“That is the ugliest fish I have ever seen.”
The Processor avoided touching the gelatinous grey-black blob and even stepped back into the bony obstacle of the Engineer who had spoken over her shoulder.
“Any idea what it is?” she asked.
“It’s not tuna,” he shrugged. “Toss it over.”
She looked around for a gaff, still not wanting to touch it even through her heavy gummed gloves. After three weeks on the fishing scow, her hands were still soft and pink.
“Oh, don’t be a pussy,” the Engineer said with a phlegmy, nicotine-tanned chuckle. He reached a sinewy arm past her to grab it with his bare hand, but as soon as his fingers neared it, the creature scuttled away. “What the hell?” he shouted, drawing his hand back like it had been stung.
The Deckhand who had been watching said matter of factly, “Fish don’t move like that.”
The Processor glanced at him and said, “Thanks genius.”
He sniffed, spit a wad of snot on the deck and said, “College bitch,” and sauntered away.
“Hey, move your asses,” the Captain of the seiner called from the helm tower.
“Yeah, okay,” the Deckhand called back, and to the Processor mumbled, “Let’s get a gaff and get this outta here.”
They each tried hooking the blob, which from its size looked to weigh about fifty pounds, but they found it difficult to gain a purchase on the thing since it gave way like gelatin but remained intact like the toughest rubber.
The Captain, who had turned his back on them, felt the confusion behind him and turned again to see the two struggling. From his position, he could see the bulky creature had a dark grey color, similar to a porpoise, but also a translucent surface. It looked clear to a depth of an inch or more, and as the sun struck it, the beams were refracted with a prismatic effect that in brief strobes of light made the color seem like a rainbow.
The two hands had just managed to slide the gaffs under the blob and were using them like spatulas to push the thing through a scupper when the Captain shouted, “Wait!” He slid down the ladder to the deck and kicked his way through tuna flopping on the deck as they were being loaded into the refrigerated hold. “What is that?”
“Just bycatch,” the Processor said. “Came up in the last purse. We’re trying to dump it, but it’s slippery. Sorry Captain”
He grunted at the girl, and called the Mate over. “Ever seen anything like that?”
The Mate gave it the barest glance, said “Naw,” and moved back to work.
“Hold up!” the Captain shouted at him, irritation making him set his lower jaw. “You know these damn waters. Take a good look!” He noticed the Engineer still watching the scene and yelled, “You get below. Oil something.”
The Engineer nodded and headed down below while the Mate gave the Captain a glance that was at once wary and dismissive. He bent over and opened his eyes wide, mugging an expression of concentration. He then turned back to the Captain and, overemphasizing each word stated, “No Captain. I do not know what it is.” He looked back at the fish-blob and gave it a nudge with his gummed boot. “Now can I get back to work?”
The Captain grunted again and jerked his head to motion the Mate away.
But as the Mate tried to step away, he fell as if his legs had been pulled from under him. He cursed and tried to untangle his legs but found that the toe he had used to nudge the creature was still attached to it, a tendril of it stretched out like taffy and glued tight to the toe of his boot. Down on his ass, he began kicking both feet at it, alternately breaking free with one boot then getting restuck with the other. “It’s tar!” he shouted in anger, “Just a tar glob. They float off from rigs. That’s all it is.”
“But it’s got eyes,” the Processor said.
The Deckhand leaned in and said, I don’t think those are really eyes. They’re just spots. He probed at one with the butt of the gaff. See, they slide over the surface. But it did walk … or crawl or something. It’s not just tar.”
The Captain looked over the Processor. “What about you, schoolgirl? You learn in college about the sea?”
“Hey, I’m humanities. I don’t know a thing about fish. This is just a summer job.”
He gave a low growl of frustration at her uselessness as he continued to stare at the mystery animal, rubbing his eyes one at a time. “I don’t see a mouth. How does it eat?”
“Aren’t those fins along the bottom?” the Deckhand asked.
“Might be,” The Processor said to him. “They look like fins. But I don’t think they were there when it rolled out of the net. I think they … grew onto the deck, like feelers.”
“Wait, no look,” the Deckhand slid a gaff along the back and hooked something almost invisible in the jelly on the creature’s skin. “It does have fins. A big dorsal fin.” As he lifted, the dorsal splayed out like an oriental fan with webbed tissue held between spines needle-sharp at the tips. The pressure of the gaff drew out liquid that formed into droplets on the ends of the needles.
“Is that venom?” The Captain asked, then answered himself, saying, “Wouldn’t be unusual. Be careful of it. Ugly as a stone fish, and that’ll kill you cold in fifteen minutes.”
The Processor asked, “So should we push it off now?”
The Captain surprised them with a decisive, “No!”
The Mate had finally managed to push the fish-blob from his boot with a hand-pike and muttered, “I’m going back to work.”
The Captain ignored him and said to the girl, “I want to take it in. Take it to the college. To somebody there who might know what it is.
The Mate stopped and glared at him. “What the hell for?”
“For money, stupid. It’s weird. Maybe it’s rare – worth something. Stinking fish aren’t getting me outta debt. If this is rare…” He trailed off.
The Processor and Deckhand found an empty drum and coaxed the creature head first, or what they thought might be the head, into it. While it had seemed to fight them in their attempts to push it over the gunwale or through the scuppers, now it slid easily where they pointed it. The little fins or flippers even moved to propel it forward. They filled the drum with seawater, lashed it to the base of the mast, and then went back to work the tuna.
Over the next week, they fished the shoals on a westerly course, making their way back to port with a hold still only half full.
Every night before turning in, the Captain would check the fish-creature. Some of the crew had noticed him leaning over the drum so far that his face almost touched the surface of the water, about six inches below the rim. The Mate took some pleasure in telling the others that he had even heard the crusty old man cooing to it like a pet.
The Oiler giggled, “Yes, she’s his kitty now.”
“Does it talk back to him?” asked the Deckhand.
“Yes!” the Processor laughed, “It says ‘give us a kiss big boy.’”
“Kiss me where it’s salty.”
“Mmm, stroke that sea pussy.”
“Shhh!” The Deckhand whispered. “He’s coming.”
They could hear his heavy rubber tread thumping down the ladder to the galley. The crew stifled their laughter, but not very well, and the Mate gave a suppressed grunt that set off the Deckhand who blew a runnel of snot out of his nose before he pushed the laugh back down and the Processor had tears running down her bright red cheeks.
But the Captain didn’t notice. He wandered into the room with a distracted look on his face, making eye contact with no one, and not saying a word. He picked up a mug and went to the coffee urn. After filling up, he wandered back to the bunk cabin and lay down.
The spigot still dripped a little and the Cook leaned over to twist it all the way off.
“Maybe it’s a boy.”
They all burst out laughing.
The stories about the Captain and his pet grew and were traded around the little fishing boat. In such a tight space, the Captain should have caught on and, had he been his usual self, should have been screaming mad. But either he had become too distracted to hear or too hopeful to care. He did not shout or curse or even give a spoken reprimand to anyone. In fact, he hardly seemed to talk at all except to give the most basic orders about the running of the boat. On the rare occasions when he did engage in conversation, it always concerned the rarity of the creature and what wealth it might bring him. He had really begun to speak in terms not of a quick and profitable sale to some lab but of “untold riches” in mythical terms.
In hopes of finding more material for his gossip about the Captain, the Mate began to spy on his nightly ritual of communing with the creature. Afterwards, he always shared a new little tidbit in the galley:
“He’s making kissing noises into the barrel … The damn thing is coming to the surface to meet him. I think they’re in love … He’s not just cooing at it. He’s talking to it! … The thing is making sounds back at him … Have you seen that a glow comes from the barrel when they’re together?”
That final one was too much for the Deckhand. “Glow? How’s it gonna glow?”
The Engineer, taking a brief moment away from his retreat among the engines below, snorted, “Like the mareel, dummy. You never seen the milk sea glow?”
“Mareel? what’s that mean?” asked the Oiler.
The Engineer chewed thoughtfully for a moment on the horny callus of a knuckle, all of them barked and torn until they had scarred into lumpy barnacles. “Well, sea fire, I s’pose some call it. The Vikings said it was the fire the gods left over when they created the earth.”
“It’s called bioluminescence,” the Processor added.
“You said you’re just a, a human major, whattayou know about it?” asked the Deckhand.
“I watched Cousteau.”
“Lotta things glow in the sea,” the Engineer said before heading back to lay below. He crooked a finger at his prodigal Oiler to join him and get back to work.
“And this thing glows when you talk to it?” asked the Deckhand, grinning.
“Not for me! For the Captain,” the Mate protested.
“Oh sure, just the Captain.”
The Mate soon fell silent and moody, refusing to say any more until he headed for his bunk.
“Captain’s not the only one talking to that thing,” The Deckhand whispered to the Cook and Processor, the only two who remained. “After the Captain goes to bed, the Mate stays up there. I seen him looking into that barrel. He’s getting as daffy about it as the Captain.
But the next night, the Captain, not the Mate, called everyone, even the Oiler and Engineer from below, to join him on deck around the drum.
“It’s blooming! It’s blooming!” he shouted.
A smile from the Captain had always been rare enough, but this joyous excitement struck the crew as an impossibility. Still, here it was, and he smiled and patted them on their backs and gestured to them to gather close to the drum and look inside at the creature.
“Look at it! It’s actually blooming!”
The Processor noticed he had said “it” and not “he” or “she,” so the Mate’s innuendos about the Captain’s more romantic inclinations had been untrue.
“It’s a gold mine I tell you. If it’s blooming now, it may make fruit or babies or something. There’ll be more. We can farm them, harvest them. We’re all gonna be rich men, fellas.” He looked at the Processor and grinned, “You too girlie, no one gets left out.”
The crew looked down into the drum. The Deckhand started to switch on a torch but saw he did not need it. The bioluminescence within the drum provided enough light to make clear everything in the water. The creature itself remained black-grey in color, but from the clear jelly that coated it, numerous nubs had begun to bud, and these had vivid, splendid, even psychedelic colors. Each nub possessed its own family of hues whether in the blue spectrum or red or violet or green. And they sprayed light out in spumes that could have been liquid mist or fragments of light beams. The crew members could not tell through the water since the surface remained still and unbroken. The jets of variegated spume shot with greater power from the nubs that had begun to bud, and one bud had broken into splayed petals that created a light so bright that they could barely look at it without pain.
“So it’s not a fish but some kind of plant.”
The Engineer said, “Looks like a lotus … had one here once.” He pulled back his shirt-sleeves and looked along his arms. “Here it is.” The Deckhand looked at the inner side of the man’s fish-belly white bicep.
“That’s just a black blob now. When’d ya get that? During the war?”
“Yeah, over to the Orient.”
No one else looked at the age-smeared tattoo for their eyes were held in near hypnosis by the beauty of the creature.
“That’s what we’ll name it,” the Captain said dreamily. “Lotus. It’s the lotus-fish. The lotus-plant. The sea-lotus.”
“Sealotus, yeah, like a mermaid,” the Mate said, and no one asked him what he meant because to all of them looking down into the drum, it made sense in a way that required no solid logic. They remained gathered around the Sealotus for hours, and the group only began to break up when the petals of the creature closed.
“Does it bloom with the sun?”
“No, it’s been dark for hours.”
“Maybe it blooms with the moon.”
“When did the blooms first open? Did anyone see them open?”
No one had. It may have bloomed while the sun was still up, so it was decided that someone would have to keep watch on the Sealotus at all times. The crew argued about the first shift with everyone demanding it. The Captain ordered those not on watch to get some sleep.
The next day, they managed to do very little fishing. The watches had to be broken down to two hours each to give everyone on board a chance. Even then, two or three other crew members always hung around the drum with the assigned watchers. Being on watch simply meant the one on duty got first dibs on hanging his head over the water and staring down at the Sealotus.
Under the constant attention of the crew, the buds grew and bloomed. The spumes of light rays frothed the water, breaking the surface now and sending clouds of colored mist floating across the decks. The crew members followed the clouds of light about and made a game of walking through them face-first, claiming that it refreshed and energized them. No one felt better than the person on watch though. The crew members boasted that they felt like Superman. With power and energy, they would then throw themselves back into work with the nets but soon their attention would drift, and they would wander back to the drum or chase clouds across the deck.
The Captain did nothing to stop this. He had no interest in the tuna anymore but instead spent his time calculating the money he saw coming from his capture of the Sealotus. His main duties came to consist of negotiating the watches so fights did not break out and keeping the boat heading for port.
The Engineer, who because of his duties maintaining the engines as well as the all-important refrigeration of the catch, could not take part in the watches. So he noticed before anyone else that the crew was becoming sick.
“You been puking?” he asked the Processor when he saw her coming out of the head. “Ain’t no shame in it. Lotta newbie Processors get sick, have to leave the boat. Seen it happen many times.”
“Oh no,” she smiled, shaking her head. “I feel terrific.”
“Really honey? You look a little peaked.”
“Oh?” She furrowed her brow and held a palm up to her cheek, stroking it and closing her eyes. “No, no, no feels fine, toasty.”
“Huh.” He held up a grease-blackened hand to check her himself, noticed how filthy it was and asked, “d’you mind?”
She looked confused for a moment, then enthused, “Oh no, please!” and pressed her face forward into his hand, moving it so he stroked her as she had stroked herself.
“Girl, you’re cold as ice. You got a bug of some kind. Better tell the skipper.”
“Oh no, I’m fine, really, really good.” She wandered down the passageway and then up the ladder to the deck, not the hold where she was supposed to be working.
The Engineer returned to his motors and pumps, finding his Oiler wiping the pipes in a desultory way, working up a shine and mugging into the reflection.
“You making a career outta that one pipe, boy?”
“Hmm?”
“Lemme see your face.” The Engineer grabbed the oiler’s chin and turned his head so he could get a good look at it. “Saints, you’re paler than that girl. Did you get enough sleep before your shift.”
“Didn’t sleep. Stayed on deck with the Sealotus. Much, much better’n sleep.”
The Engineer stepped back. “You lost your bearings boy? You’re supposed to spell me for the next six.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine, go ahead, I’m not sleepy at all. You go hit the rack – or better, or better, or much, much better,” he had suddenly turned toward the Engineer and pressed close to him, almost nose to nose, so the Engineer could see the feverish brightness of the Oiler’s eyes, “go up and take a shift with the Sealotus. It’ll set you free!”
The Engineer backed away, mumbling he’d “get some goddamn sleep” then added in a yell, “and get to those knocking valves like I told you!” He then climbed up a level to the bunk cabin and sacked out for the rest of the afternoon.
As evening fell, the watchers noticed that the grey metal drum itself now glowed. The sides of the drum had been rendered transparent by the powerful light within. They worried that it might melt and allow the Sealotus to slosh out and over the boat’s side, but the light remained cool to the touch. The petals of the large bud, the one the Engineer had said looked like a lotus, had grown so large and spread so wide, they covered the circumference of the drum top like a lid. It emitted no scent but a beam like a searchlight shot up vertically from it and the men would bathe their head in it as if it were a shower of soothing water.
In something of a panic, two watchers, the Deckhand and the Mate, noticed during the night that the level of seawater in the drum had dropped. Not only were all the blooms of the nubs now in the open air becoming dry, but the body of the Sealotus itself was half exposed. They weren’t sure whether the water had been consumed by the flowers or boiled down by the light spraying from them or had simply evaporated, but they feared the creature might die. While no one had found anything on it that resembled gills, they thought it possible that it might suffocate.
They decided that only quick action would suffice, so they hooked the purse seine winch to the drum in order to lower it into the ocean to be refilled. But terrified that the Sealotus might use the opportunity to swim away, they decided to take it out first. Fearing also that it might slip away on the deck, they reasoned the best course would be to have one man hold it while the other worked the winch. The creature was too massive to hold up in one’s arms, so the Mate decided he would hold it on his lap. He sat down with his legs spread wide to accommodate the bulk while the Deckhand carefully tipped the drum over onto him. The kaleidoscopic beams from the flowers swung around like crazy klieg lights as the creature splashed out onto the Mate. The little fins or flippers along the grey circumference of the Sealotus wiggled briefly but then latched onto the thighs of the Mate, holding itself in place
“Too heavy?” the Deckhand asked.
“No, light as sunbeam really.”
The deckhand got to work, his anxiety over the creature making his actions sloppy and inefficient. The task took far more time than it required, especially since the drum kept dumping its load of water as he tried to lower it easily onto the deck. Finally, he got a nearly full barrel set down next to the Mate, who did not look worried at all but was smiling and humming.
The Deckhand ran back to him and asked, “Is it ok? Is it suffocating?”
“No, no, don’t worry,” the Mate answered. “I think it likes to be held.”
“Oh.” The Mate stared at the two of them for a while, shifting from one foot to another. “Well, can I hold it then?”
For just a flash, the Mate looked at him with murder in his eyes. Then his features smoothed out and he smiled, “Sure, sure, sure. You’ll love it.”
For almost an hour, the two traded the weight of the Sealotus back and forth between them, mostly peaceful except for tiny moments of hate and jealousy.
They were interrupted by the Engineer who, after managing to sleep only about four hours, had come up on the deck with a coffee and a pipe to have a smoke before checking on his Oiler’s work. He saw the Mate, sitting with his back against the wheelhouse and the bulky creature covering his whole midsection while the Deckhand leaned over him, dipping his face in and out the blossoms’ mists of light.
“By Neptune’s beard what are you two chuckleheads doing with that ugly thing?”
They looked up at him slowly and then at each other. The Mate looked back at the Engineer and asked, “Would you like to hold it?”
“No, I don’t want to hold that diseased looking thing. And you shouldn’t either. That layer of mucous over the thing could contain … I don’t know, disease! Venom!
The Mate stood up and approached him. “No, we’re fine. We’ve been holding it for hours. It wants to be held.” His expression hardened. “You should hold it.”
The Engineer looked him up and down. “Look at your clothes, man. There’re little holes burned all over your middle. That thing must have acid …” But as he said this, the Engineer doubted it. It was true, there were holes, small black spots like cigarette burns on the Mate’s clothing. But there was nothing to be seen behind the holes, no skin burned or otherwise. The holes seemed to extend down to a great distance, and the Engineer tried to pull his gaze away as his words ran out. He looked up into the Mate’s eyes.
“You need to hold it.”
The Engineer backed away. “No, you oughta put it back in the salt water there. It might need it. Might be thirsty or some … damn thing.” Still facing them, he backed into the companionway and started climbing down. The Mate looked back at the Deckhand and nodded, but the Engineer did not think they looked convinced as he descended out of their view.
Others came on watch soon, and the Mate found them very willing to take turns holding the Sealotus and pressing their faces into flowers’ polychromatic spume. Meanwhile, the Engineer lay below to lose himself in his work among the diesel and grease fumes of the shadowy engine compartment. Until about four in the morning, he blocked out his concern about the Captain’s money hunger and the Mate’s newfound love for sealife by babying the Vee 12 diesel so it would get what he still hoped would be a fairly decent catch back to port.
But when he found the refrigeration ducts had not been flushed and blockage had shut the whole system down, he headed for the ladder to lay topside and tear into the Oiler for not keeping up on his maintenance duties. “Catch’ll be ruined! That lazy son of a bitch!”
He found his Oiler, as he knew he would, gathered with several others around the Sealotus. If the Mate had ever put it back in the drum, it was out again now, covering most of the Processor while she lay on her back on the deck. The Cook was there too, looking on with his mouth hanging open, drooling a thin line of spittle.
“You!” he shouted. “Do you know what’s happening with your catch? Everything you gutted–”
When they looked at him, he stopped speaking. The two crewmembers closest to him had holes in them. They were riddled with those funny holes in their clothes that seemed to go on forever. In one, he could see right through his stomach to the wheelhouse behind him. In spite of the holes, he was still standing, smiling, and eating.
He looked down at the Sealotus on the girl’s lap. Most of the nubs had blossomed now and were sending out torrents of light so powerful and multicolored that he thought they must be visible from shore, still twenty miles away. He saw that the petals were missing from the largest and oldest bloom. Nonetheless, light still glowed from its center, coming out in a corkscrew that meandered around the men and girl. But the petals were all gone, their ends looking chewed.
“Jesus wept, now you’re eating the damnable thing?”
A voice from above said, “You gotta keep eating if you wanna keep going.”
The Captain, or what was left of him perched atop the helm tower, smiling and whistling happy as a bird. One of his arms was missing, and at the point of his shoulder where the arm should have been attached, the skin and shirt both looked puckered as if something had pulled away part of him. As the Engineer looked at the man, the shoulder continued to stretch and strain as if whatever had taken his arm were still pulling more of him in. No blood ran from the wound, if wound it was, for the man looked utterly drained. Most of the top of his skull was missing, along with one eye while the other wrinkled and crinkled with a secret inner joy. And his chest was punctured by a thick constellation of black holes.
“All of us been eating,” the Oiler said, holding out a fleshy piece of pinkish-white petal. “We saved you some.”
“You’re sick, boy. You’re all sick. Look at you. You all are pale as ghosts. Your skin’s lost every bit of healthy color.” He pointed a shaky finger at the Sealotus. “It’s that thing. That mess a sea snot. It’s a vampire … that’s what it is. You all lost blood I bet, lotta blood. I think it sucked it right outta you. We gotta get to port and get you up to hospital. Every damned one of you.”
From the rack beside him, he grabbed a pike pole with a straight spike on the tip. And swung it around to point at the crew. “But that thing goes over the side first.”
The girl screamed with such a sudden and bloodcurdling ferocity that he nearly dropped the pike in surprise. The Sealotus slid from her lap and slithered back with a mewling sound while the rest of the crew moved to stand between it and the Engineer. When they faced him like that, he grasped that they had lost much more than blood. All of them were punctured by black holes that operated like drains, drawing light in from bodies, making them go pale to invisibility. In the shadowy pre-dawn dark, they looked incomplete, just splinters and fragments of humans, one leg here, an arm there, a torso floating without limbs and the edges of these pieces pale, colorless, dissolving to grey and then to a black that merged with the black night around them, incapable of even obscuring objects behind them.
The Engineer backed away from their hungry faces and from the shreds of Sealotus petals that several held out to him while the creature itself squirmed farther behind them to be lost in the dark. The crew murmured encouragement to eat, to feel the wonder of it, the joy. He continued to back toward the companionway until he felt a presence behind him. Glancing quickly over his shoulder, he saw that the Captain had come down from the helm to cut off his escape. He too held a piece of petal which he offered like a sacrament.
Looking over the port side, he considered jumping into the sea. At that moment, hypothermia and drowning in the frigid waters seemed a better option than being devoured in some inexplicable way by the Sealotus. The crew saw him looking and moved to intercept him as he leaped for the side. But it was a feint, and he jumped back and ran through a gap in the purse seine left carelessly draped over the deck. He grabbed a fistful of netting and swept it over the gap he had passed.
The others scrambled after him as he rounded the tower and headed for the foredeck where he had seen the Sealotus retreat. He could hear feet stamping on the deck behind him, but the crew had tangled in the net hanging in its disorderly pyramid from the boom. The Engineer moved around the deckhouse, careful of the creature which might be lying in wait for him in the dark along the side-deck. But it did not appear beside the deckhouse or in front of it. He looked around frantically to see where it might have wedged itself or, hopefully, where it might have left a trail of slime showing its path over the side. He saw nothing, so he tried the hatch over the crew quarters. Firmly shut, the hatch resisted his first pull, yet as he reset his stance to tug again, footsteps rounded both sides of the deckhouse and shapes torn by shadows appeared.
Blocked port and starboard, the Engineer jumped atop the capstan and reached for the top of the pilothouse. Just as he inched his fingers over the upper lip, he could feel hands grabbing for his feet, trying to pull him back, and he kicked them away. His ropy muscles strained and shook as he gradually pulled his skinny frame over the reverse angled windows to the top of the house. Panting, he threw himself flat on the upper deck.
Looking back he saw someone else’s hands reach over the lip and begin climbing. First one forearm hooked over the top and then the other. The left upper arm slid up for leverage and the crewman swung his left leg onto the upper deck. Seeing the shirt sleeve of the left arm, the Engineer recognized it as the Mate’s flannel. With left leg and left arm all the way up, the Mate began pulling his torso the rest of the way. The Engineer saw where it should be rising, the arm bringing its shoulder, its chest, and its stomach into view. But there was no neck or head. He couldn’t move as he watched the headless man rise to his feet and stand over him.
Maybe the sound it made was an attempt at speech; all the Engineer heard was a cavernous rumble coming from the open-ended windpipe extending out of the thing’s chest. And that was enough to get him to scrabble to his feet and run over the pilothouse and past the helm to the mast. Attempting to keep moving laterally away from the chasing headless man, he tried climbing up the boom of the purse seine net first, but it angled too sharply, and he slid back toward his pursuer. With a leap, he grabbed onto a rung of the mast, staying just out of reach of the Mate.
With nowhere to go but up, the Engineer climbed to the lookout perch. Looking down, he saw the Mate beginning to climb after him. Past the Mate, he could see shadows flitting here and there as pieces of humans were trying to maneuver cables and spars to cut off any retreat of the Engineer.
With the Mate closing in and no other option but the big drink, the Engineer began climbing hand over hand along the steel cable that ran from the mast to the boom. One of the crew, maybe his Oiler though there was little left visible of him but greasy swatches of his coveralls, wrapped himself around the base of the boom, so the Engineer could not slide down it. Others went to the seine skiff over which the tip of the boom hovered, and cut it loose to drift away so he could not drop into it and row to freedom.
The Captain, still in possession of his mouth though much of his upper head had been extinguished, called up, “Where do you expect to go, old man?”
Looking down, he saw the hatch to the hold had been left open, allowing the catch to thaw even faster with the refrigeration down, but making for a less rocky landing for him if it had. So he let go and fell thirty feet, past the disembodied grabbing hands and flailing arms into the dark hold.
The tuna gave, but only a little. The impact felt like someone had slugged him with a burlap sack of sand. Recovering as quickly as he could, he clawed and crawled his way across the slick fish bodies away from the open hatch and into the complete blackness of the deepest section of the hold.
He burrowed his way through the layers of fish while trying to keep a passageway open for air which had already become thick with the stench of ripe fish though he could still breath it well enough. In the warmth of the hold, the slime that usually coated the scales of the tuna had begun to run off in thick rivulets, covering him, hiding him. A wave of confidence washed over him as he realized that if those things the crew had become could still track by smell, they would not be able to down here. And they could not track him by sight since even when dawn came in an hour or so, it remained black as the innards of a whale in here.
Those subhuman freaks couldn’t touch him now. If they stayed on course, they would reach port sometime soon after dawn – and that insane Captain surely still wanted the money from the college in town, so he wouldn’t mess with the heading.
Yes, he felt safe now. He felt a rising power and energy, maybe even a euphoria. Yes, yes, it was true dammit, he felt like Superman. He wondered about the strangeness of such a feeling at the same moment that he noticed the hold was not so dark after all. A pink glow pulsed through the fish meat in front of him. Although he did not want to, he began pushing the hulks of tuna out of the way to find the origin of it until he exposed a patch of the grey gelatinous body of the Sealotus with a bright pink bud. Freed of the pressure of the dead fish, the petals sprung open and peeled back, exposing the central floral disk of red, fiery as the tail of a rocket engine. Only inches away from the Engineer’s face, the bud blasted a jet of light particles into his eyes while on the deck above, the last human color was drawn away into blackness, and the Engineer thought incredibly, “It feels so good to lose your light at sea.”
When the Seiner crashed into the dock some time later, it caused little damage since the engine had begun to catch and sputter, leaving it to drift more than drive forward. The dockworkers who climbed aboard first found no one anywhere, but they did notice the skiff had been launched, so they still had hope for the crew. The Coast Guard was called, and the search was set in motion. Police would arrive soon to investigate the boat.
Before they arrived, a docker checked the hold. “Not much of a catch. And it smells. Not frozen, but some of it might be salvageable.”
“Well, if they are still out there, they’re gonna need every cent they can get from this load.”
“Yeah, let’s get some Processors out here. They can sniff every damn tuna they unload. See if they’ve turned yet.”
The other docker nodded. “Yep, that’s why they make the big bucks.” Both the men laughed at that.
“But seriously, when they check out the fish, have them really get their faces down into ’em and sniff deep. We can’t rely on sight alone.”
Copyright © Jedediah Smith 2021
First published in Let the World Drown edited by Tim Murr
Jedediah Smith 