A Real Haunting
by
tallsunshine12
Chapter 1 Admiral Harriman Nelson
Scores of systems, circuitry, weaponry, air revitalization, sonar, radar, hydrophones, communications—the works. Every year, the Seaview, the most powerful nuclear sub ever to grace the world's seas, had to have its own yearly check-up like any other healthy, marine organism.
Though there were smaller inspections once a month, even hourly, a full inspection could only occur once a year—otherwise, the hair-pulling stress would overwhelm Seaview's officers, one in particular.
Admiral Nelson had his hand full of D. C. bureaucrats. These mostly pensioned men from Congressional resource committees came out to Santa Barbara each year, insisting on being present to 'inspect' the inspections. He had to be polite, even politic. Else, these penny-pinchers might jerk his ticket—cut funding somewhere for Seaview's various ventures.
"This year's going to be harder than most," he told Lee Crane, Seaview's skipper, over coffee in the bow, Seaview's 'front porch.'
"Why's that, Admiral? Every year is hard enough to me." Crane might agree with the admiral though that some years were harder than others. "Remember that general—what's his name, Braunsweitter? He came aboard in a white glove—I thought I'd flip."
The admiral, quietly laughed, nodded. "I bet he ran his index finger over every inch of Seaview!"
"And turned up about as much dust as in the Oval Office washroom!"
"Instead of inspections," Nelson said, blowing on his coffee and taking a sip, "we could be collecting sediment cores from the bottom of the ocean—"
"Or mapping a trench with the fathometer," Lee added.
"And while we're stuck at sea, they always ask—why study dolphins and not whales? Why spend here, why go there?"
"And what do we say?" sing-songed Lee.
"We like dolphins better than whales!"
Crane shook his head. "Don't forget, Admiral, this time General Hauptmeyer is coming aboard."
"You need not remind me, Lee. He's the one who recommended Congress cut environmental research by 80%. I'm glad we escaped having to testify on that one!"
"I hear he's tough." Chuckling, Lee sobered up. "Though that may be just a rumor. Have you met him?"
"Several times." The admiral ran a hand over the side of his head. "He still wears his hair slicked down and parted severely in the middle, like they did in the nineteen-oh's."
Lee laughed, continuing the joke. "Wait, Admiral, the way a man parts his hair, or doesn't part it—is that a reason for him to be thought of as tough?"
"Wait 'til you meet him. He could tear nails out of plywood with his bare teeth, and then eat 'em!"
"Surely you jest, Admiral?" said Crane, good-naturedly.
"Don't pull that 'surely you jest' stuff on Hauptmeyer, Lee, or he'll put you in the brig."
"I won't.' Lee chuckled again. He loved talking with the admiral over coffee. Once, the aliens and the underwater monsters, the mad scientists, the mermaids, and the mummies had all left the ship, it was just the two friends, sharing a cup of java and talking.
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Night fell on Seaview. The corridors filled with an infrared glow so that in an emergency, the sleeping men would be able to wake and adjust to full light promptly. With the red light on all night, it would take less time for their eyes to adapt.
Lee stood down from his watch, after giving orders to O'Brien—Chip Morton, the usual Exec, was not aboard this trip—to hold trim and keep Seaview on course for Norfolk, Virginia, where they'd pick up the bureaucrats. Ah, the inspectors.
Three hours passed. Norfolk reached, the Seaview surfaced. Capt. Lee Crane, Admiral Harriman Nelson, and two ratings, Kowalski and Patterson, climbed up into the conning tower or 'sail' of Seaview and found a small pilot boat waiting to escort them ashore. Getting in, Lee made a remark that fit the occasion.
"After we get our 'guests' safely stowed aboard, Admiral, why don't we revisit Norfolk for rounds of beer, like doing an Irish pub-crawl?"
The admiral, who had some Irish in him, readily agreed. Just the top-ranking Seaview officers would go, much to the chagrin of the thirsty Kowalski and Patterson. Lt. O'Brien, in charge of the control room, never went anywhere, much like Cmdr. Chip Morton. The sub's bulkheads were prison walls, and a junior officer like O'Brien, although a trusty, was hardly ever paroled.
The inspectors came aboard. Right off, General Robert Hauptmeyer objected to his quarters as too drafty. He was not a seadog, he kept saying, until one crewman—still holding his heavy suitcase—remarked, respectfully, that the general had begun to sound like a stuck needle. General Hauptmeyer was put out too that Admiral Nelson had not invited him along for the beer crawl. The admiral had been trying to duck out after stowing Hauptmeyer aboard.
"Of course," said the admiral, his gut twisting, "you're invited." He was doing his best to be super-polite and not liking the taste of it in his mouth. "And so are Dr. Davits and his assistant."
She at least had not complained yet. Pretty in a fawn-like way, Marie Olekaiuna (Nelson flubbed it three times, but Lee spoke it correctly right off the bat) had soft eyes, a cute, turned-up chin, teeth as white as a shark's, and short, silky dark hair. It was lustrous and full to the grasp, the admiral thought, like seaweed from the Sargasso Sea.
Nelson liked her, but stoic and pragmatic, he was not one for wasting his left-brain, or reasoning, faculty in spinning out romantic delusions.
Let the poets, the right-brain thinkers, do that.
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Hauptmeyer also brought along his wife for the beer crawl, although she was to be left behind—thankfully, blissfully—at the dock when the Seaview put out to sea. But there was something that wasn't going to be left behind as the boat sailed.
As the Hauptmeyers and the four other diners were enjoying cod, catfish and hushpuppies in the open night air on the screened porch of the Blue Lagoon Restaurant and Bar, a ghost was aboard Seaview preparing to haunt it.
Looking in Nelson's cabin, but finding it empty, the ghost moved on down to Lee's quarters. Slipping through the steel door without turning the knob, the ghost saw that there too he'd been foiled. No admiral. No Lee Crane. How could he do a proper haunting if the key men aboard—the admiral and the skipper—were off gallivanting around town from seafood house to seafood house?
The ghost knew where they had gone. He'd been wandering Seaview's corridors and listening to some of the politer comments made by members of the crew who had to remain on board throughout the night.
Late, late that night, in a rare good humor, after dismissing the wife of a thousand years with a brief brush against the cheek, the redoubtable Hauptmeyer swung on Admiral Nelson with his boozy thanks.
"What a splendid fellow you are to have invited us. We must do all do it again sometime."
"We will," said Nelson, mollifying the drunken Hauptmeyer with a pat on the back. "But this is not good-bye, yet." He said that rather wistfully, as if wishing it was.
"I'm so glad it's not!" Hauptmeyer yelled, staggering on the quay and almost pitching into the dark water of the dock.
The admiral was dumbstruck at the beaming change in the usually splenetic Hauptmeyer, whose ancestors must all have been formidable Prussian military men. Hauptmeyer had gone 'off the wagon' early in the evening. Perhaps the idea of 'cramming' with over a hundred men in a thin Unterseeboot upset him and he had to take it out on the scotch and waters. Sad to note that nothing more than copious amounts of liquid 'encouragement' had cheered up the heel-clicking general.
"Come along, General," said Nelson, guiding him to the pilot boat. The two able season, Kowalski—Ski—and Patterson, who had waited at the dock for the diners to return, helped the general aboard. Then Dr. Davits, a research engineer and a lobbyist for an environmental group, and the tempting Maria, with hair like seaweed, were handed down by the skipper. Ski made room for Maria close to where he sat by thrusting Dr. Davits to a back seat.
With a small, hourglass figure and the softest voice imaginable, Maria was a looker and the young men could react in the only way they knew how, even if it meant being written up for insubordination.
Nelson, likewise in the back row, had been young once too, but he doubled that General Hauptmeyer had ever been. Lee Crane was still young, but in such exalted company, he showed great restrained towards Maria. Look, but don't touch.
The short ride over to the Seaview, with the dark water and the dark sky lit up by harbor lights and electric boat lanterns, ended as it had begun. The able seamen fell all over themselves to escort Maria out of the dinghy and largely disregarded the needs of the remaining (male) passengers.
A stern Ahem! from Nelson brought them back in line. He and Lee could get aboard Seaview blindfolded with both hands tied behind their backs, but he knew that Hauptmeyer—a portly man with a lot of scotch in him—might need assistance. Lee got a hand under the arm of the elderly Dr. Davits, while Nelson turned and cast the line back to the pilot.
Hauptmeyer wanted to sit up and 'talk' about sea monsters and such, so the admiral gave him one more hour. An hour it was that he could have been dreaming of hair as thick as seaweed. At about 0200 hours, Nelson righted Hauptmeyer and steered him to his own cabin, then he returned to his quarters, sighing, and changed for bed.
The moment he plumped his pillow and adjusted his coverlet over his knees, the haunting began. Like a distant police siren, wails came from the cabin walls. Then the boat shook, delivering the admiral, in his striped pajamas, onto the floor.
Not that he fell out of bed, because the quake hadn't been that strong. No, he jumped down, believing the Seaview might be breaking up. Any disturbance was likely to happen on Seaview, and at any time of the night. Aliens and abominable snowmen had no watches. It was a bad time for it though, with the inspectors were aboard. The clock said 0230 as he ran out of the cabin.
The wailing, now like a screaming Rhesus monkey in Nepal, followed him into the corridor. Could it be coming out of the wall vent above his head, Nelson wondered. He stood on tiptoe and peered into the grill plate over the vent, hands flat on the wall.
"Who's in there!" he called. "Who's haunting my ship? Is that you, Seamus?" Nelson was referring to his late, great-great-great-great grandpa Seamus O'Hara Nelson, who had visited him on the Seaview a month ago last Monday.
"No-oooooooooo."
"I heard that!" The admiral spun around in the corridor, trying to figure out just where he had heard that sound. It was not in the vent.
Nelson woke Lee with his calls. Scratching his head and wished for a bromide for his headache, Lee came out of his cabin in his own pajamas—a solid burgundy, so like him—and spotted the admiral spinning in circles.
"Admiral, that dance went out with the dinosaurs," he said, grumpily. Yawning, he asked the inevitable, "What time is it?"
"Past two-thirty, Lee. You should be asleep. You have the early watch tomorrow."
"I know," Lee said, yawning wider. "I wish I were asleep. But I heard you calling out, out here, and came to … ah, investigate." He was dropping off. Snapping his head forward, he said, "What's up?"
"Something's on the ship."
"That could be a lot of things, Admiral. Missiles, men, stores, underwater gear, a raft, some medical stuff in Sickbay—I could go on."
"Lee," the admiral quipped, a bit heatedly, "you have a lot of imagination for this time of the morning."
"I was dreaming of …"
"Then go back to your dream and let me get back to my—my—"
"Your what, sir?"
"I've been hearing things and my bed was shaking. I nearly fell out. Listen."
Doing the admiral's bidding, Lee tilted his head up. He heard nothing. In officer's country, on the third level of the boat, he couldn't even hear the hum of the submarine's engines. He answered candidly. "Silence. If that's what you wanted me to hear, Admiral, I'm afraid I can't. It's too quiet to hear."
Nelson, exasperated, said, "Lee, the unemployment line is long, the way there short."
Lee sighed, then smiled and went up to his admiral-friend. "C'mon, sir, we'll get you back snug before you really wake up. You'll have to tell Doc about this habit of sleepwalking."
The admiral pulled back, as if struck. His eyes blazed. "Lee, have I ever sleepwalked before?"
"Admiral, we've all seen you. The last time, you came to the reactor room with no protective gear on—Patterson spotted you there."
"That wasn't me."
"Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting." Lee scratched his head again. "Another alien. They're hard to keep straight."
"This is a ghost."
"Admiral, you're seeing—and hearing—things. I mean, you're not—oh, I don't know what I mean, except the Seaview isn't haunted."
"It was once," said the admiral, steadfastly, with conviction. He seemed full of himself with some kind of knowledge he had not shared before with Lee. Lee had to ask about it.
"It was? By whom, Admiral? A ghost has to have an identity, like any other person."
"My fourth-great grandfather, Seamus O'Hara Nelson."
Lee didn't seem as impressed as the fourth-great grandson did over the name or the visit. However, he said, "Why didn't you tell me? Doc could have looked at you right away."
The admiral laughed, a bit tremulously. "I know you like things to always be on an even keel, Lee. To run smoothly. It's your way. So I kept Seamus to myself. He was here about, oh, let me see, a little over a month ago. Came on a Monday. I was the only one who saw him."
"I'm beginning to believe you would have been the only one to see him, Admiral. Now, c'mon, we have to dance around the inspectors tomorrow and we both need sleep."
"How can I sleep in a haunted cabin, Lee? Bed shaking, wall wailing—am I to get to sleep in all that?"
"Want to trade rooms? My other brother Jim used to trade with me when I had my usual nightmares about racehorses running me down," Lee said. "It helped."
"You were too young to bet, right, Lee?"
"Yeah, too young, though sometimes I gave the number of the winning horse to my father and he bet. He always shared the winnings with me afterward. I told you all this though, Admiral. Time for bed now."
The admiral agreed, going towards his cabin again but with ginger steps. He poked his head in and called, "Who's in here?"
"No-oooooooooooooooooooo one!"
The admiral flew back out into the corridor. Lee watched him for any other rather curious signs or behaviors. Had he flipped his lid? Did the last gin and tonic get to him? What about the margarita? Or was it mercury poisoning from the huge amount of fish he had ingested over the course of the evening?
"You heard that, Lee—you had to!"
"Admiral, I heard you cry out and then run out into the corridor like it was on fire in there, which, with your smoking, it often is." Lee shook his head. He yawned again. He was finding the admiral's 'nightmare' tedious.
"You go to your cabin, Lee. I'm going to the wardroom for a cup of coffee."
"Coffee's cold, and the steward's probably in bed, too. Or he should be."
"I'm warm the pot myself. I haven't forgotten how. You never forget how, no matter how out of practice you become."
"Well, if you're going to go down there alone—in your present state of mind, Admiral—I'll go with you."
"I just hope we don't meet up with the ghost on the way."
Lee paused a minute, and then followed. The admiral might be up to some kind of trick. He invariably pulled jokes and hoaxes on the crew whenever things got a little too tight for him. And with the inspectors ready to pounce tomorrow, he might be feeling a bit antsy. Lee just hoped the joke was a soft one, so it wouldn't wake him up too bad. He knew that even if the admiral wasn't sleepwalking, he was. Sleep was good.
The ghost, watching them through the air vent, was delighted that the admiral and the skipper had both chosen this time to go on a quest for coffee. What better time to haunt them than when they were together, and no one else was about?