The Vessel

10. Congrego

Desanto sat on a couch which was apparently his, a large knife resting on the cushion next to him. He'd been sitting there for some time, paralyzed by the indecision of fight or flight. After he'd taken a moment to calm down, collect his thoughts and consider his options, he'd managed to open the front door. But then something interesting happened: he didn't leave. He should have run, should have flagged down help and brought back whatever they had in the way of an army on that ship, or at the very least a witness. He knew this, and yet he hadn't done it. He hadn't because he needed to know what he'd woken up to on that ship, what conspiracy if any it hid within its walls. But it was more than that.

He had to know if he was insane.

What had frightened him in that bathroom involved more than the self-mutilation- as if that wasn't enough. It was that, the more he thought back on the man in his bathroom, the one who was tearing apart a face they may or may not have shared, the more he realized what he'd been ripping off himself, the chunks of muscles and flesh, weren't entirely right. The ears were just a little too long. The shape of his nose wasn't quite right, a bit too angular. Even the tongue in his mouth, as it lashed and moaned in a pool of blood, had been oddly forked at the tip. There was something very, very wrong with that man, even before he'd started pulling himself apart. Perhaps it was even the reason why he had.

Eventually, when his need to know the truth outweighed his fear of it, Desanto stood from the couch. He reclaimed the knife and held it out in front of him, slowly making his way back, returning to that place with the blade piercing the air before him like the fin of a shark trolling through shallow waters. There was no sound present but the pounding in his own chest, no smell but the hormonal cascade flooding his bloodstream with catecholamines, that sickly-sweetness of norepinephrine and epinephrine following him down the hall along with the mustiness of coursing testosterone and cortisol. He passed from the living room to the bedroom, and finally, to the bathroom.

But there was nothing. Not only was there no wretched man, there was no sign he'd ever been there. The sink was clean of gore and muck, the floor spotless and free of blood. Knife in hand he scoured the bathroom from top to bottom, looking for any evidence of what he'd seen, but he couldn't find even a speck of blood.

There was no chance, none at all that what he'd seen could be cleaned and covered up so quickly and so silently. And that left only one possibility: the wretched man had never been there.

Suddenly realizing he hadn't used a bathroom since he'd woken up, Desanto rushed to the toilet and emptied his bladder. When he was finished he looked around himself. The excess energy in the room, the tension, had dissipated, leaving behind a bland, unremarkable bathroom in its absence. It seemed almost silly to be afraid of it now. He flushed the toilet, wondering how long that stuff swirling down the drain had been with him, frozen inside of him during Cryosleep. It was a strange thought.

He decided a shower was long overdue.

Desanto stripped the gray uniform from his tired body and tossed it to the floor, keeping one eye on the sink as he climbed into the shower pod and let the temperature-controlled water wash over his aching muscles. The thaw was still fresh in him. He soaped himself generously from the dispenser, taking comfort in the simple, automatic act of showering. Before long, though, a wave of nausea too strong to ignore took hold in the pit of his stomach. It climbed out of his gut, through his chest and up his throat.

Desanto dropped to his knees and retched. His stomach tightened and he gagged a second time, the water from above spraying down onto his naked back. He was about to heave a third time when something down in the drain caught his attention. It was a flicker of movement that lasted only a moment. Maybe it was just just a play of light, but it really- not that it was possible, he told himself- really looked like an eye looking up at him.