Haggopian and Other Stories

I did some checking on Joe’s background that same afternoon, discovering that he’d travelled far in his earlier years and had also been a bit of a scholar in his time. Too, it had been noticed on occasion—whenever the mists were heavier than usual—that he crossed himself with a certain sign over his left breast. A number of the lads had seen him do it and they all told the same tale of that sign; it was pointed with one point straight up, two down and wide, two more still lower and closer together; yes, his sign was a five-pointed star!

In fact, Borszowski’s letter so disturbed me I was still thinking about it that evening after we’d shut down for the day. That was why I was out on the main platform having a quiet pipeful—I can concentrate, you know, with a bit of ’baccy. Dusk was only a few minutes away when the accident happened.

Davies, the steel-rigger, was up tightening a few loosened nuts near the top of the rig. Don’t ask me where the mist came from, I wouldn’t know, but suddenly it was there; swimming up from the sea, a thick, grey blanket that cut visibility down to no more than a few feet. I’d just shouted up to Davies that he better pack it in for the night when I heard his yell and saw his lantern come blazing down out of the greyness. The light disappeared through an open hatch and a second later Davies followed it. He went straight through the hatchway, missing the sides by inches, and then there came the splashes as first the lantern, then the man, hit the sea. In two shakes of a dog’s tail Davies was splashing about down there in the mist and yelling fit to ruin his lungs—proving to me and the others who’d rushed from the mess at my call that his fall had done him little harm. We lowered a raft immediately, getting two of the men down to the water in less than a minute, and no one gave it a second thought that Davies wouldn’t be picked up. He was, after all, an excellent swimmer. In fact the lads on the raft thought the whole episode was a big laugh—that is, until Davies started to scream.

I mean, there are screams and there are screams, Johnny! Davies wasn’t drowning—he wasn’t making noises like a drowning man! He wasn’t picked up, either.

No less quickly than it had settled, the mist lifted, so that by the time the raft touched water visibility was normal for a November evening—but there was no sign of the rigger. There was something, though, for the whole surface of the sea was silver with fish; big and little, of almost every indigenous species you could imagine; and the way they were acting, apparently trying to throw themselves aboard the raft, I had the lads haul themselves and the raft back up to the platform as soon as it became evident that Davies was gone for good. Johnny!—I swear I’ll never eat fish again.

That night I didn’t sleep very well at all. Now you know I’m not being callous. I mean, aboard an ocean-going rig after a hard day’s work, no matter what has happened during the day, a man usually manages to sleep. Yet that night I just couldn’t drop off. I kept going over in my mind all the…well, the things. The occurrences, the happenings on the old Sea-Maid; the trouble with the instruments; Borszowski’s letter; and finally, of course, the queer way we lost Davies—until I thought my head must burst with the burden of wild notions and imaginings going around and around inside it.

Next afternoon the chopper came in (with Wes Atlee complaining about having had to make two runs in two days), and delivered all the booze and goodies for the party the next day or whenever. As you know, we always have a blast when we strike it rich—and this time we figured we were going to. We’d been out of booze a few days by that time (bad weather had stopped Wes from bringing in anything heavier than mail) and so I was running pretty high and dry. Well, you know me, Johnny. I got in the back of the mess with all those bottles and cracked a few. I could see the gear turning from the window, and, over the edge of the platform, the sea all grey and eerie looking, and somehow the idea of getting a load of drink inside me seemed a good one.

I’d been in there topping-up for over an hour when Jeffries, my 21C, got through to me on the ’phone. He was in the instrument-cabin and said he reckoned the drill would go through to pay-dirt within a few minutes. He sounded worried, though, sort of shaky, and when I asked him why this was he didn’t rightly seem able to answer—mumbled something about the seismograph mapping those strange blips again; as regular as ever but somehow stronger, closer…

About that time I first noticed the mist swirling up from the sea, a real pea-souper, billowing in to smother the rig and turn the men on the platform to grey ghosts. It muffled the sound of the gear, too, altering the metallic clank and rattle of pulleys and chains to distant, dull noises such as I might have expected to hear from the rig if I’d been in a suit deep down under the sea.