Author's note: Warning, some minor language.
The Thing in the Water
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1935
Isle aux Morts, Newfoundland
"Mary! Mary! Don't let it gets me, Mary!" the writhing man on the bed screamed.
"Sure and I need ye to calm down, Jack love," the worried woman trying to hold down her husband's arms said.
"No, it's coming Mary! The monster's been beatin' the pat' all these years and now it's coming!"
"There ain'ts no monster, Jack!"
"What's Da on about, Mam?" thirteen-year-old Ned asked from just outside the door. "What monster?"
"Jesus, Mary 'n Joseph, Ned!" the flustered Mary snapped at her eldest, "Don't be bothering with such foolishness now! Where's Frank with the doctor?"
The boy's Aunt Ruby looked at him even while struggling to help her sister to keep her brother-in-law from hurting himself. "It's only the delirium talking, my love," she soothed. "Go down now and wait for your uncle and the doctor. Mind your uncle gets some coffee too; it's an early morning for him tomorrow if he's going to replace your Da on the boat."
Ned reached the bottom of the stairs just as Doc McKiver and his uncle Frank burst through the door. The doctor only stopped to yank off his snow-covered coat before heading up to his patient, giving Ned a distracted nod on the way. Frank meanwhile reckoned the room upstairs would be crowded enough, so went to warm his hands at the wood stove.
"Right brass-monkey weather out there right now, young Ned. I'm after freezing my fingers off. Won't be any use tomorrow if that happens."
Ned nodded and bit his lip. He was trying to be a man - wouldn't be but another year and he be on the fishing boats himself - but he was scared.
His uncle saw. "Don't take on, Neddy me son. Yer Da's bad off, I'll grant ye, but he's been through worse."
"But he's talkin' crazy, Uncle Frank," Ned whispered. "Goin' on 'bout some monster wandering the roads and coming for him."
Ned saw his uncle stiffen.
"What is it, Uncle Frank?"
"Nuthin', boy," the thick-shouldered fisherman told him, but young Ned saw him shrug like a person does when they're trying to shake off a sudden chill. "Yer Da's jist got the pneumonia. People say strange things when dere 'eads is burning up like that with the fever."
Ned noticed though that his Uncle hadn't looked at him at all while speaking, but instead had kept his gaze fixed on the stairs leading up to the floor where his sick brother-in-law lay. Even with worry for his Da hitting him again, Ned was still perceptive enough to know this was something else.
However, he didn't feel like pushing his uncle that night, so in the end Ned might never have got to hear the story if Old Billy McCrae from down the road hadn't come by a couple of bottles of Black Label beer to keep Frank company during the vigil.
Old Billy was a scraggly cuss, half "touched", or so most said. Ned had once asked his cousin Doreen why that was and she'd told Ned, "Gots a problem with the liquor, that's alls I know. But Da told Jenkins at the church one day he'd gone strange after they found that "thing" in the water."
"What thing?" Ned had asked breathlessly.
"Dunno, but there's a whole bunch of'em what's never been quite right since, from how old lady Normandeau tells it."
But Billy was a good-hearted sort and the best thing about him was that if you wanted to know anything, all you had to do was pour the drink down his throat. That is, when he didn't bring it himself.
It was coming up to four in the morning when Ned woke to find himself lying on the chesterfield. The wind howled outside and the room was dark, but there was enough light from the flickering hurricane lamp in the corner for him to see that his uncle was asleep but Old Billy was in the wing chair wide-awake and thinking.
"Billy?" he whispered.
"What is it, boy?"
"My Da was going on 'bout a monster before. In his raving."
"Was he now?"
"Yeah."
"And you're wanting to know iffen it's real, I take it?"
"Yeah."
"I shouldn't, boy," Billy said, "boy" coming out as "by" with his accent. "It's not a tale yer Mam would be wantin' ye to hear. Flay the skin right off've me, the woman would, as like as not."
Ned listened to the snow striking the window. "It's real, though, isn't it?" he asked quietly after a time.
"That it is, me son. That it is."
"Please tell me."
"Ain't much of a tale. Not really."
"Tell me anyway."
Billy nodded. "It was back in '12, when yer Da, Frank and I were on the Guinevere. Ah, my lad, but that was a darlin' boat! Last of the sail-rigged, not a steam trawler like what we have now. A steel-hulled ketch, and could make as sweet a turn as fleet-footed young lass at a dance, but dependable as the rock of Gibraltar. And the fish! Oh, me son, the Grand Banks ain't as they used to be."
"The monster was in the water, then?" young Ned interrupted, eager to keep the old man on topic. The thing! The thing in the water! his brain shouted with excitement.
"Aye. Like I said, this was back in '12, not long after that fancy ship sank. You know the one - out on its maiden voyage."
"The Titanic?"
"That's it. Oh, a sad thing it was. Knew a mate on the Mackay-Bennett when she was commissioned to go looking for all them what didn't make it. He told me they brought home more than twice the number of bodies they'd canvas wrappings for, and that weren't even a tenth of them what were lost. And they'd buried almost half of them what they'd found at sea on top of that. You couldn't brings in bodies that weren't embalmed, and they'd run out of the necessaries. Still, there were so many them down in Halifax they had to set up a morgue in a curling rink. Oh yes, I tells ye, boy, it was a right sad, sad thing.
"Any road, we'd been pulling up debris from the poor girl - beams, paneling, a broken deck chair and the like - in the nets every so often, but no bodies, not till then, any rate."
"When?" Ned asked.
"Mid-June or thereabouts. Memory's hazy these days, Neddy. But I do recall it were weeks later. Far too long for…that."
"What?"
"It was caught face-down in the nets with the cod. Archie Balfour was the first to spot it. Lord t'undering, but that man was slow as molasses in winter! Wonderful mechanic - could put the arse back in a cat - but not much good for anything else. Thought it was a black shark we'd caught even after the body sort of slid down and one of its arms got freed. Boy was down right gleeful thinking we'd caught the first fish with limbs!"
Ned couldn't help but snicker, despite everything.
"And Lord, when he finally saw what it really was, well my eardrums were fair bleedin' from the racket! Then the poor sod nearly fell arse foremost over the rail, panicked as he was. I was so busy grabbing the fool that I didn't see what he was making a time over till the Captain told us to open the net.
"Sure and it were a body, all right. A thin lad, maybe mid-20s. 'Tween the black hair and the black fancy evening duds he had on, didn't seem to be any colour on him but that one white hand and collar.
" 'Turn the poor devil over,' Captain Allen ordered, 'let's see what we've got.' We did and some of us younger ones flinched when it suddenly flopped over and we saw the face on it. As pale-grey as frozen milk and sort of hard looking, though you'd expect that with a body what's dead and probably freezed up solid. Still…
"Yet it were the eyes what really got to me. They were open. An icy-blue, practically glowing in that awful white face, yet cloudy with death. Fixed and staring at nothing. Staring and empty, with pupils - that's the black part - the size of dimes.
"I'll tell you, boy, the whole thing was a puzzle right from the start. As your Da and a couple of others picked the thing up and took it down into the hold, I heard Eamon from Gambo telling Tetchy Jake how it didn't look like no drowned body he'd ever seen.
" 'How's that?' I asked him.
" 'Ain't got that bloated, waxy look to it like a body what's been in the water a long time has,' he said.
" 'How do you know it's been in the water a long time?' I asked. Hadn't thought on it none, but I shoulda realized a body dressed like that wasn't no fisherman off'en any trawler.
" 'It's got to be from that there ship - the Titanic. Heard tell a liner found a body just last month.' He was going to say something else, but then we heard a series of screams from the hold.
"We raced down there… And… I don't knows how to say it."
"What?" Ned gasped.
"The damned thing was sitting up."
"Sitting up?" Ned hissed, just barely stopping himself from letting out a shout to wake the house. "Whadda ya mean, sitting up?"
"Jist what I said. Cursed thing was sitting there big as life in the corner of an empty store room in the hold, all spooky-like, with its eyes still fixed in his head and looking like they were covered with a layer of frost."
"Then what happened?" a wide-eyed Ned asked.
"Not much. It just kept sitting there, not moving anymore, not even those eyes, and not a sound out of it. It would blink every so often, but not near as often as a living man would do."
"What did you do?"
"To be honest, we just kept staring back at it. Archie was crying, he was so frightened. We didn't know what to do with it. Some of the crew thought we were cursed. They wanted to beat it to a pulp and then toss back into the water, but the Captain said no. Said it was just gas rising in the corpse, making it sit up like that. Said there weren't no reason not to give the poor devil a proper Christian burial.
" 'We gonna bury him at sea, Cap? Rules say we can't take in no body what's not been embalmed,' Jim the cook reminded him.
" 'We'll see to that in the morning,' the Captain said. But he was fearful too and I think half the reason he didn't want to see it beat was he didn't want it confirmed that the thing was already dead and yet still moving 'round.
"So we sailed for three days with that thing in the hold. Never moved once, 'cept to blink, which to my mind shot the Cap's idea of body gases into a cocked hat, but there was no telling him that. Fisherman are like sailors - a superstitious lot - and the Cap was shaken bad. He'd forgotten 'bout the embalming for one. And the hold was bare except for that one day's catch. That and… it.
"Nobody was at the wharf when we came in, and we were grateful for that. We were as silent as it was as Cap got out the gangplank and then opened the door to the hold.
"That sound, Ned… the sound of the thing getting to its feet and shuffling its way past us… ain't none of us as didn't shudder with horror. It stumbled past us, still with that empty stare, and climbed out of the boat. We watched walk down the wharf and away down the lane, none of us breathing till it was out of sight. Then… then it was like something shifted and half the crew broke and ran, never to be see in these parts again. Heard some moved to Labrador or thereabouts, and a few went to the cities, but the only one I ever saw again was Dick Barnett; he'd gone and went to be a cobbler in St. John's."
"But what happened to the body?" Ned asked in shock.
"Don't rightly know."
Ned felt there was something wrong here; this didn't feel like a ghost story. And then he remembered the fear in his father's and uncle's eyes. Anxiousness took a cold grip on his stomach. "You're telling me nobody knows?"
"No, boy, and that's what keeps a number of us from sleep to this day. I can't hardly go into the bush without wondering if the thing is there watching me. Wish we'd taken the bloody thing and chopped its damn head off!"
The old man looked seriously at the boy. Outside, dawn was approaching.
"I'll tell you something more too, Ned. Yer Da and me, we went and looked at it one night while it was sitting in the hold. That room were dark, but you could still see the thing's eyes…
"Because they were glowing gold."
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Author's note:
Three guesses as to who our mystery monster was? Anyway, my apologies to those - like me - who don't care for OC heavy stories, but the idea that over the course of fifteen centuries there would have to be times when immortality would be damned hard to explain has been stuck in my head for awhile now. I figure if Merlin was on the Titanic, he wouldn't take a place in the lifeboats (though I suppose I could have given him a lifebelt), so the only option was that he'd have to float around in the ocean until he was either picked up or made it to shore. And, while unable to die, six weeks of freezing water, no drinking water, no food and constant exposure to the elements would likely put him in some kind of physical distress.
So I hope you enjoyed it, even without our regular players. And my sincere apologies to all Newfoundlanders for the accents used. Sorry if they're inaccurate and completely over the top. I've tried my best, but there's not a lot of guides out there for Depression era Newfoundland speech and I had to make do with a few cheesy videos on you tube and my own tin ear.