Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (10 page)

As I was getting ready to turn in for the night, Keiko offered me a swig of some rice wine she had secreted under her bed. It was potent stuff, stronger than whiskey. I don’t think you could even legally call it wine, so much as turpentine that gets you drunk, but it was better than being totally sober.

The last thing I wanted to do was tell her about the demon, but when liquor and grief mix, they’re a potent combination. Between two and three sheets to the wind, I started talking and didn’t stop. I got all the way to my paranoid fear that the demon had followed me onto
Nishigo Maru
before she held up her hand, told me she had to rest.

Back at my bunk, I fell apart. I wasn’t even that drunk, but I don’t remember much else of that night . . . besides briefly considering going up to the deck and letting a wave take me. It wasn’t until I said everything out loud to Keiko that it all became real to me. I couldn’t ever go back to being just a mechanic. Whatever I ended up being, it would have to be a whole new me. A Bobby Singer that’d be a stranger to the man I’d been for decades.

Some time in the early morning, the wheel on the hatch spun and the door slammed open. It was those two burly men again, plus Yoshiro. He hadn’t shaved and looked like he’d been up all night, which in fact he had. Another crew member was missing, this time from the engine room. The engineer had been manning his post alone when he disappeared, and his absence wasn’t noticed until the overheating alarms started to sound on the bridge. With no one at the controls in the engine room, the rotors had been left spinning at maximum thrust for far longer than they were designed.
Nishigo Maru
was dead in the water.

Since I had been interested in an engine room job, I was again the first and only suspect. Things were starting to get real, and I was imagining myself getting tied to the anchor and thrown overboard. Yoshiro went so far as to hit me when I couldn’t answer the questions to his satisfaction. I told him everything I could, and hoped that they wouldn’t ask Keiko what I’d talked to her about the night before.

When they dragged me to the brig, I was actually relieved. It meant they weren’t going to kill me outright, so things were looking up. The brig itself wasn’t what I’d envisioned, it was more like a closet than a prison cell, with a small metal gate in the door to allow plates of food to be passed in and out. Because the engines weren’t operational, the lights were off in the prison/closet, which made it even more claustrophobic. Yoshiro promised he’d be back later in the day for another round of questioning, so I had that to look forward to.

I sat in silence the whole day, never receiving any of the meals that I felt were implied by the gate in the door. Guess they had bigger fish to fry, since when Yoshiro returned, it was with the news that another sailor had disappeared. Despite me being locked up all day, I was still considered a suspect. They weren’t sure exactly
when
the guy had disappeared, so it was possible I’d killed him before I was taken into custody. In Yoshiro’s defense, it’s not like it woulda been reasonable for him to expect that something supernatural was at play, but at that point I think letting me out of the clink would have been the decent thing to do.

That night, I had another visitor. Keiko. She brought a bowl of noodle soup, which didn’t fit through the gate in the door. Instead, she passed the spoon back and forth, letting me get enough in my stomach to stave off the hunger pains. She didn’t stay long, but her visit raised my spirits enough to let me get some sleep.

In the morning, Yoshiro returned, this time with a gun. Five more sailors were gone. Yet another was found dead, his throat slit. Whatever witchcraft I was doing from in the cell (closet), he was going to make me stop. I asked him if he thought it was more likely that someone else on the crew had snapped—maybe because of the terrible hours, maybe because of the terrible working conditions, or maybe because of all that friggin’ seaweed on the menu. Yoshiro didn’t find any of that funny.

Whether I truly believed that theory—that another crew member had snapped and started murdering his coworkers—I don’t really remember. It must have been pretty clear that something unnatural was afoot, especially since it was so soon after Karen’s death. What I
do
remember is Yoshiro sticking his gun through the metal grate and firing off three rounds, all of them ricocheting around the tiny cell. That I didn’t get killed was incredible, that I didn’t even get
hit
was both a miracle and a testament to how terrible a shot Yoshiro was.

With his hand still reaching through the grate, clutching the pistol, I put every pound of pressure I could on his wrist. I heard it break with a sickening crack, and the gun fell to the floor of the brig. It wouldn’t do me much good on the inside of the cell, but at least Yoshiro wasn’t holding it any more. He ran out of there like a chicken with its head cut off, nearly tripping over the raised lip of the hatch.

Yoshiro didn’t come around so much after that. From what I heard of the outside, things went from bad to worse on the ship as more and more crew members began to disappear and/or be found murdered. I went three long days without food or water, abandoned to starve in the tiny cell, before finally Keiko returned. She told me that half the crew had disappeared, and that Yoshiro was one of them. No one was in command of the ship, no one was even trying to get the engines fixed. They were all just holed up in various corners with guns, waiting for whatever-it-was to come for them.

My head may have been buried in the sand when I first stepped onto
Nishigo Maru
, but by that point I had fully accepted that something unnatural was happening. If a member of the crew had gone ’round the bend, there would be bodies, or someone would have seen something. I told Keiko as much, and she hesitantly agreed. If I hadn’t thrown Rufus’s book into the storm, maybe it would have given me some clue what we were facing, and what to do to kill it.

Keiko agreed that we had to try to investigate, so she went about finding the key to my cell. She returned an hour later with no key, but a blowtorch she’d taken from the empty engineering hold. I coached her through its use (it was the same model I had for tearing up cars at the salvage yard) and I was finally free.

We went together through the ship, deck by deck, trying to find any clues as to what was haunting the dark corridors. What we found was a lot of water. Water splashed on the deck, water forming trails through the halls, water pooled in places it had no reason to be. Something wet was moving through the ship. Maybe several somethings. When we got to the mess, we found a contingent of sailors barricaded behind an overturned table, one of them holding a pistol. He fired off a shot as we entered the hall, forcing us to retreat back into the corridor. I had Yoshiro’s pistol, but didn’t see any point in returning fire. The other humans weren’t our enemies, even if they thought they were. At the very least, more humans alive meant more potential victims that the ship’s intruder could attack before it got to us, and that helped our chances of survival.

Sticking my head in for the briefest of moments, I tried to talk the sailors down. Told them I was on their side, that we were trying to hunt the thing that was hunting us. They shouted back in Japanese, and whatever they said made Keiko blanch. Mouths like pirates, those guys had. Reasoning with them wasn’t going to work, it seemed. As we left, one of them shouted at me in broken English: “Who are you?” Guess they didn’t get the memo about the foreigner on board. I tried to explain, but the guy just shouted more Japanese. Then something in English about “not one of us.” Not very welcoming to outsiders. We moved on.

Below the engineering compartment was a storage area, which seemed like a decent enough place for something shifty to hide out, so we checked there next. As we entered the cargo hold, I saw something move in the shadows. Like it was slithering. I almost fired my pistol into the darkness, but inside a ship like that bullets ricochet like crazy, so I didn’t take the chance. If I saw what we were hunting in the light, I’d take the shot.

Broaching the topic of monster lore with someone is never easy, but it certainly makes the medicine go down easier if you’re in the middle of a crazy situation like that. Once bodies have started to pile up, people will believe anything. Since I wasn’t familiar with sea folklore, I asked Keiko if there were any stories that fit our current predicament. She shook her head, said she couldn’t remember any. Something about the look on her face told me she was lying. I pressed the issue, asked her to tell me more about Ikuchi, that sea creature she’d described a few nights earlier. She hemmed and hawed for a spell, then came clean—it wasn’t Ikuchi, if Ikuchi was real, he woulda eaten the ship whole.

I asked her if there was another option, and she admitted there was. Her father had told her stories about creatures that come up from the deep and steal away men. They can take on human form when they’re above the water, their tails splitting into two legs. They’re called Ondines in the lore, but most people call ’em mermaids. But there was no way that was happening here, she said. That was just a story.

I reminded her what I’d told her about Karen. That a lot of things I didn’t think were real turned out to be fact. Asked her more about the Ondines, but she didn’t know anything other than what her father had told her, and that was half a century ago. If my instinct was right, and we were dealing with a sea creature of some sort, we had to learn more about them. That’s when I remembered Tamuro’s library. A scholar of the sea, he must have had some books about nautical folklore.

On the way to Tamuro’s office, we came across another sailor, this one was only a kid, nineteen years old, max. He was soaking wet, shivering, his hands clenched into a death grip on a handrail. When he saw us, he screamed bloody murder. He’d been through something terrible, and the trauma was still affecting him. We tried to help him up, to bring him with us, but he recoiled from Keiko’s touch, stood up and ran down the corridor. After he turned a corner, we heard another scream. I ran after him, gun raised, ready for whatever was around the corner, but when I got there, the hallway was empty. All that was left was a puddle of water and a streak of blood.

At the hatch to Tamuro’s office, we paused. Something was moving inside. For a second I wondered if it could be Tamuro himself, if somehow he had survived whatever ordeal had befallen the rest of the ship. Whoever it was, they were hidden behind Tamuro’s desk, squirming around too much to really be hiding, but hidden from view nonetheless. Pistol raised, I moved around the desk until I got a good look at the man—it was Yoshiro. He hadn’t been taken, he’d simply given up fighting and started drinking instead. I asked him what the hell he was doing in the skipper’s office, and he held up a bottle of booze. Tamuro’s personal stash, and since he was no longer gonna need it . . .

I helped Yoshiro to his feet, asked him what had happened since we last saw each other (besides him getting sloppy drunk), but before he could answer, his eyes went wide and he fainted. I turned to see what he’d been looking at—Keiko. He’d taken one look at her and collapsed. Now that—that was odd.

Pieces were starting to fit together for me, but I didn’t have the whole puzzle. I asked Keiko to look through Tamuro’s books for any references to Ondines while I tried to revive Yoshiro. As she searched, I replayed the last few hours in my mind. In the mess hall, the guy had shouted that I wasn’t one of them, meaning the crew. What if he hadn’t been talking to me? What if he’d meant Keiko? I went back a little further, back to my first meeting with her—no one else had been in the mess, they’d all reported for duty already that morning. The next time I saw her, I’d gone in early and left before anyone else got to breakfast to avoid an incident. Then I’d seen her after hours, again by myself. She’d come to my cell twice, both times by herself. I’d never been in the same room with her and another soul at the same time. Maybe she wasn’t a member of
Nishigo Maru
’s crew at all. When the sailor in the hallway and Yoshiro saw her, they both flipped out, as if they recognized her—maybe from when she attacked them? And then there was the lore about mermaids—I’d heard the old fisherman’s tales, knew that mermaids were always described as female, at least the ones that came to the surface. There was only one woman on the entire ship, and she was standing right in front of me.

Could Keiko be an Ondine? Could the solution be that simple? What that possibility didn’t explain was how she came to be on the ship, and how I found myself in another messed-up situation like this so immediately after the demon possessed Karen. It also didn’t explain how people were disappearing while Keiko was with me—was there more than one Ondine onboard? Was it still possible that there was a rational explanation for everything that’d happened?

I had a choice to make, and none of the options were great: