Had I known the content of the individual and possessed knowledge of the damnable settlement from which he hailed before our venture, I would have slain the man on the spot. You might find this statement unsettling, but please, bear with me. I am the last survivor of a peaceful endeavor, and what I pen below is laid out in blood, not ink.

          I am Aidan Stokes, originally from Manchester, England, a sailor, a man of physical merits who prefers to observe rather than go on about the inanities of life. Several years ago I found myself stranded in America, within the boundaries of Delaware, listless and out of touch until I received hire for a scientific research vessel bound for a dredging assignment of some scientific merit near the island of Puerto Rico. 

          They christened it Valmarian, an obscure name that would become a curse. The man in who built it and charted this expedition, Enoch Brittingham, came out of some obscure piece of Kent County marshland known as Valmar, from which the ship received its name. It was there his family helped to establish the area and grew wealthy off of the killing of whales for their prized oil. The town and the sea were their callings, and Brittingham sought to cull the vast Atlantic for its secrets, a better fuel source than cetacean oils.

          He was a man of wide build and great vigor from decades at sea, strong, resolute, with a perfectly groomed gray beard and wavy white hair. But those eyes, aye, were filled with an intensity to rival the most ravenous of wolves. Aside from the day we met he had never spoken to me, and on that fateful day he merely stated, “Yes, this man is mine.”

           An upright gentleman from Sisters Knell, New Jersey, Edward Drink, was hired on as captain, and he and I got on well right away on account of the man’s soothing demeanor and welcoming nature. The rest of the crew were but names to digest and bellies to fill. I came on as a mere cook, grateful for the work and a chance to get away from my sins in Wilmington.

          We set out from the Christina River in on 3rd June, 1914, on this steamship the man had designed by his own mind to closely imitate the USS Pensacola, a steam sloop Brittingham had served in his youth in a blockading squadron overseen by Admiral Farragut. She measured 225 feet, displacing 3,000 tonnes fully weighed, and possessed a triple-expansion engine of which capacity and modern wonder I know not. 

          I shall leave out those first nights at sea, their inviting warmth and imperturbable evenings. My days and nights were galley bound, quelling loud mouths with meaty stews or barely cooking our stock of hearty American beefsteaks with onions and carrots. I had eaten, and prepared, much finer meals back in the city, and those were the only things left behind I craved.

          But soon the talk of the ship became about the enigmatic Mr. Brittingham who rarely ever exited his cabin. When he did, he gave Captain Drink exquisite details in charting course, abrupt changes in direction, just enough degrees to keep matters equally strange and suspect. I could pay this no mind, at first, having been assaulted by the twin plagues of Boatswain Johnny Parr and First Mate Kirkin (whose first name sadly eludes me), whose hunger and thieving from our stock caused me no end of frustration. I may have bloodied a nose on one occasion, but the details of that are mine to keep.

          Brittingham kept his attention to himself, and to speaking in private to Captain Drink, and we were instructed from day one to never go to the Bridge, or to bother our enigmatic benefactor in his quarters. Fair, at first, as I had work about me.

          We ended up over a calm stretch of water boasting a circling school of porpoises. Here, Brittingham assured the crew, were depths untold, riches beyond compare, and, ‘the source of America’s future’. Wealth, like muscles and weapons, breeds big claims.

          We had with us some of the longest cables and their accompanying dredges to hinder a ship since the HMS Challenger dared plumb the Seven Seas. With these, Brittingham intended to pull up some anonymous marine lifeform he was convinced would empower lighting and contraptions well into the Twentieth Century. His consistency in form bordered on madness to the crew. To me, he was but another petty plutocrat baking in the dim light of an obtuse hobby.

          Yet on that very first day they lowered the dredge and Valmarian skirted in a southwesterly heading for hours and the mass upon mass of primordial earthen woes were brought up to litter the deck, he claimed to have found his prize. After sorting through vast reaches of mud the crew washed overboard, heaving fishes with massive eyes, stomach curdling worms and  objects what lit up in the darkness, the man himself shoved aside the two young mates mucking about over a cumbersome lump of hard matter, and hastily removed all vestiges of the sea floor from it. 

           He was smiling, laughing at certain points, while we were summoned to stand on deck, bereft of clarity, scratching our heads. I found the deliberateness of his movements troubling, out here so far on this random stretch of ocean. For how might a man be aware of such specificity in the limitless dreamland of an ocean?

          “At long last,” the elusive Brittingham announced, even summoning Captain Drink from the Bridge. “Good sirs, you and I are the first to lay eyes upon an Antediluvian miracle. A whisper from the past roaring to life in our time. What you will see is at first, not impressive, or perhaps even unnerving, but it holds more to mankind than any here might fathom. Steam, petroleum, whale oil, even the carbon in Edison’s bulbs will soon be but the follies of a primitive and whimsical past that never understood true power.”

          What we saw before he turned it roundabout was a yellowish rock the size of my chest, lumpy, with unremarkable, uneven cracks all about its circumference. Peculiar black masses had attached themselves to the rock, like spikes wedged in, but no such rock or barnacle could compare to their uniformity or ability to never reflect light or give evidence their puncturings having damaged the afflicted material. On occasion, a peculiar species of worm, white over sea green, would motivate in and out of those onyx tubules, and in my mind I possessed a distasteful imagining of honeysuckle gone foul.

          Then Brittingham turned the thing round so that we might behold its fullness.

          There it was. A skull, a human skull, fully three times the size and thickness of any man’s, even the tallest man I could envision. Aside from a slight slope on the forehead, it was identical in every facet to mine or yours, missing only the jawbone and a few teeth.

          And those teeth! Our benefactor, such as he was, lifted the skull to reveal the bloody thing had two whole rows of them, the front being naught but fangs, predatory, while the back were all broad, worn down molars. A distinct gouge near the left cheekbone showed the thing had endured some vicious blow to the face during its, dare I say, lifetime. I tell you that on seeing the Skull, the face of the ancient thing, Mate Peter Lake pulled back his curly hair, laughed until spittle came down his chin, and quickly went below deck. I thought nothing of it at the time, other than to give a meager laugh like the rest of the gents.

          “Superstitious,” one remarked about the young man.

          “A ghastly hunk from the sea, to be sure,” another mumbled.

          A few made the mark of the Cross while our lone Muslim crewmate, Khouri, shook  his head and merely repeated, again and again, “No.”

          Oddly, I hadn’t thought Lake’s behavior odd at the time, or that none of us but Brittingham would go near the Skull, not even Drink. However, those two crucial events were but the start of a race none of us could hope to run.

          Fiendish happenings began that very night. The first occurred at dinner, nineteen-hundred hour, the usual steak and onions brewing. I had set out one of Brittingham’s favored stashes of mead, for he preferred a sweetness to his liquor and impressed this on the men. They took to it well enough and, despite the avoidance of speaking on ‘the find,’ were of good mood, especially as the man had offered to increase pay and doubled the share of mead. 

          But then Lake and Quartermaster Joseph Still caught sight of unusual lights and stormed out of the galley and made for the stairs. Most of the crew followed, as did I. At first there was naught but the brilliance of the Milky Way spiralling the Atlantic into and out of itself, a magnificent dance of light and darkness no art form of Man could imitate. But then, the mysterious sighting returned to our sight.

          For certain a set of five, unequivocally bright stars were in the night sky, three of them particular in their illumination. Lake whispered they were blinding, and Still found them to be an irritant. Aside from noting their improbable size, I said nothing.

          “We’ll not sleep tonight if this persists,” he said. “Aye, if these be stars.”

          I agreed, yet how else could they be explained except as stars?

          We considered them for near to an hour, with most of the crew quiet. Someone claimed the captain had stepped out for a minute to stargaze, and the light in Brittingham’s cabin was on, the curtain pulled back. But the man himself never came on deck. We could make out nothing from his lair other than the minuscule gleam from a telescope lens, and a Morse lamp hastily blinking out, something, into that stupefying night sky. A minute later, the curtain closed.

          I later proclaimed there were pots and plates calling me, and turned to go below. Others followed in tune to yawns and a scarcity of further developments with the five lights.

          It was then, on the stairs, that some claimed to have heard a distinct sound at aft. A soft splash.

          After much posturing and questioning, we went back up, more curious than disturbed. We moved aft and observed the Atlantic, its pleasant ripples and saline balm. The five stars were absent. But there was nothing of note or out of the ordinary. Indeed, several minutes elapsed before a call went out that Mate Lake had gone missing. We searched for him all over the ship. The captain ordered the search above and below deck for the following two hours, until he called it off.

          Brittingham called the captain, who then called me to give the men ‘all the mead they might ask for’. This I did, though befuddled. Soon, all drank themselves into a powerful unconsciousness, all save for myself.

          I cleaned dishes, the galley, and then moved for the hardened comfort of my bunk. The  night possessed an endless itch, as many of the men nearby were perturbed by nightmares. I could not sleep at all. There was a continuous sensation of, what could I call it? Of not being alone? No. It was beyond the common awareness that other souls slept next to me. I can best describe as a piercing, akin to pressure in a specific region of the brain before a severe headache ensues. But this caused no such thing, only a disturbing tension which caused me to toss and turn. Through the porthole, those five lights returned and one of them shone a hellish shade of false white. 

          It would continue to do so, all through the night, no matter how far the ship travelled.

          There were fingertips reaching out to me underwater, not for help, but to wave farewell. I know not what form this came to me in, whether as the briefest of dreams, or a purgatorial hallucination.

          But after all things unravelled, I believe it to have been Lake, after he had allowed the ocean to take him. The first to suffer. Or, to be set free.

          The following morning I awoke a full two hours past the time for first meal. Angry, confused, I rushed to dress and get myself ready to serve. But there was so much commotion on the top deck I had to go up and investigate.

          The men were up and about, busy, wet. Muddied black. Bloody. 

          “We’ve dredged again?” I asked, wondering just how long I had been unaware. They were all there, huddled around the cut open corpse of a large tiger shark. It had been caught and hacked to death, its innards strung out across a third of the deck. Blood in the mud, and the dredge limp from evacuation. Another collection of bizarre and unnameable, heaving beasts from below gasping under the weight of our airy world flopped about, gazing at the alien sky through ungodly eyes. 

          I thanked God there were no other inhuman artifacts retrieved, then questioned myself as to why I had thought the word.

          Inhuman. For clearly the giant Skull was a human, although a mammoth one. But I knew naught of history, and my knowledge of the spiritual realm began and ended with a few tales of Arthur, a lackluster recollection of myths told by the Greeks, for my family were neither into the Good Book or those older faiths that tome condemns. I had the layman’s heart, their mind, their big-knuckled, ropy forms. My sole difference from my kin was a brain that never ceased asking questions internally. I possessed one thousand inquiries on the deck that morning.

          Men were carting off shark pieces, dripping blood on themselves with a thoughtless zeal. I had never seen the like, as if one eve of nightmares had tapped out their collective sanity like a split open wine cask. In a rare moment of foolishness on my part, I dared speak.

          “What in the hell is going on here?”

          Every single one of them stopped cold and regarded me in the most chilling way. Their eyes were, without exception, devoid. They had no awareness of me, as if seeing me for the very first time. Certainly our time together had been brief but we all knew each other by name, told childish jokes and ate meals together in the galley. But no. There was nothing. I was alone on a ship full of strangers drenched in blood and brandishing blades.

          “Stokes,” said Jones, one of the men who operated the dredge. It came out flat, lifeless. “Yes. This is him.”

          I had, by this point, taken four steps backward. I knew not why. It was not due to feeling threatened, but based on a surge from deep down. A hunch, a sort of primal act informing the newer part of my brain that sometimes distance is an ally. I obeyed it. 

          “The shark. You lot have been, rather gruesome with the poor thing.”

          “Oh. This?” Jones turned to look at the remains. “Tail caught in a loose rope on the dredge. Its own fault really. Wriggling like mad made the hauling go harder. Had to chop it on the quick.”

          “Quick,” said his partner, Allison.

          “Quickety quick,” said the third dredger, Harris. “‘Fore the school rings, gotta cross the bustlin’ street. Carriage’ll run over anyone, even a child. Shark outta water’s like a carriage gunnin’ fer the station.”   

          “An’ we wuz the traffic light.”

          A few of the men uttered stilted, withering laughs, devoid of any form of manly joviality.

          “Light,” Jones said.

          “There are five, but three see,” Allison whispered.

          At that ungodly second, the tiger shark, despite being ravaged, issued its final exhalation. A single, exacting twitch of its upper body and then, sweet release. 

          “It, could not have kept living,” I said, as if trying to offer it some pathetic form of eulogy.

          Suddenly, the crew looked up, then down, and hastily reached for mops to swab the deck. I followed their eyes.

          Brittingham stood there outside of his quarters, tall and defiant in his outdated starched crinoline suit and Panama hat, the Skull in his hands, resting on the railing, its worms seething. “Gentlemen, I see my promise to increase your pay upon our return by a factor of ten has heightened your fishing prowess. Good. This is very good.”

          I stormed over to him, his vaunted privacy be damned. “Butchery is an art for a skilled hand. This is no way to let men blow off steam I have ever seen before.”

          “Oh?” the man said, never looking at me.

          The railing felt incredibly warm under my hand. I attributed this to the intensity of the Sun down here close to the Equator. “Listen here, sir, you may have money to toss about as you please to blind their eyes, but in order for this ship to function, especially a man short–”

          “What do you know of function…Cook?”

          “I…” but then Captain Drink exited the Bridge, glaring at me. His face, becalmed as ever. But the eyes. 

          “Mr. Stokes.”

          “Good day to you, Captain.”

          “First meal will be late. Later still if you do not attend to your duty.”

          I considered the stern expression, and realized this was the only man aboard I shared a friendship with, a gratitude even, for I had not considered any man friend in some years until he came into my life. I glared at Brittingham, the obnoxious Skull, and left the bloodied, maddened deck for my assigned post.

          Breakfast went on quiet. The men ate. Lunch went about the same. The Atlantic had a blessed serenity to her. All of it smoothly oiled as the most well told falsehoods.

          But by nightfall, as I laid out the typical steak, onions, and the sacred mead, the men filed in, lax in the shoulders. Bereft of vivacity. Not in the fashion one finds in another when they are fatigued. The eyes were as wide and alert as if from a fresh night’s sleep. But they were lacking in shine, unattentive. Their clothes were sopping in caked mud and marine blood round great stains of perspiration.

          One third never ate, another shuffled food from one side of their plate to the other, only eating a few bites. The remainder ate like starved rats, devouring their meal, then coming up to grab more, and it was then I had to resort to smacking the backs of hands with my steel ladle.

          But I stopped after lashing Jones quite sufficiently, because the portholes revealed the five lights had returned. As if on cue, many of the men made for the door, anxious to go and see them up close again. A few had leapt up to go greet them,yet had their backs to the portholes and could not in any way have known they were there.

          Jones and a few others stayed in the galley, watching through the porthole. I joined them, slowly, hesitant, and to be frank, frightened. A stench of filthy men mingled with sickening dread in my mind.

          “So close,” Jones whispered. “They’re so very, very near. Like god, ain’t it? The small one, not the capital. But near to the same.”

          “What do you mean?” I asked. 

          Then he looked into me, his eyes were saddened, lost. “Like when the one comes a calling you to come back.”

          “Back? Back to where?”

          He returned to fixate on the lights. “Does it matter? Call’s the thing.”

          Allison, also beside us, lowered his head and removed his cap. He began scratching his scalp feverishly. “Cook, you see them coming out?’

          “Do I see what?” I studied his head of mangy brown hair, but saw nothing unusual, other than that he had broken the skin in several places.

          “Soon,” he said, raising up his head and nodding. “Soon then.”

          “Soon,” Jones concurred.

          Another night came and dwindled into midnight, and I was near restless, in and out of a fitful imagining of sharks growing men’s teeth, fish guts on a filthy deck constructed from the stretched skin of some unregistered leviathan, the sound of waves giggling, a distant conversation in a tongue I never knew. This was shattered by an incredible death knell, a scream that even brought many of the men to their senses. For a time.

          We shot shot out of our bunks, following the continuous, curdling din to the rear of our quarters. In the dark, I floundered about until I found the torch and made it ignite. Waving it around, we found dear, sweet, little Allison huddled in the corner, face sopping black wet in the dim, wavering flicker. His hands were gripped into dripping fists.

          I shoved the lantern into the hands of the closest man to me and got on my knees to examine him. “By God, Allison, what the hell happened? Were you attacked?’

          His head was a bloody mess at the sides. But he opened up his fists, and I recoiled.

          Hands full of soft, thick brown hair doused in blood. The young man had ripped it out, two handfuls, the poor scalp raw, exposed and glistening in the lantern light. Allison’s eyes pulsated from excessive tranquility to animalistic outcry. 

          “Is it out though, Mr. Stokes?” he asked, voice aquiver.

          I had…no answer for him.

          But Jones did. “No, but you’re close, Al. So very close. They get inside then want out. Five, but three still see.”

          There came from the whole of the men a unanimous agreement over this statement. I was the sole person missing comprehension. “Well, can someone clue me in on what exactly the three are seeing, and how it does this to a man? And somebody get Doctor Armstrong, for God’s sake! Quartermaster stop staring like a dolt and act, man!”

          I tried my best to console Allison, though I sincerely doubted he needed, or wanted, any part of it. The old physician arrived, bleary-eyed and confounded, shocked by what he saw. But he termed it a radical agency of sea sickness plus the degeneracy of an impotent generation, and hauled Allison off to his tiny sickbay.

          The crew went up to gaze into the five stars, humming in unison.

          The young man Allison would die an hour later. I heard the splash lying in my bunk. And yet, I only went halfway up the stairs, curious, then went back to lie down. I knew. I simply, knew there was no point in pursuing the matter. God forgive this weak soul who never knew You.

          Late night came. Jones laughed in his sleep all the evening. Everyone else slept. I felt more as if I was wasting away from the inside out. But the sea massaged all. Eventually. How else can I explain it to one who never experienced such a condition as sleeping, yet, not? The eyes always open, and then, suddenly, you see five or fifteen minutes have elapsed on your pocket-watch you cannot account for in any sensible way except that you must have dozed off during the ‘missing’ time. However, there is no feeling, no sensation in the mind at all of having slept. You are as awake as ever, eyelids transparent, but the waking world is not yours, nor are the fabled Dreamlands. You are persona non grata to all reality. And this petrifies the spirit.

          In the midst of this anti-sensation, your mind, well, ceases.

          Yet another day dawned, and I awoke even later. No bell alerted me or a rough shake from a calloused hand only, being, brought me from the nothingness. But this time, no one said a word about the meal being tardy, or about my absence in the galley. I went above deck, sluggish, to find half, yes, half of the crew present. Worse, the Sun was now at our forward, meaning only one thing. Outraged at sighting this, I violated one of our benefactor’s hard rules.

          “We have changed course?” I asked the captain as soon as I slammed opened the door to the Bridge. He was there at the wheel with Quartermaster Still, both staring out the window. Vacant.

          “Stokes,” he said, tone dead. “Have we run out of meat?”

          “Provisions are perfect, Captain. But if I may, why have we altered course.” My temper took an upturn, but I subdued it. “We are eastward bound.”

          “Mr. Brittingham has uncovered a larger source of the new combustible and we are headed there to bring it up.”

          I went into stunned silence for a minute. There were more of those hideous Skulls in the deep? “Is that so? And has he yet informed you as to how a mass of aged bone will power steam engines or one of his fancy automobiles?”

          “He has.”

          “Well? Out with it. I should like to be in the know.”

          “Earth, water, air, fire. Solid, liquid, gas. Spirit.”

          I blinked perhaps too many times. “Beg pardon?”

          “The human himself will power the technology of the future, Mr. Stokes. With a single, merciful Skull at the center of every metropolis, directing that flow where it is best suited. Have you not seen how it has revivified my men? Oh, how they work.”

          I expected an exclamation in the final sentence, only to receive it to my ears in that uncomfortable droll the entire ship suffered from those last days. 

          “But the crew is short. Where are the others?”

          “…they gave what they could.”

          Infuriated, I tore open the door and crossed the deck, past the men working hard at nothing. I did notice their muscles, glistening in the Sun, were larger, their energies heightened. Minds blank, bodies invigorated, but how? What in all the world could possibly regenerate such dead–

          At aft I saw three ropes slung over the side. These were not the cables for the dredge.

          My feet would not move, even though my mind needed to know, strained for some wicked conception of closure, for concrete answers. I forced my body to head aft, one tepid step at a time, and in one held breath, I peered over.

          Several men hung by their necks, bare toes skipping across the water, a few on each rope like trinkets on a charm bracelet. Jones. I could make out his face, despite the eyes. They were removed. 

          I fell backward and shrank in on myself, a fetal position, that inherent yearning for the womb which fills the gap left by retreating manhood. Sanity had been a lie all along. All I wanted was good labor and a getaway. That was all. I was no saint, definitely a sinner, but had I been so horrid in my own life to deserve this fate? Did they? My gut screamed their ends were self inflicted. Or rather, inflicted by a force, one I had no way of defining nor making sense of. 

          But I saw one wit of Carrollian style logic in this miasma. As men died, the survivors grew stronger. Had Captain Drink even slept? What of Brittingham, the doctor, or…

          I ran to sickbay and slammed open the door.

          “Goodness, Stokes! Trying to wake the dead at sea, are we?” Doctor Armstrong said, sitting at his small roll-top desk, drawing. “And, we know well how so many dead there are in this tall drink, hmm?”

          “I have had enough of these contrite responses, Doctor! What happened to Allison? Why are there…dead men…overboard while you sit here making,” I moved closer, “Making…what are those?”

          “Why, familiar faces.”

          I forgot my argument in the light of his face drawings. Armstrong had sketched detailed renderings of brutish men, ones with angry, white eyes, receding hairlines, sloped foreheads, and awash in powerful muscles. The brows over the eyes were covered in thick black nodes, as if some form of hostile sea coral had embedded themselves into the beings. Over each of the heads were three orbs full of lines, vivid illumination. 

         “What–what are these?”

         Armstrong smiled. “Pure potency, Mr. Stokes. A race of profound prowess, so much so that an act of sheer, unmitigated jealousy tossed them all into the bottom of the unforgiving sea. But now, oh boy, do we have modern convenience to haul these treasures back up to see the blessed Sun. The Word rings true. A Light dawns on us in these final days!” He got up from the chair and spun around, slowly, and then I noticed his dotted, wrinkled skin had smoothed out, even regained elasticity. 

          “Light cannot come from death.”

          He stopped cold. “Oh. I begin to see now. You are, eh, not of the inclined, as it were.”

          “No, I am not. The five lights will not have me, for I will not be taken by them, whatever they may be.”

          “Oh, Mr. Stokes, five is but the beginning. You know, my family is from Valmar, just like the Brittinghams. There are plans there, good ones, written down before Betsy was born to stitch the first Bars and the circular Stars. Why, if you went there with me, perhaps after this venture, I could show you thirteen things beyond anything you might understand. They would help you, expand your horizons. Mine have been.”

          “These, sentient numbers, guided Brittingham to very precise locations in the middle of the ocean.” Senselessness began to make sense to me.

          “There are presences in the world bursting with immaculate recollections, memories spanning eons. They’ve seen a thing or two, as some say, and they will share their wisdom. For a price, naturally.”

          “A price paid for in madness and lives.” My hands were fists, and I felt the heat flood into my cheeks. 

          “Better than warfare. Or plague, or wandering around confused by a cornucopia of religions which offer no real answers, only petty tithes and paltry hymns. I benefit already. You can, too.”

          “If I sacrifice for King and Country,” I said, grimacing.

          “Be a shame to lose the man who makes our meals. But if you’re not willing,” from the desk drawer he produced a small revolver. 

           “Why you!” I attacked him in a fit of rage.

          The revolver went off, once, twice, in our melee, but I was still the stronger. Though he had younger skin, he still had the musculature of a very old man, so I bested him and took control of the weapon. Out of breath, I shoved him to the floor.

          “I am going to force the captain to take us to Puerto Rico. There, I will get off. You lot can do as you please afterward. But know this. I will never succumb to whatever evil this is you’ve summoned from below!” I felt myself sweating profusely. The air had heated. My mind wanted to drift away from this stressful environment. There was a skiff slotted into the ship. I could release it and take my chances at sea, partially certain they would not care to pursue me, so dogged were they to get more of the antediluvian Skulls.

          Armstrong held up his hands. “Stokes my dear man, their minds have such reach! Imagine a future with their eyes in us all. Airplanes and ships guided by consciousnesses from above the clouds, like god on the telephone speaking inexorable truths all day, powering technology–”

          “Quiet.”

          “Imagine a Morse code, new to us but older than Babylon, a million dots and dashes heightening intelligence, developing new mathematics, laying down a perfected curriculum for school children.”

          “Shut up!” I clicked the hammer back.

          But that was it. I felt the Valmarian slowing down, the bell ringing. And right then, the dredge went into the drink.

          I felt bones not my own crawling across the sea floor and up my spine, whispers from beyond offering blasphemous promises to gullible souls in exchange for millions upon millions of lives lost. The unsuspecting world would advance on an obscene power in the midst of that future, growing cemetery of mankind. I debated myself on these moral quandaries, subjects I had never had to bother with in my life. 

          But tomorrow lay in my hands. No one knew except me that Fate would play out here, in the salty air, encircled by dolphins and some maniacal form of osteomancy toyed about by rich hands.

          “No,” I told Armstrong in a heated syllable, “I will end this. Now.” I aimed the revolver to his temple, and squeezed the trigger. In this excited state I ransacked the desk for more bullets and, on finding them, refilled the revolver and placed the remainder in my pockets.

          None of the three men ceased their work on hearing the shot, which made it easy for me to recover, go out the door, and confront them. “Away from the cables!” I said. They backed away, unblinking. 

          As they raised their hands, I beheld the five stars.

          “Three still see,” I said, “yet I hold the gun.” The crew are victims but Armstrong was willing, went through my mind over and over, a self inflicted Hail Mary to forgive myself.

          Their illumination stifled me, to be honest, but my rage arose anew and I turned to make for Brittingham’s dark quarters.

          The door opened halfway as I approached.

          “Come in, Cook,” the wealthy bastard said coldly from within his keep. “Is this not where you have always sought to be?”

          I shoved it back with the revolver, my mood hot, breath heavy. “Brittingham. So the rich do dance with the Devil after all.”

          He smirked, sitting there mostly in darkness, the Skull under his left arm as an armrest, blazing at me. Only the man’s mouth and chin could be seen. “Oh, Mister Stokes, we all learn our moves from devils you’ve yet to envision.”

          “Armstrong is dead.”

          “Pity, really, but if humanity has anything truly to offer, it is numbers.”

          Then I heard the door to the Bridge open and slam shut. Footsteps. So, I entered the quarters, shut and locked the door, all the while keeping the business end of the revolver at Brittingham’s obnoxious facade. “We have precious few minutes. Order the captain to turn us toward Puerto Rico.”

          He lit up a Cuban cigar, puffing on it with eerie tranquility. “No.”

          Again I forced back the hammer, ready to do horrible work once again. “Damn you do it!”

          Captain Drink knocked on the door in a gentlemanly fashion. “Stokes? My good man, what troubles you? Surely we can reconcile like men?”

          “We must head for the island, Captain!” I yelled through the door, eyes on my quarry. “I am, not well, I fear.”

          “We cannot, at least, not this night. The load it is fetched and on its way.”

          I could hardly swallow, my back slammed against the door as a feeling of helplessness pervaded my muscles. Brittingham puffed on his cigar as the Skull glistened in some unassuming way as bits of it appeared to move. My mind was slipping.

          “Load, you say?” I laughed, nervous. Paranoid. Cornered.

          “Aye. Five eyes times five times lives. Multiples of layered white turn orange then red, tears on the Moon.”

          Nothing he said held any form of comprehension, and I panicked. My hand quivered. Brittingham leaned forward.

          “Remain still!”
          “When they rise,” the rich ingrate said, “you will succumb. Or, sprawl out like the poor shark, I think.”

          A rapid series of events followed I cannot clearly recount only that, between the din of gunshot, Brittingham had a rupture in his face. The Skull was in my hands, wet from a thin, viscous material like tissue that fumbled and increased. The captain’s left eye detonating as if by grenade so close to me as I shoved him aside and raced to the dredge.

          I may have been screaming. Blurs. There are innumerable blurs in the memory.

         Whispers resounded from the five stars, Skull my thinking as I caught sight of the dredge coming up so very fast. Surely it hadn’t gone all the way down, scraped the primordial, and returned already? I shot the cable again and again until the revolver clicked empty. Standing over the side, I at once threw the warm, moist Skull into the Atlantic and there it was.

          Nothing but blackwater. Vacant, fist-sized eye-holes glaring at me as they returned to the depths, hating me. Judging. Nothing at all. 

          I looked up at the night sky and the five stars receded into the infinite background. 

          “You, you, you! Man the skiff!”

          Here is how I saved the lives of three, pitiable men who lacked understanding and reason, having been drained by the Skull in whatever way one can fathom. They were listless, as was I, at the mercy of the sea as the Valmarian burned in the distance from a fire I initiated. 

          At long last I arrived, myself and Khouri, on blissful sands and kissed the soft, wet earth. He prayed to Allah for mercy. I watched the stars, natural stars, spin in the Milky Way and all was well in the universe. 

          Here on this unnamed soil I scratched the happenings of the Valmarian Expedition into the captain’s log I absconded. Only the ending’ details elude me. There are only recollections of bangs and the color red, of worms in the ocean on skeletal coral reaching out at me, of why I think of it as ‘at’ and not ‘to’. We left, four men, arrived as two.

          I have struggled over theses days to account for where two went. I cannot, what with all of the bangs and the redness in my mind. 

          But I must see to fetching crabs for the pot I brought, keeping a fire, and reminding Khouri to stop humming to the stars for it keeps me awake at night. 

          He now sings to the stars, but only five. He has named them. Calls them sons of Sceapa and Stowocyllen, of Maedere In Shatters and the Forgotten Felge, of Wegfarene Wacan who makes and breaks the Veil of dead blood. I know them not. Perhaps they are in the stories he heard as a child. But they can sing back and on certain evenings, they lull me to sleep.

          I have found writing difficult now. 

          Brittingham! Get out of my house! Valmar is in my home! Thirteen lights but three still see.

          Today has been better. The crabs are fat and lovely. I cried over the loss of Drink but he no longer needs the eye. Splashes in the water wake me up. They jumped. Others were tossed. Do you see?

          …renDed in our FAt we waste need a new oiLLLL well fed stuffed 

          …In Wilmington I killed men in fights for money. Funny. Brittingham said I would make more at sea. I can cook better there. 

          It is now Friday, I can tell because there are five weekend stars along the horizon. All is calm. A ship is in the distance. I have constructed a great fire and lit it. But now I must go to await them, and Khouri is humming the wrong song in his sleep. His eyes still see, and I have at last carved a spear since the bullets are gone. I will write more later. My thoughts are clear now on seeing the ship.

          …Khouri

          Khouri reddened bent over it’s prayer he must be in prayer what else? what?

          He is alright

          I am alright. I’m alright. I will be. 

          …

          By JOvE

                          I AM nOT RIGHT
[NOTE: this account, scrawled into the captain’s log of the science vessel Valmarian, was found by an American fishing boat on April 7th, 1919, atop a ring of five stumps. It was sent to the Brittingham family, who stored it in the Valmar Free Public Library, Valmar, Delaware, for safekeeping]