“I always enjoy a nice clear night– no fog.”

“Well, I love this time of day. This is the kind of twilight- a rainy kind-that always relaxed me. You go out on a hike during the day and come back as the rain starts to fall. Every muscle in your body feels like it unwinds once you draw a hot bath. It’s cold outside, so you keep a fire going. Nothing is as relaxing as this kind of weather at this time of day.”

Anderson opens his attaché case and produces a clean, new, legal size note pad and a fountain pen.

“I’m ready to get started whenever you are.” He says with some hesitation.

Joseph takes another sip from his tea cup and puts it down on the window sill. He sinks his body in to a green deco arm chair and lets out a grown followed by a deep sigh.

“There were eighty-one men onboard the USS Solon went it went down-Forty-three crew, twenty-eight enlisted navy, four officers and six scientists. The ship was a five hundred foot repurposed

We were running on the bare minimum of hands. Everyone from the Solon standard complement was an able seaman. We took on no new crew before sailing.”

Joseph tilts his head to the side and focuses on the veins of water made by scattering rain drops on the window pane. Anderson frantically scribbles his notes.

“The fore hold was filled with some kind of device. It was installed by linking metal boxes together. Not small ones, like munitions canisters, but big things like lockers from a boot camp. They had to be two feet thick by nine feet tall. Maybe they were another ten feet wide. They were locked into groupings that totaled fifty feet in length. There were thirty groups in the hold. In the foremost part of the cargo area there were three diesel generators that powered the thing. When you’d go in there it’d feel like an oven. We were in the North Atlantic in November and that hold felt like summer. Two of the men who went down to work near that thing came on deck with the flesh melted from their fingertips. It looked revolting and-”

Anderson’s hand leaps to his mouth as he lets out a muffled gagging sound.

“I apologize. I shouldn’t get in to that kind of thing.” Joseph says while offering Anderson a handkerchief.

“Thank you.” Anderson replies. He shakes his hand to refuse the swatch of flimsy cotton.

“When the machine was working the lights would dim every thirty minutes or so. We’d hear a humming noise vibrating through the hull and then the lights would fade in and out.”

Joseph takes a moment to collect his thoughts before he begins again. His hand is now grinding in circles at the base of his jaw. His beard begins to tangle and scratch.

“The aft hold is where they kept the animals. It smelled foul. It was loaded with stacks of cages, nothing bigger then a small dog was in there. I think I saw a tank filled with snakes or eels in the far corner. At the end of the compartment was another section where a chain-linked fence separated the cages from a steel door which lead to the next chamber. On nights when I’d pull watch I’d hear noises coming from behind that door. They weren’t animal or human- definitely not mechanical. They sounded like wet thumping crashes. My father was a butcher and when raw meat was hammered against a slab it would make a noise like what I heard.”

Joseph pulls back in his seat and rubs his eyes. He sinks lower in the arm chair and finishes his tea.

“The Solon would move between Great Britain and North Africa stopping at allied ports to unload crates from the animal hold. When we’d make port we’d usually get refueled by a tanker and pick up a new lot of cages.

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