Tag: the storm dark sea

Sequel to Sanitarium and Alien Soul, though it can be read independently.

~

Anatoly didn’t like her.

Nobody on the boat precisely liked Sharley, but most of them were merely ambivalent about her. She was the only woman on the boat and she spoke very little Russian, so she mostly kept to herself. She was in charge of the engines, so they rarely saw her topside unless they hit a big catch and needed all the hands they could get. Even then she kept to herself, ignoring the cursing and aggravation of the others as they dealt with tangled nets and a deck made ice-slick by too many fish. Not once did she join in; she worked in silence, with tidy efficiency, dealing with all that must be dealt with before escaping back to her engine room.

No, he had no reason to dislike her as much as he did. She was quiet and she never caused trouble, unlike some of the rest of his crew, but there was something…wrong about her, something he could put no name to.

Anatoly had been captain of this fishing boat for ten years, and had it been up to him, he never would have hired her. His mechanic had broken both legs, though, and she was the only person in the tiny port town who knew how to deal with the motors on such a large trawler. And he had to admit, Sharley was better at the job than Dmitri had ever been: the man had been drunk more often than not, and the engine room usually filthy, but she ran it like a professional. One of the few personal details she’d offered was that she had once been in the Army, and the tidiness of her workspace made him believe it.

She was on the deck now, helping with the nets. They’d hit an obscenely large shoal of salmon, one that might make them all more money than he’d ever seen, and the rest of the crew were joking and catcalling and already planning what they would do with their loot. Sharley, though, was off to the side, silent as usual, her expression unreadable.

She was taller than most of the crew — she had to be at least a hundred and eighty centimeters, if Anatoly was any judge — and she was one of the palest people he’d ever seen. Her long hair was a faded blue, with several inches of dark roots, braided and pinned around her head to keep it out of her way. It was her eyes that truly unnerved him, though they shouldn’t have: they were dark, but the left had a section that was almost orange, and the right was half taken over by an uneven pinwheel of blue and green. He didn’t know the name for it, but they gave her a distinctly unbalanced look, that almost seemed to warn of her personality. Something had once broken this woman badly, and one had only to talk to her — whenever you could get her to answer — to realize she was still incredibly cracked. And that made him nervous, too.

But they needed her, he reminded himself as he hauled at the nets, and at least the rest of his crew were ordinary enough. All Russian, defectors like himself; in the paranoid decade of the 1970’s, Alaska was one of the few places they could settle in relative peace, especially if they spent most of their time at sea. They were hard, weathered men, used to a life of deprivation, though that didn’t stop them complaining as sailors always did.

Beside him, Ilya cursed as a massive wave washed over the deck, soaking him and everyone around him in frigid seawater. No amount of rubber clothing could keep it out; it always found its way in, chilling you to the bone even if you were sweating with exertion. The air stank of fish and salt and sharp, bitter diesel, but to Anatoly it was the smell of money, and it made him momentarily forget his odd mechanic. The trawler listed alarmingly to port, but she’d been through worse, his old ship, and she’d never yet let him down.

Another wave rolled over the deck, and Ilya wasn’t the only one cursing. Of course they’d caught this haul in the middle of a storm, one nasty even by the standards of the Bering Sea. Bruise-dark clouds boiled overhead, broken at times by the silver strobe-flash of lightning — a rare sight, out here. The thunder was obscured by the roar of the sea, churned into frothing whitecaps that would have made a lesser captain abandon the whole thing.

The ship listed again, metal groaning as it fought the current and the current fought back. And then, before he could blink, he was falling, falling, his heart in his throat and his stomach threatening mutiny as ‘up’ and ‘down’ ceased to be relevant concepts. He was in the water before his brain could catch up with events — water so cold it almost stopped his heart then and there. It crept into his rubber suit and pulled him relentlessly downward, all attempts at swimming useless, and he only dimly registered the horrified cries of his crew. The only thought his stunned brain could produce was that this was such an embarrassing way for an experienced captain to die, even as he struggled and the sea choked its way into his laboring lungs. He tried to cough and only drew more in, while what little light there was receded into dimness. The sea was claiming its own, as it did so many sailors, and he didn’t want to die, not now, not when it seemed things would finally go right.

He wasn’t aware of the arm around his waist until he broke the surface again, still trying and failing to breathe, but when the salt cleared his stinging eyes he saw it was Sharley who had him. Curses tried to leave a throat still full of water, curses that came as automatically as the breath he couldn’t draw. Idiot woman — she was going to drown herself along with him, and why? What point, for her?

“Zatknulsja nahuj,” she said — of course she’d have learned how to say ‘shut the fuck up’ in Russian. She never wore the rubber suit; she was treading water as he could not, but that couldn’t possibly be enough. Anatoly might not be as tall as her, but he wasn’t a small man, and Sharley was built like a sinewy beanpole. “Krepko derzhat’say, u menya yest’ ty.” Hold fast, I have you. The grammar was a mess, but still he understood — and it was more than he would have expected of her.

She was wrapping a rope around him even as she spoke, and forced his numb hands to grip it. They were so cold he wouldn’t have known he was touching anything if he hadn’t been able to see it, and then he was being reeled in alone, reeled like the salmon that made his living. A wild thought passed through his head: was this what they felt, this terrifying pull that yanked them upward to their deaths?

But he was heading to life, or so he hoped — and heading there alone. Sharley wasn’t hanging on with him anymore; she’d released him and was still somewhere in the water, probably being pulled down herself. Idiot, idiot woman, but he couldn’t have disliked her now even if he’d been coherent enough to want to. Not with potential survival dragging him toward it.

He wasn’t even aware of it when he reached the deck, not until Ilya started trying to pound the water from his lungs with a fist to his back. He coughed, wheezed, and vomited, his throat feeling like it had been scoured with sandpaper and his body so numb he would have thought himself already dead if he weren’t so busy choking.

Strong arms hauled him down below, and his consciousness faded momentarily to a dim, fuzzy grey. It wasn’t until they’d yanked his suit off and dumped him in a tub of warm water that reality came back into focus. His skin suddenly felt like it was on fire, pins and needles burning him alive, and he vomited again, but for the first time he felt like he could breathe.

Half the crew had joined him, and he knew, dimly, that they were losing the rest of their catch. They’d rather lose that than their captain, but there were too many of them in this tiny sickbay, crashing into one another as the ship rocked. The man who passed for the ship’s doctor was shouting at them, but the sound of his voice seemed very far away, muffled by unimaginable distance.

And then there was someone else, not shouting yet somehow easier to hear. It was a voice he’d so rarely heard: Sharley, he thought, but that couldn’t be. Surely the sea had claimed her in his place, but that voice was unmistakable — rough and strangely deep for a woman, hoarse from a throat so rarely used to speaking.

Her pale face filled his blurred vision, those odd eyes burning even more than his skin with a light that was almost unholy and nearly completely inhuman. Wet hair, already crusted with ice, stuck to her skin in faded blue ropes that glittered faintly in the harsh glow of bare light bulbs.

“Ya ne spasal tvoyu zhizn’, chtoby ty mog umeret’ na mne, mudak,” she said, and he wondered, hazily, if she meant to say something about not letting him die. Her Russian was awful, and yet he wondered that she spoke any at all. She rested a hand on either side of his face, surprisingly gently. She had incredibly long fingers that pressed to his temples, but light though her touch was, he instinctively recoiled from it. There was something in it that was truly horrible, something so alien his brain couldn’t assign a name to it: her hands were even colder than the sea, yet they burned even hotter than her eyes. Her eyes, which held him half-hypnotized; in their mismatched depths he saw with terrible clarity his own mortality — and her lack of it. Oh God, what was she? Savior or not, he was suddenly terrified of her as he had been of no other earthly thing.

As if she’d read his mind, her expression shifted, melting into a mix of sorrow and resignation even as he choked up the last of the water in his lungs.

“I wondered when you’d figure it out,” she said quietly, half to herself. “People always do, in the end. Be still.”

He had no choice, really. The hypnotic quality of her gaze intensified, until it was all he could see, sucking at his very soul. Terror gave way to complete exhaustion, pulling him down as relentlessly as the sea.

~

Anatoly didn’t know how long he slept, but by the time he woke they’d ridden out the storm. He was lying on one of the bunks in sickbay, wrapped in several wool blankets, dry and very warm. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this comfortable.

His eyes still burned, and would for some time yet, but when he eventually managed to force them to focus, he found Sharley sitting beside his bunk, watching him with unnerving intensity. How had he ever thought her human? She was as alien and remote as the moon, and even now he found he was a little afraid of her.

He tried to move, and discovered his right arm had been strapped down, an IV leading to a bag of saline taped to his elbow.

“Don’t try to get up,” she said quietly. She had a pipe in her hand, an old wooden pipe that exuded some kind of sweet-smelling smoke. “You had a damn close shave there. You’re staying put until I’m sure you won’t catch pneumonia. Ilya’s running things for you.”

Her words were the most he’d ever heard her speak, and despite his vague fear he found them comforting. Whatever she was, she didn’t mean him any harm. The sorrow lingered in her odd eyes, and he knew, somehow, that she wouldn’t be with them much longer. He was somewhat ashamed to find that relieved him.

“What are you?” he asked, his abused vocal cords allowing him to do no more than whisper.

When she answered, her sadness was almost palpable. “There isn’t a word for what I am,” she said quietly. “All you need to know is I’m the person who saved your damn life. Just…do me a favor and don’t tell anyone else, okay? I don’t…well, I don’t like it when people are scared of me.”

How could anyone who really looked at her not be? No wonder she isolated herself. Too much exposure couldn’t help but make a person realize she was…whatever she was. Or rather, what she wasn’t.

“I won’t,” he managed, still staring at her as though seeing her for the first time. She wore a stained white tank top and jeans, and he realized her arms and throat were covered in scars. Faded scars, obviously old, but just as obviously deep. Something had once tried valiantly to tear this woman apart, and he wondered, with a faint shudder, what she’d done to it.

She must have noticed him looking. “Long story,” she said, “and you don’t need to hear it. Might be happy to know they salvaged most of your catch, though.”

He should have been, but it was difficult to focus on the mundane details of life with her so close. Faced with such a creature, he could hardly focus on anything.

“Sleep,” she said, rising. “You’re gonna need a hospital when we reach land.”

She left, but he laid awake a long time, troubled by thoughts his pragmatic mind would normally never have entertained. Sharley was as unfathomable as the storm-dark sea, and he wondered if it had spat her out, as unable to deal with her as he was.

Eventually he slept again, and only woke once they reached port. He asked after her while they loaded him into an emergency helicopter, but Ilya said she’d disappeared before they docked. Anatoly wouldn’t be surprised if she’d vanished into thin air.

He was never to see her again, and though it still ashamed him, his every instinct was glad of it. Those strange eyes occasionally haunted his nightmares, dreams he could never clearly recall. He’d seen his death in them, and he couldn’t forget it no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t rationalize it away as the delusion of a man half-drowned. She’d saved his life, but she also haunted it.

Even once he’d recovered, he couldn’t bring himself to back to sea. They’d made enough money that he could afford to take the pay cut working in a cannery, and he left his trawler to Ilya. Everyone thought his resolution to stay on land was born of his accident, and he never told anyone the real reason. The truth was that he never wanted to run into her again.

~

Followed by The Sea Holds Many Things (Some of Them Are Almost Human)