Weirdbook #35. Adrian Cole

with blood. And with my other hand, I grabbed Benny’s hood, twisted, pulled, and yanked back with tremendous violence.

      He didn’t even have a chance to gasp. I brought the pick into his head and chest a hundred times—or so it seemed. More than enough to kill the man, with all the blood pooling out of him, and the disfigurement of his face.

      Left with a sudden urge to be sick, I ducked back into the stateroom and began to dry heave. My job was nowhere near finished. I needed desperately to compose myself, so I took a few minutes in the darkness, breathing deeply. Then I went to the sink in the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, thinking about my next victim.

      It was Stovich. The small guy, not too strong as I’d observed. I knew I could overwhelm him with my strength. And so I did, when he came down to the freezers to help me bring up more bait jars. With a three-foot length of rope, I wrung the last breath out of the man. I was amazed at how simple it was—like lifting a heavy box onto a shelf or climbing a short flight of stairs.

      Finally, I was ready to use the gun and end my torment. I had seen the next step of my plan a hundred times, in the movies. It would begin with a casual stroll toward their proximity—the two men left on deck. I would make myself busy, perhaps find some rope to coil. And then, as smooth and swift as the hydraulic block used to pull crab pots up from the ocean, I would simply walk up to the first man and put a bullet in the back of his head. Then I’d unload the remaining cartridges into the last man before he realized what had just happened. I’d kill the last man—Taylor—before his stupid face would turn into the scowl I’d seen back in the storage room when he offered me moldy cheese.

      * * * *

      Seconds after the first man’s brain blew out of his left eye, I stood on the deck and stared in dumb horror.

      Click, click, click…!

      Taylor’s face twisted into more than a scowl, as there was something much heavier than anger in his eyes, his bent brows, his quivering lips.

      Click, click, click…!

      He came at me, a cannonball of fury. I fell with a thump, landing on the slick deck. My hand that held the revolver smacked into the base of a crab pot, and the gun slid down a scupper and into the sea.

      Taylor cursed as he laid one fist after another into my gut. I gripped his hair and tried desperately to push him away.

      “Think you’re a killer, eh?” he shouted. “I’ll show you how to kill!” He reached up and scratched at my eyes. I screamed, and then one of his fingers fell into my mouth. Clamping down, I bit, chewed and ripped away at it. I heard an awful snap, followed by a howl of pain.

      “Son of a…!” Taylor cried, pulling away from me.

      I got to my feet and searched the deck for a weapon, or place to run. But I was too late. Again, he was on me like a charging bull. He smashed me into a crab pot, against its ribbed siding. Then he reached for my throat. Terrified, I realized he meant to strangle me—and I knew from experience just how easy that would’ve been. I knew he’d kill me in seconds if he got his hands around my neck.

      I made a quick shift of my hips and used the slick deck to my advantage, sliding between his legs. The void left behind caused Taylor to fall forward and smash his head into the steel girder of the crab pot.

      When I stood, he was blinking and rolling his eyes, and there was a naked gash on his forehead, leaking blood. “I’ll…kill…you.” Those were his last words before I sent him unconscious to the deck with a smashing fist.

      * * * *

      The time it took to kill four men…

      The time had transpired with some effort, but before I knew it, I was struggling with my greatest challenge yet: getting the dead into the crab pot before they woke again.

      Taylor, now bound with rope, moaned as I shoved him in with the rest of the crew. Far to the horizon, the sun was a sliver of orange fire, sinking deep into the frozen sea.

      “Why are you doing this?” he mumbled.

      Running controls on the hydraulic crane, I spotted the shadows of night rising from the northeastern corner of the world.

      “Let us out!”

      A gull passed through the ship’s rigging before circling back to perch high on the mast.

      “We saved you, dammit! We pulled you from the ocean! You’d be dead if it weren’t for us!”

      I brought the pot onto the launch table then stepped away from the controls. For a long minute, I stared at Taylor’s twisted body as it lay on top of the others. His back was to the ship, and he thrashed about in vain to turn around so that he could see me. He cursed, spat, and begged, but when I finally threw the control switch, he was the first one to go in.

      And just when the pot crashed into the ocean, not surprisingly, I saw hands move. I saw fingers grab at the cage, and bodies wriggle against one another. I saw Captain Bailey look up from the mouth of his cold grave. I saw his eyes: beads of fire burning a hateful path straight to mine. And those dead eyes of his burned for a full fathom, before disappearing into the blackness of the Bering Sea.

      My subsequent conflicts were long and arduous. Close to land, I hurried to gather gear, water, and food, then stowed everything into a motorized dingy. Once ready, I set the Aleutian Whisper on a westerly course then struck for land in my little boat. And as I drifted away, from the wheelhouse came the sounds of Elvis Presley’s, Don’t Be Cruel. At last, I was liberated from the ghostly terrors of that abominable ship and her abominable crew.

      But was I, really?

      * * * *

      Thirty years later and I now live in the basement of a colonial-style house near Seattle, Washington. I’m known as the recluse of the town, the old man who keeps to himself. In the evening, I seal my door with three padlocks, fearful of what might happen if I don’t. And always, in the small hours of night, I hear the dampening sound of a crab pot slamming into mud. I see squirming cadavers as they jerk, pull, and claw for a way out. I see them, in the darkness, in my mind’s eye, in my terrible dream that has woken me each and every day since that awful night. And in my ruined thoughts, I picture the dead crewmen stagger to shore, at last, broken free of their grave at the bottom of the sea.

      But in the end, none of these terrors compare to what I must cope with once I rise from my bed: my single horror, as spawned from the night before, and from the cold depths of my subconscious…the mound of yellow goo I must cleanse away each morning.