The Empty Ones, by Vivian Shaw

AUTUMN 2024, SHORT STORY, 4700 WORDS

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The Sea Witch is not one of the biggest boats in the Bering fleet, but it’s been around almost as long as the real stars, the big-name boats that people outside this little, hyperfocused, horrible, thrilling world pay attention to. People try to nickname her Ursula from time to time, but it never sticks, and—weirdly enough—the guys who insist on calling the Witch by that particular name don’t seem to do so great in terms of cash or keeping jobs. People up here remember things.

The Witch’s skipper is Jonah Hewley, and yeah, he was legit named Jonah forty-seven years ago by what most of us guys have to figure was a selkie who had a one-night stand with his dad. Hewley doesn’t look like the rest of them; the lines a crab fisherman’s face develops look different on him. There’s a weird tilt to his black eyes, a point to his ears, it’s like sometimes if you catch him in the right light he doesn’t look all the way real. Until he opens his mouth and lets fly, and then you know this dude is one thousand percent human asshole.

He’s an asshole who can find the crab, though, so if you can stand one greenhorn season on his boat and not either want to die or fail spectacularly enough to wash out, you might make it to a second year, and if you stick the second year on Jonah Hewley’s boat you’re pretty much set up to get yourself at least an interview on anybody else’s tub.

Which does not make this shit suck any less when you’re riding twenty-five-foot swells and the spray’s beginning to freeze and the fucking greenhorn at the rail is throwing the hook like he’s at some kinda goddamn garden party horseshoes game in between puking his guts, and you also want to throw up like you’ve been throwing up for three days now and fuck knows how you’re even walking around with how much you’ve puked and how little you’ve eaten and it is not like any of Hewley’s regular guys are gonna say hey go sack out for a second and maybe try to drink some fuckin’ Gatorade before you fuck up your kidneys or anything useful and—

—and the kid at the rail, you think his name is Donny, has hooked the line and is hauling it in and manages to get it through the block right the first time and the line comes up nice and clean with no fucking jellyfish all over it and then the bridle breaks the surface and he hooks it to the crane and the pot surfaces and—

—and it’s white, nearly solid white, it looks incredible, got to be close to eighty keepers, this is king crab season and you’re on the red crab and you want big numbers but this thing is not just good but great and—

—and the deck boss barks, “Dump it. Dump that shit now. Lose everything, lose it right now. Now.

Grayson on the crane swings the pot back to the rail and the guys let go of the door-latch ties and he shakes it a little and the entire fucking haul, over seventy king crab easy, tumbles back into the Bering Sea. That’s thousands of dollars plopping back into the fucking water. You can see your own paycheck shrinking by the second. Why the fuck, you think, not remotely for the first time, did you even come up here again, instead of sticking around down south where the water is clear blue instead of whipped-foam white and you can work a shift on deck without freezing your goddamn nads off?

Grayson and the deck boss, Patel, look at each other and both shake like dogs coming out of deep water, and then Patel goes to the loud-hailer and says, “Empty ones, boss. Had to dump it.”

“Empty ones?” says the captain, tinny through the cheap speaker.

“Empties. Maybe one or two keepers, but mostly that was empties.”

“Fuck,” says the captain. “Pull the next one and let’s see if we’re on shit or if that was just a warning.”

“Roger that, boss,” says Patel.

You do not have the chance to ask stupid questions about it, not for a good twelve hours of solid hauling; of the string of fifty pots, thirty-seven have to be rail-dumped because of what the guys are calling empty ones: pure-white crabs, white as bone, white as bleach, that float for a second or two before disappearing back into the Bering Sea leaving a trail of bubbles behind, moving sluggishly. You know there’s not a new species of king crab that’s white all over like that, so what actually gives?

Everyone, including the skipper, is in an absolutely foul mood by the time all the gear is stacked back on deck, and it is probably only because you are so completely exhausted that as soon as you’re all inside and shucked off your gear you don’t have enough of a filter to stop yourself saying, “So what’s the deal with the empty ones?”

“The deal is you should shut your face, kid,” Patel growls.

You’re gathered in the Witch’s excuse for a galley/mess, all fake-wood Formica and vinyl, shoveling in Donny’s version of Kraft Mac & Cheese (it has baked beans in it for some ungodly reason) before you head back out to work. This isn’t eating for pleasure, it’s throwing fuel on the fire, and you all eat without tasting it much, which is probably a good thing. The ketchup bottle is rolling back and forth across the table like a goddamn metronome; somewhere along the line you must have forgotten to be seasick, because you barely notice the movement as you fork horrible macaroni noodles into your face. It’s not like that down in Florida, because the ocean’s not trying to kill you so hard; you might hurl a few times for the first couple days and then get used to it. Up here you really do want to turn inside out until that weird forgetting-switch thing happens, and then you basically just don’t pay attention to how much the boat is rocking. Getting back on dry land after one of these jaunts is hilarious because it feels weird that the ground’s not moving.

You’ve been working with this crew for two years now, spending winters up here and the rest of the year down south, and Patel still doesn’t really trust your ass to do what he tells you to, which is not fair. It’s not your fault the hydros happened to blow while you were working the crane last year, that shit was just bad luck. Sailors in general are some of the most superstitious motherfuckers alive, and fishermen even more so, possibly because they know the sea’s constantly trying to kill them, and it’s only because Captain Hewley himself decided to give you another shot that you’re even on this boat right now.

Hewley is looking at you, that weird black-eyed not-quite-human gaze thoughtful. “Tell him,” he says, after a moment. “Kid’s gonna hear the stories sooner or later, might as well tell him what to keep an eye out for.”

Patel pushes away his mostly empty plate and reaches for the pack of Newports lying on the table. “Fuck,” he says, popping a match alight with his thumbnail. “Okay. You already know this is basically the most dangerous job on the planet, yeah? Crab fishermen die like, what, eighty times the rate anyone else pops it on the job. Mostly that’s cause we’re up here on the fucking freezing cold Bering Sea and it wants to kill everyone stone-dead, so if you want to stay alive you got to stay lucky.”

He, and the rest of the crew, instinctively reach for the nearest piece of actual wood and rap sharply on it with their knuckles. The only ones who don’t are you and Donny the greenhorn-and-cook (for a certain definition of “cook”) and you trade confused expressions with him.

“What’s that got to do with empty ones?” he asks, and gets slapped—gently—upside the head for his pains by one of the other deckhands.

“Shut up, kid,” says Patel, almost kindly. “You know about dead loss, right, why we gotta keep the water running through the tanks and not beat the crab up too much with how the boat’s rockin’ all over the place, and how when you do get some dead crab in your tanks it poisons the rest of the catch unless you get in to town and off-load real fast, all that shit.” He leans back, blue smoke trickling from his nostrils. “The empty ones, they’re dead crab. Only they ain’t exactly all the way dead, on account of they’re still movin’ around, despite the fact they’re nothin’ but empty white shells.”

You think of white calcined bone, of the streams of bubbles the white crab sent up as they sank slowly underneath the water. Empty shells that move with no meat in them. You wonder, and try not to wonder, and chase another forkful of Kraft Mac & Cheese round the flower-patterned plate: how did all the meat come out without cracking any of the shells?

“You’re goofin’ on us,” Donny says, and you wonder again how the hell a corn-fed Midwestern farm boy found his dumbass way out here in the first place, even as the question kind of makes you feel better. “Dead crab don’t move.”

“These ones do, kid,” says the skipper, lighting up a Camel. “Best not to ask questions like why, about shit like this. Just trust me that they do.”

“We pick ’em up sometimes in the pots,” Patel says. “Like today, over half that last string had empty ones in, and you can’t just sort those fuckers out on the table like dirty crab and throw them overboard; anything that’s been in a pot with empty ones is no good. They might look just fine, big old keepers, but you put those crab in your tanks and you’re gonna wake up to a boat full of dead crab that’s already starting to stink. Can’t do shit about it other than clean out all the tanks real good and get someone to come say some words to make sure it’s safe again.”

“Or smudge it with sage,” says one of the other deckhands. Nearly everyone is smoking now, and a faint blue haze is gathering just under the ceiling. “Don’t need to be a Christian blessing or nothin’, you just need to get the juju fixed. We used sage on the Amelia Rose a couple times, worked okay.”

Donny seems to be having less trouble with the necessity for blessing the boat than with the idea of empty white crabs that move around and spread death. “What happens if you don’t?” he asks.

“Lose your catch,” says Patel. “Be lucky if that’s all you lose.” He pauses, looks at the skipper as if he’s not sure he should be saying this, and you think part of that’s theatrics for the kid’s benefit and part of it is not. The Newport dangles from his lower lip with half an inch of ash on the tip; he takes it between his finger and thumb and crushes out what’s left in the communal ashtray. “Listen, kid. A while ago there was a rookie skipper on—what was it, the Alaskan Hope, dumbass name for a boat—he got himself some empty ones early in the season and didn’t think he needed to get his tanks blessed, just washed ’em out and went right back to fishing. Whole rest of the season he’d be coming into Dutch or St. Paul with a boat full of dead crab, three or four times, whole damn tanks nothin’ but dead loss, and at the end of it he didn’t come back at all.”

The others are nodding; this is clearly a thing that has been discussed multiple times over God knows how many beers in God knows how many shitty little bars. Donny is looking spooked, which is just as clearly what Patel was going for.

“What happened to him?” you ask, wanting a cigarette yourself and not reaching for one; you quit six months ago, although sometimes up here you really kind of wonder why.

“Damnedest thing,” says the skipper. “He’d about filled his tanks, right at the end of it— they were live when he got ’em on board, at least—he was kinda stepping on the crab to push ’em down into the tank and get the lid on, you’ve seen us do it, both feet on top of the crab rather than the deck, and all of a sudden—” He snaps his fingers. “Crab underneath him just seem to give way, and down he goes right into the middle of ’em. Happened so fast the deckhands barely even saw it, as I hear tell.”

“They got him out, though, right?” Donny asks.

“Eventually,” says Hewley. “Wasn’t much left, just his rain gear and boots.”

“And the bones,” says Patel.

Hewley nods. “Some of ’em, anyway. The bigger ones.”

Donny is looking not just spooked but horrified. “You mean the crabs ate him?”

“Oh, probably he drowned first,” says Patel, not sounding convinced. “Guys tried to get him out, of course, reached down in there with a pole or whatever they got to hand, but the guy just sank right to the bottom underneath the pile of crab, thousands and thousands of pounds. Little bastards must’ve been hungry, I guess, but they were all dead too by the time the boat docked.” He lights another cigarette, meditatively. “Feel sorry for that crew.”

There’s silence for a moment. “Think they broke the boat up after a while, too,” says Hewley. “Sold it for scrap. Nobody wanted to go near it.”

“Have you ever had to do that on the Sea Witch?” Donny says. “The—the blessing thing.”

“Once,” says Hewley. “Long, long time ago. When I was just starting out. Never want to have to do that again.”

“Which is why we dump the shit as soon as we see any sign of the empty ones,” Patel adds. “So keep your eye out for anything white, and don’t ask stupid questions.”

“And get back to work,” says Hewley, pushing back from the table, cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth. “Got ten minutes before we need to start hauling gear, and fingers crossed we’re gonna see some numbers this string, instead of shit we gotta dump. Jake, Donny cooked, so you got dish duty first, hop to it.”

Jake hates dishes, but even he knows not to fuck with the skipper in this particular weird changeable mood, and starts stacking Corelle plates with bad grace as the rest of you go clamber back into your oilskins and try to pretend this is not gonna suck.

All through the rest of that endless fucking afternoon you cannot stop seeing that image Hewley described in your mind’s eye: the moment when all the crab legs sticking out of the tank hatch must have retracted, pulling back, letting the wretched man in, letting him plunge into the mindless writhing mass of crabs and closing over his head. How fast it must have been. How fast and how irrevocable, and you really hope the dude drowned quickly, once they had him in their claws.

There are no more empty ones that string, or the one after it, and the tense atmosphere on deck begins to relax a bit: gradually you begin to lose the immediate horror, but when you finally do get a chance to hit your bunk for a couple hours, you cannot sleep for thinking of it.

Sometimes insomnia happens on the boats, especially after a particularly fucked-up day. Your bunkmates don’t stir as you slip out of the half-hearted shelf of a bed and get back into enough of your clothes to maybe go look out the galley windows and see if there’s anything not nailed down that you can eat; you’re the kind of hungry that you get after the seasickness finally fucks off, like your stomach’s trying to make up for days of hurling. There’s half of a dinner roll still sitting in its bag on the counter and you think nobody’s going to miss it, and the sweet carbs and doughy, squishy texture kind of help your backbrain calm down and shut up—

—and you can hear the skipper up at the helm above you through the companionway stairs, the door up there must be open, shit, you’re not supposed to be fucking around in the kitchen like this, but he doesn’t sound like he’s in the mood to yell at anybody, the more you listen. He’s talking to someone, and you realize after a moment it’s gotta be Patel.

“—dunno if it was that smart to tell the kids that shit,” he’s saying, sounding a little bit like an ordinary person. “I mean. Sure, it’s fun to see ’em go that fabled whiter shade of pale and all, but it’s not like they’re up here for good. They’re seasonal, Dee. They don’t gotta know about shit like this.”

“They do if it means they know to fuckin’ rail-dump the pots soon as they see that shade of pale,” says Patel. “Anyway, I didn’t tell ’em the real bad shit. I figure if they want to know more they can summon up the nuts to ask you about it, lord ’n’ master.”

“Thanks a whole fuckload,” says the skipper, and then there’s a pause while he keys the radio and talks to someone else, and you think you’re probably safe to sneak back to your bunk when he cuts back in. “God, I don’t even remember the last time I told anyone the other story. Can’t even remember all the details now. Musta been back in the early aughts, I was still workin’ on my uncle Josiah’s boat, before I got the Witch. You know what I do remember, him telling me, seventeen and near pissing myself with fuckin’ terror after I saw those people in the water? That drowned-dead people do come back, sometimes. When they don’t die clean.”

Pause again, this one containing the little flick-inhale-sigh-exhale sequence that means he’s lit another smoke. When he starts up talking again the difference is noticeable: he doesn’t sound exactly like the large-and-in-charge skipper you’re used to, just an ordinary tired human, some random guy, and it’s weird.

(You wonder how Patel’s responding to this, which one of Patel’s patented non-expressions he’s wearing now. He’s got five that you’re aware of, and this entire conversation feels weirdly and awfully private, like you’re overhearing someone’s deeply personal moment.)

“I’m seventeen,” Hewley picks up the thread, “and I’m at the crane lookin’ down at the water and it’s glassy calm like it never is and I can see the anchor chain stretchin’ away down into the green and suddenly there’s this white blank face there instead, someone’s actual face swimmin’ up toward me, pullin’ itself up the chain hand over hand and I think oh shit someone’s boat must’ve sank, we have to radio the Coast Guard and pick up this guy and the rest of the survivors before my brain catches up to my eyes and—this guy I’m looking at is not a survivor.” The skipper pauses again, still sounding weirdly human. “For one thing, there’s, uh. A lot of his face is kinda missing, like it’s been nibbled. What’s left is white, fishbelly white, no blood anywhere, and there’s a crab crawlin’ out of where one eye should be. White crab. Not one of ours, little bastard, maybe so big across the carapace. But bone-white. And then I see another one in his mouth, and I think that’s when I snap out of it and get the fuck away from the side of the boat and yell for my uncle and the guys.”

Another pause, a brief one. “Turned out that wasn’t the only one who wanted to come up to say hi to us, that night. Turned out there were three that time. My uncle’s crew comes up on deck when I start yelling and they’re like aw SHIT not this again, but it’s clear they know how to handle it. I’m pretty sure they recognized the last guy who showed up, but nobody said anythin’ out loud where I could hear it, and they just go get out the stuff from the special locker and half an hour later we’re all clear of—problems.”

What the fuck is in the special locker, you wonder, but the skipper’s still talking. It’s not hard to picture him at seventeen; it’s hard to picture him discombobulated at any age. “Shit’s apparently sorted but I got no idea what to do with what I saw, and I’m freakin’ out. So I’m up there in my uncle’s fuckin’ wheelhouse afterward and all I can say is Those guys were dead, Uncle Joze, they were fuckin’ dead like he doesn’t know it, and he just looks at me and says Son, the problem ain’t that they’re dead, you know that and I know that, everyone on this boat knows that. Problem is that they don’t seem to know it their own selves. That they come back nonetheless, and we don’t know why. Maybe they’re hungry, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just lonely and want some company down there in the dark and don’t wanna wait for some other poor fucker to make a bad call and end up drowned, but that doesn’t mean we need to let ’em screw with us more than we have to.

You can picture the skipper taking a drag off his Camel; you can’t picture him ever being scared. What you can do is hear his dead uncle clear as if the guy’s on the radio from the past; skipper’s a crazy mimic. The cigarette rasp is vivid, as is the change when he drops his uncle’s voice and goes back to his own: “But they come back. I never forgot that, Dee. Never forgot him saying that, like any other thing I’d need to learn if I was gonna have my own boat someday. I had a notebook I wrote shit down in sometimes, back then, and that one day I just wrote those three words: they come back.

“A while later, I finally had the Witch as a rookie skipper and I was workin’ hard as hell to keep his and my dad’s reputation going, and I think I got lucky a bunch of times, but there was a ton of work and money that went into this boat and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get out from under it. But that season we hit and blasted through each damn goal I set for us. I’ve never been as close on the crab like that again, holds filled over and over again with good live catch, and it was the same year that asshole on the Alaskan Hope died. Not that anyone was sad about it.”

He pauses, and again you can hear the pride in the new untrained crew, his crew, whom he’d assembled to work together to catch crab and earn some damn money on a well-run boat, unlike that asshole’s piece-of-shit rebuilt vessel.

“Everyone called that fuckin’ tub the Alaskan Dope and nobody was too particular about not lettin’ him hear, even in the beginning nobody liked him—when I heard about that shit it was like I was seventeen again and I swear I heard Uncle Joze in my head saying They come back. For—fuck, months afterward I remembered to say a prayer now and then, and one of the things I prayed for was never to see the Alaskan Dope skipper lookin’ up at me from under the water, what was left of him after the crabs were done, bones and shreds of oilskins, climbin’ that anchor chain or that buoy rope up toward my deck, his skull-face grinnin’ like this shit was the funniest thing he ever seen. I prayed that he’d never come back, and I guess I thought it wasn’t too likely, since they’d eaten most of him, even the bones. Not much left but some shreds of oilskin and those long bones. Not enough to put itself together to come on back up and say hi.”

“Boss, I don’t know if that’s better or worse,” says Patel, and for once you think you hear what the man sounds like when he’s being entirely honest, not bullshitting anyone on any particular wavelength. “I guess I hope it’s better not to have to think about some drowned-dead captain hangin’ around to maybe fuck with you if he gets bored, but the empty ones creep me out so bad, man. It’s—you know how you can sometimes hear the crab blowin’ bubbles with their fucked-up little mouthpart things when they’re down in the tanks? I know what crab sounds like when they’re alive and eatin’. I—maybe think I know what the empty ones sound like, too, boss, when they take their meal.”

You’ve never heard Patel sound like that. Like a regular guy, someone who’s not sure of himself or what he actually wants. You know him as the stalwart-heavy deck boss, no more yielding than a fucking bollard, sensitive as a Formica counter. The guy who’s talking now, slightly unsteady, is a guy you’ve never met—and the guy he’s talking to is only slightly more familiar.

“Well,” says Captain Hewley, after a moment, sounding more tired than you’ve ever heard him. “You know. Lotta people get to hearing sounds up here, Dee. Sometimes they’re bad sounds. Sometimes some not-so-great shit happens in the sea that you’re bound to overhear. Sometimes people don’t know when to quit on it and need a reminder to lie still. Sometimes the crab are gonna be hungry, and you have to hear them eating. Shit happens on a boat. It’s up to you what you do about it.

“Some guys buy ’emselves earplugs and get on with it, some guys just kinda say okay, this is how this is, some guys decide fuck this shit, it ain’t worth it, and go fish somewhere that’s not tryin’ to kill them all the time. I don’t judge.”

“Bullshit you don’t judge, boss,” says Patel, and both of them laugh, a warm sound that cracks the built-up sour tension in the air like a hammer on rime-ice, and on that wave of shared laughter you creep back out of the galley without the rest of your nibbled dinner roll, and crawl back into bed thinking you might never feel hungry again.

Because Patel is right about the sounds of their feeding, when they take their meal: the little sounds of mouthparts moving past each other, tiny chewing tearing smacking sounds. They don’t have big mouths at all, the crabs, but they are relentless, and you think even over the snoring of the others, the clatter and hum that is the background noise of the Sea Witch, that you might be able to hear it anyway, all the way down at the bottom of the ocean; that you may never not be able to hear it, no matter how far from the Bering Sea you end up.

Because crabs are everywhere.

Even back south, where all this freezing bullshit will fade into a bad dream, even under the blazing Florida sun throwing brilliant diamonds of reflection on water the color of clear bright-blue ink, water in which nothing can hide, where you don’t have to worry about drowned people’s swollen-soft remains pulling themselves up your anchor chain hand over hand because they’d like to come up and say hello, to be sociable, because in water this clear you can see a very long way down—even in this water, which is not trying to kill you, you think you will never be able to forget the sounds they make, and you wonder despite yourself what the doomed skipper of the Alaskan Hope heard in his own last moments, and if he had been conscious enough to hear it his own self: the chewing sounds.

The little mincing, chewing sounds, as the empty crabs begin to feed.

Vivian Shaw wears way too many earrings and likes edged weapons and expensive ink. She was born in Kenya and has lived in the UK, Maryland, and New Mexico. She writes about monsters, both in and out of classic horror literature; machines, extant and fantastical; disasters and their causes; and found family. She is the author of the Dr. Greta Helsing contemporary fantasy series, and a sci-fi/horror novella, The Helios Syndrome (Lethe Press). She reviews for The Washington Post, and her short sci-fi/horror fiction has appeared in Uncanny and Pseudopod.

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