Chapter 2: A Grave for the Living
Chapter 2: A Grave for the Living
Sleep was a shore David couldn't reach. He lay on the narrow, lumpy bunk in his cabin, the rhythmic thrum of the Da Baron’s engines a monotonous, vibrating pulse against his skull. The oppressive humidity of the Gulf of Mexico seeped through the steel walls, making the thin blanket feel like a damp shroud.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but the darkness behind his eyelids was filled with unsettling images. Cassara’s face, etched with a trauma he couldn't comprehend. The glint of firelight on a being of “righteous thunder.” Metatron. The Angel of War.
His mind, a place of order, of spreadsheets and shipping manifests, rebelled against the concepts. It was stress-induced delusion, he told himself. The pressure of the trip, the intimidation from Captain Jean-Pierre, it had all conspired to crack open some forgotten corner of his subconscious. Cassara was likely a traumatized ex-soldier from some obscure conflict, her story a coping mechanism, a metaphor. It had to be.
But the certainty with which she’d spoken, the primal fear that had replaced the captain’s thuggery with a kind of holy dread… that felt real. The world had felt solid under his feet just yesterday. Now it was thin ice over a fathomless, cold abyss.
Exhaustion finally dragged him under, but it wasn't the peaceful oblivion he craved. It was a plunge into a world more vivid, more real, than the waking one.
He was standing in a graveyard.
The heat was suffocating, thick with the cloying sweetness of wilted flowers, cheap rum, and cigar smoke. The sun was a white-hot coin in a bleached sky. Above-ground tombs, painted in chalky pastels of pink, blue, and white, crowded together like a silent, waiting congregation. Many were crumbling, their plaster skins peeling to reveal brick bones. Makeshift crosses, some draped with beads and faded ribbons, tilted at weary angles.
A man leaned against the largest, most ornate mausoleum, tapping a rhythm on a tombstone with a gnarled cane. He wore a dusty black tuxedo and a matching top hat, both incongruous and perfectly at home in the sweltering heat. Dark glasses hid his eyes, but they couldn't hide the fact that his face was a grinning, polished skull.
“Bonjou, little doctor,” the figure said, his voice a gravelly rasp that was both charming and deeply unsettling. He took a long drag from a thick cigar, the tip glowing like a malevolent ember. “You look lost. A man like you, a man of logic and straight lines, has no business in my garden.”
David’s heart hammered against his ribs. He knew, with a certainty that defied all reason, who this was. This was the master of this place. The gatekeeper.
“Who… who are you?” David’s voice was a dry whisper.
The skull-faced man chuckled, a sound like bones rattling in a dry gourd. “They call me many things. Mèt Kafou. Papa Gede. But for a formal man like you?” He swept his top hat off in a grand, theatrical gesture. “You may call me Baron Samedi.”
The Baron gestured with his cane toward an open patch of rich, black earth nearby. It was a perfect rectangle, six feet long, three feet wide, and dark with depth. A freshly dug grave.
“I have a gift for you,” the Baron said, his grin widening. “A place to rest. A final home. It is quiet here. Peaceful. No more worrying about angels or shipments or the troubles of the living.”
A cold terror, colder than any fear he’d felt in the captain’s cabin, seized David. This wasn’t just a dream. This was a message. “That’s… that’s not for me.”
“Oh, but it is,” the Baron insisted, his playful tone hardening. He took a step closer, and the world seemed to tilt. The smell of grave dirt and cheap perfume intensified. “It has your name on it. See? It is a kindness, really. A quick end. There are worse things than a quiet plot in my garden.”
“Worse things?” David repeated, his throat tight.
The Baron’s skull-face turned towards the horizon, as if looking for something beyond the cemetery walls. His playful demeanor vanished, replaced by a look of profound, almost professional, distaste.
“There are spirits of balance,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “And there are spirits of hunger. My family,” he gestured to the countless tombs, “we handle the transition. We welcome the dead. It is a sacred duty, a dance as old as time.” He spat a stream of smoke onto the ground. “But there is another. One who does not dance. One who only eats.”
He leaned in close, his voice a venomous hiss. “It calls itself Congo-Savanne. It is old. Brutish. A scavenger that has forgotten its place. It doesn't care for souls, only for the meat they ride in and the fear that seasons it. It is an engine of consumption, a monster with a grinder on its back.”
The image flared in David’s mind with sickening clarity: a hulking, shadowy form, not of flesh, but of rusted metal and bone, with a massive, geared mechanism fused to its spine, its teeth stained with something dark and viscous.
“This one,” the Baron sneered, tapping his cane on the edge of the waiting grave, “it makes my work messy. It breaks the sacred vessels before the spirit is ready to pour. It is coming for you. For your powerful friend. Her spirit burns so brightly, like a fire. Congo-Savanne can smell a fire from miles away. It wants to put that fire out. To grind it into ash.”
The Baron looked David up and down, a glint of something like pity in his dark glasses. “So I offer you this choice. My clean, quiet earth… or its grinding gears.”
The world dissolved. The heat, the smell, the skull-faced Loa—it all spiraled away into darkness.
David awoke with a violent gasp, thrashing in his sweat-soaked bunk. The air in his cabin was cold and clammy. His heart was a wild drum against his ribs. It was a dream. Just a nightmare. A vivid, terrifying nightmare brought on by Cassara’s insane story.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk, trying to catch his breath. The ship’s engines thrummed their steady, metallic beat. The single bulb overhead cast a weak, yellow light. Everything was normal. Solid. Real.
He ran a shaky hand through his damp hair. A monster with a grinder on its back. The image wouldn't leave him. It felt more real than the rusted wall in front of him. He had to get some air.
As he stood, his bare foot touched something on the floor. It was cool, smooth, and impossibly thick. He looked down.
Slithering silently from beneath his bunk and towards the gap under his cabin door was a snake. It wasn't just any snake. It was a python, massive and primeval, its body thicker than his thigh. Its scales, a mosaic of brown and black, shimmered in the dim light. It moved with an unhurried, liquid power, a silent river of muscle and scale.
David froze, every muscle in his body screaming. The snake paid him no mind. It flowed out of his room and into the narrow corridor, its tail disappearing into the shadows a few seconds after its head.
He stood there, trembling, staring at the empty space where it had been. There was no rational explanation. No way a creature that large could have been on this ship, in his sealed cabin, without anyone knowing.
It wasn't a metaphor. It wasn't a delusion.
The dream had followed him back. The warning was real. And in the deep, mechanical thrum of the Da Baron’s engines, he could almost hear the grinding of ancient, hungry gears. They were sailing straight into its jaws.
Characters

Cassara

David Rojas
