Chapter 63 – I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream
Nobody signs up to skirt the Center Seas because it's smart. We took the job because we were out of options.
Hug the coast up past Orvel, then make the stupid crossing toward Safon, skirting the outer edge of the Center Seas. Calm season, half the leviathan sightings were rumors, and the pay was fat enough to make men pretend they didn't remember what happened to most ships that tried this run.
The sort of job you take when you're tired of almost dying for pocket change and ready to risk dying for real money.
We loaded cargo all morning. Barrels, crates, sacks. Salted fish, grain, iron tools, the usual bones of trade. The crew were in a good mood, singing and swearing in equal measure, the way men do when they can already taste the pay in their hands.
Then they brought *that* aboard.
It came in on a flatbed wagon, lashed down with chains that looked too heavy for anything that wasn't planning to move on its own. The dockhands wouldn't touch it until the man who'd hired us waved them forward.
If you could call him a man.
He wore a long coat with the collar up, even though the air was warm. Hood shadowed his face. When he reached out to sign the manifest, his sleeve slipped back just enough for me to see the arm beneath.
Not skin.
Not really.
Something pale and smooth, like boiled fat stretched over bone. And from the wrist down, it wasn't a hand at all. It was… strands. Not quite tentacles, not quite fingers. Too many joints. They wrapped around the quill and moved with this horrible, boneless precision, scratching his name in letters my eyes slid off.
I told myself I hadn't seen it. Sailors see things when they don't sleep enough. When they drink too much. When the sea gets in their head.
"Big haul," I said instead, because pretending nothing was wrong is cheaper than exorcists.
"Big haul," the captain agreed, watching the crate come up on the crane.
He was smiling. The gold had put ten years back on his face. "The gentleman said it's important. Pays like it's important, too."
"The gentleman," I echoed. "That what we're calling him?"
The captain snorted.
"Don't start," he said. "You want to eat this winter, you don't start. You lash that box down and double the ropes. Last thing I need is our 'important' cargo shifting in a swell."
"Aye, captain," I said.
Important cargo.
That's one way to put it.
***
We settled into the rhythm of the voyage quickly. Watches, sails, checks. The crate—taller than a man and almost as wide as the ship's beam—sat in the hold, lashed to the floor with chains and rope. We weren't told what was inside. We weren't paid enough to ask.
First night, I lay in my bunk with the familiar groaning of the hull around me, counting creaks like prayers. The sea has its own language, and if you've lived on it long enough you learn the difference between "I'm fine" and "you'll drown in your sleep."
We were fine.
Almost asleep when I heard it.
Knock.
…nothing.
Knock.
…nothing.
Knock.
Three, exactly.
Not the groan of timber, not the slap of a loose rope, not the shift of a barrel. Too sharp. Too deliberate. Like knuckles on wood.
My eyes opened in the dark.
"Hoy," I whispered across to the next hammock. "You hear that?"
My bunkmate snored softly, rolled over, said nothing.
I told myself it was just my heart in my ears. Just the ship speaking a dialect I hadn't heard before. I closed my eyes.
Eventually, the rhythm of the waves erased the memory of those three neat little taps.
The second night, it happened again.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
This time I checked.
I swung my legs down, feet hitting the cold planks, and listened.
Silence.
The kind of silence that feels like someone's holding their breath with you.
"It's nothing," I muttered to myself, because talking out loud makes lies easier to swallow. "Ship's old. Wood settles. Air pockets. Whatever."
I climbed back into my bunk.
Sleep took longer to come.
By the fifth night, I'd heard those three knocks four times.
Always when I was half asleep. Always from somewhere just below us, where the big crate sat.
Never more than three.
Never less.
***
The captain vanished on the ninth day.
We were already in open water, the coast a long dark line on the horizon, when I realized he hadn't taken the morning watch. Thought he'd just slept in. He wasn't young anymore, he was allowed.
By midday, no one had seen him.
"Check his cabin," I said, already knowing how that sentence was going to end.
We went together, me and two others. You don't open a door like that alone.
His cabin door was locked from the inside.
"Captain?" I called. "You alive in there?"
Nothing.
We exchanged looks.
"Kick it," I said.
The first mate—well, the man who used to be *just* the first mate—put his boot to the door. Solid oak shook, then gave with a crack, swinging inward.
The smell hit first.
Not rot. Not yet. Something sweeter, cloying. Like fruit left too long in the sun.
The captain hung from one of the ceiling beams, rope looped neat around his neck. Tongue swollen, eyes bulged, feet bare and swinging an inch above the floor.
We cut him down. It didn't matter.
There was no note. No curse. No explanation in the cramped, neat handwriting I'd seen on a thousand manifests.
Just him.
Gone.
I looked at his hands.
Callused. Scarred. Human.
I didn't look in the corners to see if anything else was there.
***
That night, no one wanted to sleep.
The crew gathered in knots on deck, smoking, muttering, glancing toward the bridge where the captain used to stand. The first mate kept his hands tight on the wheel like it might fly away if he let go.
"What now?" someone asked finally.
Do we turn back? Sail into port with a dead captain, a cursed crate, and a story about a not-man with a tentacle arm? Try telling that to the harbor master. See how fast they seize the ship and our pay with it.
The men's eyes kept drifting to me.
"Cargo's already paid for," I said. "We're halfway. We turn back, we lose everything. We keep going… we finish the job."
"We're one captain down," someone said.
"And twenty-two men up," I replied. "We can steer a ship. We can follow a chart. The sea doesn't care who's holding the wheel."
That was the logic of it.
The real reason was simpler.
That crate unnerved me more than the ocean did.
And turning back meant facing the man with the wrong arm and telling him we'd lost his "important" delivery because our captain decided to hang himself.
I'd rather take my chances with waves and superstition than with whatever he'd do.
They nodded, eventually. Men used to bad options.
By the time the sun bled down into the water, I was captain in everything but name.
I lay in the dead man's bunk, staring at the ceiling beam that had held his weight, and listened.
The ship creaked.
The waves hissed along the hull.
Knock.
…
Knock.
…
Knock.
Exactly three.
The sound came from under the floor this time. From the hold.
"Just wood," I told myself.
The wood didn't answer.
***
Sleep caught me like a thief.
One moment I was staring at the beam, the next—
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I opened my eyes.
The cabin was dark, but not empty.
Something hung in the corner.
For a heartbeat, I thought the captain's body was still there. Then it moved.
Swinging.
Dragging itself off the beam.
His neck was broken. I saw it plainly this time—the way his head lolled at an angle that no living thing could manage, chin pressed obscenely close to his shoulder. The rope still cut into his skin, fibers fused with flesh like it had grown there.
His feet didn't find the floor.
They *slid*.
Toes trailing, skin leaving faint smears on the planks as he swung forward, then forward again, pulled by nothing I could see.
His hands scrabbled against the wall, fingernails tearing as he dug for purchase. Skin peeled where his nails snapped. No blood. Just raw, pale meat.
He crawled.
Not like a man.
Like something wearing a man.
His eyes were open, bulging, red where they should have been white. His tongue lolled, blackened, swollen, teeth marks where he'd bitten through it in his last moments.
He smiled at me.
It was the same smile he'd given by the docks when he said "Big haul."
"Captain," I tried to say.
Nothing came out.
My throat locked.
He moved faster.
The way a hanging body shouldn't move. The rope above him didn't hang straight; it bent, strained, as if something unseen was dragging it along with him.
He lunged.
Straight for my face.
I flinched, threw my arms up—
And he was gone.
Just the dark cabin. Just my own ragged breathing. Just the groan of the ship.
My heart hammered so hard it hurt.
"Bad dream," I whispered. "Just a dream."
I sat up slowly.
My hands shook.
I looked at the floor where his feet had dragged.
For a second, I saw long, dark streaks. Like something oily had smeared there.
I blinked.
The floor was clean.
"Dream," I said again, too loudly. "Just a dream."
The knocks didn't argue.
They just came again.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
***
We lost the helmsman two days later.
He'd been chatting with me at dawn, yawning, scratching at his beard, arguing about whether Safon stew was better than anything the Orvel docks could offer. Normal things. Warm things. Human things.
At noon, he smiled, set the wheel, walked calmly to the starboard rail, and stepped over it.
No hesitation.
No scream.
Just a grin that looked wrong on his face.
We dragged him back, but there was nothing to drag. The sea took him fast, like it had been waiting.
After that, it got worse.
Hardtack went soft in a day. Mold bloomed on barrels that had been sealed tight. The water turned metallic. Men started scratching their own skin until it bled, muttering about something crawling underneath.
I caught myself staring at my hands more and more.
Sometimes the skin looked normal.
Sometimes it didn't.
Sometimes, when I blinked, I saw them without skin at all. Tendons exposed, flexing. Fingers like wet meat hooks. Bone gleaming where it shouldn't.
Then I'd blink again and they'd be fine.
Once, I woke with the taste of copper in my mouth and found my nails bloody.
The knocks never stopped.
They came at dawn, at noon, at midnight.
Always three.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Polite, almost.
Like something asking to be let in.
Or out.
We tried to reach a port.
Any port.
The compass spun.
The wind shifted against us no matter which way we turned. The horizon blurred. The sky stayed the wrong color, a flat, greasy grey that made it impossible to tell how far we were from land.
Days stretched.
Crew numbers shrank.
Some went over the side like the helmsman. Some went quietly in their bunks, eyes open, mouths frozen mid-scream, throats unmarked.
By the nineteenth day, there were more empty hammocks than full ones.
By the twenty-first, it was just me and four others, hollow-eyed and jumpy, clinging to our routines like prayer beads.
The food was gone. The water was a joke. The ship creaked like it was tired of existing.
And still, from the hold:
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
***
It wasn't the sea.
I knew that by then.
The waves could drown a man, but they didn't knock *politely*.
The dead didn't crawl from beams on their own. Food didn't rot *backwards*—fresh at the bottom of the barrel, spoiled at the top. The sky didn't stay the same colour for a week straight.
Something on the ship wanted our attention.
Something in the hold.
In the crate.
The obelisk.
We'd joked about what was in there at the start. Statue of a forgotten king. Idol from some outlying shrine. A pillar they wanted to erect in front of some rich lord's estate so people would know exactly how much money he had and how little taste.
No one joked now.
No one went below unless they had to, and even then no one went alone.
Until I did.
It was the twenty-third night when I broke.
No sleep left to lose. No crew left to reassure. Just the ship, the sky, and the steady heartbeat of knuckles on wood.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I took a lantern and a pry bar and went down.
The stairs to the hold creaked under my weight, the wood gone soft and strange. The air grew colder, then warmer, then both at once, like two seasons had gotten tangled.
The smell met me halfway.
Not rot.
Not exactly.
Something like butchered meat and wet stone and the inside of a mouth that hadn't been opened in far too long.
The lantern flame guttered as I reached the bottom.
The crate sat where we'd lashed it, chains still in place.
On the surface, nothing had changed.
But the air around it pulsed.
I could see it if I didn't look directly at it—a shimmer, a ripple, as if the space it occupied didn't quite agree with the space around it.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
This time, the sound didn't come from below or above.
It came from *inside* the crate.
"Enough," I said.
My voice sounded thin in the hold. Thin and small.
"Deal's off."
The pry bar fit easily under the lid where the boards met. No nails came free. No splinters flew. The wood just… bent.
Like it had been waiting.
I levered the top up and pushed.
The lid fell away with a hollow thud that sounded wrong for the space it landed in.
The obelisk inside was taller than me. Wider. Made of stone so black it swallowed the lantern light. Not polished. Not rough. Its surface seemed to change depending on where I looked—flat here, ridged there, rippling if I tried to follow the lines.
Carvings crawled across it.
Not letters. Not any script I knew. Just twisting grooves that made my eyes water if I stared too long, patterns that never repeated the same way twice.
Veins pulsed under the stone.
Slow. Thick. Like something alive was buried inside, pushing against a skin it had outgrown.
I reached out without meaning to.
My fingertips brushed its surface.
It was warm.
Not the warmth of something that had sat in the sun. The warmth of something with a pulse. Something that had never known cold.
The holds of ships are not supposed to have heartbeats.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The sound didn't hit my ears this time.
It hit my teeth.
Rattled my bones.
I staggered back.
"All right," I said, because talking helps when the world stops making sense. "We're done. You don't belong here. I don't belong here. Nobody belongs *here*."
I raised the pry bar like a club.
The lantern light guttered, then steadied.
I swung.
The iron bar came down with all the strength left in me, all the fear and hunger and rage and grief behind it.
It never reached the stone.
Something caught it.
Not a hand.
Not a tentacle.
Flesh.
The boards around the crate bulged.
The seams between planks split, and wet, pale meat pushed through. Strands of it, cords of muscle and tissue, sliding out like the ship itself had been hiding organs between its ribs.
They wrapped around the pry bar.
Around my wrist.
Around my arm.
Warm. Slick. Strong.
I dropped the lantern.
Flame spilled across the floor, licking at the meat.
It didn't burn.
It *absorbed* it.
The fire sank into the flesh like water into dry earth. The meat pulsed brighter, veins flushing with a colour I couldn't name.
More of it spilled from the walls, from the ceiling, from the spaces between crates. It writhed like it was all one thing, drawn to the obelisk and me in equal measure.
I tried to pull back.
No use.
It climbed.
Up my arm, across my chest, around my legs. Tendrils as thick as rope and as thin as hair, covering everything, sliding under my clothes, pushing against my skin.
Then through it.
Like I was just another board to seep through.
I opened my mouth to scream.
The flesh was faster.
It surged up my neck, over my chin, lips, teeth. Warm, wet, suffocating. It pressed into my mouth, filled it, slammed up against the back of my throat.
I gagged.
Nothing came out.
I tried to bite.
No use.
My jaw locked.
The meat hardened, then smoothed, sealing.
I tried to breathe through my nose.
The flesh covered that too.
It moved with obscene care, molding itself over me, around me, inside me. Every hole, every opening, every little path where air or sound or light might escape.
Sealed.
The obelisk loomed in front of me, black and pulsing, the carvings sliding, rearranging themselves.
The knocks came again.
Not outside.
Inside my skull.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
My lungs screamed their need. My body thrashed, or tried to. The meat held me, gentle and unbreakable, like a mother restraining a child having a fit.
I felt something slip between my ribs.
Not a knife.
A question.
Heard not with ears but in the raw, exposed meat of my mind:
*Now do you understand?*
The world narrowed.
Not to darkness.
To *awareness*.
Of every inch of my skin.
Of every place it had been replaced.
Of how little of me was left untouched.
The flesh wasn't choking me.
It was breathing *for* me.
Every time my chest tried and failed to draw in air, something else pulsed, pushing warmth through me, keeping me alive.
Keeping me awake.
Refusing to let me pass out.
I tried to scream again.
No air moved.
No sound.
My throat spasmed uselessly.
Inside my head, the sound existed. A roar of terror and rage and pleading, an animal noise that had no words left.
The obelisk drank it.
I felt it soak into the stone like water into dry earth, felt the carvings deepen, the veins thicken.
Pain lanced through my jaw.
The flesh rearranged me, smoothing over teeth, gums, tongue. There was nothing left to open. No hinge to move. No lips to part.
Just a blank, seamless stretch where a mouth had been.
I realized then that the knocks had stopped.
There was no more need to ask.
The thing in the crate had what it wanted.
Not my ship.
Not my soul.
My *voice*.
My capacity to refuse.
To warn.
To beg.
Somewhere far above, waves slapped against the hull. Wind strained at the sails. The world went on.
Down here, in the hold that was no longer a hold, something new breathed through me, in me, with me.
I was not dead.
I was not allowed to die.
I hung there in the meat, staring at the pulsing black stone, thoughts scraping against the smooth, useless place where my mouth used to be.
I had no mouth.
Every part of me clawed against the inside of that fact.
And I needed, more than anything I had ever needed in my life, to scream.