Free Dreadful Skin by Cherie Priest

footsteps had been drowned by the rain, so I changed my approach and went toward the stern, toward the crash—or so I thought.
    I skidded around the corner and found myself overlooking the big red paddlewheel. I caught myself on the railing’s edge before I could topple down into it, and I thanked heaven and lucky stars both.
    I turned around and saw where a window was gone, blasted inside the cabin as if something large and unwilling had been thrown through it. It pained me—I hesitated, and I cringed, but I looked inside anyway. I expected to see something as horrible as the captain’s room, but there was nothing. Only the evidence of a struggle—shards of glass, toppled books, a chair with one leg smashed out from under it.
    And blood.
    I saw a little bit of blood. But it wasn’t much. It was a small, splattered amount running thin with the added influx of rainwater; it suggested discomfort and inconvenience, not death. Whoever was hurt had left the scene.
    “Laura?” I shouted again. “Sister Eileen?”
    I tore myself away from the broken window and fought the wind-thrown rain again—I held out my arm, with my elbow pointed forward, trying to clear myself a path through the sheets of water. It hardly helped. I could hardly see.
    And that’s why I plowed right into him—the cook. He was a bigly muscled man like I was in my youth, and he was as black as a plum with brown eyes set in yellow. My head connected with his collarbone and I recoiled with apologies begging from my lips.
    “I didn’t see you there,” I told him. “I—” I wiped my face on my sleeve and continued. “I wonder, did Laura find you?”
    He didn’t react, except to stand there and sway.
    I felt warmth in my hair, dripping down my face. I wiped it again with my sleeve—and only then noticed something stained and streaked upon it. It wasn’t mine, I didn’t think.
    “Cook?” Between the rain and the darkness I couldn’t make out much detail in his visage. But he was wearing a gray night shirt and it was just light enough to spy the way he had both arms raised up to clutch his chest, and his throat. And his skin was so dark that I hadn’t seen, until I looked for it, that all of his soaking came not from the rain.
    I reached out a hand to him—though I don’t know how I meant to help.
    He reached a hand to me—though there wasn’t anything I could do. I saw that, when he took the hand away. I saw white there, underneath his grasp. It was bone, and tendons, and the cords of his throat.
    Before he could take my hand, he fell slowly sideways. I stepped forward to catch him or assist him—at least to lie him down on the deck, perhaps, and give him that passing measure of dignity. His weight bore him down though, harder than I could hold him up. He toppled past me. His hip cracked against the rail and broke it—the bone or the rail, I don’t know, I only heard it—but over the side he went, and he splashed down into the Tennessee River. He bobbed a moment or two before sinking, or being washed away to a spot I couldn’t see.
    I stared down after him, gasping, panting, breathing in the rain and wishing for the sun—for God, for Eileen, or Laura, or anyone.
    And above me, up on the hurricane deck and between the gonging beats of thunder, I heard the unmistakable sound of a struggle.

XIII.
    The cook’s room was empty when I finally got to it. His cabin looked all right, but the door was hanging open and water was blowing on in. I came inside and looked around, pushing the door shut behind me enough so I could shake the water off myself.
    “Cook?” I called, but it was obvious he wasn’t there, and I don’t know why I bothered.
    The room was tidy and didn’t have much in it, like mine. He didn’t own much, and what he had was stashed like his mama told him how to do it. The only thing undone was the bed—the covers were pushed aside and the sheets were unmade. It looked like he’d turned in for the night and maybe heard