“Well?” Fabrini said.
Cook snapped the lightstick against his knee and led the way in. The air was dry and stale, motes of dust the size of snowflakes drifting in the glare of the lightstick. They moved around carefully, afraid they’d fall through a hole or gore themselves on a jagged shelf of metal. And maybe, just maybe, they were afraid that something with long white fingers and eyes like red ice would take hold of them.
“Christ, it smells like a tomb in here,” Fabrini said.
And that was close, Cook decided. A sarcophagus that had been brought up from abyssal depths. It smelled of brine and mildew, rust and antiquity. There was another odor, too, something just plain dirty that he did not like.
“Look,” Fabrini said. “A lantern.”
He pulled it off a hook and let Cook see it. Cook took it, saw the shadow of kerosene sloshing around inside. He pulled a pack of waterproof matches from his pocket that he’d taken from the survival equipment. He struck one off the riveted bulkhead and wild, jumping shadows paraded around them. The wick was bone dry and it caught almost immediately.
“Let there be light,” he said, turning up the valve until the bridge was flickering with orange-yellow illumination.
That’s when they got their first good look at the room they were in. It was long and rectangular with life rings on the bulkheads, everything covered in a thick, furry layer of dust. They uncovered an old-fashioned shortwave radio set that was tarnished green. The ship’s compass was thick with sediment. The bridge telegraphs for the port and starboard engines were both locked tight with rust and completely immovable. There was so much grime on the bridge rail that Cook didn’t realize it was brass until he brushed against it and revealed the gleaming metal below. And the ship’s wheel itself was threaded with cobwebs and clotted with dust.
None of what they saw had been touched in decades.
“Christ,” Fabrini said, examining a brass tripod telescope. “How long has this ship been derelict? A hundred years or what?”
Cook just shook his head, led them off into another room. This one had a large, flat table and things like rolled-up posters in slots along the far wall.
“Chart room, I’d guess,” Cook said, setting the lantern into an inch of collected dust on the table.
There were copper chart tubes and navigational books set in low shelves. A nickel-plated aneroid barometer hung above them. Beneath that down of dust, the table was crowded with old navigational instruments – dividers and parallel rulers, three-armed protractors and quadrants. Cook found a sextant in a wooden case with mirrors and shades. In another case, there was a ship’s chronometer.
He was figuring that back in the real world some of this stuff might have been worth money to collectors.
Most of the books were in poor condition, worm-holed with pages bloated from moisture and bindings crumbling with dryrot. Fabrini examined a few and the pages flaked away beneath his fingers like autumn leaves. Some were in better condition, but most were deteriorating and set with a webby sort of mold. He found an especially large book that looked to be leather-bound. Most of the pages were stuck together and those that weren’t were spotted with a black mildew.
“Looks like the ship’s log,” Cook said, bringing the lantern closer.
Fabrini nodded. “Yeah… U.S.S. Cyclops? Yeah, says it right on top of the page. Ever heard of her, Cook?”
He shook his head. “A warship like we thought, though.”
“How in the hell did a Navy ship end up here?”
“How do you think?”
Cook examined the fine spidery writing that had gone a copper color with age. Most of the pages tore when he tried to part them and it was a matter of reading fragments in-between the spots of mildew. Cook leafed through it, found many of the pages in the back in fairly good condition though warped from water stains.
“Christ, these entries… the most recent ones… all date from the First World War. 1917, 1918. Nothing beyond that.” He looked at Fabrini in the yellow light. “The Cyclops has been here a long time, I guess.”
Fabrini swallowed, but didn’t say anything.
Cook kept reading, trying to put together the last weeks before the ship ended up in the Dead Sea. Fabrini was getting impatient, but knew there was something important here, if they could just put it together.
