A Plague of Demons Page 7

  Out across the dark water, the nearest ship lay no more than two miles offshore. The dog-things were close now. I could see them silhouetted against the lesser sky-glow, like some evil swarm of giant rats piped from their lair by the music of hell-a plague of demons. The leaders slowed, coming on cautiously, dozens of them, almost shoulder to shoulder…

  I turned, leaped far out toward the black surf below. I felt the icy waters close over me. Swimming just above the muddy bottom, I struck out for deep water, heading out to sea.

  ***

  The ocean floor by night was a magic land of broken terrain, darting schools of many-colored fishes, waving screens of green, translucent weed. A hundred feet from shore, the bottom fell away, and I swept out over a dark chasm, feeling the chill currents of deep water as I angled downward. The small fish disappeared. A great, dark, lazy shape sailed toward me out of the blackness, was swallowed up in the gloom. There were noises; grunts, shrill whistles, the grind and thud of tide-stirred rocks on the bottom, the distant, mechanical whirring of a propeller-driven boat.

  After twenty minutes, my vision began to blur; I was feeling the strain in my arms, and the first stifling sensations of oxygen starvation. I angled upward, broke the surface, and saw the low silhouette of a half-submerged vessel a quarter of a mile away across rippled ink-and-silver water, streaked with the winking reflections of her deck lights.

  I trod water, looking around; a bell-buoy clanged a hundred yards away. Farther off, a small boat buzzed toward shore from a ship in the distance. There was a smell of sea-things, salt, a metallic odor of ship's engines, a vagrant reek of oil. There was no sign of pursuit from the shore.

  I swam on toward the ship, came up on her from the starboard quarter, and made out the words EXCALIBUR-New Hartford in raised letters across her stern. There was a deck-house beyond a low guard rail, a retractable antenna array perched atop it with crimson and white lights sparkling at the peak.

  Farther forward, small deck cranes poised over an open hatch like ungainly herons waiting for a minnow. I caught a faint sound of raucous music, a momentarily raised voice. The odor of petroleum was strong here, and there was a glistening scum on the water. She was a tanker, loaded and ready to sail, to judge from the waterline, a foot above her anachronistic plimsoll.

  I pulled myself up on the corroding hull-plates, inched my way to the rail, crossed to the deck-house. The door opened into warmth, light, the odors of beer, tobacco smoke, unlaundered humans. I took a great, grateful lungful; this was familiar, reassuring-the odor of my kind of animal.

  ***

  Steep stairs led down. I followed them, came into a narrow corridor with a three-inch glare-strip along the center line of the low ceiling. There were doors set at ten-foot intervals along the smooth, buff-colored walls. Voices muttered at the far end of the corridor. I stepped to the nearest door, listened with my hearing keened, then turned the handle and stepped inside.

  It was an eight-by-ten cell papered with photo-murals of Central Park, chipped and grease-stained at hand level. There was a table, a metal locker, a hooked rug on the floor, a tidy bunk, a single-tube lamp clamped to the wall above it beside a hand-painted plaster plaque representing a haloed saint with a dazed expression.

  Footsteps were coming along the corridor. I turned to the door as it opened, and nearly collided with a vast, tall man in a soiled undershirt bulging with biceps, blue trousers worn low to ease a paunch that looked slight against his massive bulk.

  He stared down at me, frowning; he had curly, uncut hair, large, dull-brown eyes, a loose mouth. There was a deeply depressed scar the size of an egg on the side of his forehead above his left eye. He raised a hand, pointed a thick finger at me.

  "Hey!" he said, in a startlingly mellow tenor. He blinked past me at the room. "This here is my flop."

  "Sorry," I said. "I guess I kind of stumbled into the wrong place." I started past him. He moved slightly, blocking the door.

  "How come you're in my flop?" he demanded. He didn't sound mad-just mildly curious.

  "I was looking for the Mate," I said. "He must be down the hall, eh?"

  "Heck, no; the Mate got a fancy place aft." He was looking me over now. "How come you're all wet?"

  "I fell in the water," I said. "Look, how are you fixed for crew aboard this ship?"

  The giant reached up, rasped at his scalp with a fingernail like a banjo pick.

  "You want to sign on?"

  "Right. Now-"

  "Who you want to see, you want to see Carboni. Oh, boy…" the loose mouth curved in a vast grin. "He'll be surprised, all right. Nobody don't want to sign on aboard the 'Scabbler."

  "Well, I do. Where do I find him?"

  The grin dropped. "Huh?"

  "Where can I find Mr. Carboni-so I can sign on, you know?"

  The grin was back. He nodded vigorously. "He's prob'ly down in the ward room. He's prob'ly pretty drunk."

  "Maybe you could show me the way."

  He looked blank for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah. Hey." He was frowning again, looking at my shoulder. "You got a cut on ya. You got a couple cuts. You been in a fight?"

  "Nothing serious. How about Mr. Carboni?"

  The finger was aimed at me like a revolver. "That's how come you want to sign on the 'Scabbler. I betcha you croaked some guy, and the cops is after ya."

  "Not as far as I know, big boy. Now-"

  "My name ain't Big Boy; it's Joel."

  "Okay, Joel. Let's go see the man, all right?"

  "Come on." He moved out of the doorway, started off along the corridor, watching to be sure I was following.

  "Carboni, he drinks a couple of bottles and he gets drunk. I tried that, but it don't work. One time I drank two bottles of booze but all it done, it made me like burp."

  "When does the ship sail?"

  "Huh? I dunno."

  "What's your destination?"

  "What's that?"

  "Where's the ship going?"

  "Huh?"

  "Skip it, Joel. Just take me to your leader."

  ***

  After a five-minute walk along crisscrossing passageways, we ducked our heads, stepped into a long, narrow room where three men sat at an oilcloth-covered table decorated with a capless ketchup bottle and a mustard pot with a wooden stick. There were four empty liquor bottles on the table, and another, nearly full one.

  The drinker on the opposite side of the table looked up as we came in. He was a thick-necked fellow with a bald head, heavy features, bushy eyebrows, a blotchy complexion. He sat slumped with both arms on the table encircling his glass. One of his eyes looked at the ceiling with a mild expression; the other fixed itself on me. A frown made a crease between the eyes.

  "Who the hell are you?" His voice was a husky whisper; someone had hit him in the windpipe once, but it hadn't improved his manners.

  I stepped up past Joel. "I want to sign on for the cruise."

  He swallowed a healthy slug of what was in the glass, glanced at his companions, who were hitching around to get a look at me.

  "He says it's a cruise," he rasped. "He wants to sign on, he says." The eye went to Joel. "Where'd you pick this bird up?"

  Joel said, "Huh?"

  "Where'd you come from, punk?" The eye was back on me again. "How'd you get aboard?"

  "The name's Jones," I said. "I swam. What about that job?"

  "A job, he says." The eye ran over me. "You're a seaman, eh?"

  "I can learn."

  "He can learn, he says."

  "Not many guys want to sign on this tub, do they, Carboni?" Joel asked brightly.

  "Shut up," Carboni growled without looking at him. "You got blood on your face," he said to me.

  I put a hand up, felt a gash across my jaw.

  "I don't like this mug's looks," one of the drinking buddies said, in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard. He was a long-faced, lanky, big-handed fellow in grimy whites. He had a large nose, coarse skin, long, discolored teeth with receding gums.r />
  "A chain-climber. I got a good mind to throw him to hell off back in the drink where he come from. He looks like some kind of cop to me."

  "Do I get the job or not?" I said, looking at Carboni.

  "I'm talking to you, mug," the long man said. "I ast you if you're a cop."

  "Who runs this show?" I said, still watching Carboni. "You or this talking horse?" I jerked a thumb at the second man. He made an explosive noise, started up from the bench.

  "Sit down, Pogey," Carboni snarled. The lanky man sank back, talking to himself.

  "That's a pretty good swim out from shore," Carboni said. "You musta been in a pretty big hurry to leave town."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Cops after you?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Not that he knows of, he says." Carboni grinned. He had even white teeth; they looked as though they had cost a lot of money.

  "Any papers?"

  I shook my head.

  "No papers, he says."

  "You want me I should pitch 'im over the side, Carboni?" the third man asked. He was a swarthy man with stubby arms and a crooked jaw, like a dwarfed giant.

  "Cap'n wouldn't like that," Joel said. "Cap'n said we needed crew-"

  "Up the Captain's," the horsey man said. "We don't need no-"

  "Pogey." Carboni rolled the eye over to bear on him. "You talk too much. Shut up." He jolted his chair back, turned, lifted a phone off a wall bracket, thumbed a call button. The glass eye was rolled over my way now, as though watching for a false move.

  "Skipper, I got a bird here says he's a seaman," Carboni said into the instrument. "Claims he lost his papers…" There was a pause. "Yeah," Carboni said. "Yeah…" He listened again, then hitched himself up in the chair, frowning. He glanced toward me.

  "Yeah?" he said.

  I let my gaze wander idly across the room, and switched my hearing into high gear. Background noises leaped into crackling presence; the hum of the phone was a sharp whine. I heard wood and metal creak, the thump of beating hearts, the glutinous wheeze of lungs expanding, the heavy grate of feet shifting on the floor-and faintly, an excited voice:

  "… UN radio… a guy… bumped off somebody… Maybe a couple… try for a ship, they said. Cripes, looks like…"

  Felix had said that with a little concentration, I could develop selectivity. I needed it now. I strained to filter the static, catch the words:

  "… handle him?"

  Carboni looked my way again. "Can a kid handle a lollipop?"

  "Okay… look…" The voice was clearer now. "… lousy local cops… we turn this guy in… reward, peanuts… their problem. We need hands. Okay, we work this boy… get there… Stateside cops… a nice piece of change…"

  "I see what you mean, Skipper," Carboni said. He had a corner of his mouth lifted to show me a smile that I might have found reassuring if I'd been a female crocodile.

  "Get him down below… Anchors in in an hour and a half. Shake it up."

  "Leave it to me, Skipper." Carboni hung up, swung around to give me the full-face smile. The bridgework wasn't too expensive after all-just old-style removable plates.

  "Well, I decided to give you a chance, Jones," he croaked. "You're on. You'll sign papers in the morning."

  "Hey, okay if he helps me out in the hot-room and stuff?" Joel asked. He sounded like a ten-year-old asking for a puppy.

  Carboni thrust out his lips, nodded. "All right, Jones; for now, you help the dummy. Take the flop next to his."

  "By the way, where's this tub headed?" I asked.

  "Jacksonville. Why? You choosy or something?"

  "If I was, would I be here?"

  Carboni snorted. "Anchors in in an hour." He leveled the eye on Joel. "Get moving," he barked. "What do you think this is, a rest home for morons?"

  "Come on." Joel tugged at my arm. I followed him out, along corridors to a door. He opened it, flipped on a light, showed me a room identical with his own except that it lacked the plaster saint and the hooked rug. He opened the locker, tossed sheets and a blanket on the bed. I pulled off my wet jacket. Joel puckered his mouth, looking at me.

  "Hey, Jones, you better get Doc to fix them cuts you got."

  I sat on the bunk. I felt weak suddenly, sucked as dry as a spider's dinner. There was a humming in the back of my head, and my face felt hot. I pulled the sodden, makeshift bandage from the arm the dog-thing had chewed. There were four deep gouges, half a dozen shallower ones-all inflamed, swelling. The arm was hot and painful.

  "Can you get me some antiseptic and tape?" I asked.

  "Huh?"

  "Is there a first-aid kit around?"

  Joel pondered, then went into the corridor, came back with a blue-painted metal box.

  In it, I found a purple fluid that bubbled when I daubed my wounds. Joel watched, fascinated. At my request, he applied some to the cuts on my back, working with total concentration, his mouth hanging open. If he saw the glint of metal filaments in the torn skin, he made no comment.

  I folded gauze; Joel helped me tape it in place. When we finished, he stood back, smiling. Then he frowned.

  "Hey, Jones-how come you didn't get Doc to fix you up?"

  "I'll be okay," I said.

  Joel nodded, as though I had clarified a difficult point. He looked at me, frowning. He was thinking again.

  "How come Carboni's scared of you?" he asked.

  "He's not scared of me, Joel," I said. "He took a shine to me on sight."

  Joel thought that one over. "Yeah," he said. "But look; we got stuff we got to do. We got to get a move on."

  I stood up, acutely aware of fatigue, and wounds, and a sensation similar to a ticking bomb behind my eyes. Felix's posthypnotic anesthetic had been a big help while it lasted, but the withdrawal symptoms evened the score.

  "I want to go up on deck a minute," I said. Joel blinked, followed me. I stepped out onto the deck, shivered in my wet clothes as the freshening wind hit me. There were no lights on the shore opposite; half a mile to the left, there was a faint gleam from the windows of the beach shacks. Farther along, the great arc of the dredged harbor was a line of jewels against the night.

  I tensed the eye-squint muscles, saw the black water snap into gray, misty clarity. On its surface, nothing stirred. I attuned my hearing to pick up the softest of night sounds. There were the thousand pings and thumps from the ship, the creak of the anchor cables, and the crump! and hiss of the distant surf. If the demons were close, they were well hidden. For the moment, it seemed, I was safe.

  Chapter Eight

  For the first eight hours at my new job, while the ancient tanker plowed at fifty knots sixty-five feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, I labored with Joel at routine drudgery that could have been performed with greater efficiency and less cost by a medium-priced computer.

  I spent a bad hour when we surfaced to pass through the Gibraltar locks; a boat came alongside and I heard the clank of feet on the deck above, caught scraps of voices asking questions, and the Captain blandly denying any knowledge of stowaways. I was waiting just inside the deckhouse door as he invited his official visitors to search the ship. They declined, with curses. I heard them reboard their launch; then the sound of its engines growled away across the water. I leaned against the wall, feeling hot and dizzy. My arm throbbed like a giant toothache.

  Joel had been waiting with me. "Hey, Jones," he said. "How come we're hanging around here? You going out on deck?"

  I let a long breath out; it was a bad habit I was forming-forgetting to breathe for minutes at a stretch. I straightened with an effort, feeling the deck move under me. "Sure," I said. "Let's go take a look at the Rock."

  The cold predawn air cleared my head. I leaned on the rail beside Joel, watching the towering barrier walls slip down into the churning water as the lock filled; then the tanker edged ahead, the mighty gates slid in behind us, churning water aside, and met with a dull boom.

  Again we rode the flood, gained another hun
dred feet. Forty-five minutes and five locks later, we slid out into the choppy, blue-black waters of the South Atlantic, five hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. Dawn was coloring the sky. Lights gleamed wanly from the fortress of Gibraltar, and from the flat, white city on the African side.

  A raucous buzzer sounded across the deck. At once, the foaming water surged higher along the hull.

  "Hey, we better get below before we get dunked," Joel said. We stepped back into the stale interior; a moment later we heard the crash of the waters closing over us above; then the silence of the deep sea settled in again.

  "Well," Joel said cheerfully. "I guess we got to get back to work, Jones."

  ***

  During the next forty-eight hours, Joel and I found time for several four-hour sleeps and a couple of short naps, between bellowed orders from Carboni or the unseen Captain. At odd intervals, we went to the crew mess, demanded and got plates of oily cold-storage eggs and too-salty bacon.

  Now, having just completed a laborious two-hour visual inspection of reset switches, I again sat at the long table, listening to the feverish humming in my head, picking at a mixture of mummified beef and canned milk and taking medicinal sips from a clay mug of North African brandy. Across the table, the bearded elder known as Doc worked conscientiously to finish the bottle.

  Joel had put his head on the table and gone off to sleep. At the far end of the room, Pogey, the horse-faced man, was monotonously and with much profanity calling off items from an inventory list, while a short, chinless sailor with a wool cap and warts ticked them off on a clipboard.

  What the rest of the nine-man crew did aboard the vessel, I hadn't yet learned. Four of them had just left the room, staggering drunk.

  "Three more trips, Jones," Doc said. "Thirty-one years on the line-nine on Excalibur; I'll miss the old tub." He looked around the room with sad, red-veined eyes. "No, I'm a liar," he corrected. "I hate this damned scow." He looked at me as though I had praised it. "I've hated every minute of those thirty-one years. Hated medical school before that. You ever been in a cadaver lab?"