10.31.07

Let me tell you a story

Posted by 3 at 7:50 pm in Marine Life

You’re new here, aren’t you? Ain’t seen a new face around here for years.  

Sit down, let me buy you a drink. Thirsty? No? Well, it’s refreshing to see a dry sailor now and then. If there’s one thing consistent about the docklands, it’s the healthy amount of drunks.

So what brings you around these parts, son?

Ah, a government worker. No doubt here to fulfill your patriotic duty of staring at cargo crates for hours. Can’t say much excitement goes on around here, at least not anymore.

C’mon, let me get you that drink, it’s the least I can do.

Alright, kid, let me tell you a story. You ever heard of these docks before? Nah, didn’t think you had.

You see, back in, what was it, eighty-three? Eighty-four? There was this… well, there was this ship that made anchorage here. Weird looking thing, covered in dishes and golf balls and crap, one of those fancy research vessels. Well, it kept mooring here every other month, but it was kept pretty off limits, to grunts like me, anyway. The SS… Montana? Montgomery… Montauk, that’s what she was, the Montauk. Well, word spread pretty quick about this weird-ass ship, and people started talking. Mostly bullshitting over drinks, anything from looking for Atlantis to drilling a hole in the ozone layer, that sort of crap. The Montauk became kind of a joke around here. And, for some time anyway, we just laughed at the damn thing and got back to moving crates and fixing cranes.

 Well, one night, the damn thing just showed up out of nowhere. Now, we get unscheduled visits every once in a while, usually some dumbass skipper who can’t read his own name, much less a shipping schedule, and the dockmaster usually goes and chews the fuck out of them and that’s that. But not this time, oh no. The Montauk, this weirdassed research vessel covered in blinky lights and god knows what else, always had to do things weird. So, imagine this; it’s one of the foggiest damn nights of the season, you’re about to punch out, when suddenly someone sounds the general alarm. Well fuck that, right?

So I run out, thinking if there’s going to be some crisis, at least I’d get overtime, but then I see the Montauk, slowly making its way into one of the berths. Only, it ain’t stopping, and to top it off, it’s at this weird angle, like the pilot’s baked out of his mind or something. So the ship just sort of slowly smashes into the pier, which is about the third or fourth indication that something’s seriously gone bad. Anyhow, look out that window over there. Yeah, see that crane over there? They never did get all the dents worked out of the thing.

Now me and the boys are out staring at this thing, too fucking stupid to decide whether or not to report this or just shit our pants and run like hell. But the dockmaster, the guy’s a real champ, just sort of calmly strolls out of his office, stares at the Montauk, and grabs the nearest bullhorn. And at the top of his goddamn lungs, he just screams

 “WHAT
THE
FUCK
ARE YOU MOTHER FUCKERS THINKING?!”

So, any- what? Yeah, fuck off, I’m trying to tell a story here. So, where was I?

So anyhow, the dockmaster, real champ, just starts swearing up and down at the ship, and, get this, no one- not a single person, does a thing. There’s no reply from the ship, and all of us grunts are just sort of milling around. So, naturally, getting nothing from the ship, just turns around, and without batting an eye, raises the bullhorn at us and starts screaming at us. So of course we get the picture, and cast the mooring lines.

Now here’s where the story gets interesting, ’cause that’s when me and my mates got on the ship. Normally, any ship has lights of some sort right? But not the Montauk, no sir. Not a single damn light on, so of course me and my mates have to grab these bigass torches and shine em’ all over the place. So Jim, big guy, Jim, goes in first, with this giant-ass spotlight, and sort of just shines it around, comes back out and says something like “All clear” or something like that, but either Jim’s dumber than rocks (which could be said), or he was just bullshitting us, because when the rest of us stepped through that hatch, it was anything but clear. The entire bulkhead was covered in this weird fuzzy shit, real velvety, but the most fucked up thing was the sailor who greeted us.

Well, naturally, he wasn’t very much alive, but the most fucked up thing about it was he wasn’t very much intact, either. Sure, most of his important bits were there, but his eyes, nose, and ears were just gone. And, he was sticking out of a wall, which, you know, isn’t someplace you normally expect to find a sailor. So, the first thing we find inside the Montauk is a deck covered in peach fuzz and half a sailor stuck to a wall. Great start, huh? So, we end up splitting, you know, see what the hell else is wrong with the damn ship. I ended up following Finnegan down to the engine room to see if we could get any of the lights up, because it looked like the generators had been out for a while.

So we’re making our way down to the engines, seeing more and more fucked up shit, sailors embedded in walls and… I don’t know, something like veins running in and out of the corridors. And the weirdest thing? Neither of us could smell a thing. You’d think after being covered in peach fuzz, human organs, and bits of sailors, the place would hit you like a tank, but nope, nothing. Alright, so we’re in the engines, trying to figure out where the generators are, because at this point everything’s covered in organs. Not sure how to explain it, it’s just like the place was turned into giant innards or something. Anyway, Finnegan’s getting real jumpy at this point, and I’m not exactly in the most lucid of moods, so of course that’s when it decided to attack.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what I saw, mostly because Finn and I were basically running like fuck and swearing out our ears, but this… I don’t know, this thing just sort of sloshes out of one of the organs and starts running- well, not really running, more like shambling, towards me and Finnegan. From what I can remember, which like I said, isn’t much due to the running and screaming, it was kind of human- like it was human, but just… I dunno, stopped being human, like its skin just stopped fitting. In some places it was real loose and flappy like, and some other places, it was just stretched tight, like, like… uh, like some weird demonic condom or somethi-

Oh shut up Finn, you telling the story or me? Yeah, fuck you, if I remember correctly, you fucking ran off at the first sign of trouble. So, anyhow, this weird saggy, stretching not-human sort of just shambles over to us, and of course, we flip our shit and run like hell. Now, you wouldn’t expect it, what with this thing’s joints being all wrong, but that thing was fast. Fast enough to keep up with us, anyway. So we end up hitting the top deck, and this thing, of course, is right behind us, all the while doing this weird moaning bit. I dunno, imagine like you’re missing all your teeth and maybe your tongue or something, but you’re still trying to say words, real words. That’s what it sounded like. So Finn and I are backed up against the railing, and he just jumps off, which is, of course, a pretty fucking stupid thing to do. So I’m still up there, and this thing, just keeps comin’ toward me, still making that weirdass howling, moaning noise. So I do the only sensible thing I can think of, which is to pull out my Ka-Bar and just sort of wedge it into where I think his face was.

And, well, that’s when it started bleeding spiders.

So here I am, on the deck of this ship of the damned, with my knife stuck in this not-quite-human’s eye, and millions of these tiny little spiders pouring out of the socket, and suddenly Finnegan’s idea doesn’t seem so fucking bad after all. So I grab the rail and vault over, and ten minutes later, I’m pulling myself up on the pier.

Now it looked like my buddies had gotten out okay, but from the looks on some of their faces, they saw some fucked up things too. But whatever we thought was moot because not two minutes later, a bunch of government types, kind of looked like you, I guess, pulled up in these black vans and cleared everyone out. The dockmaster was, of course, his usual charming self, telling them to do all sorts of things with their genitalia and their mothers, but we all ended up being escorted out of the docks. The next day, the ship was gone.

So that’s the story of the SS Montauk, the most exciting thing to ever happen around this dock. ‘Course, you won’t ever hear about it anywhere else, but ask any one of the boys in this room, and they’ll swear up and down that they saw some fucked up shit that night. No one’s really sure what happened on that boat, and to be honest, I don’t think I really want to know.

Anyway, that’s the story. You ever want another drink, you know where to find me.

See you around.

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