Work Text:
(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.
~~~~
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.
~~~~
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?”
~~~~
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.
~~~~
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.”
~~~~
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.
~~~~
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.
~~~~
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 right 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.
~~~~
The piece of polished metal used for a mirror in the bathroom had gone dull. A tiny silver fish lay dead in the sink.
Dean leaned closer to the mirror, squinting at his unfocused reflection. He touched his temples, ran both hands through his hair, pulled his eyelids down. He wasn’t gushing blood like Leigh but his face was just as pale, just as bloodless. Even in the bad light, his lips were dusky blue. The carotid lay silent if he pressed down on it. He pulled off his coat and sweater, lifted his shirt and pushed up the legs of his jeans until he found them – deep purple bruises along his calves and up in his thighs as well. They were the marks of blood breaking through the veins and filling the tissues under the pull of gravity when his heart had stopped beating.
“Lividity,” he said, pressing a finger against them. It didn’t hurt. “Great.”
They went on a hunt for a monster neither of them knew anything about, in a little walnut shell of a boat in December. Sam got dragged out of the boat and Dean killed himself trying to get him back. Well, he thought, well, no shame in dying while doing what you love.
Sam, someone had scratched into the wall by the mirror. Sam Sam Sam Sam. He touched his finger to the letters of his brother’s name. He must’ve left all the other messages, too, and forgot it.
“Hey Dean.”
Sam was hovering in the hallway, looking so goddamn sad, like somebody died. Oh wait. Dean smiled at him, thinking that he should share the joke. He already opened his mouth to say it and stopped. Sam still wore those wet clothes, and his hair had dried in ropes and was a real rat nest. His nose and the tips of his ears were red from the cold. Can’t have a red nose without a heartbeat.
“Are you not dead?”
Sam shrugged, like “sorry”. Dean was out of the bathroom in a split second. He grabbed Sam by the front of his coat, resisting the urge to shake, and pressed two fingers to his pulse. He looked for it for what felt like ages. There. Sam’s carotid bumped against his fingertips – once, again, again, and Dean was suddenly lightheaded.
Sam caught the side on his face with one hand, rubbed a thumb under Dean’s eye with Dean’s fingers still on his artery. He looked so sad, and Dean hated that, to be able to see this part of being gone. Sam leaned forward and pressed a kiss against Dean’s mouth, just a soft touch of lips that felt feverish hot with the living blood flowing through his veins.
Dean smacked him on the shoulder.
“Ow! Goddammit, Dean, what was that for?”
“No goodbye kisses, you fucking necrophiliac.” Sam smacked him right back. They were back on track. “Where did you go? I thought the sea monster got you.”
“You flickered out again, like earlier in the sick bay. I went looking for you. I ran into the captain on the second deck just now – he told me you were back up here.”
“Okay.” Dean still felt a little lightheaded with relief, a little unsteady on his feet. Or maybe it was the lack of heartbeat catching up to him. He sat down with his back to the wall, and Sam followed. It was good like this, just to sit there and not think of what came next.
Nevertheless, there was the whole question of next. He glanced down at his watch out of habit and froze for a moment. Would it even show the right time? Or would it, like in dreams, show the time he was dreading? But the second hand was making its way around the face, like usual. It was ten minutes past three – less than five hours until the sunrise.
And Sam was with him. Dean smacked him on the shoulder again, got smacked back.
“Cut it out.”
“What are you doing on this ship, Sam?”
“You’re here, asshole.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which, Dean supposed, it was. He would’ve done the exact same thing.
Last time they were on a hunt all the way on the Washington coast, Sam deliberately provoked a ghost to get dragged under a shipwreck with Dean, not knowing if they’d be able to get out. They got out – to get trapped on another shipwreck a few months later.
“I’m getting you out,” Sam said.
“You’re not. You’re going back to the shore.”
“No, Dean. I know where your body is. I’m going to get you back in there.”
The dizzy feeling was back and with it the dull pain in his chest. Dean put his head down between his knees and took a few deep breaths, slowly. He thought, I know why Leigh smokes so much here. This place was so goddamn cold. Leigh rolled up the sleeves of his uniform shirt and claimed it was hot but Dean saw the way he cupped the lighter, the way he kept his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulder and drew in the smoke with a little ecstatic roll of his eyes. Dean saw it all now once again and understood it. The cold was freezing up the muscles in his hands, making them ache. It was seeping through his chest, reaching for his heart again.
Sam poked his side. “Have you seen any reapers yet?”
Dean shook his head. Deep breaths in and out. Pain came like a thick hot spike through his heart, sudden, making him twist reflexively, making his eyes water. He braced for another one but after a few moments, still none came.
“Dean?”
“It fucking hurts. What’s the point of being dead if it still hurts?”
Sam pulled his head in and pressed his nose against Dean’s temple, and it felt good. It felt hot – the tip of Sam’s nose like an ember. It felt like something that, if he had to give it up forever, would drive him mad – if he remembered this and could never have it again.
“Okay,” he said after a minute, after the mental pat-down, making sure he was intact and not shamefully falling apart anywhere. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t really have one.” Sam moved away a little to reach into his coat’s pocket. He took out the ugly seashell, green and grey and very old, covered in calcified growth. Sam cradled it in both hands like something fragile, even though the thing looked like it could probably break a man’s skull. “Bluebeard has a nest on the bottom – this fucked up thing made of shipwrecks. You should’ve seen it. He keeps your body down there, stuffed inside a fridge.”
Thinking back on the lividity bruises, it made sense. Dean put a hand on his thigh automatically, seeking out under the fabric what he knew was there – the purple stains that didn’t hurt anymore. By the distribution of those marks, his body was in a sitting position somewhere.
“Wait,” Dean said. “I’m down there with the octopus dude?”
“Would you quit it with the tentacle porn?”
“I can’t help it.”
“Whatever. Bluebeard wants this ship for his collection – this is why he’s been coming closer to shore.”
“And the kidnappings?” Dean said.
“He needed a human to go on board. I don’t know why other monsters kidnap people.” Sam held up the seashell and let Dean take it from him. It felt strangely heavy. “Bluebeard says I’m to shut off her engines and release this.”
Long ago, down in Florida where the sea dragged the oddest shells onto the beach at sunrise, Dad had told them that seashells never forgot the ocean. Dean thought of that now, holding the twisted thing in his hands and remembering that beach from many years ago and the shells he and Sam collected – the deep cranberry red and softer raspberry hues of them, the yellow of lemon sorbet, the vibrant color of oranges. They must’ve been low on money then, for him to think of all the food, though he didn’t remember one way or another. Press the shell to your ear, boys, and you’ll hear the ocean inside. No matter how long the seashell’s been on land, it never forgets.
He lifted Sam’s seashell to press it to his ear, like he hadn’t done since he was a child.
“There’s a hurricane inside,” Sam said. “Don’t drop it.”
Dean pressed it against his ear. The thing inside didn’t sound like the soft whisper of the waves – it sounded as if a monster was tucked deep within the spiral canal of the shell. It howled and it screamed. Dean heard masses of water colliding somewhere far away, wherever it was that Sam’s Bluebeard had kidnapped the hurricane from.
And through the distant howling of wind, he heard the sound of a gun being cocked.
He hit the deck together with Sam, half-dropping, half-rolling the seashell out of his hands. Gunshot was deafening in the narrow hallway. Dean saw the seashell with the trapped hurricane roll away and hit the wall, and he was already climbing over Sam to shield him from the next shot, forgetting for a moment that he had no body to block a bullet. But Sam did touch him, kissed him, hit him earlier.
“Leigh, what the fuck?”
The captain standing at the open hatch had his gun raised and pointed at Dean’s chest and at Sam crouched behind him. His face had stitched itself back together again, safe for the pallor and the blood running from his ear and out of his left eye.
Sam said, “How does that gun still work?”
Dean elbowed him in the ribs and felt it connect. “Leigh, what are you doing?”
“I heard him. Bringing the ship down, the torpedo at dawn, sushi earlier.”
“Sushi?” Dean’s mind went blank. “What sushi?”
“Jap sympathizer.”
“Shit,” Sam said behind him. “Did you break the shell?”
Dean raised his open hands in the air, staring into the muzzle of the gun. “The war is over, remember? We’ve won. Remember?”
The gun quivered a little. Dean caught Leigh’s eyes and held it there, securing attention on himself and away from Sam. Gradually, Leigh’s face relaxed, and then, as if to mark a breaking point, his left eye slipped in its socket and rolled up just as he lowered his gun to point at the deck.
“I forgot.” He rubbed at his temple like the headache was bothering him again, glanced down at the gun and put it away. “What the hell now?”
“Go into the light?” Dean tried. Leigh gave him a disgusted look.
“The gun works,” Sam said, resting a hand on Dean’s shoulder. When Dean turned around, he had his seashell cradled in the crook on one elbow like a baby. “The gun works and I can still touch you. Dean, I think it’s the ship. Bluebeard kept saying she dreams about the torpedo. She dreams, she believes, she remembers.”
“What are you saying? The ship believes she’s whole?”
“The crew, or the ship, or both, I don’t know. Bluebeard said I had to stop her engines and release the hurricane before dawn, while she still believes. He thought it would make the death stick.”
Make the death stick. Dean shook his head. “The engines aren’t running.”
“Sure they are,” Leigh said.
“The engines rusted through and fell apart about seventy years ago.”
“But can you hear them?” Sam said
Dean had opened his mouth to argue but then heard what Sam was talking about – the low rumble he felt in his skin and in his bones through the floor more than he heard it with his ears, the constant noise he had grown accustomed to over the course of the night and had learned to ignore. This, he thought, this is how she came to answer his SOS. Morrigan believed in her engines, or her captain and her corpsman with the pretty smile believed, Talley and the sailors sleeping below and manning the guns believed, down in the machine shop and up in the radio tower.
“This is how she jumps around,” Sam said. “This is why he wanted me to stop the engines, so she couldn’t escape the hurricane.”
“I was going to wake up the men,” Leigh said. He was starting to get that distant look again. “I couldn’t find the XO anywhere. I forgot.”
Dean scrambled up off the deck and caught Leigh’s arm before he could leave. “Maybe your XO survived, and that’s why he’s not here.”
“That’d be nice,” Leigh said. “He has a small daughter.”
Sam got up as well, still cradling the seashell hurricane. “Maybe we could try something here.”
~~~~
The ship’s PA came to life with a crackle, taking him out of his thoughts. “…How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat?”
Sam shook his head and took the searchlight’s handles again, sweeping its beam over the waves. There was nothing but swirls of fog. They had four hours left before dawn – four more hours of the thinning faith of the dead sailors and their dead shipwreck, before the sun rose and turned everything back to smoke and rusted metal.
“…And I will think of this when I’m dead in my grave,” Tom Waits drawled on the PA.
“I guess you really like ‘Alice’,” Sam said and patted the railing wet with rain. “Good choice, old lady.”
He moved the shutters on the searchlight again, blinking out “Come”. Up and down, up and down. The shutters wore a touch of rust, like everything else on the ship by now, and they groaned with every move and became stuck, making the message stutter. The PA coughed again and fell quiet. Sam was left with no sound but the screeching of old signal light, the soft splashing of waves and the rumble of engines deep within Morrigan’s belly.
With the way this night had been going, the goddamn Coast Guard was going to see the signal and show up to check it out.
“No sign of him?”
Sam jumped. Dean stood right behind his shoulder, looking wet and dead and apologetic. Sam looked down quickly, studied the clasps of Dean’s jacket instead of looking at his face, at those blue lips and grey skin that were bringing up more bad memories.
“I didn’t hear you behind me.”
“Well,” Dean shrugged. “I’ll rattle my chains next time or something.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Sorry. You want a smoke?”
He fished two cigarettes out of a pack of Lucky Strikes, lit both and handed one over to Sam. Sam held it for a moment, looking at the strip of paper over the filter where Dean’s lips touched it, thinking, It’s okay. (It wasn’t.) He though, Would you have kissed your brother’s dead mouth? (He had.) He put the cigarette between his lips quickly and drew in the smoke. It tasted like fog and, faintly, like seawater.
“Are these Leigh’s cigarettes?”
“Mine are in the car,” Dean said and made a face, just a quick twitch of his mouth that told Sam he was thinking about the Impala. “I bet ghost cigarettes don’t count toward your lung cancer. Neat, huh?”
Something seized painfully in Sam’s throat, making him choke on the smoke. He turned back to the searchlight, moving the protesting shutters again. Come. Up-down, up-down. Come. He was wasting the precious time he had with Dean with this sulk.
“Sam.” A hand on the side of his neck was cold as the metal under his fingers. “Sam, you look sad.”
“What the fuck do I have to be happy about?” He said it to the night, to the black water that went as far as the eye could see, to the moon the color of a melon.
“Sam.” The hand brushed against his neck again, a thumb touched his jaw, pulled at the corner of his mouth. Sam licked his lips – they, too, tasted like seawater, briny to the point of bitter. “Sam, come on.”
He turned his head, following the tugging of that hand, looked Dean in the face. Dean touched a cold finger to his lower lip, shot a quick look toward where the nearest gun mount stood half-shrouded in fog, and moved his finger to the tip of Sam’s nose instead. He used to do that when they were little, pretending that Sam’s nose was a car horn and making noises to go along with it. Sam wondered if he remembered. He stood still with one hand on the railing, letting the ghost cigarette smolder in it, with his brother’s dead cold fingers on his face, another hand held uselessly by his stomach, clenching and unclenching. Dean stroked along Sam’s eyebrows, one and then the other, pulled on his earlobe and on a strand of hair. None of it was too gentle but all of it was slowly breaking Sam to pieces.
What if Bluebeard wasn’t watching? What if he couldn’t read Morse code and wouldn’t care to check it out anyway? Sam asked himself if he’d abandon the plan and just do as he was told, stop the engines and release the hurricane and let this ship go down with all hands again, let them all be trapped forever in Bluebeard’s nest. He recoiled from the thought, unable to answer it. If he did that, he thought, if he did that, the sea monster would most likely keep both of them in his palace of shipwrecks anyway. Dean would never forgive him if he let Bluebeard take the ship and imprison the ghosts. How would they ever escape back to the surface?
He couldn’t tell if he’d do it. Desperation was clawing at his chest.
“Seen any reapers yet?” Sam said before he could start blubbering like a little kid.
Dean dropped his hand and took a drag of his cigarette. “No, no one.” He shifted his eyes away, and Sam was suddenly overcome with bad feeling, and it also tasted like seawater in the back of his throat.
“What? Dean, what?”
“I think it sucks that you and I get to come back, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Over and over again. Why are we so special? None of these guys get to come back. I bet they’d want to.”
“You say it like it’s a good thing.” Dean shrugged, beginning to turn away, and Sam knocked the cigarette out of his hand. It winked and disappeared overboard. “Nobody is coming for us, Dean. No reapers. No Heaven or Hell for us. I think we pissed off everybody. When we die for good and have no more bodies to come back to, you and I are going to be like these guys, only without the cool destroyer.”
Dean was looking him straight in the face now. Sam had a vague suspicion that the fucker was beginning to smile.
“We’ll never see our dad again,” Sam pressed on. “No replay of sweetest memories and no eternal torture either. It’s just going to be the two of us.”
“But can we haunt the Impala?”
Sam blinked at him, realizing suddenly that he had been yelling and that his eyes were tearing. Dean was smiling like he loved the idea.
Dean said, “I’m okay with that. If we can haunt the Impala, that’d be fine.”
“It’s like you don’t care.”
“Sam. Heaven, Hell – the fuck do I want with those dicks anyway? The fuck do you want with them? Come on. Will you haunt the Impala with me?”
Sam sighed. “Okay. We can haunt the Impala.”
“Damn right we will. Now wipe your nose and keep sending those signals. I’m going to check on Leigh and his guys, make sure they’re still ready. They forget sometimes. Keep at it.”
He left just as noiselessly as he came. Sam wiped his nose. He went back to moving the shutters.
He was getting sleepy, lulled impossibly by the sound of waves, the late hour and the soft almost imperceptible sway of the deck, when the sea monster showed. Sam saw him a few feet away as an irregular disturbance in the water, something large moving very fast toward the ship, and in a sleepy moment he was afraid that it was the torpedo. But then a wet head showed, followed by massive shoulders and the tentacles, so many of them they made the sea look like it were boiling. Bluebeard latched onto the railing, pulled himself up by the tentacles and found a comfortable position there next to the searchlight, throwing one arm over.
Sam took a few steps back and closed a hand over the knife in one pocket, and touched the seashell in the other, for luck. It was buzzing a little under his fingers.
“Here I am,” the sea monster said. “Why do I still hear the engines running?”
“I’ll shut them off once you bring my brother back. I want him up here, with me.”
Bluebeard snorted. “No. I get my ghost ship – you get your brother.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, that’s just too damn bad, isn’t it?” Bluebeard folded his arms on the railing and rested his head on them. “I gave you my word.”
“And you had your tentacles crossed.”
A flash of anger rolled over the sea monster’s face. “I did not!”
“You did.” Sam took a deep breath and scooped the seashell up in his palm inside his coat pocket. “Look, where are we going to go in the middle of the ocean?”
“That’s not the point. We’re going to do this how I said.”
Sam took two steps to the side, standing closer to the railing and mostly out of Bluebeard’s reach, who was watching him intently. Sam pulled the seashell out and held it in his outstretched hand over the water. The sea monster shifted at the sight of it, readjusting the grip of his tentacles.
“Have fun hunting hurricanes down south,” Sam said. He licked his lips which had gone dry. “What is it, five months until the next hurricane season? How many years did you say it took you to trap this one?”
“Morrigan has been drifting since the war.” But he said it carefully, slower than usual. “I have time.”
“That’s provided you can find her again.” Sam moved his hand just a little, careful not to drop the shell, and the monster jerked. “I’ll fucking drop it.”
Sam could see the anger breaking out in Bluebeard’s face again, that same quick wildfire rage that made him so much like those guys he reminded Sam of, the ones who liked to smack their wives and girlfriends around the house. The contours of a thick vein were starting to show in his forehead, and Sam gripped the knife tighter in his pocket. Several long moments passed with Bluebeard darting his eyes back and forth between Sam’s face and the seashell. Finally, he raised an open hand, mirroring the gesture with several tentacles.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I’ll go get your brother.”
“I mean, where are we going to go?”
“Right. Put the shell away.”
He disentangled the tentacles from the railing, pushed off and dropped back into the sea – a huge mass of flesh, his lumberjack’s torso dwarfed by the lower half three times its size. Sam backed away until his shoulder blades hit the wall, and he slid down along it and sat there with his head between his knees, taking deep breaths.
When he looked up, the double-barreled silhouette of the 20mm Oerlikon gun pointed over his head stood out against the black sky and the stars.
“I believe in ammunition,” Sam said to himself, a quote from some movie he couldn’t quite remember. He crossed his fingers for good luck, on impulse, in case it would add some power. A sailor peered at him from the gun mount briefly, hearing the words, and ducked down again. Sam couldn’t make out his face, just the big-eared shadow of his head.
It took a long time for Bluebeard to return, and Sam had bit his thumbnail down to the quick and was running his tongue over the tender strip of skin when he saw the surface of the sea break again. Bluebeard had Dean’s body slung over his shoulder. Sam jumped up to his feet and grabbed Dean’s jacket to help pull him onto the deck before the sea monster even latched on comfortably.
Dean was just as grey and pale as he was when Sam was talking to him earlier, only his face was slack and completely expressionless, like a horrible mask Sam had hoped to never see again. He had Dean laid out on deck and was kneeling over him when a tentacle suddenly wrapped around his throat. Sam gasped and grabbed it, fumbled for the knife in his pockets only to have Bluebeard catch both of his wrists. The pressure was building up in his head again, like it was going to explode. But this time, the sea monster only let it go on for a few moments before loosening the grip.
“No more fucking around,” he said.
The tentacles slid off, wet and leathery. Sam dropped to his hands and knees, a hand on his throat. “No more. Just bring him back.”
Bluebeard heaved himself over the railing and fell down onto the deck with a smack like an enormous fish. “You have three hours left before dawn,” he said. “Once the engines are off, release the hurricane. It’s ripe, so it’ll overtake her quickly. But make sure those engines are off. The winds are bad for hurricanes up here. It’ll fizzle out within an hour maybe, so she’d better not be able to run.”
“Got it,” Sam said. “I’ll be quick. But you’re coming to get us out of here? Both of us?”
“Both of you.” Bluebeard leaned over Dean’s body. He was starting to make strange rolling motions with his jaw, and Sam could hear his circular rows of teeth grinding. “You know, it won’t be hard to bring him back. I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has any claim on him.”
“Yeah. I figured as much.”
“It’s been a long fucking night,” Bluebeard said. Then he opened his jaws full of lamprey teeth and fell down on Dean, latching onto his mouth. Sam saw blood. He gasped and lunged forward, and suddenly Dean’s chest shuddered and moved. Blood was trickling down Dean’s cheek from the corner of his mouth. With a low growl, Bluebeard let go and pulled up, and Sam saw blood on his beard and something between his jaws. It’s Dean’s tongue, he thought, and, Oh fuck. But Dean was trying to take shuddering breaths, and the thing between the sea monster’s teeth was black and long and sleek like an eel, slipping out of Dean’s throat. Before Sam could get a good look at what it was, it was gone, swallowed down by the sea monster, and then Dean rolled over and vomited what looked like half of the Pacific onto the deck.
“Easy, hey.” Sam grabbed his shoulders, holding him up. A strong shudder was starting to pass through Dean’s muscles as he continued retching. Sam snuck a glance at the sea monster who had climbed back up on the railing and was sitting there comfortably, rubbing his belly and looking satisfied. “Dean?”
Dean gave him thumbs up with a hand that was shaking like an electrical current was passing through his body, and fell over on his side.
“Your turn,” said Bluebeard.
“What the hell was that you pulled out of his mouth and ate?”
“Don’t you mind that. Now, the engines.”
Sam slowly got up to his feet, noticing that they felt a little shaky. He took another look at Dean who was breathing, looking at him from under half-lowered eyelids from where he lay by the wall. Sam found the seashell again in his coat pocket, felt the way the hurricane inside was crashing against the walls of its prison. He took several steps toward the stairwell leading down to lower deck and to the engine room. It took him close enough to the side of the ship and out of Bluebeard’s reach. Then he turned around.
Bluebeard was still sitting on the railing, tall like two grown men. “Now, Sam,” he said.
“Catch,” Sam said and tossed the seashell overboard.
It made a splash that Sam saw but didn’t hear for the sound of Morrigan’s 20mm guns coming to life for the first time since the Second World War. Sam clamped his palms over his ears as soon as he dropped the seashell and rolled toward the wall. It still felt like the sound was going to crack his teeth. In the flash of igniting gunpowder, he saw Dean curled up on the deck a few feet away, with his hands over his ears but his eyes trained forward. Sam was watching Dean and didn’t see the anti-aircraft rounds pierce Bluebeard’s body but he saw the splatter of green land on the deck. He thought the flash was messing with his color vision. He was still watching Dean when the gun fell quiet. He felt more than heard something huge crash into the sea. Dean looked back at him then and smiled. There was green on his face and in his hair, and his smile was the most beautiful thing Sam had seen all night.
It was three hours before dawn.
~~~~
There wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt, so he lay still and let the corpsman work. He figured, this was what happened when you didn’t have Zachariah to hand-pick the buckshot out of your lungs and heart. His last time was with Zachariah. No, he though, wait, there was that medical resuscitation with Dr. Roberts. No wonder the other side wanted nothing to do with them these days.
Everybody had been awfully quiet for the past hour. It was awkward as hell.
“Am I going to live, Doc?” Dean said, just to break it up.
The corpsman had been poking at the bruises on his thigh. “I don’t know. You’re my first resurrection.”
“Fair enough.” He looked up at the ceiling again, and there was another long gash that hadn’t been there before. It was better to look at the ceiling than at the ghosts. He felt indecent looking at them, like he was rubbernecking at an accident site.
“I can give you some morphine.”
“Your morphine is about seven decades old, and we have two hours to sunrise. It’s probably not such a good idea.”
The corpsman smiled at that – still had enough of his face left for the smile.
Leigh, quiet until now, pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against by the head of Dean’s cot. “Doc, why don’t you go talk to Sam? Write a note for your sister back home. I’ll stay here.”
When the corpsman left, Leigh pulled up his chair and sat down by the bed. Dean turned to look at him – past the blood and the torn flesh, the bone fragments and the blown eye socket. Dean probably looked only marginally better than a ghost himself. He let that sympathetic twist in his gut come and go and he let himself see the face of the man he’d spent this night with, underneath the horror show.
“That was a good idea you had,” Leigh said, “to take messages to people back home. I suppose a lot of wives and siblings won’t be alive anymore. Maybe the kids are around.”
It wasn’t about the living receiving the messages, he thought, it was about the dead being able to say goodbye. Maybe it would let them move on, and maybe it wouldn’t. But it was their best shot, without any bones to burn.
He tried not to look at the words scratched into the wall over his cot – his own goodbye letter.
“There is a woman, Sarah,” Leigh said. He looked like his mind was somewhere far away from the ship and the sea. “I bet she hasn’t changed one bit.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Darren. Thank you for your service, man.”
Leigh smiled crookedly as he searched through his pockets. He came up with his crumpled pack of cigarettes, where three still remained. He took out one and lit it. “I took a head count. Twenty seven people are missing, including the XO. I can’t find the ship’s cat either. Looks like Morrigan didn’t go down with all hands after all.”
Dean nodded. “We’ll look you guys up, back on shore.” Twenty seven people - that was something. Twenty seven out of three hundred and twenty nine, and one cat. Still, that was something.
“Sorry I gave you shit about Sam. It’s none of my business what you guys do. You know, you really pass for brothers. I believed you there for a while.”
“Thanks,” Dean said. “We try.”
“It’s time to go. Are you good to stand?”
Morphine would’ve been awesome. “We’ll find out.” He tried to take Leigh’s offered hand but couldn’t quite get a grip on it. His hand didn’t quite go through but kept slipping off, and what he felt on contact wasn’t skin anymore but water. “It must really be time to go, huh?”
This time, when they stepped outside, there were dead everywhere. They stood and sat on deck, up by the gun mounts and on the bridge, a parade of bloody, burned and drowned ghosts slowly dissolving into fog and saltwater. No one said a word. Sam was sitting on some pipe on the deck, looking pale and a little green.
Leigh said, “You talked to everyone?”
“Everyone who came to talk to me.” Sam gave a little wave with a pocket notebook.
“What are you going to tell people? That you ran into their husbands’ and brothers’ ghosts out at sea?”
“We’ll think of something. We’ll get the messages delivered. I promise.”
The borrowed motor boat was still tied behind the ship, with their hunting bags inside. Looking down into it made Dean a little seasick. The sea was calm, but where a destroyer was rocked slightly, it probably wouldn’t take much to overturn the small boat. Sam went down first. Dean took his time, feeling how weak his body had gone, how stiff and reluctant to move. He gripped the net and clenched his teeth and hoped his fingers wouldn’t slip. It wasn’t a long way down. Leigh watched from the ship. He had tried to help but his hands were like water.
Dean made it into the boat without losing his grip but was shaking by the time he reached it. He sat down and hid his hands in his pockets and let Sam start the engine and steer them away. The ghosts waved from the ship. He waved back. There was a rotten feeling inside of him that wouldn’t go away.
They took the boat far enough from Morrigan to lose her in the dark and the remaining fog. There were no working lights on her anymore to give her position away with a brief flash, and no light in the sky to make her stand out against the horizon. Dean wasn’t sure what would happen when the torpedo came, if the explosion would be felt by the living, but he and Sam agreed that it was best to stay away. When they couldn’t see the ship anymore, Sam shut off the engine to conserve gas. There was no point of trying to move anywhere until they could see where they were going, or until they were far enough from the ghost ship’s interference to get the navigating equipment working again.
What if the sunrise came, Dean thought, and they found that there was nothing but water for as far as the eye could see around them? They were low on gas and way, way out of range for a tiny boat like theirs. Then what?
“I hope we don’t get stuck haunting this boat,” he said. “That’d be so fucking embarrassing.”
“You just came back from the dead. Are you in a hurry to go back?”
He still looked pale and a little green, like the night was finally catching up to him or like maybe the rocking of the boat was getting to him. Dean put a hand on Sam’s knee, hooked his fingers behind it and smoothed his thumb over the side of his kneecap. It felt good – a tiny promise of warmth, a closer contact. There was no one alive around but tuna. They were alone at sea for who knows how many miles. Dean pulled Sam’s head in and Sam went quietly, leaned forward and rested his forehead against Dean’s chest.
They spent what remained of the night in silence, pressed close together for warmth, watching the deep inky color of the sky turn to graphite grey as the stars grew pale. The sunrise was coming. Dean kept his eyes on the spot where he knew Morrigan to be. Sam had his chin propped up on his hand and was looking toward the ship too, waiting. Dean nursed his many pains and aches quietly and let the little cropped thoughts run through his head, like tails of unwritten messages for Sam. It’s okay. I’ll never leave you like that again. It’s okay.
Maybe when the sun came up, Sam would believe that he was real and come out of his funk.
The fog was finally gone right before dawn. At some point, when it was still too dark to tell the difference between a cloud and a ship, a sound came – groaning of metal and rushing of water. But they heard no explosion and no shouting. Moments after, a series of high waves almost flipped the little boat over.
The dawn finally came, quiet and not terribly picturesque. There was no ship on the horizon. But there were, in the opposite direction, distant columns of stone sticking out of the sea, crowned with pines.
“You think she’s gone for good?” That was the first thing Sam said in almost two hours.
“I hope so.” He pointed to the sea stacks. “Do we have enough gas to get back there?”
“Probably not. We’ll have to call the Coast Guard and tell them we got drunk and went too far out last night.” Sam suddenly grinned at him and went looking through his pockets. “Wait, I forgot. I got something for you.”
“Is it a hurricane in a seashell?” Dean said.
But it was a pair of Twinkies in faded, unmistakably old wrappers.
“They are from Bluebeard’s nest. I found them inside a ferry that sank about seven years ago. I knew you’d like them.”
Dean looked up from the Twinkies to his face. Sam’s smile was wide and full of teeth and beautiful. He’d gotten Dean a couple of nasty old Twinkies. It was a touchingly sweet gesture.
“Don’t eat them now,” Sam said. “At least wait until you’re better.”
Dean hid the Twinkies in his pocket. The ocean was slowly changing colors from black to gunmetal grey as the sun rose behind the thick blanket of clouds that had covered up the sky in the last hour. Dean looked down into the water and imagined for a second the abyss that lay beneath them – the fish and the seaweed, the canyons and the mountains, the shipwrecks and the sea monsters. The ocean had swallowed a destroyer with three hundred ghosts on board – no trace of them left. It had swallowed larger ships and tiny boats, so many of them. They were down there now, in the dark. Dean imagined the shipwrecks sleeping below and Morrigan settling down among them, into her soft bed of sediment. Fish and octopuses would come into her empty dark cabins and hallways. There would be no ghosts to scare them off. Like the other ships on the bottom of the Pacific, Morrigan would sleep.
~~~~
I hope this letter finds you. You don’t know me; my name is Sam. My brother and I are divers. We’ve found something last week that we believe was meant for you – a message sealed in a bottle. It was badly damaged, so I’ve rewritten it for you below.
Sam W.