again. He wiped the blood and stared at his hand for a second before dropping it. “We’re all fine.”
“I never meant to leave,” said the radio, and then in a different voice. “This is no drill.”
Sam tugged on Dean’s sleeve and raised his eyebrows. “It’s their radio,” Dean said. “It does that.”
“I’ve read about this once,” the corpsman said. The thread in his finger snapped and he frowned down at it. “It’s a hysterical illness, sort of, where people believe they’re dead. It’s supposed to be rare.”
“Can it pass from one person to another?”
“I don’t know, Captain, I’m not a doctor. I just read it in a book once.”
The corpsman’s skin started to break and blister again, and Dean had to look away, with an unnamed feeling settling in the pit of his stomach, a mixture of sadness and shame. He didn’t want to watch them slowly break down into blood and bones and come to remember their death. Watching Leigh trying to figure out navigation, the broken communication system, the bouts of rare psychiatric sickness of board, watching him wipe the blood off his face - Dean felt like a cheat who held all the answers but kept his mouth shut.
Dean shook his head, thinking that this was probably a good time to ask about the seashell, with the ghosts distracted. But when he turned, Sam wasn’t there.
For a moment, it was like being back in the boat, with only fog and black water on all sides, and the paralyzing terror to make his hands shake and lose strength. The pain in his chest came and went, like a thick needle prick to the heart. Dean took two careful steps out of the rectangle of light spilling out the sick bay, quietly to keep from being noticed by the ghosts inside. There was an open hatch ahead through which they came in, and only a dark hallway going the other way, with a set of stairs leading down to lower decks. The stairway seemed an unlikely choice - it would’ve been hard for Sam to pass that way without Dean or one of the ghosts noticing, so the open upper deck it was.
“Where are the civilians?” came the corpsman’s voice from the sick bay, and Dean turned around and ran.
Outside, he could hardly see five feet in front of him. Christ, was the fog ever going to lift? He ducked around the corner, out of the square of light from the hallway and out of sight of whoever came looking. He stopped with his back against the wall and listened. The fog swirled before him, having swallowed the sea and the sky, leaving only this dead thing floating in the milky nothingness. The moon was a sliver of sugar candy above, licked to translucency. A faint smell of rust came and went. Dean could hear the lapping of invisible waves overboard and the indistinguishable murmur of voices from the sick bay, but no one followed him.
There was another voice, toward the stern. Dean started moving that way, wishing for some weapon, something tangible in his hands.
“…precise,” the voice said. It had a strange quality to it, choked and forced, with jarring inflections. “Can you imagine how hard it is, to trap a hurricane? Can you?”
That couldn’t have been one of the ghosts - talking about trapped hurricanes, and Dean walked faster while trying to stay quiet. And there was Sam finally, standing by the railing, bending over a little like he was trying to see something below. Someone else was with him, a large guy with his arm casually thrown over the railing. The guy was bare-chested in the cold, wearing some sort of high-waist dark pants.
No, Dean realized, the guy was on the sea side on the railing, leaning over, and the dark thing around Sam’s neck that he took at first for the lowered hood of his coat was a thick grey tentacle. The tentacle was probably restraining rather than choking, because Sam had his arms braced against the railing.
The sea monster turned his head when Dean took another step. His face was the color of a dead fish’s belly, with a dark dripping beard, and his mouth was too wide. When he saw Dean, he dropped his jaw open and made a slow hissing noise. Inside his mouth was a carpet of small sharp teeth and a narrow black tongue. Dean took another reflexive step forward, reaching for the gun and not finding it.
Sam punched the sea monster in the throat. The monster’s eyes went huge, and he gasped and threw one arm up to his neck while the other slipped on its metal hold. Seeing him tilt backward, Dean was already running forward. The monster dropped down like a sack of stones, and Dean just barely got an arm around Sam’s waist, another grabbing him by the belt. It’s going to break his neck, he thought, but he was already falling backward and dragging Sam down with him. Sam made a choked noise, and then the tentacle was gone, sliding overboard after its owner.
Dean rolled over and pulled Sam’s coat open, thinking shit, god, don’t let him have to do CPR out here, in the middle of the ocean, with a dead Navy corpsman from 1945 as the only help.
Sam shook his hands off. “I’m fine, dude, I’m all right.”
He sounded hoarse but he was speaking and moving. Dean leaned over him for a minute, making sure, letting the panic settle inside. Sam grinned up at him, and Dean let out a breath he’d been holding. He grabbed Sam’s head in an awkward one-armed hug, smacked a hard kiss against his mouth and a softer one against his hair, and flopped back down on the deck next to him.
He could feel the slight sway of the deck this way, and the cold of it in his spine. Up above them, cloaked in the dense December fog, floated the five inch naval gun with seaweed draped over it, and above that a searchlight and a radar, eroded and broken. Dean could feel Sam’s heavy breathing next to him, and everything was well in the jungle just then.
“Thank you,” Sam said. Dean punched him in the shoulder without looking. “Ow.”
“Where did you go, asshole?”
Sam shrugged, which Dean felt against his shoulder. He was staring up at the gun above them, biting his lip, and the look on his face was wretched. Dean wondered if he didn’t remember leaving, if the sea monster had some sort of psychic control over him.
“Hey Sam?” Dean tapped him on the stomach, and Sam caught his hand and covered it, trapping it against him. Dean was perfectly content to leave it there. It felt strange, like sticking his hand into a hot oven but it was nice. “Sam I don’t like this sea monster. It looks like a lumberjack with tentacles. I was hoping for something more dinosaur-like, you know? Creature from the depths. A terror from the Black Lagoon. You know?”
Sam squeezed his hand. “Yeah, I know. I’ve been calling it Bluebeard.”
“Bluebeard,” Dean repeated slowly, thinking of secret chambers and of bloodless corpses hanging off meat hooks. “Well, at least it’s got tentacles.”
“Can’t have it all.”
“Sam.” Dean tapped him on the stomach again, like knocking on a door. “Sam, I need to know. Did something happen between you and the tentacular sea monster?”
Sam knocked his hand away and kicked him in the ankle.
“I’ve seen it in those cartoons.”
“Fuck off.”
“But the cartoons!”
“Ask me that again, and I’ll stab you in the eyeball.” He sat up, and Dean pushed himself up on the elbows. “Come on,” Sam said. “Let’s get out of here before we freeze to death or before our respective stalkers come back.”
Dean got up as well. “Leigh’s not bad. He’s just confused. He thinks it’s World War Two.”
“I never said he was. He seems like a decent guy. Let’s just find some quiet place to talk shop.”
“That reminds me. What time is it?”
Sam glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s midnight.”
Midnight. The strangest feeling suddenly came over Dean, like something in his head going off the rails. He didn’t remember feeling like this before but suddenly knew that he had. He’d felt like this in the hallway, before Sam disappeared. He’d felt it earlier, too, but when? The world stood still in perfect balance and then slowly tilted, slowly, beginning to collapse.
~~~~
When Dean woke up, he was alone and his chest ached deeply. The naval gun barrel was floating over his head, half-dissolved in the fog, and above it hovered the radio tower. He lifted his hand and pretended to touch the signal lamp, way up there. It was so far away. If he could reach it, he could send a message and bring Sam back, maybe.
Dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot. No, that wasn’t right.
Dean lay on the deck for a long while, just breathing. It hurt like a bitch, all the way in his heart, a residual pain. It felt oddly familiar, and something in him, either experience or common sense was telling him not to fuck with this pain. Dean rubbed two fingers over his sternum. The hurt had settled deep inside but it was leaving, aftershocks of a greater agony.
This was what it felt like in the water. He wondered how he could’ve forgotten this.
Sam, he wanted to say, Sam, I think I screwed up my heart. But Sam wasn’t there. Again. Dean turned his head both ways but there was only fog, the goddamn winter Washington fog that barely let him see further than his outstretched arm.
“Sam?” No response. “Goddammit.”
He rolled over slowly, keeping a hand pressed to his chest, like that would help him stop another - cardiac arrest - burst of crushing pain, whatever it was, like a charley horse in his heart muscle. There were spots of rust on the deck and wide sheets of seaweed draped over the railing. Moving on his hands and knees, Dean got to the edge of the deck and looked down.
“Shit. Sam?”
He grabbed onto the railing to get up, moving carefully. If his heart was going to do this thing from now on, he was going to end up with a pacemaker, like an old geezer. Or a defibrillator - that was even better. He wondered now, with a strong sense of unease, if his heart had stopped in the water, if the ghosts pumped on his chest. It seemed like they should’ve told him. It was a big deal, a heart stopping, and why wouldn’t they tell him such a thing?
He did remember being pulled out of the water, though, if nothing after that.
The pain subsided but Dean wasn’t sure he could trust it yet. He leaned with his hands on his knees, taking deep careful breaths, and looked around. Up on the bridge, he could see an outline of a man’s figure.
He waved. “Sam!”
The figure stepped away from the window, and Dean headed up to meet him halfway. He stopped on his way to pull his clothes into some presentable appearance, to rub some color into his face and make sure he wasn’t short of breath. Sam was going to flip his shit over this. Ideally, Dean would’ve liked to delay the shit-flipping until they were back on solid ground.
It wasn’t Sam. Darren Leigh was sitting by himself on the deserted bridge, his head cradled in his hands. When Dean walked in, he lifted his head enough to see and froze that way. He looked like he was in a world of pain.
Dean sighed. “Can we do this some other time? I’ll explain when I have time. Have you seen my brother around?”
Leigh continued to stare. Blood slowly seeped over his lower eyelid, collecting around his eye, until he blinked and it rolled down his cheek in a slow fat drop. “Did you lose him?”
“Maybe.”
“I haven’t seen him.” He wiped off the blood and frowned down at his fingers.
Dean turned around to go but hesitated in the doorway. “Leigh. You okay?”
“My head hurts. I haven’t had these headaches in years.” He rubbed his fingers together, smearing the blood, and closed his eyes. “Go look for your brother. Brother,” he repeated slower.
“What?”
“Nothing. Head hurts.”
Blood mixed with a clear fluid was dribbling out of his left ear, running down his cheek and soaking the uniform collar. Christ. Dean had seen ghosts in physical pain, some that were stuck forever with it with no relief. It had always seemed like the most miserable afterlife to him. What the hell was the point, if you were still going to be in pain after death?
Dean came closer and sat down on the floor opposite Leigh. “Hey, maybe the doc has something for your headache. Want to go down and see?”
“I know the way.”
“Come on, buddy.” Dean dropped a hand on his head, awkwardly, careful to not touch the wounded left side. “I’ll make you a deal: we’ll get you medicated, and then you help me look for my brother. All right? I don’t know my way around here, and besides, I’d probably get shot without you.”
Leigh rolled his eyes. The left one rolled considerably higher. “Why do you keep calling him your brother?”
Dean took his hand off and set it on his own knee. “Because he is my brother.” Leigh made a face. Oh, he did see something earlier. “None of your business. Come on.”
“You’re right. It isn’t.” He looked down at his hand again and spread his fingers for Dean to see. “Am I bleeding?”
Dean shifted his eyes to the ruin of his head, and it seemed strangely indecent to be staring. Leigh was looking straight at him, grim and serious.
“Yeah.”
“From my head?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it survivable?”
Dean could see the facial bones again. “No.”
Leigh nodded. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Dean waited, wondering if he was going to flicker out now, if this was the end of the loop and he’d have to run around the shipwreck by himself, searching for Sam.
“Huh,” Leigh said. “Is the war over?”
“Yeah. It has been for a long time.”
“Who won?”
“We did.”
That got a lopsided smile out of him. He searched through his pockets, still smiling, and came up with the crumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one and took a long drag.
“I have to go talk to the crew.” He pushed himself off the floor, seemingly unbothered by the headache now.
“Hey, no, Leigh.” Dean caught his arm. “Your crew is dead. I’m sorry but they are. Sam is alive, and we have to find him before-” He bit his tongue before he said anything about the sea monster. Enough crazy was enough. “We have to find him.”
“No, you have to find him. I have to talk to the crew. Doc Baird’s been handling psychotic breakdowns all night. Or so we thought.” But already on the stairs he paused and looked back at Dean. “Are you sure Sam is alive?”
“Of course I’m sure. We were just hunting ghosts when you guys showed up.”
Leigh sighed. “And a few hours ago I was sure that we were on patrol duty in the South Pacific. Look at us now.”
A pinprick of a heartache came back, like a bad feeling. “We were working a case. We’re alive.”
“You’re not,” Leigh said. “I’m sorry.” And he turned and headed down the stairs to the lower deck, leaving Dean alone in a hallway suddenly gone dark and musty. The lights dimmed and went out, and from everywhere came the smell of rust and rotting seaweed, rolling over Dean in a big wave. With the smell came the feeling of cold - the kind of cold that was like a sledgehammer to the skull, like iron claws around the heart, like the whole of the freezing Pacific embracing him and swallowing him down.
NEXT
WTF! Back to Master Post to double check the warnings