100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A US Navy submarine didn’t have a brig. There simply wasn’t room. Most of the time, it wasn’t a problem. The navy was an all-volunteer service, after all, and highly selective, accepting only the best. It was why fights on submarines were a rare thing. Things could get tense, sure—it was inevitable when you had over 100 men crowded together with limited space—but between all the basic requirements and the psychological profiling, the navy screened out the hotheads. Which was why, no matter how hard he tried, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Oran Guidry had killed his own brother.

LeMon hadn’t survived the attack. He died right there on the galley floor. Matson, who seemed to have made as miraculous a recovery as LeMon had, came up from quarantine to pronounce him dead. The corpsman ordered LeMon’s body transported to the torpedo room, where Gordon supposed he would lie in a body bag next to Warren Stubic and Steve Bodine. The thought of it made him shiver. He hadn’t canceled midrats—galley rule number one was that meals for the crew went on no matter what. But it was hard. He kept staring at the spot on the floor where LeMon had died.

If it was some kind of elaborate murder plot, if Oran had planned this all along like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, stabbing his brother while they were still moored in Pearl Harbor would have been the polite thing to do. Then Lieutenant Commander Jefferson could have assigned a couple of sailors to watch him until the MPs hauled him off to a real brig. If only Roanoke still had a working radio, they could have signaled for a surface ship to take Oran away. Aircraft carriers and battleships were floating cities, complete with brigs.

But Roanoke didn’t have a working radio, and even if it did, they were in Soviet waters and couldn’t risk alerting the enemy to their position. No surface ship could come to take Oran away, so Captain Weber had improvised and turned Jefferson’s now-empty stateroom into a makeshift brig.

Gordon decided he had to go see Oran. He had to find out why he had done such an unthinkable thing. When midrats were over, he went to Officer Country. A battle lantern had been mounted on the bulkhead to replace the broken overhead lights. Since Jefferson’s stateroom locked only from the inside, an ensign named Van Lente stood sentry by the door, a pistol strapped to his belt. Oran Guidry wasn’t going anywhere.

Aside from the guard and Oran, Officer Country was empty. The other officers had joined the boatwide manhunt for the three missing officers. Gordon suspected it was futile. They had already searched the submarine from bow to stern, so he didn’t know what they hoped to find by doing it again. He had heard old navy men talk about cursed missions—surface ships that encountered nothing but heavy storms in otherwise calm seas, submarines that sprang fresh leaks in new places every week—but never anything like this.

One mystery at a time, though.

“How’s it going, Van Lente?” Gordon asked clumsily. He didn’t know what else to say.

“The prisoner’s been quiet, sir,” the ensign reported. “Hasn’t tried to get out.”

The prisoner. God, how had it come to this?

“Can I see him?” Gordon asked.

“I’m not supposed to let anyone in,” Van Lente said. “Seaman Apprentice Guidry is considered dangerous.”

Gordon had seen with his own eyes just how dangerous Oran was, but he was still having a hard time understanding what had happened. Taking LeMon down to quarantine earlier, he had been out of his mind with worry. There was no question how much he cared about his brother. That was what Gordon didn’t get. Why would a man who loved his brother that much turn around and coldly, brutally murder him? It wasn’t the fever. Oran wasn’t delirious and out of control like Stubic or Bodine. So why had he done it? Gordon needed to know. He needed to understand.

“I hear you, Van Lente, but I have to see him,” Gordon insisted. “Please.”

Van Lente shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. My orders are to keep everyone out for their own protection.”

“Please,” he said again. “I’m his DivO. I just… I need to talk to him. You know me, Van Lente. How many ops have we been on together? You know I’m no fool. I wouldn’t go in there if I thought he was a danger to me. Just give me five minutes with him. That’s all I ask.”

It would have been so much easier if he could have simply ordered Van Lente to let him into the stateroom. He was a lieutenant, after all, well above an ensign, but security orders couldn’t be countermanded by anyone outside the security division. The only way he was getting in there was if Van Lente did him a favor. Luckily, it appeared that Gordon had gotten through to him.

With a sigh, the ensign stepped aside. “You’re going to get me in trouble, Lieutenant.”

“This whole damn boat’s already in trouble,” Gordon said.

He stepped past Van Lente and opened the stateroom door, walked in, and closed it behind him. A single battle lantern hung from the bulkhead in the otherwise dark room, casting a cone of light onto the center of the floor. Oran sat on the foot of the fold-down bed, just beyond the edge of the light, half his face veiled in shadow. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look in Gordon’s direction. He kept his eyes down, pensive and melancholy.

“Your brother is dead, Guidry,” Gordon said. “I don’t know if anyone told you yet.”

Oran didn’t respond.

“Did you hear me?” Gordon pressed. “LeMon is dead. You killed him.”

Oran shook his head. “That wasn’t my brother, suh. And I tell you now, he ain’t dead. He’ll still be alive long after the rest of us are gone.”

Christ, he had lost his mind. From the guilt, probably. Gordon moved to stand across from Oran. He leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “Why’d you do it? Why kill LeMon? I thought you two were close.”

“Suh, I didn’t kill LeMon,” Oran insisted, finally looking up and meeting Gordon’s eye. “I stabbed that thing in the galley so I could show you.”

“Show me what?” Gordon asked.

“That it wasn’t him,” Oran said.

“By stabbing him?”

Oran fell silent again.

“Guidry, I’m here as your friend, all right?” Gordon said. “Not your DivO, not your boss—your friend. I’m trying to understand what happened, but if you’re just going to give me riddles, I might as well go.”

“Do you believe in God, suh?” Oran asked him. “Jesus and the Holy Mother, all that?”

Gordon hadn’t expected such a question, and he didn’t know how to answer it. His mother was Catholic, kind of. He didn’t remember her ever taking Communion or attending mass, but she was baptized, and she’d had him baptized as a baby. She always wore a little silver cross on a silver chain around her neck, so it must have meant something to her once. Maybe it was her work at the psychiatric hospital that had put her off religion. All that suffering, all those bent and broken minds, for no reason other than that God had willed it so. Gordon’s father was Jewish, but about as Jewish as his mother was Catholic. He never saw him go to synagogue. Gordon had been raised without much in the way of religion, somewhere between lapsed Catholic and lapsed Jew. No confirmation, no bar mitzvah, just the occasional Easter service with his mother’s family, or Passover Seder with his father’s. He gave Oran the only honest answer he could.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I believe, sometimes not. I guess that’s like most people.”

“I’m a good Catholic, suh,” Oran said. “I love the Holy Mother and the baby Jesus, and I pray to them. I wish… I wish I’d gone to church more often, suh. Gone to confession.”

“Murder is a lot to confess,” Gordon said.

“Do you know who Saint Bruno is, suh?”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Gordon said.

“He’s the patron saint of exorcism, suh, of ridding the world of evil spirits. I think he’s the one I should pray to now.”

Gordon raised his eyebrows. “Exorcism?”

“My family, suh, we go way back in the bayou. We come from Acadian stock, suh—Frenchmen who migrated all the way from Quebec down to Louisiana. My family were trappers, and over time they mixed with locals—Spanish colonists, escaped slaves, Tunica Indians from the surrounding territories. We’re bayou through and through, suh; it’s in our blood now. And in the bayou, Catholics don’t just believe in what comes out of the Vatican. It’s combined with stories people been tellin’ in the bayou for centuries. We believe Jesus rose from the dead to forgive our sins, but we also believe there are things out in the swamps. Ghost lights, spirits, creatures, the vengeful dead. The rougarou.”

Gordon straightened. “You used that word before, in the galley. What is it?”

“The rougarou is a creature from the swamp that sucks the life out of people while they sleep,” Oran said.

The most astonishing part was that he said it absolutely straight-faced, just as he might say that a cat was an animal that chased mice. But on some level, Gordon knew he shouldn’t be surprised. He had seen Oran stab his brother with a chef’s knife. The man had obviously lost his mind. Was rambling about swamp monsters much of a stretch after that?

“I heard lots of stories about the rougarou growin’ up,” Oran continued. “They look like old hags. They tear off their skin and leave it in a stone bowl, then go out prowling the bayou as spirits. Some say it tears off its victim’s skin too, wears it as its own so no one can tell the difference. Ain’t no way to kill it except by finding its bowl and sprinkling salt on the skin it left behind.”

Gordon shook his head. Clearly, Oran was too far gone for him to reach. This story that his brother had been replaced by the roving spirit of a swamp hag was stark-raving lunacy.

“I know how this must sound, suh,” Oran said. “But they’re here, suh, on this submarine. That thing I stabbed, it ain’t LeMon. It’s not my brother. It’s a rougarou. And I’m tellin’ you, it’s still alive.”

Gordon walked back toward the stateroom door.

“Where you going, Lieutenant?” Oran asked.

“We’re done here, Guidry.”

Oran hung his head. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

Gordon didn’t answer. His silence was answer enough.

“Just be careful out there, suh,” Oran said. “Promise me. There never is just one rougarou.”

“That was your brother you stabbed,” Gordon snapped. “Not some creature from your bayou folktales. Don’t you understand that? Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Monje was already dead,” Oran said.

Gordon gave up. There was no reasoning with the man. He just wished he had spotted the warning signs sooner. If he had, maybe he could have saved LeMon’s life. He went to the door, ready to leave this madhouse. More than ready.

A loud crash came from outside. Gordon stiffened. Oran stood up quickly from the bed.

“Ensign Van Lente, is everything all right out there?” he called through the door.

He heard Van Lente cry out, then a gunshot. Gordon grabbed the doorknob.

“Don’t!” Oran warned.

Gordon ignored him. He opened the door slowly, just a crack. The corridor outside was pitch black.

“Ensign Van Lente?” he said. There was only silence.

He opened the door farther, and the lantern light from the stateroom spilled out into the dark corridor. It fell across the lantern mounted on the bulkhead outside, and Gordon saw that it had been smashed. He pushed the door open farther, and the light fell on Ensign Van Lente. He was lying on his back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. His pistol was on the floor beside him. Something was straddling him—a dark shape in the shadows. Gordon pushed the door open farther, until the light hit the shape. Its head was bowed, its face buried in Van Lente’s neck. The shape looked up at him, leaving behind a bloody wound in Van Lente’s throat. Gordon nearly screamed.

It was Ensign Penwarden. His mouth and chin were red with Van Lente’s blood. Penwarden threw one arm across his eyes, shielding them from the light, and hissed angrily. Gordon had only a moment to notice the elongated teeth in the grimacing mouth. Then Penwarden sprang at him.