They alighted on the next deck. “Bridge is this way,” Finn said. He led the way. But as he headed down a long hallway of lounges, smoke shops, and coffee bars, he felt an eerie sensation as if some primal sense were warning him not to go further.
They came to double doors that led to the pool area. Only a few wooden lounge chairs remained around the empty pool. A towel cabana seemed eerie and empty.
Finn looked up; the sun had set. There was barely a moon to guide them.
He moved faster, making a mental note to remind them all that they needed to stay together as soon as they caught up with the others.
Finn stepped on something that stuck to his shoe. He paused.
Devon had been following him so closely that she slammed into his back.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He looked down.
There was more black goop.
“What is it?” Hampton asked.
“Nothing,” Finn lied.
“How far is the bridge?” Brigitte asked.
“Forward,” Finn said.
“Well, yes, forward,” Brigitte muttered.
“Silly,” Devon teased her. “At the front of the boat.”
“Technically, it’s a ship,” Hampton said.
“Whatever—let’s move,” Suzie suggested.
They kept walking and reached the bridge beyond the social area of the deck. Finn opened the door on the port side and walked in.
There was no one there.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh God!” Brigitte gasped.
“There’s no crew—we’re running in the middle of the night, and there’s no crew!” Suzie gasped.
“Screw the crew. Where are our friends?” Hampton whispered.
“Michael!” Devon shouted. “Where are you? Oh, my God—where did they go?” she demanded.
“The crew!” Brigitte said. “We could hit an iceberg—we could … oh, my God! We’re going to die out here,” she said hysterically.
“We won’t hit an iceberg; we’re not far enough north,” Hampton told her.
“Granger?” Finn called. “Anita? Marnie?”
“That stuff is all over,” Brigitte whispered.
“What stuff?” Hampton demanded.
“The black goop,” Brigitte said.
For a moment, Finn closed his eyes and steeled himself. This had to be some kind of a really bad joke. The crew was gone—the dining staff was gone. Black goop everywhere. And he was here with only Suzie from his own group—and three of the Ghosties.
All right; he was letting it get to him.
He walked over to look at the goop; he touched it. Back to the first kind of black goop he had touched. And it was tar.
It was a trick; a game. It had to be. Someone had been reading way too many H. P. Lovecraft stories.
“This is bull,” he said. “And no one can disappear that quickly.” He pictured the maps he had seen of the ship’s construction. He didn’t have a photographic memory, but his eye for detail was usually decent.
Seriously? Though small compared to current cruise vessels, the ship was huge. They had covered the one deck and now they were at the bridge. There were dozens of places where people could be, even in large numbers.
“The crew stairwell,” he said. “Down to the officer’s duty lounge.”
“What?” Brigitte looked at him hopefully.
He turned and walked to the rear of the bridge. A latticed door was there and might have just been a cover for controls, but it wasn’t. He threw it open. Stairs wound down to the deck below. He started down. The others followed.
Suzie let out a gasp.
“What?” Finn paused. Devon was almost on his back; in other circumstances, he’d have been thrilled.
“Ugh! The walls. It isn’t just goop, I don’t think, Finn. It seems to … move.”
“Don’t touch the wall, then,” Finn said.
He came to the bottom of the stairs. Suddenly—blindingly—lights shone into face and he heard the sound of delighted laughter and applause.
He lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the lights that blazed at him. There, sitting a chair before him, looking all the world like a wannabe Cecil B. DeMille, was Matt Barringer. At his side was a man with a microphone on a pole and on his other side was a fellow working a camera.
“All right, Mr. McCormick!” Barringer said. “Congratulations! You found us—you led the way. You’ve won a seven-day cruise for two with all expenses paid on the Sun-Moon experience of your choice and a five-thousand-dollar prize! You found us—science does win out!”
Behind him, Devon let out some kind of a sigh and nearly crashed into his back in a dead faint.
He turned to catch her; Brigitte was tumbling, too. He was a strong man, but catching the cascade of women behind him was no easy task—it rendered him silent for several minutes.
There was still sound.
Michael Corona was berating Matt Barringer. “If you’re playing games, you asshole, they weren’t fair games. You came and got us while they were still down there. To say that Finn McCormick figured it out and won is a ridiculous and unjust way of playing your game.”
Finn settled Suzie and Brigitte and went for Devon. Hampton had been struggling to keep her up. Finn swept her over his shoulder. Something damp clung to his shirt, but she’d been touching the wall and he knew it. He carried Devon down and set her in Barringer’s lap.
“Fuck you, Mr. Barringer, and your reality show, or whatever the hell it is you’re doing here. I’m going to pray you have a real medic on board. You could have hurt or killed someone.”
“Hey, come on, now! If you read your contract, you signed on for filming!” Barringer said.
Devon was coming to, but Finn seemed to be seeing red now. Not goop, but he was so angry that a red haze seemed to hang over everything.
“Hey,” Granger said suddenly, blinking and looked around the officer’s lounge. “Where’s Anita? Anita isn’t here.”
Barringer stood up and turned around, looking at the group around him. Finn looked, too. He saw Granger, Michael Corona, and Marnie. Suzie, Hampton, and Devon had been with him.
It was true; Anita wasn’t there.
“Where the hell is Anita?” Granger demanded, his tone growing thin.
“She’s somewhere close, don’t worry,” Matt Barringer said. He looked at his cameraman and grinned. “We had her, didn’t we? Maybe she’s trying to change the game and make it be on us?”
“It’s just another fucking trick he’s playing on us,” Finn said angrily. And yet, something in the back of his mind told him that what was fueling his anger was more than just annoyance with a man who was a true ass.
Some of the goop had been tar. Some of it hadn’t been. What the hell was it?
Some other substance Barringer had created? Well, fuck his contract, too.
“Sue me,” he said, looking at Barringer. “Keep playing his game if you want,” he told the others. “I’m through.”
Finn retraced his steps, returned to the promenade deck, and went to the hallway that led aft toward his cabin. He walked in, slammed the door, and lay back on his bunk. He felt as if he was seething inside like the black goop. He lay there for several minutes, trying to get his temper to cool.
When it did, he discovered that he was still disturbed.
Some of the black goop had been tar. Some of it hadn’t.
He stood up and ripped off his shirt, looking at the shoulder where whatever Suzie had gotten on her from the wall was now on his shirt. It wasn’t really black goop; it was of a more watery substance on his shirt. He smelled it—the stuff had a foul odor, and it was something that he should have recognized, he thought. Whatever it was, whatever it reminded him of, remained at the back of his mind and he couldn’t quite pull it forward.
Oh, for a lab!
he thought.
Finn walked to the little desk in the cabin where he had his computer set up. He thought about going on to one of his various social network groups and raging against the near-criminal practices of the ship’s company. But instead, he found himself keying in the words, “How to kill a shoggoth.”
Naturally, the replies that popped up were from Lovecraft enthusiasts or horror fiction writers.
He didn’t have access to any nuclear weapons, nor was there the possibility of shooting a shoggoth into a black hole.
He spun away from the computer. He hadn’t found
shoggoths
anyway; they were massive—not goop on the walls. Not to mention—
they weren’t real!
But what if …?
What if Lovecraft had changed the details and written up a story a drunk had told him in a bar?
Lovecraft was a teetotaler—the poor man would probably cry if he knew about the number of drinks and bars that had been named in his honor.
Okay, so he didn’t drink. But he still might have talked to friends or strangers while sipping water or coffee or tea at a bar.
Or wherever.
Ridiculous! What is the matter with me?
Where could black goop creatures have come from? They would have heard or felt something if a large
thing
had come aboard. Of course, it didn’t have to be large. And it didn’t have to be an
it
. There could be many things …
Or, perhaps, the shoggoths were real; they could take on any form if they felt they were outnumbered, pretend to be part of the ship. They could have lain in wait … and when the ship had moved out to open sea now …
So they’d been on the ship all those years? Wouldn’t they have starved?
Perhaps they had a period of lying dormant—like locusts. Only with shoggoths, they could remain for decades in a state of hibernation rather than seven years. Or, perhaps, all that time they’d been dining on sea creatures.
Ridiculous. All they had seen was black goop—not massive bloblike forms terrorizing the ship. The only terror on board was Matt Barringer.
As Finn sat there pondering, there was a fierce pounding on his cabin door. “Let me in, oh, God, let me in, please!”
It was Devon’s voice. He leapt up, his heart pounding, and threw open the door.
Devon threw herself into his arms.
“I ran here. I ran here with my eyes closed. I’m terrified, Finn. We started to break up; Michael was furious—you cheated, they cheated, he didn’t get a chance to win—and Granger was crazy that Anita had disappeared. Suzie was trying to calm him down. Hampton was all weird—he walked back up the stairs and Brigitte went after him. I kind of realized where I was with all that going on and—Finn! How could you! You probably saved me from an awful fall, but you put me in that awful man’s lap—I just up and ran, but that didn’t matter. Barringer was angry, saying he was going to have to get the crew back up to man the ship. I ran as fast as I could and I figured you’d come here because you were afraid you’d beat someone up or … Finn, I’m terrified!”
“It was a hoax,” he said. But even as he spoke, he turned back to his computer. He was worried.
A hoax gone awry? A reality show that was becoming real?
Or was this all just making him crazy, too?
“The black goop, this ship,” Devon murmured. “It’s all a Lovecraft novel, isn’t it?”
“Story,” he murmured, and then felt like an ass. “It’s not a Lovecraft novel, Devon. There wasn’t goop in his story; there were shoggoths and Elder Things and something else in the mountains but not—goop.”
She still stood there, just shaking.
She
had come to
him
and thrown herself into his arms. He should have been on top of the world.
“Cthulhu,” she murmured.
“No Cthulhu,” Finn reminded her. “Cthulhu is massive, with teensy-tiny wings, arms and legs, and a head with squid- or octopus-like tentacles,” he said, trying to grin.
“Finn, yes, Matt Barringer is an ass, he was trying to do some kind of a sensationalist thing—we were idiots for wanting a TV show so badly—but, beyond all that, something is wrong,” she said determinedly. She looked a little stronger.
He stood and put his hands on her shoulders. He smiled and couldn’t help but touch her beautiful face. “We’re going to be all right,” he assured her.
Just as he did so, there was another pounding at his door; this time, he didn’t have to open it. Granger burst in. “We’ve got to get together; we’ve got to meet back down in the lounge. This is for real—the crew is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone? Ask Barringer where they are—tell him to quit playing his stupid game and get the crew back,” Finn said.
“Look, I hate the ridiculous bastard as much as you do,” Granger said. “But I honestly think this is serious—real—Finn. Barringer is in the lounge breaking out bottles of alcohol—in tears. Please, come … please!”
Was everyone on the ship in on this? Was he the butt of the joke?
Or was there something to the black goop?
“We should stick together, yes, we should all stick together,” Devon said nervously.
“All right, what the hell, let’s go to the lounge,” Finn said. “But …” He looked at them sternly and pulled out his cell phone, never more grateful that he had sprung for the best international deal and equipment he’d been able to find.
“Who are you calling?” Granger asked him. “There are no local cops!” he said, his tone somewhat desperate.
“Emergency,” Finn said.
But Granger was right. He dialed 911 and the phone rang and rang. He dialed the international operator and she hung up on him. He dialed again.
“My sister in Daytona,” he said.
Deirdre came on after the third ring.
She was his big sister. He tried to explain; she gave him a furious, high-powered lecture. She asked him if he’d been drinking.
But, in the end, she believed him and promised to find someone who could help them.
“Isn’t there a radio on the ship?” Devon asked, looking at him hopefully.
“Yes,” he said, summoning his memory of the ship’s plan again. “But its two decks down and I don’t know how to use it,” he said when he hung up. “Deirdre can be like a bull in a china shop. She’ll get the navy out looking for us, I promise you,” he told her.
Devon smiled at him. “Oh, thank you! I’m never going to want to be on TV again, I promise you!”
“Let’s meet the others,” Granger said.
They left his cabin and walked down the aisles until they reached the lounge.
Matt Barringer was behind the bar with an open bottle of tequila. He hadn’t bothered with a glass. His cameraman was next to him—swilling from a bottle of whiskey.