Sacculina Read online

  “I have never seen anything like that before,” the captain said quietly. “No siree. That’s a new one.”

  “What? I don’t get it,” Jack said, stepping forward to look at the bass, all of them now in a tight circle around the hold. “Is it uncommon or something?”

  “That’s one word to use. Bizarre might be another,” the captain said, setting down the net. “We should take some pictures of it, maybe sell it off to some nature magazines, newspapers. I’ve been ocean fishing for forty-some years, yeah? Ain’t seen nothing like this.”

  “What’s so strange about it?” Jim asked, studying the fish, now lying still, its stomach rising and falling quickly. “Barnacles aren’t uncommon, are they? Aren’t they always on boats and stuff?”

  “Yeah, they are,” the captain said from his knees, staring intently at the crustaceans stuck to the fish’s skin. “They’re also on whales, sea turtles, big fish like that. They cement themselves, see, to the fish, to the skin. Then they let the fish take them to the food, the plankton, whatever. Crabbers like to find ‘em, as it means the crab ain’t shed recently, meat’s better, richer. But I’ll be damned, I sure ain’t never seen one on a sea bass. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?” Henry asked, bent over despite himself, all of them talking quietly, as if they were studying a sick child, or a dangerous, trapped beast.

  “See, this ain’t a whale, Mr. Lowell. This is a bass. It’s way too small for a barnacle, they wouldn’t waste their time on such a creature.”

  He bent down, grabbed the fish tightly in one hand, then, with his free hand, gripped one of the black crustaceans. He pulled, groaning slightly, and Jim could hear the sick, squelchy ripping of the bass’s flesh as he yanked the barnacle free. Blood spurted from the spot it had stuck itself, quickening the fish’s death, reddening the hold.

  The captain held the barnacle up for them all to see. “This is an unusual little guy.” He turned it over. “See the bottom here, where it’s got all the fish skin? That’s where it laid its cement, its glue. On whales, for instance, over time the skin of the fish will be ingested, up into the barnacle, to increase the strength of its hold. And this opening here...” he flipped the thing over, revealing an eye-shaped slit at its top, “that’s where it feeds. It’s a parasite, I guess you could say. Or, at the least, a freeloader.”

  He chuckled once, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “This one’s awful big,” he continued, “and I ain’t never seen one on a fish like this. Never.”

  Chris reached down and gently pulled the barnacle from the captain’s fingers, studied it closely.

  He poked the opening and tiny tentacles—they looked more like skinny white earth worms, Jim thought—swarmed around the tip of his finger, latched tight. To his credit, Chris didn’t scream, or panic, but simply raised his arm and showed them all, one-by-one, as if the thing stuck to his finger were his favorite baseball card and this nothing more than elementary school show-n-tell.

  “Dude, that is gross,” Jim said.

  The captain stood, slowly, and studied the thing attached to Chris’s finger. “It’s trying to eat you, son,” he said.

  With the slightest of frowns, Chris flicked his hand sharply, and the black thing shot away. They all watched it fly through the air, back toward the mysterious deep, where it plunked into a rolling wave, and disappeared.

  * * *

  Three more hours passed and they caught no more fish. Not a bite. Not a tug, not a nibble. Nothing.

  And then there was the bubble.

  They heard it first. Or, more accurately, felt it.

  A rumble of sorts. The kind of low, vibrating sound you’d get from a subwoofer. They all froze, glanced nervously at each other, at the boat, at the water.

  No more than fifty meters away, the waves went flat and there was a rippling in the water. A circle in the sea, the breadth of a football field, took shape.

  As they watched in fascination, the mammoth disc of restless water rose into several broad, sphere-like, but translucent, bubbles.

  “What the hell?” Jack said, but no one answered.

  The bubbles rose, some ten meters high at their peak, the bright sunshine glimmering along their surfaces in an oily rainbow dance.

  And then, one-by-one, they silently popped.

  The ocean returned to normal, the waves picked up, and a massive gust of sulfur swept over the boat, making Jim gag and hold a shirt over his mouth and nose again until the breeze carried it away.

  “Well, I’ll shit,” the captain said, and went back to his controls.

  “Maybe an underwater volcano,” Henry offered, and took a bite from his sandwich.

  Jim felt too sick to care, too hot and bored to offer his own version of the event, and as nothing else of note occurred as the hours went by, they forgot and focused on staring at the mute fishing poles, the dead lines, and thinking of the useless, floating bait sunk below.

  Eventually, Jack and Chris slowed down on the beers, full and sleepy and tired of pissing into the sea. Jim had one bite of a ham sandwich, felt his stomach gurgle unpleasantly, and opened a bag of chips he had stowed in his pack. Henry put on a wide-brimmed hat, sat quietly eating his own lunch, legs up on the bench as if he were on a veranda instead of a small, swaying, stinking fishing boat.

  The captain kept fussing, getting more and more anxious about the lack of fish, but refusing to come right out and apologize or offer any solutions. He checked his gear, stared at his Doppler, drank a beer, helped himself to a sandwich, pissed off the front of the boat and belched and sighed as they all baked in the heat.

  The ocean, at least, had calmed. Jim thanked the gods for that, because if the rocking had kept up he would have puked up the four beers he’d already drank since they’d settled into this calmer spot of sea. The thought gave him a disgusted craving for the quickly-depleting stash floating like dead mermen in the now-sloshy cool water of the red cooler.

  Finally, the captain, in a desperate act to appear useful, suggested they troll. He fired up the engine and pushed them slowly through the water for a half-mile or more, far enough that Jim felt himself going green again. The fumes were horrible, thick with diesel stench, sticking to the layer of sunscreen lotion on his skin, filling his nostrils and eyes with the hot, sharp stink of pollution.

  “Don’t understand it,” the captain said loudly over his shoulder. “I’m showing all kinds of activity here,” he said, tapping the screen of his Doppler monitor.

  “You can see fish on that thing?” Jack said, looking over the captain’s shoulder.

  “Well... no,” Captain Ron said, giving the wheel a half-turn. For show, Jim thought. “But, here, you see that?”

  The captain pointed to a gray cluster settled beneath lines and circles as it crawled slowly across the black screen.

  “That’s a large school of somethin’ or other. Don’t know what. But if this thing sees it, it’s big. Like a mass of anchovies, maybe stripers...”

  “So why aren’t they biting?” Chris asked as he stood, walking to the wheelhouse, resting a meaty forearm against the open doorway. “You sure we’re using the right bait?”

  “Of course,” the captain snapped, then sighed, scratching his chin. “I dunno, maybe we try different bait, maybe we try a different locale.”

  As the two men cornered the captain, Jim passed his eyes over the poles, hoping to see one bow, the reel to catch, the line to spring taut. He watched his dad finish his sandwich, crumple the plastic wrap in his hand, stick it into the pocket of his windbreaker. Jim smiled, feeling a rush of love for his father. He was glad they could do this together, despite it being a pretty major failure. His eyes dropped to the hold where the lone dead fish lay silent, the strange barnacles on its flesh mutating it into something bizarre, unsettling. Jim swallowed acid, swore to himself he would not partake of the meat from that one, not even if Jack gave him all the shit in the world.

  Henry moved
abruptly. His palms were pressed to the boat’s rail, his back bent as he leaned outward, his eyes on something over the side of the boat.

  Jim lurched over to his old man, put a hand on his back. “What’s up, pop? See some mermaid titties?”

  Henry looked at his son, smiled, and Jim smiled back, found himself wondering the last time he and his father had smiled at one another. Then Henry’s smile faltered, and he pointed not to the water, but to the hull of the boat.

  “You notice those before?”

  Jim leaned over, put his palms down, looked to where his father pointed.

  Clumped on the side of the boat, dipping in and out of the water with each slopping wave, was a wide cluster of black barnacles.

  Jim bent further, looked as far over the edge as he could, and noticed a bunch of the things were stuck not only to the side of the boat but, as far as he could see through the water, down along the bottom as well.

  “No...” he said, thinking back to the moment they all climbed aboard the vessel. Although, he admitted to himself, they had boarded on the other side—the starboard side, he thought—and he had been pretty out of it.

  And yet...

  “No,” he said again, more firmly. “I didn’t.”

  He walked, rather more steadily now, over to the other side of the boat, bent over the edge. Jack was watching him, one eyebrow arched in curiosity.

  “You feeling sick, bro?”

  Jim shook his head, looked over and down.

  There were hundreds of them. They carpeted the side of the boat from just above the waterline and down as far as he could see. The boat being a rather sickly shade of white, it was not hard for him to gauge the coverage of the things.

  “Goddamn,” he said, and then Jack was at his side.

  Jack bent over next to him, looked down. “Holy shit,” he said, nudging his brother. “Captain needs to clean his boat, dude.”

  Jim shook his head, unsmiling. “No, they weren’t there before. I mean, when we left.”

  Jack turned, sat on the edge of the boat, his bare back—he had ditched the Mello Yello shirt when the sun came out full throttle—to the water. “That’s impossible, Jim. Hell, I’ve been looking at the walls of a jail cell for six years, but even I know those things have to stick around a while before they, you know, get shells like that. They were there, you were just too hungover to notice.”

  Jim saw that Jack’s smile didn’t make it to his brown eyes. He thought again, the memory of them boarding more clear now, defined images returning as he pulled them from the old brain rolodex, and shook his head. “No, no way.” Because he did remember. The words on the side of the boat had read Not A Chance. And they’d been clean and clear as day, Jim would remember that faded shit-brown lettering the rest of his life.

  And now the boat’s moniker was spotted with a rash of the barnacles that had absolutely, positively, not been there that morning.

  Jack stretched his arms into the air, twisted his back to let it crack, then gave Jim his most patronizing smile. “You’re crazy, man. Look,” he turned toward the wheelhouse, where Chris and the captain were still watching the black-and-white screen above the wheel. “Hey! Captain Ron!”

  The captain turned, gave the boys an eye. “Come here and settle a bet, would you please?”

  The captain killed the engine, locked the wheel. He walked over to the brothers, Chris in tow.

  “If I can,” he said.

  Jack pointed over the side of the boat. “All that shit stuck to your fine vessel. Will you please explain to my little brother what those things are and how long they’ve been stuck there? He seems to think they might have just swum up like that and grabbed hold of your hull.”

  Jack moved aside as the captain rested his belly against the side of the boat, stared down toward the water. He was silent a moment, then another. Long enough for Jack to lose his smile.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he said.

  And then Henry screamed.

  * * *

  Jim’s most lasting memory of his mother as she really was—that perfect, smiling creature who was whole and happy, before they took parts of her away, before she became the pale, moaning shell she died as—was the day he and Jack had the worst fight they ever had, or, unknown to them both, ever would have.

  It had been over a videogame. Jack was mercilessly destroying Jim in the newest version of Mortal Kombat, and Jim, fed up after the umpteenth defeat and sick of hearing his older brother’s taunts and cackles as his fighters were disemboweled, beheaded and de-spined, stood up, his face red, and screamed, “I HATE YOU!” He followed up those eloquent words by throwing the game controller at Jack’s grinning melon of a head. Mid-flight, the cable attaching the controller to the game console detached, sending its trajectory off-course, but still close enough to clip his brother right behind the ear before spinning into the basement’s concrete wall, where it, rather graphically, shattered into pieces.

  Jack, eyes wide in shock more than pain, put a hand to his unmarked head, then turned to see the pieces of the controller. He picked up a couple parts, looked at the broken thing, his eyes glazed. This was his controller, from his game system, which was his 16th birthday present from their parents.

  “Asshole!” Jack screamed, blood rushing to his face. Jim, knowing he’d gone too far, paled, his fury washed away by switchback fear. He took a half-step toward the stairs.

  “Jack,” he started, but then Jack was on him. Jim screamed in pain as Jack punched him in the chest, grabbed him and pushed him hard to the thinly-carpeted floor. Jim’s head bounced off the carpet that covered the concrete beneath, a white flash popping in his brain. Jim was still seeing stars as Jack pushed his face down into the coarse, mildewed carpeting.

  “You dumbass! Those things are like fifty bucks!”

  Jack hit him in the back of the head, spun him over and sat down hard on his sternum, knocking the wind from him while driving his knees into Jim’s splayed biceps.

  Jim tried to say something, to beg, to plead forgiveness, but Jack slapped him hard across the face, then thrust his palm over the top of his mouth.

  As Jack pushed down, with greater and greater pressure, on Jim’s lips, his fingers digging into his flushed cheeks, Jim realized, with no small amount of alarm, that Jack’s hand had moved up—ever so slightly—to cover not only his mouth, but his nose as well.

  Jim couldn’t breathe.

  Even more terrifying was the fact that Jack was not relenting, not softening his grip. No, not an inch. He wasn’t yelling or cursing. Jim strained to meet his eyes with Jack’s, to let him see his alarm, his terror. Because then he’ll let me go, he thought. If he doesn’t... if he doesn’t let go...

  Jack’s face was bright red, his eyes bulging, his breath held, trapped deep inside. He was... moaning... and the veins in his neck stuck out as if he were the one being smothered to death, and not his smaller, weaker little brother.

  Even so, it wasn’t until Jim saw the silvery string of saliva slide like spider silk out of the closed corner of Jack’s mouth that he felt it: terror, pure and white-hot.

  He’s going to kill me, he thought. He knew it was true, and he knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  Survival instincts, panic, whatever it is that makes us fight for life, kicked in with a rush. Jim bucked his hips, but Jack didn’t even seem to notice. He kicked his legs, flailed his hands from the elbows down, screamed in his throat, soundlessly, using the last of his air. But nothing could break Jack from the trance. Jim tried to cry, but other than the wetness from his eyes there came only a horrible, gurgling sound from deep inside his chest.

  As the tears ran and Jim stopped bucking, Jack’s eyes seemed to clear, if only a little, and his mouth opened and released a PAH! sound as the breath came out.

  “Jack Ransom Lowell!”

  Their mother had come down the basement stairs to check on the ruckus, and now she stood, across the room from
them, her hands wringing a dish towel, her face half-fury, half-fear. Her eyes, however, were blazing, and not to be denied.

  Jack pulled his hand away faster than a jack-rabbit scurrying for safety, and Jim started bringing in great gulps of air, followed almost immediately by the loudest, baby-wailing sound he’d ever made, as if he were filling his lungs with air for the first time, fresh from the womb, and hating the god-awful taste of it.

  “AAAAAHHHHH!” he cried, lost in the fear and the hate and the pain.

  Jack leapt up, but Jim couldn’t move, he was too damned spent. Exhausted from the pain of being hit, the fear of death, the fury of his own big brother... he could only lay there, crucified, wailing and screaming for his momma.

  She walked over to them, stopped a foot in front of Jack, who stared at her like the most beaten dog you’d ever seen and, despite having an inch of height on her, looked every bit the caught child. Her hand whipped out and struck him across the face. The slate crack sound hovered in the air a breathless minute, then dissipated.

  Their mother kneeled down, Jack a frozen statue above her, and looked at Jim. She put a hand on his hot, wet cheek.

  Jim looked up at her and saw an angel. His angel. His mom. Her long blond hair fell over one side of her face, hiding a flickering brown eye. She was wearing a blue summer dress, a dark navy blue with tiny sunbursts on it. She always wore dresses, right up to the end, when they hung off of her like thin empty sacks, her frail, eaten form nothing but sharp joints, spent organs, sallow, dry hairless skin and bulbous, yellowing eyes. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, wiped his eyes and nose.