Dead Sea

1

So the raft drifted, borne by whatever currents there were in that miasmic, clotted sea. It was carried further into those banks of pale green weed that were thick and rotting and pissing a mephitic condensation into the damp air. The mist never lessened, though sometimes it was thin and vaporous and transparent to a degree. And at other times, thick and cloisterous and oddly agitated as if someone had stirred it with a wire whisk.

In his more poetic moments, Gosling saw that sea as being an ocean of blood. It was more pink than red and sometimes a dirty yellow, but it was never clear like water back on… well, back where he’d come from. This was an alien sea. A reeking, slimy discharge of watery protoplasm, something drained from a poisoned tumor or squeezed from a diseased placenta. He likened that sea to a petri dish, warm and wet and clogged with organic profusion, a metabolic medium, a fluidic slush of life and death and potential.

Cushing, who was something of an armchair naturalist, told him that wasn’t too far off the mark. That this sea — wherever it might be — was a living stew, a nutrient bath where life would be plentiful in amazing varieties and forms. He likened it to the primordial oceans of earth, so very rich in life it was practically a living thing itself.

“And it’s perfect, isn’t?” he said. “When you think about it? Steaming and moist and warm, an equatorial pond. The temperature of the water is probably unvarying, never too cold or too warm, always just right for things to breed and multiply.”

He said he thought the fog was created by the chill air hitting that warm soup of water. Earth’s prehistoric oceans and lakes would have been like that — rank and seething and misty, the very cradle of life.

“But none of that tells us where we are,” Soltz pointed out.

And that was true.

Cushing said, “Soltz has developed a few theories of his own based on watching Bermuda Triangle shows.”

“Oh? And you have a better explanation?” Soltz said. “Because I think at this point we’re all waiting to hear it.”

“Take it easy,” Cushing told him.

Gosling looked over at George. He was sleeping up near the bow. “What is your theory, Soltz? And please tell me it has nothing to do with flying saucers.”

Soltz looked offended at the idea of that. As if he wanted to say, well, the Bermuda Triangle is one thing, but flying saucers? What do you think I am? A kook? He looked over at Cushing, then at Gosling. “My theory involves vortices, time/space displacement. I think we were sucked into a vortex of sorts. That would explain why when we first entered that fog we could not breathe.”

“What would that have to do with it?” Gosling asked.

“It’s pretty apparent, isn’t it? That vortex grabbed us and when we could not breathe it was because we were momentarily caught between our world and this one, in some sort of dead zone, the hopping off point between our dimension, say, and where we are now.”

Gosling had been thinking pretty much along the same lines, but he did not admit it. “We only lost air for… what? Less than a minute? Thirty seconds? Not even probably. Are you telling me this vortex shot us into another dimension like an arrow and did it that quick?”

“Why not? We can’t apply our ideas of time and travel to such things.”

Gosling waited for Cushing with his scientific turn of mind to sweep Soltz and his theories under the carpet, but he did not. And Gosling himself wasn’t in any position to debate any of it either. As a sailor, he’d long been familiar with magnetic deviations and atmospheric abnormalities in the Sargasso Sea and Bermuda Triangle regions. There was no science fiction there. Funny things did happen in these places. It was well-documented and research into their causes continued, he knew, to this very day. But unusual navigational and atmospheric conditions were a long way from space/time distortions. A lot of bad writers had been throwing around the idea of those for a long time and Gosling had spent most of his life shaking his head at such pseudo-science.

And now?

Now he didn’t know what to think. Soltz went on in some detail and he listened patiently. It all made a certain amount of mad sense. Ships and planes disappearing from radar because they had been sucked or funneled into this place, most never to return. Yet, there had been a few that had returned, hadn’t there? If you wanted to believe the stories in some of those books — stories about planes or ships that had passed through some misty dead zone where their navigational and electronic instruments went haywire and then magically started working again when they passed back through the veil again. And, of course, being a sailor, Gosling had heard his share of tales about ships missing for years suddenly reappearing with no one on board.

Where had they gone?

Was it here? Was this place the answer to the age-old mystery of the ship’s graveyard? Was this the place the early mariners had seen when they told their horror stories of the Sargasso Sea? Had they breezed through here, witnessed nightmares, and then breezed out again?

Fantastic. The very same shit Gosling had always laughed at. Most sailors laughed at these things. But he knew, as they probably did, that at the back of every sailor’s mind there was a thin doubt that held on, despite what science and reason told them. A disorderly little fear that there might be a shred of truth in those old stories.

Vortices. Time/space distortion. Dimensional holes. Magnetic whirlpools that could funnel ships and planes into some alien sphere of existence. Christ, it sounded like the late show. But the fact remained, they were somewhere and it didn’t look much like the Atlantic or the Pacific or the pea green sea for that matter.

“You buy any of that?” Cushing said.

Gosling shrugged. “Maybe. Where we’re standing, one explanation is as good as the next. Something happened, didn’t it? And like Dorothy said, we ain’t exactly in fucking Kansas.”

Cushing smiled. “Did she say that?”

“Way I heard it.” Gosling sighed. “If we got in here, who knows, same thing that sucked us in might shoot us back out.”

“Do you really believe that?” Soltz said, despondent as ever. “Some cages have no keys.”

Gosling ignored that. He touched upon some of the things he had read or heard over the years, see what the others thought. “There must be some connection between this place and ours. Has to be. I’m just hoping it’s still open or it might open back up again and soon.”

He told them that he had read about a plane that vanished once. It was flying into Nassau or one of them places, supposed to touch down on some little strip there. People on the ground could hear the plane flying over, but they couldn’t see it. They were in contact with the pilot on the radio who said he could see nothing but mist above and below. That was the last anybody heard of that plane.

“So, maybe these two worlds are closer than we think,” Gosling said.

He said he’d also heard stories about shortwave radio operators picking up transmissions from ships or planes days after they’d disappeared. In some of the wilder tales, it was years later. Then there was the famous case of the five Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared in 1945 off of Fort Lauderdale. A ham radio operator claimed to have picked up their distress call many hours after they would have run out of fuel and been forced to ditch.

“I’m thinking that might tie in with that distress call we heard earlier,” Gosling told them, knowing everyone had been scared shitless after hearing that. Himself included. “That might have been something sent twenty years ago or fifty… who can say? Maybe in this place, radio transmissions keep bouncing around and now and again, they just slip out and somebody hears them.”

There was a mixture of total belief and total disbelief in the eyes of both Soltz and Cushing. But mostly just confusion set with terror. Because they were all remembering that transmission, hearing it echoing in their heads as it probably always would.

“… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog… it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and

…it’s knocking at the door… at the door… ”

And what they all wanted to know then as they did now was what exactly was coming out of the fog? What was on the decks and knocking at the door? And what in God’s name was that eerie booming sound in the background that sounded like a hollow, metal heart beating?

Gosling, however, was not about to comment on that.

Soltz had no such compunction. “What do you think it was? What got that ship? And don’t look at me like that because we all know that something got it. You heard the sound of that voice… I’ve never heard such terror before. That person was scared out of their wits.”

Gosling said, “Don’t jump to conclusions here. It could have been just about anything. It doesn’t have to be something supernatural.”

Soltz barked an almost pained sounding little laugh. “Who said anything about the supernatural? That wasn’t what I was thinking at all.”

“Oh? And what were you thinking?” Cushing asked him.

But Soltz would not say. He just sat there, staring into the mist, characteristically morose.

“Listen now, all I’m saying is that there could be lots of reasons for what we were hearing,” Gosling said.

“Don’t treat us like children, please,” Soltz said to him. “Whatever happened… whatever that ship was calling out about.. . it was not normal. Something came out of the fog. Something horrible. And whatever it was, it left an empty ship behind.”

2

The derelict.

It came out of the fog, huge and dead and forbidding, something you didn’t dare look upon and something else you didn’t dare look away from. To turn your back on it, would have been like turning your back on a razor coming at you in the darkness. The men in the lifeboat saw it and to them, it was like looking at some graveyard described by thin moonlight. It inspired the same sense of mystery and horror, an almost instinctive phobia. For this ship was like something abominable yanked from a burial ground, a relic dragged from a cursed tomb. Something diseased, sepulchral, and ancient. A tombstone emoting gray silence, a mausoleum echoing with dead whispers, blackness and lunacy. Nothing good could come of it.

Cook saw it, rising out of the mist, and it pulled his guts up the back of his throat in cold, coiling loops. Looking upon it, he could barely breathe.

It was a dire and morbid haunted house made of iron and rust and decay, thrust up from that forest of tangled, spreading weed. And though it was dead and rotting, you got the horrendous feeling that it was not dead enough. That somehow, it was unspeakably alive and aware and… hungry.

“Like a skull,” Crycek said in a wounded, despairing voice. “It looks like a skull stripped of meat.”

Fabrini said,” Knock it off.” But his voice was almost a whisper, as if he was afraid something on the ship might hear him.

“It’s just an old ship,” Cook said to them. “God knows how long it’s been here.”

“Sure, that’s all it is,” Menhaus put in. “Just an old ship.”

“You boys keep telling yourself that and you might even believe it,” Saks said.

Crycek was shaking his head. “It’s full of death… can’t you feel it?”

And they all could, a low and unpleasant thrumming in their heads, the sound of some dark machine idling… waiting to cycle to full rev.

Saks chuckled low in his throat. “Scares you girls, eh?” But it had gotten to him, too, and you could see that. Tough-guy Saks. Whatever was in that ship was scratching blackly in his belly just as it was with the others.

Cook was overwhelmed with a mindless horror at the sight of it. He tried to speak, but his throat was thick like it was stuffed with wool and rags. It took him a minute or two. “Let’s not get superstitious here. It’s just a derelict. It can’t hurt you. Might be something we can use on it.”

Fabrini looked at him. “You’re not… I mean, you’re not suggesting that we board it, are you?”

But Cook’s answer to that was to get the oars out.

The ship was caught fast in a bank of weeds. They had crawled right up her hull in glistening green mats like the ship was slowly being devoured by some colony of parasitic plants.

Fabrini and Cook rowed in closer until they hit the weeds which were so thick and congested, they had to use the oars as poles to push the lifeboat through them. Up close, the mist receding, the ship had to be four- or five-hundred feet in length with long decks and high, twin stacks rising up into the gloom. Cook had never seen a ship quite like her before. What he assumed was the bridge or the wheelhouse was suspended over the foredeck on steel stilts. And from just behind it, running aft to the stacks themselves were a skeletal framework of booms and gantries and derricks rising up like fleshless ribs. It made the entire ship look like the skeleton of some gigantic sea monster trapped in the weed.

As they poled down its length, Cook felt a sickly uneasiness in the pit of his belly. The sight of her up close — huge and lifeless and stark — left his skin cold, made his teeth want to chatter. Dead, certainly, but not untenanted.

The lifeboat slid through the weeds pretty easily, actually riding atop of them and sliding over them for the most part. Yet, it was hard work, poling along like that. But the exertion and the sweat felt good.

After what seemed about an hour, they swung around aft and got up behind her. As they passed through her shadow, the weeds suddenly seemed almost black. Not gray as a shadow might make them, but jet black and oily. When Cook looked again, it was gone.

It was like going into a cemetery at midnight, it occurred to him. You weren’t really afraid of ghosts and the dead were just dead, but… you just didn’t want to do it. You didn’t know why, but you didn’t want to. You just didn’t belong there.

As they came along the starboard side, pushing through those weaving mists, Saks said, “Looks like we’re expected.”

They all saw it: the boarding ladder was down. Cook and Fabrini urged the lifeboat nearer the ship where the weeds were so thick and snarled it was like pushing through mud. Finally, they reached the ladder.

“What’s that shit all over it?” Fabrini asked.

“Some kind of goo,” Menhaus said.

Cook was wondering that, too. The steps and handrail of the boarding ladder were festooned with something like cobwebs. On closer inspection, he saw it was a gray-white fungus, a fusty-smelling excrescence that looked like it had grown up out of the weeds and was slimed up the hull of the boat in oily-looking clots and clumps. He prodded some of it with the blade of his oar and a black sap ran from it.

“You ever seen fungus like that?” he asked Crycek, hoping the man’s knowledge of marine life had not abandoned him.

But Crycek just shook his head.

Saks said, “Looks like it’s eating right into the metal.”

And it did.

Cook said, “Menhaus? You feel up to standing guard over Saks here? Can you do that?”

What he was really saying, of course, was can we trust you not to feel sorry for that so-nofabitch and untie him?

Menhaus nodded, his eyes stern. “What about Crycek?”

“I’ll stay right here,” he said. He seemed to have his wits about him finally. “I’d rather do that than go on that old hulk.”

“Me and you both,” Menhaus said.

“Jesus Christ,” Saks said. “Untie me already. I’m okay now. I just lost my head was all. I’m fine now.”

Cook lashed the lifeboat to the boarding ladder, avoiding the fungus and wincing as the nylon rope cut into that shivering mass, making it bleed black again. “Just the same, Saks, you’ll stay tied until we decide different.”

“Which is probably forever,” Fabrini told him.

Cook took the gun and stuck a chemical lightstick inside his shirt. Fabrini took the knife and then they started up. The boarding ladder trembled as Cook put his weight on it. It groaned and moved, but did not collapse. He could feel the steps giving slightly under his boots, but he decided they would probably hold him.

Fabrini wasn’t crazy about boarding the derelict, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t about to chicken out. Particularly in front of Saks. Regardless of the situation, the macho games between them persisted.

About half way up, as the mist seeping from the water and weeds began to make the lifeboat below look hazy, Fabrini said, “Look at that, Cook. You see that?”

Cook did. It looked like a series of long, jagged furrows in the hull like something had scratched the ship lengthwise. Cook figured he didn’t want to know what caused them.

“Looks like she scraped up against something,” he said.

“Or something scraped up against her.”

3

When they reached the main deck, they just stood there, feeling the ship and certain it was feeling them, too. Much of the decks were obscured in fog and what they could see was a maze of hunched shapes and shadows, the bridge rising up above them. They walked along, Cook in the lead, past the upraised horns of stokeholds and ventilators, the blocklike deckhouses and high, circular gun turrets.

“Must have been a warship,” Cook said, “with guns like that.”

“At least they had some firepower when they ended up here.”

The decks creaked beneath them like doors in rotting houses. To Cook, the entire ship was like some huge casket thrust up from a grave, a nitrous and moldering thing full of dank secrets and viscid, crawling shadows. The atmosphere was blighted and noxious, filled with a gnawing sort of spiritual pestilence that he could feel right down into the marrow of his bones. There was an almost palpable odor of putrescence and age. Everything was rusty and leaning and going to rot. There were great, gaping holes eaten through the decks and bulkheads as if acid had been liberally sprinkled about. All in all, it was grim and haunted and forbidding, the sort of place that made something inside you pull up and hide.

They moved aft, carefully checking the strength of the decks as they went, for it looked as if the entire ship wanted to collapse beneath them. When they got beneath the skeletal, reaching arms of those booms and derricks, they saw that they were enshrouded in ropes of fungus.

“Like wax,” Fabrini said. “Dripping and running everywhere.”

Cook said it was enough and they made their way forward back to the bridge or wheel-house. Snaking fingers of fog and sinister, clutching shadows oozed from riven bulkheads and askew hatches. The stink of the ship was moldy and vaporous, thick and aged and repulsive. If anything indeed lived on that ship, it could be nothing good, nothing remotely wholesome… whatever could breed under such conditions, they didn’t want to look it in the face. From time to time, Cook felt a slight rumble below decks as if some morbid weight were shifting down there, waking up and sucking in that pestiferous air.

When the bridge was above them, they paused, both breathing fast and not from exertion.

“Should we… should we maybe go back?” Fabrini asked, so very hopeful it was almost hard to tell him no.

But Cook did tell him no. “We should go up and check out the bridge, see if we can find anything. You want,” Cook said, taking hold of the ladder that led up there, “you can wait down here.”

Fabrini looked around through the shadows and tendrils of searching mist. “Yeah, fuck you, too. Let’s go.”

It was almost humorous to Cook seeing Fabrini act this way. Oh, he understood the fear, all right, for it was on him, too, just as tight as sweat… but to see Fabrini scared shitless, well it was almost comical. A guy like that with all those muscles.

Cook climbed the ladder with Fabrini coming up beneath him. Neither man looked down until they were safely on the catwalk outside the boxish, rectangular wheelhouse. Up there, they had a view of the ghostly fog closing around the ship, the endless expanse of weeds and the mist rising from them like smoke. Looking out there into that haunted world, it was not hard to believe in sea monsters, ghost ships

…and worse things.

“Quite a view,” Cook said.

“Yeah, enough to make you wanna slit your wrists.”

Unlike most ship’s wheelhouses which seemed to have a preponderance of circular portholes, the wheelhouse here had large square ports. All of them were black and filthy and Fabrini couldn’t even scrape them clean with his knife.

Cook found the door and it was unlocked. But it was laden with rust and they had to hammer it with their shoulders to get it open even two feet. It made a groaning sound like nails pulled from old boards and then seized-up completely. They could neither open it or close it after that.

Inside it was black as a mineshaft.

Cook stood there, feeling that darkness and asking himself if he really wanted to go in there.

“Well?” Fabrini said.

Cook snapped the lightstick against his knee and led the way in. The air was dry and stale, motes of dust the size of snowflakes drifting in the glare of the lightstick. They moved around carefully, afraid they’d fall through a hole or gore themselves on a jagged shelf of metal. And maybe, just maybe, they were afraid that something with long white fingers and eyes like red ice would take hold of them.

“Christ, it smells like a tomb in here,” Fabrini said.

And that was close, Cook decided. A sarcophagus that had been brought up from abyssal depths. It smelled of brine and mildew, rust and antiquity. There was another odor, too, something just plain dirty that he did not like.

“Look,” Fabrini said. “A lantern.”

He pulled it off a hook and let Cook see it. Cook took it, saw the shadow of kerosene sloshing around inside. He pulled a pack of waterproof matches from his pocket that he’d taken from the survival equipment. He struck one off the riveted bulkhead and wild, jumping shadows paraded around them. The wick was bone dry and it caught almost immediately.

“Let there be light,” he said, turning up the valve until the bridge was flickering with orange-yellow illumination.

That’s when they got their first good look at the room they were in. It was long and rectangular with life rings on the bulkheads, everything covered in a thick, furry layer of dust. They uncovered an old-fashioned shortwave radio set that was tarnished green. The ship’s compass was thick with sediment. The bridge telegraphs for the port and starboard engines were both locked tight with rust and completely immovable. There was so much grime on the bridge rail that Cook didn’t realize it was brass until he brushed against it and revealed the gleaming metal below. And the ship’s wheel itself was threaded with cobwebs and clotted with dust.

None of what they saw had been touched in decades.

“Christ,” Fabrini said, examining a brass tripod telescope. “How long has this ship been derelict? A hundred years or what?”

Cook just shook his head, led them off into another room. This one had a large, flat table and things like rolled-up posters in slots along the far wall.

“Chart room, I’d guess,” Cook said, setting the lantern into an inch of collected dust on the table.

There were copper chart tubes and navigational books set in low shelves. A nickel-plated aneroid barometer hung above them. Beneath that down of dust, the table was crowded with old navigational instruments — dividers and parallel rulers, three-armed protractors and quadrants. Cook found a sextant in a wooden case with mirrors and shades. In another case, there was a ship’s chronometer.

He was figuring that back in the real world some of this stuff might have been worth money to collectors.

Most of the books were in poor condition, worm-holed with pages bloated from moisture and bindings crumbling with dryrot. Fabrini examined a few and the pages flaked away beneath his fingers like autumn leaves. Some were in better condition, but most were deteriorating and set with a webby sort of mold. He found an especially large book that looked to be leather-bound. Most of the pages were stuck together and those that weren’t were spotted with a black mildew.

“Looks like the ship’s log,” Cook said, bringing the lantern closer.

Fabrini nodded. “Yeah… U.S.S. Cyclops? Yeah, says it right on top of the page. Ever heard of her, Cook?”

He shook his head. “A warship like we thought, though.”

“How in the hell did a Navy ship end up here?”

“How do you think?”

Cook examined the fine spidery writing that had gone a copper color with age. Most of the pages tore when he tried to part them and it was a matter of reading fragments in-between the spots of mildew. Cook leafed through it, found many of the pages in the back in fairly good condition though warped from water stains.

“Christ, these entries… the most recent ones… all date from the First World War. 1917, 1918. Nothing beyond that.” He looked at Fabrini in the yellow light. “The Cyclops has been here a long time, I guess.”

Fabrini swallowed, but didn’t say anything.

Cook kept reading, trying to put together the last weeks before the ship ended up in the Dead Sea. Fabrini was getting impatient, but knew there was something important here, if they could just put it together.

“Apparently,” Cook said after a time, “apparently, the Cyclops was some sort of collier, a coal ship. She was spending a lot of time in the South Atlantic fueling British ships. In mid-to-late February, 1918, she was down in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds like she was having engine problems. There were some sort of repairs made. She took on eleven thousand tons of manganese ore and was supposed to head directly up to Baltimore.” Cook flipped through pages, tried to read through the mildew and separate stuck-together pages. “Apparently there was some kind of bullshit going on. The executive officer, a fellow named Forbes, was locked up by the captain. Guy name of Worley. A lot of these are his entries and they don’t make much sense. I can barely read ‘em.”

Cook read on and explained to Fabrini what he was learning. In Brazil they’d taken some three hundred odd passengers, mostly naval personnel from other ships returning home. But they’d also taken aboard some six military prisoners that were being sent to a naval prison in New Hampshire. Two of them had been implicated in the murder of another sailor and one was due to hang for it.

“They stopped in Barbados, I gather, and had dinner with some dignitaries there. Most of this is gone… but they left on March 4 ^th making for Baltimore. Dammit, these pages are ruined. I’d like to know what happened next…”

Cook went about reading, getting really interested now while Fabrini was getting really impatient. He read on and on for ten or fifteen minutes, ignoring Fabrini’s suggestions that they get out already and get back to the lifeboat.

“I don’t like leaving those two crazies alone down there with Menhaus,” he said.

“Just wait,” Cook said. “Okay, next thing I can read worth a damn is March 13 ^th. Apparently, the Cyclops was already lost, already caught in the fog and this sea. See, there’s been turmoil on the ship. That exec officer, Forbes, he’s doing all the entries now.”

Cook said it was like a soap opera what happened next. During the week that was unreadable, just about everything had happened and he could only put it together from bits and pieces. They were caught in that fog and the crew either mutinied or came damn close to it. Captain Worley refused to listen to the engineer that the engines were in rough shape. Worley kept the ship at full steam, running her right into a gigantic island of weed that fouled up her props. By that time, there was no getting out. The port engine was pretty much toast. The starboard was completely seized-up. The Cyclops was marooned in the weeds — same weed mass it still sat in, Cook figured — and the crew was coming unglued. Worley, from what Cook could tell, sounded violent and irrational, a shitty navigator on the best of days. He was drunk more often than not and spent most of his time verbally and physically abusing the crew.

“Sounds like he wasn’t fit for duty even before they sailed,” Cook explained, mulling it all over. “Somewhere during that lost week, shit hit the fan. Worley, completely out of his head and tired of the men and their ‘superstitious terror’ and ‘lack of fortitude’, as he put it, decided to flex his muscles a little. He took those six prisoners out of the brig and marched them up on deck. In full view of the crew, he shot them all down. Right in the heads with a. 45.”

“Quite a guy,” Fabrini said. “Sounds like Saks.”

“After that, the crew overpowered Worley and locked him in his cabin, they freed Forbes, the Exec. Apparently, he’d been locked up by Worley for standing up to the captain after a sailor died violently. Sounds like it was Worley’s fault, but nobody but Forbes had the balls to tell him so.”

Forbes was popular, it seemed, he managed to hold the crew together, but the engines were beyond repair. There was no hope. During the night, or what passed for night in this place, a number of lifeboats were lowered and much of the crew and passengers set off into the fog. That was the last anyone ever heard of them.

“Read this,” Cook said. “This is important.”

Fabrini sighed, not too happy about the history lesson he was getting here. Leaning over the chart table, he began to read in that oily light:

15 March 1918 (position unknown)

Matters grow worse. Been in this damnable fog for nearly eight days now. Trapped in this seaweed bed with no avenue of escape open to us. Some of the men have suggested, and understandably, that we abandon the Cyclops as she is a death ship now, a derelict, a great tomb for us all unless we abandon her. But abandon to what? Into that awful, congested mist and steaming seaweed sea?

Though I dare not admit it to the crew, I fear there is no earthly deliverance from this place.

For this is not home. This is not the Atlantic. This is no sea one can locate on any chart. I cannot say where we are. As I was under incarceration when we sailed into the fog, I witnessed not a speck of it. What my officers and Dr. Asper have told me of it is grim indeed. Asper has alluded that he believes that we have transported to some unknown world or sphere of existence, through some unguessable conduit that may have to do with distortions of time and space. Although my knowledge of physics is limited, Asper tells me that we can liken this distortion to a crack in a wall, a hole through which we have fallen. Although it sounds fantastic, I concur. I have no choice. I recall a story by H.G. Wells in which a laboratory explosion hurdles a chemist into another, terrible dimension. Our fate is similar.

I wonder into what nightmares the crews of those purloined lifeboats have sailed…

16 March, 1918 (position unknown)

Although it sounds mad at the very least or a lurid chapter pulled from an equally lurid novel, I must record the horrors we have seen or sensed out in the fog. We have caught sight on two different occasions of some immense and luminous beast haunting the weed. It appears able to make itself glow at will. I cannot ascertain its shape, as I only caught a single glimpse of it. But it is immense in size. The men on watch claim to have seen long-necked things rising from the weeds and great brown worms the size of pythons. They also tell of odd patches of weed that move independently of the mass. It’s incredible, to be sure, but I myself have seen some bat-like beast swooping out of the fog over the decks that I first took to be some gigantic moth.

I know we must leave the ship, but I wonder how long we would last in that haunted, primeval sea. For there is life out there, obscene and shadowy life…

17 March, 1918 (position unknown)

Captain Worley is completely insane now. I spoke with him earlier and that blustering, intolerant man I had known so well is forever gone now. What is left is but a shell. A mad, trembling thing that whimpers and screams, given to wild bouts of mania in which he points at things I cannot (and will not) see. In his calmer moments, all he speaks of is taking his own life before “them from out there get to me

…for it will not be good.” He is convinced that there is some arcane, hideous intelligence out in the fog, one that toys with us. He claims it comes through the bulkheads like a ghost when he is alone. That it “has eyes that watch and burn” and that its touch is like “a burning, poisoned ice.”

I dearly wish it were only Worley that has been so plagued by dementia. But the remaining crew and passengers are like demented to varying degrees. The fog that enshrouds us is no common fog. Something about it gets inside men’s minds and turns their thoughts black, turns their brains to rot. Yes, I have felt it, too, and do not dispute the terrible influence it wields.

The morale of the ship is positively decayed. I have not abandoned hope, yet I fear it has abandoned me.

The next few entries were blotted out with mildew. Fabrini wanted to stop right there, but Cook wouldn’t have it. He wanted Fabrini to know the rest. To know what he now knew. So, swearing under his breath, Fabrini skipped to the next legible entry that Cook had his finger on:

20 March 1918 (position unknown)

I have not slept in days now. I dare not. Reading through my entries of the past two days, it seems that I have been near-hysterical. They read like the ravings of a madman. But who can claim not to be mad in this hellish place? I will not go into the things that crawl up the sides of the ship or the loss of the lifeboat and crew to that repellent octopoid monstrosity in plain view of us on the main deck. The less said of such nightmares, the better. Just let me put down here that events have taken a decidedly dark turn. There has been a rash of suicides amongst the crew and passengers. Men have vanished on watch and others right out of their staterooms. Worley is gone now, too. We discovered a hole in the bulkhead of his cabin as if something had chewed its way through steel to get at him. Insane or not, Worley was right about one thing: there is something intelligent in the fog. Some haunter of the dark, some creeping bogey that has slithered up from the pits of primal fear all men carry within their souls. I have felt its influence. It is a cold and deranged intellect, a lunatic shadow out of space and time that watches from the fog and picks clean the minds of men as of a vulture with carrion. Yes, it is driving everyone mad and I with them. The men claim it calls to them out of the fog in the voices of dead loved ones, that it shows them things that are destroying their minds. I will not speak of what it has shown me. God help us all. For each night it gets closer and plucks more men into that noisome mist…

21 March 1918 (position unknown)

Trapped in the weed we are and trapped in the weed we shall remain. Out of frustration more than anything else, I ordered a motorized whaleboat be dropped. The beasts in the weed have been quiet of late, but not that other thing out there. That ghost or whatever it might be called. I ordered the whaleboat lowered, so that I and a select crew including the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Asper, might reconnoiter our position in hopes of finding some possibility of salvation. The mental strain on the crew and passengers is such now, that command has nearly broken down and they have formed into little groups or enclaves which violently oppose one another. There have been several instances now of barbarity. I fear that, given time, the crew and passengers remaining will descend into savagery. Something has to be done. For the sake of our lives and souls, we must take action.

(later)

We rowed through the weeds and once clear, motored our way through the clear channels of the sea. Although “clear” is a bit subjective, considering where we are. The water is pinkish and heavy, scummed with a trembling slime that reminds me of gelatin. Clumps of weeds and rotting debris of all sorts drift through it. Dr. Asper commented that this unknown sea is akin to an organic soup.

An hour out, we sighted a steamship languishing in another mass of weeds. We decided to board her and I wish to God we had not. We used a grappling ladder to climb over the bulwarks. According to the trailboard on the bridge, she is… or was… the Korsund out of Copenhagen. Though slimed with a weird fungus and great growing patches of moss, she was a fine-looking steamer. Straight up-and-down bow and graceful stern. The superstructure was a maze of derricks and booms, spiderwebbed by a profusion of cables and overhead supports. She had tall twin stacks and high ventilators, a fine long deckhouse. Yes, she was a proud and hardy-looking vessel.

But she was derelict… though not, we discovered, empty.

We found great blackened sections on the main deck. Some of the bulkheads crumbled at our touch. I would guess that some intense, mysterious heat had been directed selectively against her. Inside the deckhouse, we found dozens of dead men. Many had killed themselves with razors or by hanging themselves. It was a ghoulish, awful sight. The ship itself had the atmosphere of a morgue, one of violated tombs and dissection rooms. We all felt it. We discovered men in their berths that had been burned to a crisp, oxidized into flaking mummies by a consuming, directed heat that did not so much as char the bedsheets or bolsters! Some of the men immediately began whispering of witchcraft and the like, though Dr. Asper and I do not believe any of this has such a pat, though disturbing explanation.

We found the captain in his cabin. In his chair, he had slit his wrists with a straight razor and was still gripping it. But his face… a mask of utter horror, those eyes staring at something we could not see. I got the mad impression that he killed himself before whatever it was he saw got to him.

In the wheelhouse, there were more cadavers. But these were not burnt or in any other way molested, save for numerous contusions. Dr. Asper examined them, telling me that they looked to have died of some horrendous seizures, that their bones were broken, limbs dislocated, abdominal muscles strained and ruptured. Most had bitten through their own tongues. They all bore the same looks of contorted horror as the captain — lips shriveled back from teeth, mouths locked in screams, faces pulled into psychotic masks, eyes bulging. And their eyes, dear Christ, I have never seen such a thing. They were completely white, though not glazed as from putrefaction, but as if the color had been leeched from them or what they had looked upon had been so harrowing and frightful that it had bleached the pigment free.

Later, Dr. Asper attempted a crude autopsy on one of these cadavers in the Korsund’s meager surgery. He told me that its nervous tissue in general was actually reduced to a sort of pulp. That its brain was nothing more than a sort of runny slime as if said brain was boiled to a soup in its own skull. And what, we wondered, could cause such awful seizures and violent contractions? Could literally melt a man’s brain in his own skull and bleach his eyeballs white?

Examination of several others showed the same degree of damage. Also, Dr. Asper discovered that their internal organs had been dissolved down to a sort of white jelly that burned his hands when he touched it. We found similar globs of this burning jelly in various parts of the ship. It has an unusual sort of shine to it. Even Dr. Asper, with his scientific leanings, cannot explain this jelly.

After some three hours aboard the Korsund, that malign and shadowy death ship, we departed. Some of the men were nearly hysterical with the horrors they saw and those they sensed, but could not see. What appalling tragedy has befallen her? And when, I wonder, will it come for the Cyclops?

24 March 1918

Several days now since last entry. I have no good news, nothing which will save those that look to me for answers which are far beyond my grasp. Dr. Asper fears that the crew I put aboard the Danish ship has been contaminated with some nameless pestilence. They bear terrible burns on the exposed flesh of their hands and arms as if they came into contact with some intense heat. Dr. Asper says the burns are quite similar to radium burns. The men are plagued by fatigue and melancholy, terrible weakness and severe vomiting. Asper is doing his best, but the men grow steadily worse. Dr. Asper, too, I fear is contaminated, but will not admit as such.

Though I exhibit no outward signs of the unknown malady, I find myself increasingly nauseous and listless, unable to eat. My mind is given to dream and I do not trust my own judgement.

Whatever terrifying specter circles us out in the fog, it grows nearer by the day and several times now I have been certain I saw something huge and unspeakable slipping through the mists. Perhaps it is only my fevered imagination, but I do not think so. It has placed a curse over this undead sea and the Cyclops in particular. I cannot say what this haunter is or even guess at its nature, but that it is an evil, hungering taint I have no doubt. It has cocooned the ship up now with invisible threads and slowly, patiently, it is sucking our blood dry drop by terrible drop.

I pray for death.

29? March 1918

There is death now, a grim and covetous death that haunts the ship. Day by day by night more men disappear. Some have escaped into the mist by taking lifeboats. I wish them godspeed. Others have been liberated as well, but not of their own free will. This morning, I believe it was this morning, we discovered the cadavers of three men who vanished several days ago. How can I describe their remains to you? They were leathery, empty husks, their faces like crumbling Autumn leaves, webbed up in some wiry silk that is so sharp it slips through fingers if you merely brush or touch it. The cadavers were wound in this like flies in a spider’s web and hung from the aft coaling booms. We found them dangling there like corpses from a gallows. With some ingenuity, Holmes, the boatswain, managed to cut them down by climbing up there and sawing through the wire filaments that held them with a hacksaw. Dr. Asper is too sick now to examine the bodies. I tried, but even prodding one of them with a knife caused it to shatter as if it were made out of some fragile glass. The bodies have been drained dry of liquid and crystallized. Frozen? I do not know and cannot guess.

I am in poor shape. I move now and exist through sheer force of will. I have not eaten in days and my flesh is sore to the touch as if rubbed raw with rocksalt. I vomit blood regularly. There are less than two dozen of us now.

April 1918?

Very weak now. See omens and portents everywhere. Have seen no one in days now or is it weeks? Sounds coming from the mist as of a million shrieking birds or a buzzing as of bees or wasps. I do not listen to that which scratches at the door, those terrible puckered white faces which peer through the portholes. A huge, globular moon has risen above the mist now and it is the color of fresh blood that paints the decks and superstructure with a red fire. Feel a kinship with the beasts of the haunted sea and fog. For though alien, they are living, are flesh and blood. That which buzzes and shrieks above and below is not corporeal in my understanding of the word. It is a disembodied appetite, a malignant sentience that hungers and hungers stuffs itself with the bones and souls of men grows fat like a spider on human suffering and horror. I must finish this entry must before I hide myself away

Not sure now but I must be alone alone I shut my ears tight against that which haunts the ship that which screams and laughs and calls to me that ravening faceless nightmare cursed iam cursed imust be cursed it comes now and i feel its heat and cold that which slithers and hisses and fills my brain with fever oh the cold burning light frozen crystalline eyes of cosmic fire the buzzing buzzing

The log of the Cyclops ended here and for Fabrini and Cook, by God, it was enough. It was more than enough. For the things they had guessed, had sensed, had been alluded to by Crycek’s lunacy, were sketched out in frenzied, baleful detail by Lieutenant Forbes, the executive officer of the Cyclops, a man who had been dead ninety years. What they were reading was a dire history, the thoughts of a man reaching out to them from the grave.

Fabrini slammed the book shut so forcefully it made Cook jump. “I don’t need this shit, okay?” he said, his face pallid and his voice rusty and scraping. “I can’t take this shit, Cook. And don’t fucking tell me that sailor was just crazy, because I know better. You do, too. Oh Jesus Christ, Cook, I’m coming apart here, okay? Something’s breaking up inside me and I don’t know what to do…”

He was practically sobbing now.

Cook put an arm around him and the physical contact of another living, breathing human being seemed to steady him a bit.

Cook said, “Just take it easy. That shit happened in 1918.”

Fabrini was breathing hard. “And it’s going to happen again.”

“Fabrini, listen to me-”

But Fabrini did not want to listen. “It’s out there now, Cook, whatever got them. You’ve felt it and so have I.” Fabrini’s face looked almost ghoulish in the flickering lantern light. “And we’re going to feel it again real soon. And you know what?”

Cook just shook his head.

Fabrini licked his lips, tried to swallow. “I’m scared shitless and so are you.”

4

During the hour or so while Fabrini and Cook were gone, Saks tried every argument he could think of to get Crycek to turn him loose. But it was no good. Menhaus had fallen asleep in the bow, which left him alone with Crycek. And Crycek just stared at him, listening, but never speaking, seeming to find Saks’s plight amusing.

Thirty minutes into it Saks began to threaten them, telling them how he was going to kill them when he finally got his hands free. Forty-five minutes into it he had lapsed into a glum, stony silence. Crycek kept watching him, burning holes through him with those crazy eyes of his. Menhaus ignored him. The graveyard stillness was what was eating away at Saks. Now and then there would be a slopping, sliding sound from off in the weed or a muted splash from out in the mist, but that was about it. Other than a mysterious droning sound that seemed to come from far off now and again, there was nothing.

Silence. Brooding and secret and infinite.

That and the sound of Menhaus snoring.

Finally, Crycek said, “Do you feel it, Saks? Do you feel it out there waiting for us?”

“Quit with the mind games, Crycek, it’s getting boring,” Saks told him.

But Crycek just smiled. “It’s getting stronger. I can feel it and so can you… closer all the time. We’re drifting closer to its black heart all the time.”

“We’re stuck in the weeds, you silly fuck, we ain’t drifting anywhere.”

“Still, we’re drawn closer. Closer to those teeth and eyes and that cold, ravenous mind. Can you feel its mind, Saks? Feel it trying to find a way in? Because it is, you know, all the time.” He looked out into the fog, then back at Saks. “Sometimes… sometimes it’s so close I can almost touch it. But it’s always scratching at the back of my mind, trying to find a way in”

Menhaus blissfully slept through the exchange.

Saks laughed without mirth. “It gets in your mind, it’s gonna find one big vacancy.”

“Is it already inside you, Saks? The thing? Is it inside you even now?”

“Shut the hell up,” Saks told him.

What he wanted badly right now was to get his hands free, because when that happened, Crycek was gonna be in a world of hurt. Saks hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to wrap those hands around his throat or just thumb the bastard’s eyes right out of their sockets. But something was going to happen. And Crycek wasn’t going to like it much.

Crycek suddenly gripped his head in his hands and out in that cloying mist, that weird droning rose up, faded away just as quick. “Jesus… it’s thinking about us, Saks. I can feel it… feel it in my head. It knows what we’re feeling and seeing… it can read our minds…”

Saks felt something cold under his skin now like a killing frost. “Read my mind?” he said. “Let it read my fucking mind. Hey! You out there! Read my mind right now! Go ahead… you ain’t gonna like what I’m thinking!”

But it was sheer bravado, a thin veneer and nothing more. For inside, Saks was cold and squirming and he badly wanted to scream. He had decided that Crycek was full of bullshit with this devil of his… yet, yet, he could almost feel something in his mind, a whisper of motion like the fluttering wings of a moth.

Two minutes later, he was certain he had imagined it all.

“Gone… it’s gone now, Saks,” Crycek said, chewing on the knuckles of his right hand. “But it’ll be back… maybe… maybe it already got Fabrini and Cook. Maybe that’s what happened.”

“They’ll be back,” Saks said, without much conviction. “Sure they will. When… when Cook gets tired of bouncing his balls off Fabrini’s chin, they’ll be back.”

But Crycek shook his head. “Maybe not. Maybe we’re already alone… just you and me, Saks. And Menhaus.”

“Be my fucking luck.”

Crycek laughed now, but it was a demented sort of laugh like a knife scraped over glass. “If they don’t come back… I wonder, I just wonder which of us that thing will take. Me or you? Maybe it’ll just want one of us.” Crycek’s eyes were blazing now. “Yeah… maybe it just wants a sacrifice, Saks, a human sacrifice. If that’s what it wants, maybe I’ll just have to give it one. I just happen to know a guy who’s already tied up…”

5

When Gosling relieved Soltz on watch, Soltz was looking funny.. . dreamy. There was an odd haze in his eyes, a faraway look like maybe he was not there at all, just lost in distant places and unseen horizons that Gosling himself could never reach.

“You okay, Soltz?”

Soltz seemed to realize for the first time that he was not alone. He looked at Gosling, blinked, and focused his eyes behind those heavy glasses. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Just fine.”

“What were you looking at out there?”

But he just shook his head. “You see funny things in the fog, don’t you?”

“What sort of funny things?”

Soltz thought it over. Something pulsed at his throat and his eyes went shiny and distant again. “Things that aren’t there. Those things I saw… they couldn’t really be there, could they?”

“What did you see?”

Soltz shook his head again. He opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked off into the fog and Gosling did, too. It did not look any different. Swirling and thick, sparkling and yellow-white like a drive-in movie screen.

“I saw a ship out there,” Soltz said. “I know I didn’t really see it, maybe just with my mind… but it was so real.”

“Tell me about it.”

Soltz narrowed his eyes, seeing it again now. “Well… it was an odd ship, a big ship. But not a modern ship at all. One of those old ones like maybe a barque, a pirate ship… yes, that’s what it was, a pirate ship. It had high masts… except they were ragged and full of holes, gray and sagging. I heard it out in the fog, creaking and groaning, wind whistling through the torn canvas… then it came out and I saw it. It had a funny glow to it, you know? There were men along the railing and they were ragged, too. Dead men… ghosts… skeletons. They looked like skeletons… isn’t that odd? Like skeletons.”

Gosling sighed, did not like it. “A ghost ship? Is that what you saw?”

“Yes… I think so. It just went past us and faded into the mist.” He squinted his eyes and cocked his head. “It went past us and there was a woman aboard… a woman. She waved to me. And you know what, Gosling?”

“What?”

“She didn’t have any eyes.”

Gosling felt a chill lay over his skin now. The idea of what Soltz had seen was scaring him, yet Soltz seemed fine with the idea. And that was probably the worst part. Like maybe his mind was going now, was coming apart to the point that he did not recognize fear and danger.

“Go lay down, Soltz, you need a rest.”

Soltz nodded. “What… no, it’s my imagination again. I thought I heard it out there, creaking and groaning, the sound of feet on its decks, pacing and pacing.”

“Go lay down,” Gosling told him.

“I didn’t really see it, did I?”

Gosling told him that he hadn’t, but deep down he honestly had to wonder. Wonder what might next come drifting out of the mist and if it was a ghost ship, would it keep ghosting by… or would it decide to stop?

6

Fabrini seemed better after he admitted his fears openly.

Cook was sure he would want to get off the ship right away, but he seemed to be in no hurry. In fact, when they’d climbed back down to the decks below, he just stood there.

“You know something, Cook? You know what I been thinking?” he said, looking not afraid now, but just angry. “I’m thinking that I’m just plain tired of wandering around with my fucking tail between my legs. I’ve had it. I’m not the sort of guy who gets like this, ready to piss himself over ghost stories. I figure that whatever got the crew here, it wants me, let it take its best shot. Because I sure as hell won’t make it easy.”

“That’s good thinking,” Cook told him. “Reading that log made me start thinking some things myself.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well… maybe I’m wrong, but what if Crycek is right: what if this thing needs our fear, feeds off it? What if it gets stronger on paranoia and anxiety and things like that? What if? Then, I don’t know, maybe if we don’t let it see that we’re scared, maybe it’ll get weaker.”

“Makes sense to me. Let’s show that fucker what we’re made of. Let’s do some exploring.”

That really came as a shock to Cook, but he took it as he took all things with neither a smile nor a frown. They found a hatch and went below decks, down into the damp darkness. And down there, in the shadows and stink, it wasn’t quite so easy to puff out your chest. For if the atmosphere had been forbidding above, it was positively rancid below.

Using the lantern, they began exploring the mazelike passages below decks. Cook figured it was going to be bad down there and he was right. There was an awful, gagging stink in the air that was worse than even the smell of the sea and weeds. This was a foul, suffocating odor of rank decomposition and noxious dissolution. Like something wet and moldy locked in a hot closet, boiling away in its own juices. A weird combination of organic decay and rusting machinery, stagnant water and mildewed woodwork… a half dozen other things neither man could identify or wanted to.

“I feel like a worm,” Fabrini said. “A worm sliding through the carcass of something dead.”

It was right on target, but created such an absurd visual that Cook actually laughed… at least until he heard his laughter echoing back at him. No, none of it was funny. Not in the least. There were greasy, gray toadstools and furry green moss growing through rents in the bulkheads and more of that bloated fungus that was just as white and fatty as the flesh of a corpse pulled from a river. A hot, yeasty odor came off it.

Cook stepped on something soft and pulpy about the size of a cantaloupe and it went to juice under his boot. He jumped back with a cry, realizing what he’d stepped on was something like a puffball, a cloud of yellow spores spread out in the lantern light.

“You ever seen anything like this?” Fabrini asked,

Cook just shook his head.

The ship was dead, obviously, yet there was such a profusion of growth and morbid germination, it almost seemed like maybe it was moving from the inorganic to the organic. That given time, the Cyclops would be a seething diseased mushroom that only looked like a ship.

They moved on, ducking beneath ribbons of fungi, bringing light where there had only been moist darkness and bacterial action for decades. The air was saturated with a brackish sewer smell. Shadows pooled and bled like black blood. The bulkheads were thick with a slick yellow moss. Clots of fungus dropped from the ceiling overhead and hit the decks like rotten plums. Everything was creaking and groaning, dripping and oozing and stinking.

It was bad. God yes, it was bad.

But something in them, in both of them, pushed them on. Maybe it was some inexplicable, suicidal desire to see the very worst that floating mortuary could show them. Maybe they could be satisfied with nothing less. And maybe, after reading the ship’s log and having their minds touched by those of the crew, they had to know what became of them.

Doors were either welded shut with rust or had bulging tongues of fungi seeping around their edges as if the cabins behind them were bursting with fungal growth. The fungus was on the decks, too, and they were walking right through it, their boots making gluey, sticky sounds as they lifted them with each step. Cook had brushed some of it on a bulkhead with the back of his hand and it had been warm and oily like the skin of a dying man.

They found another corridor and the fungi had not abated.

But one stretch of wall was free of it, was blackened and pitted as if a great fire had swept through there. Cook and Fabrini paused before a doorway. It was burnt black. When Cook prodded it with the barrel of the Browning it shattered like candy glass. It was entirely crystallized.

“Just like the log said,” Fabrini pointed out. “That ship, the Korsund, remember? Forbes said it looked burned, that the walls fell apart when they touched them.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Fabrini tapped the door with his knife and it fell apart like ice in a spring thaw. “What could cause something like this?” he wondered out loud.

Cook shook his head. “I’m not sure… it’s like it was burned and then frozen immediately afterwards, you know? Like it was hit with a raging heat that weakened it and then dunked in a tank of liquid oxygen, frozen solid in a split-second. What else could weaken steel, make it like this?”

Now that the door was reduced to shards at their feet, Cook held the lantern in there. There was dust everywhere. And where there wasn’t dust, there was more of that fungi. The floor was thick with it. It climbed up onto a bunk, was in the process of swallowing a desk-

“Jesus,” Fabrini said, “look at that…”

Cook was looking. Seated at the desk was a skeleton dressed in dirty, dingy rags that might have been a uniform at one time judging from the tarnished buttons on the breast. The skull was thrown back, jaws sprung as if in a scream. The fungus had absorbed the yellowed skeleton right up to the ribcage, fingers of it snaking up to the jawline. To Cook, with all that fungi on it, it looked like the skeleton was white wax that had melted down over the desk and pooled onto the floor. Because that’s how it looked… like a Halloween candle.

The fungi seemed almost aware of the light on it, began to bleed droplets of diseased sap.

“You think…” Fabrini began. “You think that might be-”

“Forbes,” Cook said. “I’ll bet it is.”

He didn’t comment on what they were seeing anymore than that. The sickly yellow light of the lantern created wavering shadows, made the skeleton look like it was leaning forward, then back, made the skull grin like it was laughing at them.

And maybe it was.

Because it knew things they did not. It knew plenty of things that they would not know until it was too goddamn late to do anything about them. It sat there, laughing in its sea of fungus and ancient rot, flashing a toothy mortuary grin. Filled to bursting with a grim, macabre mirth. You could almost hear it saying: Well, well, fucking well… look what the cat dragged in… or will soon drag out. Almost ninety years I’ve been waiting for someone and now here you are looking in on me, isn’t that sweet? And you want to know what it was like when I was clothed in flesh, when good dutiful Lieutenant Forbes was a man and not a fungal wraith? Yes, you want to know what it was like for him, sitting in here, waiting and waiting, hearing voices and lost souls whispering in the corridor, things scratching and clawing and hissing his name. How it was for him, his mind gone to a soft quivering rot because he knew he was alone and that thing was coming to claim him. You want to know what it was like, him sick with radiation poisoning… because that’s what it was and you know it. The breath of that thing is radiation, a wasting frozen atomic fission born in black godless cosmic voids… the sort of radiation that melts holes through the fabric of time and space and is a cold fire burning in your guts until you vomit out your insides in glistening, greasy loops. Yes, that’s what it was like for Forbes. His guts coming up his throat and then that doorway suddenly radiant with a flickering, supercharged energy that was so very bright it was actually the purest form of darkness, the absolute darkness of black holes and dead stars. Then it came through the door, passing straight through the metal because solid matter is like a mist to it and that’s when Forbes saw it, something immense, something sinister and intensely alien. Something that perverted three-dimensional space with its very arcane, impossible existence. An obscenity ancient and undying born in a tenebrous antimatter firmament of sentient slime where physics and geometry are screaming, cabalistic cancers. This, my friends, is what our good Lieutenant Forbes saw. What he feasted upon and what feasted upon him. Something lunatic and profane in appearance, a violation of known space that squeezed his brain dry like a sponge just seeing it. A crawling and slithering accumulation of arcing colors and flesh that was not flesh but smoke… colors with texture and sound and smell… writhing, hideous waxen colors that looked into him with green crystal eyes that bleached his own eyes white and boiled his brain to soup just looking upon them, turned his gray matter to a white radioactive jelly that ran from his ears and eyes and mouth…

All of it, whether memory or psychic invasion, blasted through Cook’s brain in a searing wave that left him gasping, a choked whimpering in his throat. His head spun and he fell into Fabrini who held him up, scared now, wanting to know what in the hell was happening. But Cook could not tell him. Could not tell him anything. Because he had seen it, he had seen and felt and physically witnessed the merest fraction of Forbes’ final moments and it left him wriggling with a fear that was so big, so total, it blotted out everything for a moment… even his own mind. He stood there, hanging onto Fabrini and for a few, lunatic moments his mind had been washed clean like a blackboard and he did not know who he was or where he was. And then it all came surging back, leaving him breathless, his temples throbbing.

But what had it been?

Bones were just bones and they could not have sent those images into his head. Cook could not accept such things. Could not let himself go there. Pitted, yellow bones holding, after all these years, a distant and feral memory, a reflection, an echo of a horror beyond human experience… was it possible? Or was the answer far worse? Was it just a telepathic linkup to that thing’s mind, its consciousness, letting him know but a sliver of the fate that was in store for him? For all of them?

“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini was saying. “Are you all right?”

And Cook was nodding his head. “I think the air in here is bad or something. I got all woozy or something. I’m… I’m okay now.”

Maybe Fabrini believed that and maybe he didn’t.

Regardless, he led Cook up and out of those subterranean passages and onto the deck where the air was somewhat cleaner, fresher. Even the mist didn’t look so bad after what was below.

After a time, Fabrini said, “Should we go back to the boat?”

“If you want.”

But Fabrini shook his head. “Let’s look around some more.”

Apparently, whatever had gotten into Cook’s head, it had not touched Fabrini. His zeal for exploring the ship had not lessened. Maybe it was being cooped-up in that lifeboat for so long. Maybe that’s what it was. Even exploring a death ship and not knowing what new horror might show itself next did not make him want to leave.

But Cook thought: Of course not. Fabrini has a mission now. Exploration. And anything, even this damned ship, is better than waiting helpless in that lifeboat.

They went into a deckhouse aft and took the companionway below. There was much less fungus here, very little of it in fact. And the air was surely better, although the darkness was equally as claustrophobic. Eventually, they came to the engine room. It was a gigantic, vaulted place like an amphitheater set with mammoth steam turbines and attendant arteries of hoses and vents and pipes. There were a few inches of black, dirty water on the floor.

“I’d say she won’t run,” Fabrini said.

“I’m thinking you’re right.”

They chuckled over their little joke, moving around the turbines and pistons, Fabrini telling Cook how he wished to God he’d followed his first instinct and told Saks to stick the job up his ass. Because, honestly, he’d felt something was wrong with the entire thing, only he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it.

They moved by lantern light into what might have been some kind of storeroom and right away they saw more death.

“Shit,” Fabrini said.

Shit was right. There were maybe a dozen skeletons tangled up in a central, bony mass like something scooped from a mass grave. But it wasn’t all those skulls and ribcages and jutting femurs that made them stop dead, it was what was on them.

Crawling, fluttering, purring things.

At first, Cook thought he was looking at living brains, brains with attached spinal cords creeping amongst the bones and rot and oily water. Just like in that old ‘50s B-movie with Marshal Thompson. But that’s not what he was seeing at all. Whatever they were, they had heads about the size of tea saucers, flattened out and connected to long, bifurcated tails set with fluttering cilia. They were fleshy and pale, making a thrumming noise that sounded very much like purring kittens.

They paid the intruders no mind.

Cook wasn’t sure whether they were insect or crustacean or a little of both. They were eyeless and grotesque, moving with an inching motion like slugs. They inspired a bone-deep atavistic loathing.

“Disgusting,” he said under his voice.

“Sea lice,” Fabrini said. “Those are fucking sea lice. Salmon get ‘em. Other fish, too. I saw ‘em on TV… but only under a microscope. Not this big… these things are a hundred times the size of sea lice…”

The things moved through the bones and into the water beneath, staying there. Revolting as they were, Cook figured Fabrini was probably right. Just sea lice grown to vast proportions in this netherworld. Mutants in the real world, but just harmless critters here in this place.

“Let’s go,” Fabrini said. “Let’s check out the cabins above.”

“All right. Then we better get back. I don’t like leaving Menhaus in charge too long.”

And up to the cabins they went.

7

They unzipped the canopy on the raft, deciding to take their chances because of what they had heard: a foghorn.

The others had been awake, lost in their own little worlds. Soltz had been asleep… and suddenly he sat right up, looking shocked and frightened, eyes glassier than the spectacles covering them. “I heard it,” he said. “I heard it.”

“What?” George said, thinking maybe he had heard something, too.

“Go back to sleep,” Gosling said. “You were just dreaming.”

But they all heard it then. That low moaning sound coming through the mist and it could be nothing but the throaty bellow of a foghorn. It sounded again about five minutes later and this time it was even closer. George, who had been thinking maybe it was the mournful call of some sea serpent like in that Ray Bradbury story, suddenly changed his mind.

It was a goddamn foghorn, all right.

So they unzipped the canopy and sat under the inflated arches, listening and looking and waiting. For they were all thinking the same thing: a foghorn? Well, that could only mean one of two things. Either there was a ship out there or there was a lighthouse. And the idea of one seemed just as ludicrous as the other, but they dismissed neither. God only knew what that fog had pulled into this place through the centuries.

“It can’t be gone, not already,” Soltz said.

Gosling told him to be quiet. He wanted everyone listening. If there was a boat out there blowing its horn, then he wanted to know where it was.

Five minutes later, the horn sounded again.

And what a beautiful, haunted sound it was. A deep baritone crying out in the mist, calling stray ships to safety like a mother calling in her young, warning of toxic mists and rocky headlands, reefs that liked to set their teeth into unwary hulls. It was so loud it actually made the rubber skin of the raft vibrate when it sounded.

“Christ,” George said, “we gotta be right on top of it. Where the hell is it?”

But they could see nothing.

Maybe it was close and maybe it was far, maybe it was an echo sounding from another world, just a noisy ghost that would tempt them with hope and then shatter it just as quick. Regardless, the men in the raft could not see it for the fog would not allow it, it would not part and there was no prophet’s voice to make it do so. It hung on, thick and thicker, roiling and swirling and encasing, an ethereal roof and four enclosing walls, a ghost-sheath that covered and constricted and tucked tight. The warm sea brewed it and the chill air blew it into life, a miasma of gases and vapors and dank moisture that was semi-luminous via its own otherworldly chemistry.

“Fucking soup,” Gosling said. “If we could only see through it.. .”

Sometime later, the foghorn sucked in a breath and sounded again, but this time it was distant and lonely and lost. Eerie-sounding, like some behemoth roaring as it submerged. And when it came again, it was barely audible.

“Gone,” Soltz said, despair on him thick as ice. “Just… gone. We’ll drift until the flesh falls from our bones.”

“Knock it off,” Gosling said, really not in the mood for a pity-party.

“It doesn’t make any damn sense,” Cushing said. “I mean, yeah, we’re drifting, but we’re not moving that fast. We’re not clipping along at sixty miles an hour here. That foghorn couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away in the mist… yet we passed it like we’re in a racing boat.”

“It’s the physics of this place… they’re fucked up,” was George’s scientific take on it.

After that, there was silence.

Nothing to say and nothing that could be said that would make sense of it or lessen the tremendous let-down they all felt. Nothing to do but sit quietly and stare off into that fog which was huge and billowing and sure of itself. Sure that it had them secreted away where they would never be found.

George was staring into that clotted, stagnant sea, watching patches of weeds float by, feeling the raft skid around weed masses that were thick and verdant. That’s when he saw something just behind the raft, something dark spreading out down there like an oil slick, a few inches beneath the surface.

Looks like an old coat down there, he thought, a tarp or something.

But he knew it wasn’t any of those things, not here, and he wished to God it would just go away. But it wasn’t going away, he saw, it was drifting along with them like a kite tangled in the sea anchor.

George crept back a bit from the stern of the raft. He really wasn’t sure why, but there was something he did not like about that kite. It inspired a weakness in his belly. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he’d been in the Dead Sea long enough now to respect his own apprehensions.

He stared at it… it moved. Fluttered, something.

The air in his lungs felt oddly dry and prickly. There was a tenseness at the back of his neck, a certainty that this was not just something tangled in the anchor line, but something that chose to be there. Not accidental in the least.

“What’re you doing over there, George?” Gosling asked him.

“There’s something caught on the anchor line… I think,” he said. “I’m not really sure.”

“Well, don’t worry about it.”

“It looks alive.”

That got everyone’s attention. Except for Soltz who just sat up front, brooding and unreachable. Cushing came back by George and looked at the shape in that dark water.

“Looks like a skate, kind of,” he said.

And before George could tell him to just leave it be, Cushing grabbed an oar and jabbed it with the tip. It gave easily, sank down deeper into the darkness.

And then it came back up. Fast.

Like maybe it was pissed-off and it wasn’t the sort of thing that took kindly to being prodded with oars. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. You mess with me… look out, Charlie.

George thought maybe he let out a little involuntary cry when the thing came up out of the water and slime. It was flapping great wings or fins and he couldn’t decide which they were. Just that they spread out about six-feet tip to tip. It came up, flapping those wings and spraying the raft with water, looking oddly like a devil-ray that had learned how to fly. It hovered behind the raft like a moth at a windowpane, getting no closer, but surely getting no farther away. It carried a nauseating, briny stink to it like sun-boiled seaweed.

“Keep away from it!” Gosling warned them, taking out another flare in case he had to give this monstrosity a taste.

It was roughly diamond-shaped, with long triangular wings or pectoral fins. Its body was streamlined like that of a manta ray, flattened-out with the cartilaginous flesh of a shark. A dirty slate-gray above and mushroom-white below. There were a series of horizontal slits below where the wings met its body, maybe gill slits, and hooked brown claws, two on each wing tip. It had a long whiplike tail with raised, barbed spines that looked much like the needles of a pufferfish.

George and the others had moved clear of the stern now.

“If I had a gun,” Gosling said. “I’d shoot the ugly cocksucker.. .”

And it was ugly. Plain dirt-ugly. Something you saw crawl out from under a log that you instinctively stepped on without giving it a chance. George was feeling it, too, though he could not exactly describe even to himself the disgust this thing inspired. He didn’t want to kill it exactly… but he sure as hell didn’t want to hug it. It was simply so offensive and outrageous in form, it made you want to look at it. Like a couple spiders mating, you watched even though the idea of it made your flesh crawl and your guts pull up in sickening yellow waves.

It belonged in a jar or stuffed in a museum… but it did not belong alive and vital

It’s just a dumb animal, he told himself, it’s just being curious. It’ll get bored and leave. Sooner or later.

It reminded him of some weird mutant death’shead moth. Almost.

One that had mated with some slimy thing from a primordial sea.

And the thing-whether bird or bat or fish — just hovered there, looking much like a kite as George had thought. Its wings flapped and its body tipped forward, then back, as if it were balancing itself. When it tipped back, George could see that it had a series of small remora-like parasites hanging from its belly. They looked like deflated balloons. When it tipped forward, he saw that it had something like a head, a narrow disk lacking eyes but set with four pale yellow segmented stems like lobster antenna that were whipping about. They were tipped with bright pink nodules that looked something like eyes, but were probably some sort of sensory apparatus.

And it had a mouth… a vertical gash that moved side to side rather than up and down like the jaws of a spider. Beyond that maw, you could see not teeth, but a slick and squirming tongue-like projection of tissue that was just as white as a ghost-pipe. As they watched, it uncoiled like rope from spool and came out tasting the air. It was hollow as a garden hose and about the same thickness, jutting in and out of the mouth maybe six or eight inches like a frog’s tongue after a fly.

Cushing jabbed the oar in its direction and it jerked back, but did not leave. If anything, it came a little closer now, just hovering there like a hummingbird, those wings fluttering and vibrating madly.

“What the hell are we gonna do?” George asked.

As if it heard him, it started making a weird hissing sound, sort of a repetitive whirring like a grasshopper in a distant field.

Gosling said, “I hate to waste a flare on it… but I don’t like the looks of it.”

“Well, somebody do something!” Soltz told them, tired of all this inaction and equally tired of staring at that monstrosity like something that had winged itself free of a B-movie. “We just can’t sit here!”

And maybe the thing heard that or perhaps it just sensed the stress in Soltz’s voice or maybe it had just been biding its time.. . but Soltz saying that was like a catalyst. Like something had jabbed the thing’s asshole with an electric cattle prod. It pulled back, dipped low over the water and came back up. Looked like it might just call it a day and then it came on with attitude.

It swooped right over the top of the raft, one of those claws on its wing tip brushing against one of the arches and slitting it clean open. It swooped again before anyone had a chance to do more than hear the hsssss of the arch deflating and it caught another arch.

Gosling was yelling, “Watch it! Watch it! Keep your fucking heads down!”

And everyone was ducking and shouting and scrambling madly to keep out of its way. Making that weird, trilling th-th-th-th sound, it swooped down again. Cushing ducked under its lethal bulk and George almost did. But as he threw himself to the deckplates, he instinctively threw up his arm to shield his face and one of those brown claws scratched him from elbow to wrist. And that’s all it was, just a scratch. If it had been any more than that, he knew, it would have taken his arm off like surgical steel. He lay there, as everyone shouted and Cushing kept swinging at that crazy bat with his oar, looking dumbly at his arm. At the scratch. Just a white abrasion, really. A white line that went pink, then red as it opened like lips, blood bubbling out.

And the bat-thing kept coming at them, darting in and out with an amazing speed and agility. The arches had been pretty much shredded by then, had collapsed like punctured balloons.

Gosling was trying to get a shot at it with the flare gun, but it moved too fast, kept hovering too close to the men and the raft. And what he didn’t want to do was to burn a hole through either.

Cushing gave it a couple good whacks with the oar and it felt the impact, but it seemed impervious. It was tough and leathery and built for battle. These soft pink-skinned things didn’t stand a chance.

And it was all bad enough up to that point and then things got a little worse.

It rose up above the raft and had it just sat still up there a few more seconds, Gosling might have been able to peg it, but it had no intention. It swooped back down like an enemy divebomber, one of its wings knocking the oar out of Cushing’s hands and went right after Soltz. It targeted him and went right at him, a bee descending on a flower.

Soltz turned to his side as it hit him, as it took hold of him with those hooks, bending its wings like arms. That long, whipping tail was snaking in the air. Gosling took hold of Cushing’s oar and hammered the thing with all he had. It made a squealing sound and that barbed tail whipped past Gosling’s face, just missing his eyes by a scant two inches.

The bat-thing wasn’t on Soltz long, but long enough to make him shudder with convulsions. Long enough so that Gosling saw that white, hollow tube of a tongue come jabbing out and catch Soltz in the cheek, leaving a burning welt in its path… and a sickening odor of seared flesh.

And, yes, long enough to make Soltz scream.

And what a scream it was.

It was a mad, wailing hysterical sound that went right through everyone on the raft and echoed out through that lonesome fog like a child screaming from the bottom of a well.

It flapped and pulled away from Soltz, that tongue catching him one last time, knocking his glasses aside and wetting down his closed, pinched eyelid with a clear mucus. The effects of which were instantaneous: the thin flesh of his eyelid bubbled like hot plastic and melted into threads of skin that looked much like strands of rubber. And then he was really screaming, thrashing and writhing, his eyeball gone a shocking shade of red.

The raft was bobbing and jumping like a carnival ride. The bat-thing had rolled off Soltz, its wings hammering wildly in the raft as it tried to lift itself up. And Gosling had the oar still and as he brought it up to strike that thing, he realized in a split second of absolute revulsion that the thing’s tongue, that it had been tasting Soltz, seeing if he was worth eating, and then he brought the oar down. He’d been aiming at the flat spade of its head, but what he actually hit were two of those wild twitching antennae. The oar snapped one of them clean off and bent another over like a broken reed.

The thing really squealed then, flapping and whirring and jumping until it rose up two or three feet, veered drunkenly to the side and crashed back into the sea. It was trying to fly or swim, but all it was doing was skating over the water in a circle like a dog chasing its own tail.

And Gosling knew suddenly and with complete conviction that those antennae were like some kind of general sensory organ… nose and ears and eyes all rolled into one. It was blind and helpless without them. He had struck the two on the left side of its head and now it could not get its bearings on that side.

But there wasn’t much time to think about any of that.

Although its claws had done no more damage than slitting open three of the four arches-the fourth hanging over like a question mark now, bearing the weight of the other three-that barbed tail had lanced the port gunwale whose chambers were even now deflating.

George was holding his arm which was red with blood. “I’m okay,” he told them. “I’m all right.”

And compared to Soltz, he surely was.

The creature’s claws had slit open his face and shoulders and belly. He was bleeding profusely. He had severe burns on his face from its tongue. And his left eye that had gotten licked… it was just blood-red and swollen like a golf ball, oozing a bile of yellow tears.

And all that was bad enough, but as they went to him he began to have a seizure.

8

It was Fabrini’s idea really, but Cook went along with it. Crycek told them they were inviting death and Menhaus said it would be like living in a coffin. Saks thought it was amusing, told them if they cut him lose he’d even let Fabrini have his sister.

So the five of them boarded the Cyclops, made their way to the aft deckhouse and the cabins below. Crew’s quarters, is what Saks told them. Simple, spartan, efficient. They chose two of the cabins and began cleaning them out, which was a matter of dusting them and opening portholes to get some air in. The bunk mattresses and bolsters were mildewed and patched with rot and they dragged them out and dumped them in the corridor. After a time, the cabins weren’t exactly the Holiday Inn, but they were livable.

What neither Cook nor Fabrini especially cared for was turning Saks loose, but sooner or later, they would have had to anyway.

“I’ll even do you a favor,” Saks told them. He motioned with his thumb to Crycek. “I’ll bunk with the nut, so you two girls can spend some quality time sucking tongue.”

Fabrini just glared at him. “We starting that shit again, Saks?”

And Saks just grinned. Broad, full, filled with secret delight. And you could just see what was in his eyes, what was bouncing through his head: unfinished business. There was unfinished business between Fabrini and him. And when it came time to dance again, it wouldn’t be in the confines of a lifeboat.

Menhaus, some color back in his cheeks now that they were out of the water, said, “I’ll be bunking in with them. There won’t be any trouble.” There was almost something fierce beneath his words. “There better not be any trouble.”

Saks thought that was funny. “Not from me, not from me. You might want to keep an eye on Crycek, though.”

“Oh,” Cook said, “Crycek’s got his feet under him now, I think.”

“More or less,” Crycek said.

All in all, none of them liked that somehow pernicious atmosphere of the ship, but they all agreed on one thing: it beat the shit out of the lifeboat. At least they could move here. At least they could stretch their legs and get out of one another’s hair. And if something came after them, at least there was room to fight and evade. And the way they were looking at things, that was definitely something.

Later, once they had a snack of crackers and cheese washed down with tepid water and Cook had given them their glucose tablets like the survival manual said, Fabrini and Cook sat in their cabin and chatted. Even with the porthole open, the air was still dank and clammy. Not necessarily chilly, just heavy and moist and stale.

“I don’t want the others knowing about that log book,” Cook said, knowing that Saks was up on deck and Crycek was out foraging for things… what those things were, he would not stay. “It won’t do them any good.”

Fabrini chuckled. “You think any of that would bother Saks? Not on your life. Boarding a fucking ghost ship wouldn’t bother him… long as he was free to plot and scheme.”

“Which he’s probably doing right now.”

Neither of them doubted that. You could count on certain things in life and Saks being a low-down, underhanded weasel was one of them. But was he really a danger? That was something they could not decide. Even with the shit he’d put them through on the raft — he claimed it was a temporary madness, a hysteria that had run its course — they could not be sure. Fabrini didn’t like it, but Cook explained to him that Saks probably wouldn’t harm them. That he knew one thing about Saks now and he knew it well: Saks was deeply afraid of being alone.

Cook said, “Crycek seems like he’s starting to get a grip on things, I don’t want to upset him with any of that shit in the log. Maybe it’s all a load of bullshit, but somehow I doubt it.”

Fabrini just nodded. “What do you think about it, though? About all that shit Forbes wrote in there… do you think it’s all really true?”

“Yes,” Cook said, “I do.”

Given that Cook was pretty much in charge now — something he still was not real crazy about — he wondered if such an admission was a good idea. Surely, the leadership manual would have advised against it. When you were the man in charge, you had to consider morale. But there was absolutely no way Cook could lie about any of it. And particularly not to Fabrini who had read the log and had been there when Cook had been touched by the long-dead mind of Forbes… or whatever that had been. Impression, reflection, call it what you will.

“So where does it leave us?” Fabrini said pretty calmly.

“Hell if I know.” Cook sat on his bunk, staring at his knees. “I guess we just have to accept that we’re lost in some terrible place and that there’s terrible things here.”

Oh boy, how was that for building morale?

“I was thinking about what Forbes said about that other ship out there,” Fabrini said. “And I’m thinking there’s got to be lots more. I mean, you’ve heard all that Devil’s Triangle shit same as me. If half of it’s true, this place has to be like a fucking junkyard of lost ships.”

“And planes.”

“Exactly. Maybe after we sort ourselves out a day or two, we ought to think about doing a little exploring a little further out. Never know what we might find”

No, Cook was thinking, you just never know what you might find. Or what might find you.

But Fabrini definitely had a valid point. The Cyclops was just one of hundreds if not thousands. Ships and planes had been getting funneled into this dead zone for as long as there had been ships and planes. And, no doubt, the Mara Corday was not going to be the last. Out there, just maybe, there would be other ships and boats and maybe even if they didn’t have people on them, they would probably have food and water, maybe motorboats and gasoline, weapons, you name it.

“Yeah, I like the way you think, Fabrini,” Cook told him. “If there’s other ships out there, we might just find some supplies and make a go of this.”

And not only did he like Fabrini’s sudden pioneer resourcefulness, but he liked his sudden positive turn of mind. He’d been scared before, Cook knew. Bad scared… and who hadn’t and who still wasn’t? But he had emerged from that with a refreshing can-do sort of spirit. And that was good. Because in this place, Cook decided, your mind could destroy you just as quick as what waited out in the fog.

Fabrini waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, Cook. I mean, shit, it would take a lot to rain on my parade now being that it’s already fucking sunk.”

“Who said there’s anything on my mind?”

“Nobody had to.”

Cook nodded. “All right. All this is bad enough, sure, but now here’s a little icing on the cake.” He got up and walked over to the porthole, surveying the mist and weeds. “You read what Forbes said. About that white jelly being inside those dead men and how they’d found globs of it other places… what did he say? It had a funny shine to it? That the doctor had burned his hands touching it? That the burns on those corpses looked like radium burns? You see what I’m getting at here?”

But Fabrini just shook his head. “Cook, I dropped out in the tenth grade. Spell it out for me.”

Cook smiled, but not for long. “Radiation,” he said.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, those burns and all the crew getting sick after they came off the Korsund… it sounds like radiation exposure, doesn’t it? Radiation sickness. Forbes wouldn’t have known about radiation back in 1918 and that Dr. Asper probably only knew a little, but it sure fits the bill, doesn’t it?”

Fabrini looked pale. “That thing Forbes talked about… he thought it got the crew on the Korsund and his own crew on this tub… shit, do you think this ship is still full of it? For all we know, we might already glow in the dark.”

“If we’ve been exposed, it’s probably too late,” Cook told him. “We’re probably saturated… but remember now, I’m just guessing here. That’s all. Besides, not all radiation stays active for a long time like when they drop a bomb. I read once where the majority of radioactive materials have a half-life — disintegration rate — of days or weeks, something like that. So I’m guessing that after almost ninety years, we’re probably safe.”

“Until it comes again.”

“Yes,” Cook said.

He knew he was reaching with a lot of this. But it sure sounded like whatever that thing was, radioactivity was part of its natural properties much like exhaling carbon dioxide was part of man’s. And maybe it wasn’t radiation as they understood it, but it was something damn close.

“If it’s gonna come for us,” Fabrini said, “I just wish it would already and fry our brains. Get it done with.”

“If it’s still even here,” Cook said.

Fabrini just shook his head. “Oh, it’s here, all right. Crycek might be crazy… but it don’t mean he’s wrong.”

9

They did what they could for Soltz, which wasn’t much.

Gosling, who had a pretty good working knowledge of first aid, bandaged his wounds and stopped the bleeding. Gave him some pain killers and washed out his eye with sterile solution, put a bandage over it. But that was about it. That was all they could do under the circumstances. They covered him with one of the waterproof blankets and pretty much hoped for the best.

“He isn’t going to make it, is he?” Cushing said.

Gosling just shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Soltz had lapsed into something like a coma now. He moaned from time to time and shivered violently. He was feverish and sweating, a sweet unpleasant smell coming off him that reminded Cook of burnt hot dogs.

George was watching the bat-thing.

It was dead now.

Just drifting through the weed same as they were. He wasn’t sure what had killed it. Not really. Only that it had died maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it had fallen into the water. The only damage they had done it was smashing up its antennae. Would that have been enough? Could it have died from damaged sensory apparatus? George didn’t think so. Cushing was of the mind that it had asphyxiated, that it had been a water breather and it had just been out of the water too damn long. Simple, pat. But it did not explain why the thing had those streamers of yellow pulp floating from its mouth like it vomited out its own intestines.

George was thinking change in pressure.

Like one of those deep-sea fish brought up in a trawl net, the kind that sort of explode from the loss of pressure.

“I don’t know,” Cushing said. “That bastard seemed pretty lively to me, George. Abyssal creatures tend to be pretty sluggish when they come up, if they’re alive at all.”

Point. The bat-thing had been hovering for some time behind the raft. If it was suffocating, why hadn’t it just dived back in? Curiosity? It didn’t understand what the raft and the pink creatures in it were so it had to find out even at the cost of its own life? No, that was silly. Animals could be curious, but only to a point.

Maybe it was sick, George got himself to thinking as he prodded its carcass with the oar, maybe that’s what it was about.

But then looking over at Soltz, he figured it out.

Or thought he did.

Soltz was either dying or close to it. Gosling said his cuts were severe, but not life-threatening… yet he was feverish and shaking, seemed to be in some sort of a coma. Like the guy had contracted some weird tropical disease or was full of infection. And maybe, just maybe, it was both. The bat-thing’s saliva had burned him, gotten into his cuts… and who knew what kind of parasites and germs it carried? Things deadly to human biology perhaps, alien things our immune system couldn’t hope to fight against. So, if that was true, maybe the same was true in reverse: the biology of that thing was killing Soltz, but maybe his biology had killed it off first.

He told Cushing this and Cushing liked it. “Makes sense, George. You’ve got a logical, scientific turn to your mind and you never even knew it.”

“Yeah, that’s great, but if he’s infected with something… we could all be in danger.”

“Does that worry you?” Gosling asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “And what are our alternatives?”

George knew what they were. “We don’t have any.”

And they didn’t. Living in a raft at close quarters pretty much ruled out the possibility of quarantine and there were no emergency rooms handy. Soltz was one of them. Infected or not, they had to care for him even if it meant getting sick themselves. They could not abandon him… if they did that, they were no better than, well, Saks for example.

“You’re right, we don’t have any. So?”

George just shrugged. “So I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Figured you’d say that.”

Good old Gosling. The supreme pragmatist. You could always count on him to see the practical side of just about anything.

Gosling had repaired the tears in the gunwale of the raft using the repair kit and had aired it back up using the hand-pump. They had taken some water, but not enough to be alarmed about. The inflated arches were pretty much toast, though. The creature’s barbed tail spines had literally shredded them and that was that.

George was starting to drift off when he realized that there was something in front of the raft. Another shadow, though this one was larger than the devil ray beast. Much larger. Whatever it was, it had to be easily twenty-feet across and seemed to be getting larger by the moment.

Maybe it was a submerged bank of weed, maybe something else.

He was about to draw Gosling’s attention to it when Soltz came out of his fugue, started babbling about the rusted chain on his bicycle in-between ragged breaths of air. Gosling went to him with Cushing at his side. Cushing mopped sweat from his brow and Gosling checked his vitals.

“How is he?” George asked, to which Gosling just shook his head.

And that pretty much said it all.

Soltz was fading and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and watch him die. And the idea of that just about sucked the lot of them dry.

That shadow was closer now. Easily within ten feet of the raft. Whatever it was, either they were drifting toward it or it was drifting toward them. Take your pick.

“You see it?” George said, knowing Cushing had.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Gosling had seen it, too, but was preoccupied with trying to make Soltz comfortable. Maybe he had, for Soltz had gone back to his dream-island again which was about all you could hope for under the circumstances. If he had to die, it would be better if he went in his sleep.

Even with the semi-brightening of the day and the use of a flashlight, you could only see maybe five or six inches down into the sea. Light would penetrate no farther. That shadow, George figured, was about that far down, maybe less. Just visible as a shape, but no more.

“I don’t like it,” Cushing said.

Gosling was watching it. “Row around it then.”

There’s a mad dog in your path, just walk around it.

He was being Mr. Realism again, of course, but it was obvious that he did not like that big dark mass being on a slow collision course with them either. But he could not come right out and say it. It was not his way. He was used to being in charge of men and that had not left him. Even in this godforsaken place. And when you were in charge, you didn’t admit to trouble very easily.

George was thinking: I don’t know what in the Christ you are, Mr. Shadow, but you’re giving me a real funny feeling in my belly and I don’t like it one fucking bit. Just go away now, go away. Leave us be. We don’t need another flying manta ray from Mars…

And wasn’t that a cheerful thought? That the dead bat-thing might have a big brother or a pissed-off father?

“Here,” Cushing said, putting an oar in his hands. “Let’s get away from it.”

George had his oar on the port side and Cushing had his starboard. Feeling something evaporating in their throats and the patter of their hearts begin to pick up, they began to paddle madly away from the mass. Neither thought they would, but then, when it was maybe five feet from the raft, they broke away and to the right and skirted it, came around it into open water.

There.

Simple.

It was behind them now. Just a huge, spreading shadow. In five, ten minutes, it would be out of sight, another nasty little secret tucked away in the fog.

“Probably wasn’t anything to begin with,” Cushing said, almost like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “Nothing alive. Just something drifting around… some junk.”

And George wanted badly to disagree with that, because he didn’t think that mass was just some harmless patch of submerged weed or clot of muck. It had approached the raft because it wanted to approach the raft.

“Wait a minute now,” Gosling said. “It’s coming back… maybe it’s caught in the line from the sea anchor.”

Sure, George thought, maybe.

It sounded good, sounded damn reasonable… but he didn’t believe it. Whatever was out there it was indeed coming back. Not like something snared on the anchor, but like something moving under its own power.

“Shit,” Cushing said, which summed it up nicely.

The mass was coming back and coming back fast. It was still down deep enough in that foul water where they could not see what it was and maybe it wanted things that way.

Gosling had an oar now, too. “Row for chrissake,” he told them. “Row your asses off.”

And they did, splashing through the water, sliding over patches of weed and cutting across those occasional channels of open, dark water. They were moving, but it was still gaining. Coming even faster now and George thought he saw it moving with an odd pulsating sort of motion.

“It’s gonna hit us,” Gosling said. “Get into the center of the raft.”

They pulled in their oars and did just that.

Still the thing came, not slowing at all. It was going to bump them any minute now. Ten feet, then five, then right on top of them, everyone tensing and gritting their teeth and waiting for it… but it never hit them. Inches from the raft it simply disappeared.

“It went under us,” Gosling said.

And that surely wasn’t good. Because it was bad enough to be dogged in that Dead Sea by some black mass, but at least then you knew where it was. Not knowing, now that was far worse any way you sliced it.

“Where is it?” Cushing asked, trying to look in every direction at the same time.

“Gone,” Gosling said.

And George sat there, the seconds ticking away like separate eternities as he waited for something else to happen. For some nameless horror, perhaps, to rise up from the stark depths and engulf the entire raft like a clam closing its shell.

Up ahead, maybe twenty feet in front of the raft, bubbles broke the surface. Dozens of them until it looked like a submarine was about to surface. But what surfaced was that black mass again. It came nearly to the surface, then dipped back down again like it was saying, yeah, I’m here all right, but you don’t get to know what I am. Not until I decide…

“It’s just sitting there,” Cushing said. “I don’t like this at all

…fucking thing is giving me the creeps. Don’t mind saying so either.”

Gosling smiled thinly and maybe George did, too. But you could see that Cushing did not care one iota. That mass was scaring him just as it was scaring them, but at least he had the balls to admit as such out loud.

So they waited.

The thing waited.

“Haven’t we had enough already?” George said out loud and was immediately sorry that he had. The others were thinking it, sure, but he’d been the one to say it. Something that certainly didn’t need saying.

He kept his mouth shut.

After maybe ten minutes of awful nothing, the mass began to move slowly toward the raft. It was in no hurry. It had all the time in the world and seemed to know it.

“I think it’s… I think it’s coming up,” Gosling said.

It was.

Something was. Something was emerging, breaking the surface in a foam of bubbles and slime, something like an immense umbrella-shaped dome that ran from a lustrous purple at its apex to a fleshy bubblegum-pink around its edges. Thing was, it did not stop coming up. More of it was visible all the time, a hideous collection of floats and polyps and wheezing bladders, white and red and orange and emerald. All glistening and shining and fluttering. Around the outside of the dome, there were a series of dark oily nodules that might have been eyes… hundreds of them, black and jellied and staring.

“It’s a… a jellyfish,” Cushing said and you could hear it just beneath his words, that peculiar combination of wonder and terror and revulsion they were all feeling.

A jellyfish.

But the kind of jellyfish that swam the Dead Sea. Its bell was maybe thirty feet across, all those hissing bladders and floats that surrounded it as big as basketballs. They were inflating and deflating, like the thing was breathing. The water was roiling now with hundreds of pale yellow tentacles that fanned out in every direction. Some were wire thin, others thicker than a man’s arm and veined with a ruby-red networking that might have been arteries… or nerve ganglia for all anyone could say. Some of those tentacles must have been hundreds of feet in length.

“Jesus Christ,” Gosling said.

And George wanted to say something, too, but he was positively breathless. His lungs were filled with dust devils and blowing sand and that was probably a good thing… for if his voice had come, managed to push past his lips which were melted together in a gray line, it would have been a scream. The mother of all screams. For what was bouncing through him at the sight of this monstrosity, this evil living hot-air balloon and its attendant floats, was sheer, unbridled terror. Raw and stark and mad.

It could not be.

This thing could not be.

The water was a seething, undulating forest of its tentacles now and they had completely encircled the raft like coils of cable. They were underwater in thick, roping clusters and breaking the surface in tangles so thick you could have walked across them.

As far as George could see… tentacles. A writhing, heaving mass of them, congested like vines in the jungle.

When he found his voice, gagging on the heady vinegar-like stench of the thing, all he could say was, “What the fuck? What the fuck now?”

But nobody answered him.

Cushing and Gosling sat stock still, maybe afraid that if they moved that gargantuan alien jellyfish would sense it, would know exactly where they were and envelop them in a dripping sweep of tentacles. George decided he was going to follow their example and lock down his muscles, even though every muscle and nerve-fiber in him was snapping like high-tension lines.

So they sat and waited and the fog swirled and coalesced, was born in luminous plumes and sparkling shrouds, died in its own arms and was reborn again. Steam misted from the weeds and marshy water. And the raft waited silently with three ice sculptures onboard, an immense nightmare medusan ringing them in like a nickel tangled in a bed of kelp.

What finally broke that leaden, weighty silence was Soltz.

He moaned, groaned, made a wet gasping sound. His lips parted with a dry smacking. His face was beaded with perspiration and his unbandaged eye looked glazed and milky. “Water,” he was saying. “I need… water… need water… a drink of… water…”

And George, even though he knew the man was sick, wanted desperately to stuff a rag in his mouth, tell him to shut the hell up. Because that repeated, dull cadence of his voice was stirring up the jellyfish. Its tentacles were vibrating as if they were hearing it. Around the rim of its bell there was a fan of colorless cilia that looked like waterlogged spaghetti. They had been hanging limp before, barely moving with a sort of drifting motion like sea grass, but now they were twitching and trembling. Maybe the jellyfish couldn’t hear, but maybe it could sense the vibration caused by sound.

Cushing moved and a half dozen tentacles jerked as if in surprise.

“Sit fucking still,” Gosling said in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, just not exactly where…”

Soltz began to stir. He shifted and shook, the waterproof blanket sliding down to his knees. He was up in what passed for the bow and the thing’s tentacles were mere inches away from him over the lip of the raft.

His motion made those tentacles flutter. They changed from the color of wheat to a bright, neon-yellow. Most of them just lay motionless in the water, but a dozen or so above the waterline began to coil in lazy rolls like pythons. It wasn’t just the tentacles that changed color, but the bell, too. It looked oddly synthetic, George had thought upon first seeing it, like something poured from a Jello mold. A perfectly circular mass of transparent jelly that looked deep enough to drown in, skinned with a rubbery membrane like cellophane wetted down with cooking spray. And now it was changing color, too. From that rich purple to hot pink and then scarlet and orange and indigo… it looked like gasoline on water.

“Why the hell is it doing that?” George said under his breath.

“Chromatophores,” Cushing said just as quietly. “Pigmentation cells… it can either control its pigment or it’s reacting to mood swings like a squid…”

But George wasn’t sure if he was buying that.

What he was thinking was insane… but what if it was responding to their voices? The subtle vibrations they caused? Only when they spoke did the bell effuse color. What if it was… Jesus

…intelligent and it was trying to communicate?

That was scarier than just about anything he could imagine. The idea of some revolting dumb predator was infinitely preferable to one that could reason. For if it could reason, then it was only a matter of time before it figured out how to get them out of the raft.

This was bad. George had thought it had all been bad up to this point… the giant eel attacking the raft, that crazy devil-ray bat

…but none of that had been like this. It was one thing to be able to fight back, regardless of how disgusting your adversary was, but to just sit here and wait and wonder helplessly while your mind turned upon itself like a top, showing you all the unpleasant details of your death… yeah, now that was really bad. The sort of bad that reached down inside you and yanked your guts out through your mouth until there wasn’t a goddamn thing left in you but an echoing void like the hollow of an empty drum.

Somebody better do something, George thought, or I’m gonna crack, see if I don’t.

And maybe he was close, maybe they were all close, but he held it in check best he could. He felt gutless and sick and scared. Very scared. For how could you not be? Waiting there like that in the foggy silence, feeling like a condemned man waiting for execution, everything inside you tense and bunched, ready to explode. And in the back of your mind there was that primitive urge to fight, to do battle, even though the idea was ludicrous. There was no chance of victory against something of this immensity… yet, that primal man inside said it was better to die that way, fighting and slashing and cutting with blood in your mouth, than to take it like this. Just sitting there, letting it happen. And George figured that made real good sense, for maybe the jellyfish would kill them quicker that way. Maybe the very defiance of them hacking at its tentacles would piss it off. And a quick death would be better than waiting, better than feeling your mind going to a cold slop as those tentacles embraced you like living ropes.

George didn’t honestly think he could handle being touched by it. That was just unthinkable. Repellent. Like being webbed up by a spider and feeling it lick you… your mind would go to sauce.

The tentacles continued to unwind, slithering over and around each other like a tangle of nesting snakes slowly waking.

The minutes ticked by.

George could hear those tentacles now brushing up against the sides of the raft with a squeaking sound. Many of them, questing and scraping and investigating. One of them rose up, hovered directly over Soltz’s head and everyone on the raft held their breath… it passed within two, three inches of his face, found the gunwale of the raft and tapped against it, withdrew.

But that was hardly the end of it.

Those tentacles were real busy all of a sudden. It seemed as if maybe the jelly was intelligent to a certain degree, for it kept touching the raft, trying to figure it out. One of the tentacles slid up the side of the raft and wormed its way inside, just touching things… the blanket that covered Soltz’s legs, an oar, the zippered compartments that contained the survival equipment. It found a lightstick and darted back as if it did not like the feel of it. Then it slid back over the side. Four or five others began tapping their way along the gunnel as if looking for something.

One of them got real close to George.

It was the pale, waxy yellow of a gourd. An undulant and rubbery thing like a great blind worm rooting through mulch. Not aggressive, merely explorative. It brushed over the tip of George’s boot, paid it no mind.

And George, feeling hot and loose inside, thought, what the hell does it want? What is it looking for?

Other tentacles passed very close to Gosling and Cushing. Cushing had to move his arm out of their way.

There were things about this creature that Cushing wanted to tell them about. He knew jellies, had done a great deal of reading about them, and this was not exactly a jelly. A jellyfish, he wanted to tell them, was a hydrozoan, a colonial animal, a colony of specialized cells. Jellies did not act like this. They were not capable of reaching around and grasping things with their tentacles. He also wanted to tell them that if this was indeed a jellyfish, then those tentacles would be lined with stinging cells.

The only good thing, everyone noticed, was that the sort of tentacles that were doing the exploring were not terribly numerous. From what they could see in the water, the thing had no more than a few dozen of them. Which seemed like a lot until you realized that the jelly had hundreds of tentacles. But most were thin, reedy projections that fluttered in the water like long wisps of yellow hair.

It might have went on that way for hours or even days or at least until that medusan grew bored or dried out and had to dive back down to rehydrate itself. That was, if it hadn’t been for Soltz. Soltz awakening in a kind of delirium, sitting up and moaning, licking his lips and breathing hard. His one good eye looking around, but dreamy and unfocused, confused. He tossed the blanket aside and right away those big tentacles started moving around, coiling and corkscrewing.

“What?” he said, barely able to catch his breath. “What is this? What… what… what?”

The sound of his voice triggered chemical changes in the bell of the jellyfish. It went from that livid purple to a soft yellow, then the bright orange and fiery red of a sunset.

“Soltz…” Gosling whispered, but it was no good.

Two of the tentacles came up the side of the raft like snakes. Soltz did not see them. He tossed his blanket aside and it struck them, making them twist like earthworms in direct sunlight.

“Colors,” Soltz said, “look at those awful colors…”

So maybe he did see the jelly. For even the tentacles were suffused with oranges and reds now. The floats and bladders around the bell were inflating and deflating rapidly, the bell was quivering. Three or four more tentacles boarded the raft, looping and creeping. Soltz grabbed an oar and swung at them. They would never have been strong enough to drag a man overboard, for as the oar hit one that was rising up like a rattlesnake in a defensive posture, it went to pulp. It literally shattered in a spray of jelly. The bell went bright red and a dozen tentacles went after Soltz. He hit some with the oar and they exploded, but he wasn’t fast enough.

Two or three others noosed around him and he instantly dropped the oar, screaming and thrashing as the nematocysts of the tentacles, the stinging cells, injected their toxins into him. He stood right up straight as a post and a dozen more ringed him, and he fell thrashing into the water, right into the squirming forest of the thing.

Cushing cried out and Gosling held him back.

There was no helping Soltz.

Not now.

“Do something for chrissake!” George cried out. “We can’t just let him-”

“We don’t have a fucking choice,” Gosling said, just sick with it all. “Nothing to be done… just, just don’t look.”

But George was looking. There was no way he could not. Like seeing a man fall beneath a subway train, you simply had to look. Because maybe, just maybe, what you saw wouldn’t be as bad as what your mind would show you if you didn’t look.

Soltz was pretty much out of his head when he attacked those tentacles. To him it was a dream and he’d been reacting with dreamlike logic. When the tentacles touched him, he felt an instant searing agony spread over his bare arms and face. It was like being stuck with glowing red needles. A stinging, burning sensation that brought tears to his eyes and a scream to his mouth.

And then he was in the water, thrashing in a sea with something like kelp and crawling weed, only that weed was on fire and him with it. He was flailing in that mass of tentacles, covered with them. They were draped over his face and tangled around his arms. Many of them had come apart and hung over him in rags and glistening membranes. The bell was a livid, boiling red, pulsing and shuddering, and Soltz was screaming through a mouthful of jellied polyp as those stinging nettles shot barbs of neurotoxin into him.

Somebody was calling out to him, but the voice seemed to be coming from some distant gulf. It was muffled and unreal. He tried to thrash away, but it was no good. He was knotted in jellyfish. Huge, tortuous waves of convulsive pain tore through his legs, his belly, and now his hands and arms as he clawed and fought, trying to free himself.

“Ah, ahhhh!” he gasped as water filled his mouth. “Help me! Help meeeee!”

He tore at floats and bladders, scratching rents in the bell itself.

He kicked and splashed and ripped at the trailing toxic whips and became further ensnared, his entire body lacerated with blinding agony that made his head buzz with white noise.

He could hear voices shouting, yelling, screaming.

But it was hard to understand above his own shrieks that seemed to be fading now, echoing from an empty room. The pain was unreal and encompassing. It blotted out everything. It was like some impossible Oh-my-God wall of torture rising up around him and he seemed to be sinking down further, embraced by tentacles, his mouth filled with a stinging pulp that bloated his tongue in his mouth.

Then he was sinking, sucking in water and slowly, very slowly, everything was going gray. He could see nothing but tentacles and jelly, ruptured bits of the thing drifting everywhere in the cascading bubbles. And then everything was quiet. Still. No sound. No motion. Just that peaceful womblike grayness swallowing up all and everything

He felt himself sinking deeper.

Felt himself break the surface once again and then submerge for good.

Then nothing.

The men in the raft saw it all, watched it with stunned abject horror. George saw Soltz break the surface that last time, the bandage gone from his bad eye that was red and shining and filled with blood. That eye seemed to see him in the raft, it locked onto him and then sank beneath the foaming, dirty sea like a dying sun.

And that was the last they saw of Soltz.

10

When Saks came back, Fabrini was sleeping in his bunk. But Cook was awake. Wide awake, just sitting there and maybe trying to sort it all out in his mind which was no easy thing. Saks came through the door, his piggish face streaked with grime like he’d been crawling around down in a mechanic’s bay.

“Crycek back?” Cook asked.

Saks shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.

Menhaus went looking for him.”

“I suppose he’ll find him.”

Cook was waiting for the typical response from Saks, some homosexual innuendo, but he got none. Nothing about his mother entertaining football teams or his father fucking barnyard swine. None of the usual. Saks just stood there silently, a funny look in his eyes.

“You find anything?” Cook asked him.

“Not much. That fungus is everywhere. Found some skeletons below, but whoever owned ‘em died a long time ago.”

Saks said he found the galley, too. The cutlery was all tarnished, but usable. The food was long ago rotted away. Sacks of flour and sugar were full of fungus. Same went for casks of water and bread. But he did find several sealed containers of salt pork.

“You think it’s all right?” Cook asked him.

“Looks like it might be,” Saks said. “But I don’t know if I’d want to put any of it in my mouth.”

“Anything else?”

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

Saks nodded. “I didn’t see them… but I could hear them in the bulkheads. They were scratching.”

After that, Saks went back to his cabin, that funny look still in his eyes and Cook knew something was up. Either he had seen something or did something or was thinking about doing something. Regardless, Cook didn’t really care.

When Saks was gone, he locked the cabin door and curled up on his bunk on a mattress he’d found that wasn’t too mildewed. He covered himself with a waterproof blanket from the lifeboat and fell asleep almost instantly, thinking of scratching in the walls and rats. He dreamed of ghosts.

11

Thirty minues after Soltz went down, nobody on the raft had spoken. Maybe it was that they couldn’t speak in the aftermath of what they had seen and maybe it was that they were afraid of what they might say. Who they would say it to. Who they would blame. So maybe silence was best.

The jellyfish had disappeared with Soltz, but now it was back.

It wasn’t as close to the raft now, but just up ahead drifting with them. Its bell was nearly submerged, but now and again it would come up, then sink back down again. But even at that distance — maybe a hundred feet, right about where the fog swallowed everything — its tentacles were everywhere in the water. A fluttering skein of them that reached out, circling the boat and winding beneath it, trailing in the stillborn current like a mane. So, essentially, they were trapped.

And the idea of that was almost as painful as watching Soltz die in the caress of some sea monster.

Almost.

“So what now?” George heard himself say aloud, realizing he’d only meant to think that as he’d been thinking it for days now.

Gosling looked over towards the jelly, squinted his eyes. It looked pretty much like a gigantic plastic garbage bag, deflated and wrinkly up there, not smooth and taut as before. George’s voice had no effect on either it or its tentacles.

“Yeah,” Cushing said. “What now?”

“We wait,” Gosling told them.

“I’m sick of goddamn waiting, Gosling, I can’t take much more of it,” George said, knowing that finally, ultimately the Dead Sea was pushing him over the edge. He could feel his mind unwinding in his head like string from a spool. “I mean, I can’t take much more of this. Why don’t you put a flare into that motherfucker? See if it can feel some pain.”

“Piss it off?”

“Why not?”

“Why not? You didn’t see what that sonofabitch did to Soltz when he pissed it off? You want I should burn a hole in it, get it nice and mad? Okay, I’m game. Just tell me what we’re going to do when it comes at us, attacks the raft? Just tell me that, bright boy.”

George felt his cheeks redden. “So you want to sit here like fucking cowards and wait for that prick to choose the moment we die?”

“Shut up, you goddamn idiot,” Gosling snapped at him.

“Listen, you two,” Cushing said. “This won’t accomplish anything.”

“Shut the hell up,” George told him. “Our master and fucking commander over here wants us to sit and wait until that goddamn sea monster gets hungry again. Well, I’m not about to wait. If we got to die, then let’s die like men already. Let’s give that bastard a taste.”

Gosling just shook his head. “C’mon, George, don’t be so damn stupid. No sense riling it up. I mean look at it out there, it looks dead for chrissake. Maybe Soltz wounded it.”

“Yeah, and maybe it’s just biding its time, waiting for the right moment to spring on us.”

“Don’t give it that much credit, George. It’s a fucking jellyfish. You act like it’s the town bully. It’s just an animal, a creature, it doesn’t think or plot. It’s a lower form of life… it reacts, right, Cushing?”

Cushing nodded. “That’s it. It just reacts to stimuli. I can’t imagine it being intelligent, even as smart as a mouse.”

George knew he was being ridiculous, had suddenly transformed into the weak link in the chain, but he wasn’t backing down. Not now. “How the hell would you know, Cushing? I mean, really, how could you possibly know? This isn’t the sort of jellyfish from back home. Its evolution was probably completely different. Maybe it does think. Maybe it can plot. What then?”

“Then we’re probably fucked, George,” Gosling said. “Any more questions?”

“Let’s just take it easy now.” Cushing was looking from one to the other. “Relax here. Giving a jelly intelligence is a real leap, George. I suppose it’s possible, but not likely. For all we know, it may be damaged as Gosling says. It may not have any fight left in it… or life for that matter. Although, jellyfish are certainly not organized the way we are and damage to them and damage to us are two different things.”

George sighed. They were right. Of course they were right. “Dammit

…it’s just that this waiting, it’s getting under my skin.”

“There’s not much else we can do,” Gosling said. “For all we know, it may just swim off.”

But Cushing said, “I don’t think so.”

And pointed.

By then, they were all watching. Seeing that noxious jellyfish suddenly pump itself into life like a leaky beach ball filling with air. It rose up, that bell breaking the surface, wearing a crown of weeds. The floats and bladders it wore like some kind of pulsating necklace were coming up, too. A few fleshy and convoluting tentacles emerged, skimming over patches of weed.

If it was dead… it looked damn healthy.

The bell was round and tight and bloated-looking. From a distance, slicked in a scum of that filthy water, it looked like wet vinyl. Right away, as if it could hear them speaking, the bell lit with colors. First it went purple, like some especially moist and succulent plum, immediately fading to a sort of blushed violet and then magenta. But it didn’t stop there. It went the deep, blood-red of port wine, then coral and the blinding neon yellow of wet chrome.

George watched those colors, amazed by them. Under any other circumstances, the jellyfish would have been a real marvel of nature. Something he might have paid to see at an aquarium. But now it was just deadly and deceptive and he wished some giant foot would come down and smash it the way things like that deserved to be smashed.

But those colors… George was certainly no invertebrate zoologist or physiologist and what he knew about the behavioral mechanics of lower species you could’ve kept in a thimble, yet he was certain that there was more to these colors than simple chemical reactions. He just couldn’t get past the idea that this thing was somehow trying to communicate with them in its own utterly alien way.

Could color variation be considered a language? It was ludicrous, of course, at least in the human frame of reference where languages had to be spoken, written, or even broken into mathematical symbols or telemetry… but what if? Was the idea really that absurd? Wasn’t language essentially an organized, systematic grouping of sounds or letters or even images as in pictographic alphabets? The jelly was able to reproduce all the primary colors and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of variations in-between. Couldn’t each separate color be considered a representation of thought much like separate configurations drawn on paper were?

George looked at it, really looked at the thing out there.

Although he had no idea what it was he was doing, he opened himself up to it. Let those colors come into him, let them fill him and, subconsciously almost, he began to equate different colors with different thoughts. The language of color. It was alien and insane.. . but why not? He watched those colors and felt like they were watching him, too. And as he received, he sent, he transcribed his own thoughts into brilliant swaths of radiant color: Just go away, you have to go away. Maybe you honestly mean no harm and maybe you were only defending yourself against Soltz… but you’re dangerous to us, to our kind. So just… please… go… away…

“It’s going under,” Cushing said.

It sank beneath the sea taking its tentacles and floats with it. They could see it, just beneath the surface, a shifting and oily mass expanding and spreading out, pulsing. Then it began to move at the raft. Began to move fast.

“Shit,” Gosling said.

They got into the center of the raft and that big, loathsome jelly came speeding through that turgid water, creating a slow and heaving wake in its path. But it never hit the raft. At the last moment, it ducked beneath and dove into the murk out of sight. The raft bobbed in the swell it left and then settled down.

Nobody moved for a time.

Maybe they were expecting it to attack from below, filling the raft with stinging tentacles, but it didn’t. Five minutes, ten. It did not come back. The raft drifted along, butting its way through little islands of weed, skimming over the surface of that protoplasmic sea.

“I hope that sonofabitch stays gone,” Cushing said.

To which Gosling replied. “Well, let’s not sit here and wait for it to come back, let’s do some rowing. It’ll be good for us.”

Cushing and Gosling took to the oars and the raft began to move deeper through the dark channels that snaked through the weed banks.

And George?

He just wondered if the jellyfish’s departure was pure coincidence or the result of something much more impressive.

12

“No, we’re all going,” Cook told them. “All of us. We’re going to explore this ship and we’re going to do it together.”

They were all standing in the corridor outside their cabins, smelling the stink of the ship and feeling its ominous weight settling down on them. Cook called them all out there and told them he wasn’t crazy about any of them wondering around alone on the ship.

“All I’m saying is that this is an old hulk. A lot of the decks are rotten and one of you could fall through and the rest of us would never know about it,” he explained to them, though rotting decks weren’t what he was really concerned about. “So, if you’ve got to stretch your legs, just take someone with you.”

Fabrini didn’t have a problem with that and neither did Menhaus. Crycek just shrugged. But Saks, of course, smirked at the idea.

“You wanna be big boss man, Cook, it’s okay with me,” he said. “But you’re not going to order me around.”

“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Just do what you’re told.”

“Who dropped a quarter into you, Fagbrini? I was talking to Cook, the big boss man. So kindly fuck off.” He turned back to Cook. “I’ll do what you say, if that’s the way you want it. But if you think I’m some kind of prisoner, guess again.”

Menhaus shook his head. “You starting again, Saks? We trusted you and untied you and you’re starting again?”

“Zip it, fat boy,” Saks told him. “I plan to do what I want. That’s all there’s to it. Besides, when I’m not around that gives you and Fabrini more time to suck tongue.”

“Cocksucker,” Fabrini said, coming at him now.

But he didn’t get too close, because Saks stepped back and pulled out a knife. It had a seven-inch blade on it, looked sharp like he’d been working it on a stone. “Don’t make me do something stupid, Fabrini, because I really don’t want to.”

Fabrini had his knife out then and the two of them faced each other, eyes filled with acid.

Menhaus looked pale.

Crycek just smiled, figuring it was inevitable.

Cook, figuring he was the only cool head, stepped between them. He had the Browning stuck in his belt, but he did not pull it. “Okay, you two, that’s enough. Put those fucking blades away.” He looked from Fabrini to Saks, his fingers drumming the butt of his gun. I mean it.

They saw that he did.

They backed off and the knives disappeared.

Cook said, “You know, we’ve got enough problems here, Saks, without your shit. You want to wander this goddamn wreck and kill yourself? Well, you go right ahead. No loss, I figure. But if you ever pull that knife on someone again, I swear to God I’ll just put you down like a sick dog. And if you think I’m kidding, you think I’m bluffing, then you try pulling it on me right goddamn now.”

Saks licked his lips and it was easy to see that he wanted to pull that knife. Wanted to show these pukes what he was made of, but he backed down. And backing down did not come easy to a guy like Saks. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he did and it filled him with poison. Poison that he secreted somewhere for later, when he had a chance to use it. But right then? No, not a good idea. Cook would kill him. He knew it. Cook was not bluffing.

“Okay,” Saks said, “now that we know who’s in charge, let’s take a walk and see what there is to see.”

Crycek was still smiling. “Yeah, nothing I love better than a ghost ship.” He just shook his head. “What is it you expect to find?”

Menhaus said, “I don’t know. People or something. Maybe.”

Crycek laughed. “People? People? There’s none left. Hasn’t been for years and years. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…”

“That’ll do,” Cook said.

Good old Crycek. He could make the Good Humor Man slit his fucking wrists. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them… Yeah, that was exactly what everyone needed to be hearing. Jesus.

“Let’s get going,” Fabrini said.

Saks had located a drum of kerosene, so they charged up a couple lanterns and went for a walk.

They found pretty much what they knew they’d find: lots of fungus and rust, some bones and debris. That was all they found thirty minutes into it, unless you wanted to count shadows or the distant sounds of scratching.

They let Saks lead them on, since he seemed to know his way around ships pretty well. But, as he reminded them again and again, he’d been in the Navy. He liked to remind them of all the places he’d been and all the things he’d done there. Cook didn’t hate him as much as before. Sure, Saks still reminded him — frighteningly so — of his father, just another inveterate asshole, but he didn’t want to kill him anymore. He almost felt sorry for the man. For all men like him who felt the need to hide their insecurities and fears behind a wall of machismo. And the realization of that came as something of a surprise to Cook. Somewhere along the way, he had changed. Hatred had become an odd species of pity. Now wasn’t that something?

One of the first places they visited was the surgery.

It was dirty and cobwebbed, debris everywhere, fungus oozing down the walls like streamers at a kid’s birthday party. The furniture and desk were pretty much rotten as was most of the woodwork in there. Cabinets held jars and bottles of drugs and chemicals, the liquids which had dried now to black goo and the powders solidified like cement. The labels on them were faded and unreadable. There were shelves of moldering books and a few yellowed medical degrees in dusty glass frames.

All in all, there was nothing but age here.

“You can almost feel the awful things that happened here,” Crycek said.

“Ah, knock it off with that,” Menhaus told him.

But he was right. As the others looted through cupboards of instruments and file cabinets of crumbling papers, Cook could actually feel it. Smell it. More than an odor of age and dissolution, but an odd trace memory of pain and blackness and lunacy. Things had happened here, he was certain, terrible things that you didn’t want to think about. It was here, he knew, that the men who’d been infected aboard the Korsund would have been taken. You could almost feel their slow, lingering deaths, the horror they felt as the Cyclops was locked tighter in the grip of something unknown and malevolent. They would have laid on those tables, vomiting their guts out, never knowing in their innocent minds what radiation poisoning truly was.

Yes, the pain was real here. You could feel it.

“Check this out,” Fabrini said, hoisting a large wooden chest up onto a tabletop, pushing aside a dusty rack of test tubes and a box of slides. He knocked over a tall, antique brass microscope that was tarnished green. Motes of dust filled the lantern light.

Cook brushed sediment off it, waving dust away.

It was a surgeon’s kit, he saw. Maybe the others didn’t recognize what it was, but Cook had seen them before. When he wasn’t pushing earth with a grader, he was something of a Civil War buff. He haunted reenactments and particularly the makeshift battlefield hospitals there. Most of the surgeon reenactors were medical men in real life and their equipment was contemporary to the 1860s.

“A doctor’s kit,” Cook told them. “A surgery kit.”

Ebony-handled scalpels were pressed into felt compartments along with sutures, needles, probing hooks, tourniquets, and a particularly fearsome-looking post mortem knife. Cook lifted the tray of instruments out, revealing another beneath which held bone saws, artery clamps, bone snips, a large and rusty amputation saw. There were other implements he was not familiar with.

“Shit,” Fabrini said, “makes my stomach weak just looking at that stuff.”

There was a brass presentation plaque on the inside lid. It read: “Chas. W. Kolbe.”

“That must have been the doctor,” Menhaus said.

“No, his name was Asper,” Fabrini said.

They all looked at him.

“How do you know that?” Saks put to him. “How do you know what his name was?”

Cook stepped in. “We saw it up on the bridge when we first came aboard. There’s a crew list up there.”

Which seemed to satisfy Menhaus and Crycek, but you could see Saks didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Really?” he said. “A crew list? Isn’t that something? Fabrini’s got a good memory.”

Cook led them out of there and back into the corridor.

They found the captain’s quarters before long and although dusty and dirty, they had once been somewhat lavish. At least in comparison to the other cabins. There was nothing of note in there, save for some mildewed antiques — a naval campaign chest and a set of salon lamps. Fabrini found a nice scrimshaw-headed walking stick that he took with him. Overall, the captain’s cabin was in worse shape that the others. There was a gaping hole in the bulkhead, fingers of mist seeping in.

“I wonder what caused that?” Menhaus said.

Saks was examining it. “Doesn’t look like a shell punched through there. This room would be in shambles if it had. No… it almost looks burned.”

Cook had trouble swallowing when he saw the hole and even more trouble when Saks said that. Yes, it probably was burned, he figured. Forbes had written about something coming through the bulkhead after Captain Worley.

“What could burn through iron that thick?” Menhaus wanted to know. “A torch? A goddamn laser beam?”

Crycek grinned at the idea.

“Any ideas, Fabrini?” Saks said.

Fabrini twisted a bit, but covered himself. “Who knows? So long ago, who could say?” Cook started breathing again. Goddamn Fabrini.. . how did he let the doctor’s name slip?

Menhaus and Crycek were not interested in any of that, but Saks was. He knew he was on to something here. He had sensed some secret shared between Cook and Fabrini and he wasn’t going to let go of it. Like a tongue working a sore tooth, he was going to keep at it. As they walked down the corridors, slopping through those mats of fungi, the lanterns creating wild and sinister shapes around them, he kept suggesting places they could investigate, digging and probing, trying to find out something that Cook and Fabrini did not want him to know about.

“I’d like to take a look at the engine room,” he said, watching Fabrini for a sign of discomfort. “That sound good to you, Fabrini?”

Fabrini looked at Cook, looked away. “Don’t matter to me.”

“We were already down there,” Cook said. “Nothing to see but a lot of rusty machinery.”

“Old steam turbines, I bet,” Saks said. “You wanna check ‘em out, Menhaus?”

“Why not?”

There was no way to get out of it.

So down they went into that cavernous blackness, the lanterns peeling the darkness back layer by layer. They stood before the rusted, seized up turbines which were gigantic.

“Look at that piston,” Menhaus said, in awe, as always, of mechanical things. “Bigger than a pillar… and solid fucking brass. Jesus.”

There were a few inches of slimy gray water on the floor. They checked the machine shops and storerooms, found the pile of bones Cook and Fabrini had found… but the giant sea lice were gone. That was a good thing. Saks was trying to force a rusted hatch. With Menhaus’ help, it came open with a terrible groaning that seemed to shake the ship. There was a companionway beyond it, a set of black iron steps.

“The bilge must be down here,” Saks said. “Let’s take a look.”

There was no arguing with the guy. He felt that he was on to something and nobody could talk him out of it, even if he was light years away from the logbook that so disturbed Cook and Fabrini. Saks in the lead, they went down those creaking steps that were thick with slime and mold.

“Smells bad down here,” Menhaus said. “You smell that?”

They all did. A black, filthy odor of decay and stagnance. A stench of moist, dripping subcellars, closets threaded with wood rot, caskets plucked from muddy graves. Things buried or that should have been buried. It was a stink similar to the rest of the ship, but down here the volume had definitely been turned up. It was actually warm and yeasty, curiously alive with a sweet/sour tang of organic profusion like a hothouse filled with jungle orchids.

Not a good smell at all.

Cook had smelled something like that once before. When he was a boy, beneath his Uncle Bobby’s trailer home. Bobby’s old dog, Bobo, had disappeared the autumn before and come June, when the weather turned warm, they followed the stench under the trailer and found him. Down there amongst the cobwebs and spiders, mouse droppings and rotting cardboard boxes, old Bobo lay. He had sickened and crawled down there to die. Cook was the first to see him. He had literally rotted in half. A black fungus was growing out of his eye sockets and hindquarters, a slimy collection of toadstools sprouting from his belly. What Cook was smelling now reminded him of that — hot, moist germination.

The deck down there was flooded with about two feet of water. The hull was breached in half a dozen locations. Weeds had grown up through the holes and were threaded along the bulkheads. The bilge trough itself was thick with weeds and black, oozing water.

And that was bad.

“Jesus, lookit those holes,” Menhaus said. “This goddamn wreck could sink at any moment.”

But Cook said he didn’t think it would. It was actually marooned in the weeds. They must have been thick beneath the ship beyond belief.

“Watch that trough,” Saks told them, leading them on.

“What the hell do you expect to find down here?” Cook asked him.

But Saks didn’t answer. He stepped lightly, over tangles of weed that were green and thick and thriving. Cook wanted them to turn back. What they were smelling, it was more than the stink of the weed. It was something else. A growing, noxious odor and he did not like it. From time to time he thought he heard a sort of secretive rustling from up ahead.

They passed around an arch of riveted steel and Saks stopped.

He brought his light up so they could all see. See that forest of white, pulsating things that grew up through an immense rent in the hull of the ship. They looked at first like the stems of some weird plant, but as Saks held the light up, they could see that they were wormlike, about as thick as fence posts and hollow. Hundreds of them, slithering and rustling, black mouths set at their ends.

“What the fuck?” Menhaus said.

“Worms,” Cook told them, his skin crawling at the sight of them. “I think they’re tube worms… like the kind you see around smoker vents on the ocean floor.”

It was hard to say whether they were dangerous or not and nobody was getting close enough to find out, but they were certainly hideous. Squirming and horribly alive, standing straight up like saplings, mouths opening and closing like those of fish.

Cook almost felt like screaming at the sight of them.

In his mind, he saw himself lost without a light, stumbling around down here, falling into the bilge and dragging himself back up, all snarled with weeds and then… then falling into that creeping mass of tube worms. Feeling them coil around him, brushing his arms and face with their hot, rubbery corpse-flesh.

But it was only his imagination hurting him here. The worms appeared to be stationary and they couldn’t get to him. But such thoughts, once born are not so easily dismissed. They exist in the dark spaces between rational thoughts, in the shadows of logic.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Saks said.

And then they were moving, trying not stumble over one another or fall into the bilge. Behind them, they could hear those worms moving and sliding against one another and by the time they got up the stairs to the engineroom, they had to stop themselves from running in blind panic.

No more was said about it.

As they made their way out of the engine room, they heard a sound. They all heard it.

Footsteps.

The sound of footsteps.

Someone was coming down the companionway ladder.

13

Everyone froze

Everyone just stood there.

Cook went for his gun, thinking that this had to be the very worst thing you could possibly hear on an old derelict: the sound of footsteps coming in your direction. He thanked God then and there than he was not alone. He wasn’t sure he could have handled this alone.

The footsteps stopped outside the hatch. They could hear someone out there, someone breathing hard as if they’d run a long way. Of course, in everyone’s mind, it was not that at all, it was something far worse. Some dead and dripping thing sheathed with fungus coming to pay them a call.

There was the sound of scraping as the latch was worked from the other side. That harsh breathing. The door opened a few inches and Saks, good old hardass Saks, pulled it open all the way and took hold of whoever-or whatever-was on the other side and pitched them or it to the floor with a quick, violent jerk of his hand.

It wasn’t an it.

It was a he.

And whoever he was, the moment Saks pitched him to the deck, he let out a wild surprised cry and tried to find his feet. At which point, Saks kicked him in the side with enough force to knock the wind out of him.

“That’s enough,” Cook told him.

The face looking up at them in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp was round and streaked with dirt. Great, sunken half-moons were dredged beneath staring eyes. The lips were trembling. The face belonged to a chubby little man wearing jeans and a denim shirt so greasy and filthy, it looked like they’d been used to clean out a chimney.

“You… you’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “Not supposed to be on this ship… this is my ship… I’m supposed to be here, but not you…”

He was breathing hard with a rattling sound as if his lungs were clogged with phlegm.

“What’s your name?” Cook asked him.

“I… my name,” he said, examining his left hand like maybe it was written there. “I don’t know…”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Fabrini said. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“He’s crazier than a grub in shit,” Saks said with his usual sensitivity.

The man kept babbling, not making a squirt of sense. Something about how they were not supposed to be there, that them being there was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Maybe he has amnesia like in one of them movies,” Menhaus speculated.

But Cook found it hard to believe it was something so simple. Not here, not in this place. Whatever the reason was, he knew, it would be overblown and fantastic like everything else. What Cook was really wondering was: How long had this guy been aboard? Had he been here all the time, hiding from them or had he just arrived?

“Just tell us your name,” Fabrini said. “How you got here.”

But the guy just shook his head.

And Crycek, who’d been silent so far over the whole matter, said, “His name is Makowski, Bob Makowski. He was an oiler on the Mara, our ship. Guys called him ‘Slim’’’

Now all eyes were on Crycek.

“So why didn’t you say so?” Saks said.

“I wasn’t sure at first,” Crycek explained. “It looked like him… but that don’t mean nothing. Not here.”

They ignored that.

“Help him up,” Cook said.

Everyone stood there. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of touching him, as if maybe he was a ghost that would go to mist in their fingers or whatever had driven him crazy might be catchy.

“Give him a hand, shit-fer-brains,” Saks told Menhaus. “C’mon, Fabrini, get your hand out of your shorts. You heard the man.”

Grudgingly, they helped Makowski to his feet. He couldn’t stop staring at them as if he wasn’t convinced of their reality anymore than they were convinced of his.

“It’ll be okay, Slim,” Menhaus told him. “We’re all friends here.”

Which got a laugh out of Saks.

They brought him up to the main deck and then down to their cabins. They sat him on Menhaus’ bunk and tried to get something out of him. Which was about as easy as squeezing grape juice from a brick.

He just kept shaking his head as all those faces put questions to him.

He clutched his head in his hands, said, “I don’t remember how I got aboard… I remember drifting… I must have drifted here. Do you think that’s how it happened?”

Saks just shook his head. “Now he’s asking us. What a fucking piece of work this one is. Crycek? You sure he ain’t related to you?”

“You must remember something,” Cook said to him. “Just relax and try to remember. The ship went down in the fog… do you remember that?”

Makowski’s face twisted up like he’d bitten into a lemon. “The fog

…oh the fog… there’s voices in the fog… the voices.. . they told me things…”

Crycek had stepped back now, like maybe he’d smelled something on the guy he didn’t like. Or maybe he thought Makowski’s head was going to split open and a monster was going to jump out.

“He was probably hallucinating,” Menhaus said.

But Makowski shook his head. “No, no, no… I heard them, they told me things, they said-” he sketched his index finger in the air like he was writing words “-they told me to come here… they showed me how to get here.”

Saks shook his head. “This guy’s a real fucking treasure.”

“All right,” Fabrini said. “Can you at least tell us how long you’ve been here?”

Makowski just looked at him dumbly like the question had been spoken in Aramaic or low Latin.

“Don’t waste your time, Fabrini,” Saks said. “This guy don’t have no bristles on his broom.”

“You know, you’re not helping a thing here, Saks,” Cook told him. “Let’s just go easy.”

Saks laughed at the idea. Like maybe if he had his way, they’d throw Makowski’s useless ass over the side.

They kept at it another twenty or thirty minutes until it became pointless… if it hadn’t been before. Then they packed it in and decided to get some sleep. Saks’s watch, a digital, was still working and he told them it was getting on around eleven p.m. back in the real world.

“I suppose this crazy squirt of shit gets to bunk with us, eh?” Saks said. “Why not? Me and Menhaus, we already have Crycek. Might as well make it a full set.”

Cook sighed. “Well, I thought-”

“He ain’t sleeping with us,” Crycek said and you could see he meant it. “I’m not having this… guy sleeping with us. No damn way.”

“Now what’s your problem?” Fabrini said.

“My problem? Jesus Christ, are you all blind? Can’t you see it on him? Can’t you feel it? He isn’t right. Something got to him and there’s no way in hell I’d close my eyes with him nearby.”

“Oh, for chrissake,” Saks said.

But Crycek looked stern… and crazy, ready to do just about anything. “I mean it. He’s not sleeping with us.”

“Why, Crycek? Is he a fucking ghost?” Saks said.

“Maybe he is.”

Saks burst out laughing. “Oh, c’mon. Ghost, my white ass. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Richard Simmons has a dick.”

Menhaus looked unhappy. “You know what? I’m pretty tired here. I’m goddamn hungry, worn out, and I’m not in the mood for this nonsense.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Crycek said. “I won’t sleep with him in our cabin.”

Makowski just looked around, confused.

“Good going,” Saks said. “Now you got Crycek all worked up again. C’mere, Crycek, let daddy hold you against his tit.”

“Shut up,” Fabrini said.

“All of you shut up.” Cook rubbed his temples, massaging away the headache they all gave him. “Crycek? You bunk with us. Menhaus? You take Makowski in with you.”

Saks seemed to approve. “Sounds good. We’ll take Mr. Slim Loony and you get Crycek. Give the three of you time to be alone. You can get a nice circle jerk going in there. Fabrini can do a striptease and show you his pussy.”

And that’s all it took.

Fabrini almost knocked Cook to the deck getting at Saks. He’d had his fill and now Saks was going to get his. He made it right over to him, Saks grinning the whole time. Fabrini reached out for him… and stopped.

Saks had his knife out and the blade was pressed to Fabrini’s belly.

“Go ahead, you fucking wop,” Saks told him. “If you got the stomach for it.”

Fabrini backed off, thinking about his own knife, but never pulling it because Cook and Menhaus got between them. Were both sick to death of this shit. Even jolly old Menhaus had had enough.

“Put it away, Saks,” Cook said. “You know, we’re all getting shit-tired of you and your mouth. And we’re getting really, really tired of your high school locker room wit. We’ve had enough. If you don’t have anything good to say, then kindly shut the fuck up.”

Saks laughed, put his knife away. “Take it easy, big chief. Don’t go getting pissed-off at me if Fabrini can’t take a joke. Shit, we all know that wop is an ass-pirate, don’t jump me over his lifestyle choices.”

“Just shut up, Saks,” Menhaus said. “For once in your life, just shut up.”

Saks started laughing. Menhaus getting a backbone to him was like Mister Rogers telling you to go fuck yourself.

Fabrini, calmer now, said, “You think we should post a watch?”

“Against what?” Menhaus asked.

“Nothing to watch against… unless you believe in ghosts, that is.” Saks thought the whole idea was pretty funny. “Besides, I’m not standing out in that goddamn corridor all night listening to Fabrini moan while Crycek puts the meat to him.”

“You mother… fucker,” Fabrini said low in his throat like the growl of a dog and launched himself at Saks again.

Menhaus and Cook stopped him, holding him back.

Crycek just stood there, managing to look amused and disturbed at the same time.

And Saks? He just smiled, loving it how he could push Fabrini’s buttons so easily. Loved the power he had over the man. And the thing was, he honestly wanted Fabrini to come at him, to get in real close. Maybe Cook had been partially right when he said that Saks had a deep-set fear of being alone and that he wouldn’t kill the others for that reason… but that fear didn’t extend to Fabrini. He would’ve killed Fabrini. Happily so. You could see it in his eyes.

And what broke off all the fun and games was Makowski getting up and walking over to the porthole and saying, “None of you belong here. None of you. Tonight… tonight she’ll come… and you can’t be here.”

“Who?” Cook said, chilled now.

Makowski turned and looked at them, a sick yellow smile on his face. His eyes were dark and empty like drained ponds. “You know who… and she won’t want you here…” Saks wasn’t smiling now.

If it was possible for him to be scared, he was now.

14

So, in the raft, they waited.

They waited for small terrors and big ones, they waited for madness in every color of the rainbow… and some out of it. For although the talk was light as they rowed deeper into the weed, they fully expected death in their hearts. They expected it from the sea or the mist and possibly both. They did not know what form it might take, only that it would be terrible and immense when it showed itself.

Gosling and George were rowing while Cushing kept watch for trouble.

Gosling was worried about them, even though he would never have said this aloud. He worried about their flesh and blood, certainly, but more so, he worried about their minds. Because there was only so much the human mind could be expected to take. Only so much a man could drink down and hold in his belly before it all came back up. The camel’s back could only hold so many straws. And right then, he was thinking that those straws they were carrying were getting real damn heavy.

Cushing seemed to be taking it pretty well.

He had a well-disciplined scientific sort of mind. Regardless of how horrible the things in the mist were, he seemed to be able to rationalize their existence with a counterpart back home. For after all, he argued, even that big ugly jellyfish was really just a jellyfish. It was not some monster from hell.

Then there was George.

George was tough in Gosling’s book, he was sensible. He was the sort of guy who could take a lot because he pretty much had an optimistic turn of mind to him. But that was wearing. A little at a time it was wearing, just as it was wearing on Gosling himself.

And maybe George wouldn’t admit it, but he was beginning to fray around the edges.

Gosling didn’t blame him, for he felt the same.

The mist, the sea, those goddamn weeds… they seemed to go on forever. It was all bad enough, of course, but the ever-present billowing fog definitely was not helping matters. How long could you be trapped in a raft in that thick, pissing fog before you lost it? There was something about fog that played havoc with men’s minds. Gosling had seen it countless times at sea. The thicker the fog got, the thicker men’s fears got. They became silent and morose and brooding. It was eerie and oppressive, claustrophobic and suffocating. It squeezed the soul out of a man a drop at a time. And when the fog cleared — as it always did at sea, sooner or later — men’s minds cleared with it. They began to talk and laugh, clap each other on the backs, maybe feeling foolish for how the fog had gripped them, locked them down in a black, sightless box.

But what about in this godawful place?

What about here where the fog did not lift? Where it was always steaming and misting and haunted? How long could the human mind hold itself intact in that maze of bleeding mist?

There were times in these past few days… and even Gosling was no longer sure how long it had been now… when he had wanted to scream at that goddamn fog. Would have sold his soul just to part it like the Red Sea even for a few moments of clarity. It was just… everywhere. And it got so you could not only see it pressing in like a shroud, but feel it and smell it and taste it. And there were times when Gosling was almost certain it was inside of him, coiling in his belly or filling his skull with gray, nebulous ropes.

These were things you could not think on.

But these were the things Gosling worried about.

And that was one reason he had them rowing. The physical exertion would be good for them. It would give them a sense of purpose, the feeling that they were not just drifting aimlessly, but in charge of their fates. And something like that was very necessary to the human spirit.

It needed something to cling to.

Something to struggle against.

But there was more to it than that. The weed was very thick now, impenetrable in spots. But there were channels cut through it and Gosling was just enough of an optimist to believe that those channels were taking them somewhere. Maybe it would be somewhere they’d wish to God they’d never seen when they got there and maybe there would be deliverance.

So they kept rowing, spelling each other.

Looking and watching and waiting.

And it was while they were doing this that Cushing suddenly said, “Something… there’s something coming out of the mist.”

15

Saks waited, too.

He waited for the ultimate breakdown of Cook’s little command here. Because like death, taxes, and Fabrini’s ass getting wet, it was only a matter of time. Some things were inevitable. You could hide your head in the sand or stick it up your own ass, but the bottom line was, they were going to happen. And the real question was: were you going to be ready to face them like a man… or were you going to be like Cook’s little crew of ass cowboys and shit monkeys and have yourself a group hug and a good fucking cry?

He’d never in his life seen a more incompetent bunch than the four stooges here — Fab-rini, Cook, Menhaus, and Crycek. And don’t forget their new sidekick, Makowski, a.k.a. Slim Loony.

What a crew.

Outside of the Keystone Cops, you weren’t going to find a bigger bunch of morons. It was pathetic. Sickening, even. There was no doubt in Saks’s mind that they’d all spawned in the shallow end of the gene pool… and in Fabrini’s case, the side with the frilly curtains and oiled-up cabana boys giving back-rubs and sucking sugar plums out of each other’s mouths.

Jesus, it was like some kind of fucked-up reality show.

Cook, of course, claimed to be in charge. But, Saks figured, Elton John also claimed to be a man.

And if he was in charge, what exactly was he in charge of?

That was the real question. Because his crew wouldn’t make anybody’s top ten list. Crycek was crazy. Menhaus was a goddamn mama’s boy. And Fabrini? Shit, Saks had heard of guys coming out of the closet, but Fabrini was the only one he’d ever heard of going back in. And then there was the new guy, Slim Loony, who had more kinks in his rope than a squareknot.

And then, of course, there was also Cook, like the poster boy for inbreeding, sitting atop this heap like a circus ape hoarding turds.

What it all came down to was that it was every man for himself and that spelled death on a spit in a survival situation like this. When Saks picked these numbnuts for the job back in Norfolk, he’d never imagined what sort of goddamn useless, sewer-sucking shitrats they would turn out to be. The biggest collection of limp-wrists he’d seen since the Village People reunion.

He found himself laughing at them.

At everything.

And he was the crazy one, they said.

They thought he was the real danger. Of all things. Saks figured he was their only true salvation. The only hope they had of surviving in this goddamn place. Because, the way things were going, they were all dead men in search of a grave. Cook had no leadership ability. Neither did any of the others. Given time — and they had plenty of that, now didn’t they? — it was all going to come apart around them with Cook at the helm. He was the sort of guy that was all right for shining shoes and cleaning toilets, but you didn’t want him at the wheel. No sir.

If Cook was smart, if he had the rudimentary smarts that God gave a dog’s dick, he would have organized and did some planning. Every man should have been armed. Watches should have been set up. And that was just for starters. Because Saks might have been hard-nosed and practical, but he knew one thing for sure: they were not alone on the ship. Something was there with them. And that something was not just another nutjob like Slim Loony, but something else, something dangerous.

Something… evil.

Yeah, the way Saks was looking at things, it was only a matter of time before they wanted him to take charge again. He just wondered how many were going to be left by then.

16

Crycek woke to the sound of scratching.

Right away he started thinking rats. Started thinking big rats. Because the sound he was hearing at the door was not a little sound, but a big sound, the sort of scratching noise that goes up your spine and scrapes around in your skull. The cabin was dim, though not exactly dark. Cook and Fabrini were sleeping. Everyone was sleeping. Except for Crycek and what was outside the door.

Saks had said there were rats on the ship and he also said that was a good thing, because when the food ran out… and it was going to, yes sir… then rats could keep a man alive. Some parts of the world, he said, rats are considered a delicacy. But listening to that metallic scratching out there, like tenpenny nails drawn over rusty iron, Crycek wasn’t so sure about rats.

You know better than anyone else that this ship is not empty, a chill voice said in his head. There’s something here listening and watching and waiting. Not the Other from the fog, the devil-thing.. . no, not that. That was big, gigantic, cosmic… this was localized. What waited here was… was… more of an echo, a sentient lunatic echo… something starving for company…

It was not a scratching at the door now.

It was a tapping. A gentle rapping, tapping like in that poem by Poe Crycek had to memorize in tenth grade. Tap, tap, tap. Yes. And who exactly was that tapping at the chamber door? Crycek did not want to know, not really, yet he swung his legs off his bunk and sat there, wondering and willing whoever or whatever it was to just go away. Go scratch at Saks’s door. Go anywhere but here.

Tap, tap, tap.

See, now it wasn’t sounding so much like a harmless tapping, now it was sounding like fingers drumming impatiently. And if it was fingers, then it had to be a person… didn’t it? But who would be out there now? And if they wanted to come in, why didn’t they just use their voice?

Yes, fingers drumming now. Whoever owned them was not going away because they knew Crycek was in there and they knew Crycek was awake. That he could hear what it was they were doing. Come out and play. Come out, come out, wherever you are…

Crycek licked his lips and his tongue felt thick, ungainly. “Cook,” he said in a whisper. “Cook…”

But Cook was sleeping and that’s the way it had to be, Crycek knew. For whatever was out there wanted it that way. It would have it no other way. What waited beyond that door was for him and him alone. And the very idea of that filled him with a numb, white silence. The terror on him and in him was so extreme, so marrow-deep, that he thought he would have slit his wrists if a razor had been handy.

He thought: I’ll go back to sleep because I’m probably not even awake.

And outside the door, those fingers kept tapping and drumming. They were getting impatient. For some reason — and Crycek could not begin to imagine what it might be — whoever or whatever was out there, could not just burst in, they needed to be invited in. Like a vampire scratching at your window or clawing at your door, you had to let them in. But why? Crycek did not know, but maybe it was just the politics of this particular virus of madness.

Crycek got up, stood over Fabrini for a moment, but Fabrini was lost in a deep, almost narcotic slumber from which there was no waking. Cook was stretched out like a body on a slab and was pretty much lost to the world.

Crycek turned to the door.

He stopped two or three feet away, balling his hands into fists so they wouldn’t inadvertently reach up and pull the latch, let that clutch of creeping shadows come whispering in. Because it was there: a need to open that door. That crazy, suicidal urge the human animal has at times, to destroy itself completely just for the morbid thrill of it. Like having a gun in your hand and wanting to feel the cold steel of the barrel against your temple or wondering what it might be like to dive out a tenth-story window. The urge was there. And at times of great stress or confusion, it became active, wanted to assert itself. Such a time was now for Crycek. His fingertips were actually tingling, wanting to feel the latch beneath them. Wanting to know it. Just as his ears wanted to hear the creak of that latch, his eyes wanted see that grinning malignancy on the other side, just for one shivering second before his mind blew apart from the sheer horror of it-

“What the hell are you doing, Crycek?” a voice on the other side of the door wanted to know. “Why are you just standing there, you goddamn idiot? What aren’t your hands opening this door and letting me in?”

That voice… maybe not real at all, maybe just echoing through the silent corridors of his brain… it was human, or nearly so. But funny. Like it was full of wet sand. Crycek recognized the voice: it was Morse. Captain Morse. The skipper of the Mara Corday and Crycek’s boss.

He wanted to come in. He sounded pissed-off and desperate.

But was it Morse? Maybe Morse had survived and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there was only this voice and nothing corporeal to go with it.

“Crycek? Crycek, what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Morse said with that thick, slopping voice. “Don’t you know what I’ve been through? Stuck out in the darkness where there’s nothing to touch and nothing to feel? Open this door, boy. Open it right now. That’s a goddamn order…”

Crycek felt tears welling his eyes.

Felt his hand going up to the latch, his fingers brushing it, something on the other side of that door getting excited, breathing hard, almost panting now with a wet, drooling sound. Oh yes, it was happy, so very happy.

“Crycek.”

It was Cook. He was sitting up in his bunk. His eyes were shining black bb’s. “What the hell are you doing over there?”

Crycek started to say something, but stopped… he honestly wasn’t sure what he had been doing. “There was someone… someone at the door. They wanted to come in”

Cook’s voice was thin, dry. “Who? Who was at the door?”

“It… it was Morse,” he said. “Captain Morse.”

“Morse is dead, Crycek.”

Crycek nodded. “Yes, he is… but he wanted to come in anyway.”

With that he went back and laid on his bunk, something like a distant scream sounding in his head.

17

Maybe they were expecting a sea monster.

Maybe they were expecting something worse. Truth was, in that goddamn place, they wouldn’t have been truly surprised to see Santa and his reindeer come winging out of the mist with the Easter Bunny bringing up the back door. Got so you were willing to believe anything in that place. It was easier that way.

But what they got was another lifeboat from the Mara Corday.

“Hey, you bums over there!” a voice called. “You got any damn beer?”

“Yeah,” Cushing said, “we got a keg we just tapped.”

“Don’t forget to tell ‘em about the strippers,” Gosling said.

They rowed over to the lifeboat and saw that Marx, the chief engineer, from the ship was on board. He had two deckhands with him, Pollard and Chesbro, both kids that hadn’t yet seen twenty-five. When introductions were made, George saw that while Marx — biker-bearded and bald, tough as lizardhide — seemed okay with all of it, the two deckhands were not. Pollard looked shellshocked, like he’d just crawled from the trenches. His eyes were glazed and staring, looking into the mist at something no one else could see. And Chesbro… he kept saying how it was all God’s will.

George liked that.

He wasn’t big on religion, but he didn’t have a problem with faith, figured it could be a good thing if you were leading it and it wasn’t leading you. Problem was, you said something was God’s will, it was just another way of throwing up your hands and giving up. And looking at Chesbro, you could see he’d definitely given up. He was a thin kid with sparse red hair and freckles, like Richie Cunningham with dead gray eyes, despair clinging to him like lichen to a rock.

It was almost heartbreaking looking at these two.

So young and so… empty.

Not that George himself was exactly full. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was these days. It was hard to be sure. Sometimes he was filled with a nagging hope and at other times, bleak with pessimism wondering what in Christ they were going to do when the food and water ran out. When he thought about it, he could not be honestly sure how long they had been in the fog now. A few days probably… no more than three or four, but, dammit, sometimes it seemed like it must have been a week or a month or a year. And when he tried to remember life before the Dead Sea, life back in the real world… he had trouble. It all seemed blurry and indistinct like a photo of a flying saucer or bigfoot. Purposely out of focus. Like trying to recall a dream clearly half way through the day. Seemed that maybe he’d never been anywhere else but here and the rest of it was just something he’d dreamed about.

And Christ, he knew that sort of thinking was trouble.

But he thought it all the same.

He kept thinking: I got a wife and a kid out there somewhere, light years from this place probably. Somehow, some way I got to see them again. I just have to. I can’t die in this hellhole, I just can’t. The idea of them spending their life with some half-baked idea that I was lost at sea is unthinkable. I gotta get out of here… if only for them and not for myself.

Marx was talking about the supplies in the lifeboat and how if they pooled everything they had, they could survive well over a month. “By then, First,” he said to Gosling, “we had better come up with something.”

“God will grant us what’s needed if he wants us to survive,” Chesbro said.

“Oh, shut the hell up with that,” Marx said, a big man with tattooed arms, looked like he’d could hurt somebody bad, he got the notion to.

George was thinking that was something Chesbro might want to remember.

Gosling seemed to forget about George and Cushing right away, was just happy to be reunited with his old shipmate… and drinking partner, if the stories they were swapping were even half-true.

Cushing climbed over into the lifeboat, tried talking with Pollard, tried drawing him out of his shell.

George just sat there, taking it all in. New blood. It was exciting and somehow depressing at the same time.

“Can’t say exactly where this shitter is,” Marx said, “south of the goddamn Twilight Zone and north of the Devil’s Triangle. You go figure. But, way I’m seeing it, if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Gotta be a back door around here somewhere.”

“You wanna be careful of that,” Pollard said, not looking at any of them.

They all stared at him. He had been silent for days, Marx said, and him speaking was big news, like Ghandi busting a move.

“Careful of what?” Gosling said.

“That back door,” Pollard said. “Never know where it might lead.”

And that was it. Pollard’s jewel of the day. He would speak no more of it and even Marx bullying him brought no results.

“Just leave him alone,” Chesbro said. “He’s scared. He’s been through a lot.”

“No shit?” Marx said. “Has he really? Well, I haven’t. I just been sitting here pulling my meat and hoping Jesus would see us through this pigfuck. I haven’t been trying to hold you goddamn pussies together for the past three days with spit and hope and snot, now have I? Trying to keep you alive when things came out of the sea with empty bellies and big shitting teeth. Guess again, Chesbro, we’ve all been through a lot. Each and every one of us. But you don’t see me shutting down, do you? Or the First here? Not even Mr. Cushing or Mr. Ryan. No sir. They’re all ready to slap ass and slide dick. They got their peckers out and are just looking for some sweet hole to fill. You know what that is? That’s called being a man.”

Chesbro, true to form, was mumbling prayers under his voice. He looked up at Marx. “I put my faith in God,” he said. “Whatever happens here, will be His will. I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, Chief, there’s things here a lot tougher than you.”

“Sure as shit there are, dumbass. I’m just saying that we got to buck up and take it. We all wanna get out of here, don’t we? Well, if we’re dead, that ain’t gonna happen… now is it?” He looked over at Pollard, shook his head, looked like maybe he wanted to clop him upside the head. “Case in fucking point, Chesbro. Goddamn Pollard here. You want us all to drop to his level? Sit there with that hang-dog, where-is-my-fucking-mommy look about us? I mean, hell and ice, look at him. Looks like he got cornholed by a striped ape with a bowling pin for a pecker, got his shit packed so tight he don’t know whether to squat and push or call the Roto-Rooter man. You want us all to sink to that?”

But Chesbro was praying again, looking close to tears.

“It’s been a tough business from square one,” Gosling said. He was looking on Pollard with a sort of compassion and that much was obvious. “It’s been tough on everyone.”

“Sure,” Marx said. “People handle it different ways, I suspect. But, way I see it, we got a hell of a plot to hoe, we don’t stick together and toughen up, we might as well drop our pants and jump in that slop, let the first thing that swims by make a sandwich out of our bare asses.”

“Amen to that,” Cushing said.

George wasn’t sure what to make of Marx. He was a tough bastard, to be sure, not exactly sympathetic, but something told him the chief engineer was okay. Down deep, he was a good guy… you got past the salty language.

Marx maybe read his mind, because he looked over at George, smiled, stroked his mustache which was flecked with silver. “Don’t mind me, boys, I just go off sometimes. I’m not so bad as I sound. But we got to toughen our asses up. That’s how I see it. Every man for himself doesn’t wash dirty shorts here. We gotta stay tight and stay hard. Am I right, First?”

“As rain,” Gosling said. “As always.”

Cushing cleared his throat. “But Pollard’s right, you know.”

“How’s that?” Marx asked.

“In saying we should be real careful of that back door. In this place, we should be careful of every door.” He had everyone’s attention now and that was what he’d wanted. “Way I see it, we slipped through some kind of door into this place, some kind of warp, if you will. Vortex. Time/space distortion. Wormhole. Call it what you want. If there’s a doorway into our world there just might be doorways into others. We had best be careful we don’t walk through the wrong one.”

That gave everyone something to chew over in their minds.

“I mean, some of the things we’ve seen here… some of the local wildlife… who can say if it’s even native to this place? It might have been pulled in from other places. Maybe.”

George thought that made sense. Most of it was probably native, but some of it could have been as alien as they were. Possibly. Just a theory, but it held some water when you thought about it. And George had been thinking about such things. “I like it, Cushing,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe all those crazy stories of sea monsters sailors reported, maybe they were things that got vomited out of this place and into ours.”

“Sure,” Marx said, “why in the Christ not? I shipped with a boilermaker out of Baton Rouge when I was first a deckhand. Claimed he saw something off of the Ivory Coast like out of one of them prehistoric movies, long neck and all, Loch Ness monster-type. Said it was pea-green and had teeth like knives. Dove before they could get a good picture of it. Maybe that shitter swam out of here.”

“Sounds like a plesiosaur,” Cushing said.

“Sounds fine to me,” Marx said. “Fucking sea monster, all right. You seem to know your science, son. You a scientist or some shit?”

“No. I just like the stuff, natural history and all that. A hobby, I guess.”

George knew he was being modest. Cushing was a trove of information. And as George well knew most hobbyists knew more about their chosen obssessions than did most experts. When something was your blood and soul, rather than your bread and butter, you lived it. You drank it and breathed it and slept it. He figured Cushing was like that.

“Well, we can sure use your head,” Marx said. “When we find that way out, we’ll let you pick door number one or two or three.”

George thought that you just had to admire Marx’s energy level. He was always up, always ready to tango. To a guy like him, pessimism was unthinkable. Not among his natural rhythms. If you were to ask him, George figured, Marx would have said that pessimists weren’t nothing but sissies with philosophy and good diction.

Gosling said, “Let’s rope the raft to your lifeboat and do some rowing. I have a feeling these channels through the weed here, by accident or purpose, lead somewhere. And I want to know where that is.”

“And there’s a drift here,” Marx said. “And it’s pulling us in that general direction. Sooner or later we’re going there, might as well row our nuts off and get a look at it before it gets a look at us.”

Chesbro looked like he was going to say something, but shut his mouth.

Which George figured was probably a good thing.

Marx explained to them that anyone else that got spit into this place would drift in the same direction, chances were. So that if there were other survivors they would be up ahead. “And who knows? If this is the same place that’s been sucking ships and planes out of the Triangle and the Sargasso since god-knows-when, they’re probably up there, too. Jesus, we could find a good boat… I could get my hands on some engines and fuel… shit, I’d either push us back home or make one hell of a stab at it.”

And that, George realized, was about as close as you were going to come to a reason to live in this place.

It was too much to hope for… but it was better than drifting and brooding. He had a funny feeling they were poised at the edge of revelation. He just hoped it didn’t have big teeth and an empty belly.

18

When Menhaus came awake, he knew instinctively something was wrong.

His eyelids fluttering open, he could not put a name to it. But he could feel it, same way you can feel someone in the darkness with you. You do not need to see them or be told that they are there, you can feel it. An invasive sense of presence… no less palpable than fingernails drawn up your spine.

Saks was snoring lightly.

Menhaus could not see Makowski. It was too dim in the cabin. Shadows nested like snakes, finding each other, combining, mating, breeding a slithering brood of shifting darkness.

Menhaus tried to blink it away, for there was something positively unnatural about that darkness.

He listened. Yes, he could hear it. He could hear the darkness.

Just a subtle whisper of motion, but he’d sensed it, felt it somehow. And now he heard it: a wet, dragging sound. Like a soaked, moth-eaten blanket dragged over the floor. Swallowing, he pulled himself up on his elbows, craning his neck, listening. There. He heard it again. A secretive, moving noise. Menhaus imagined that’s how snakes would sound in the dark… but it wasn’t snakes; he knew that much. Not here. Not in this dead ship in the boundless graveyard sea. No, this was a stealthy, intelligent locomotion. The sound of something trying to be quiet. Something that knew it was being listened to and was trying not to be heard.

He wanted to write it off to imagination, to nerves, but he was beyond all that now.

For not only could he hear it, he could smell it now.

A rank, wet smell. The stink of something from the bottom of a pond.

Carefully, Menhaus found his lighter and flicked it into life.

“Saks?” he whispered softly. “Saks?”

Nothing. Saks was out cold.

Only that rustling, breathing motion.

Menhaus swung his legs over the bunk and hopped off. But quietly, a cat dropping soundlessly to the floor. He snatched one of the candles they’d purloined from the lounge and lit it.

Makowski’s berth was empty.

No, not empty. Not exactly. There was a form there, a shape, a sense of solidity. Makowski was there, all right, but wrapped in a net of shadow.

Except that the shadow wasn’t moving… it was not evaporating as the light hit it.

Yes, as he approached Makowski with the candle the darkness did not retreat. It hung over him like a shroud. Blacker than black, glistening and wet, an oil slick of shadow. It seemed to almost shudder at the intrusion of light like it was not shadow at all, but something pretending to be shadow.

Menhaus felt his heart seize momentarily in his chest.

Makowski was enveloped in the stuff.

He looked like he’d been dipped in tar.

As Menhaus brought the candle closer, closer, the mass began to slide off of Makowski, running like hot wax from his staring face. A thick, serpentine clot of it deserted his open mouth with the sound of viscera yanked from the belly of a fish. He began to convulse, to gag and sob and tremble. The black stuff was like tissue, fleshy and convoluting. You could see the flex of alien musculature beneath that neoprene skin.

Jesus, it was alive… living blackness.

Menhaus saw, for just one brief insane moment, a face in that blackness. The smooth, shining mockery of a woman’s face grinning at him… then it melted away and maybe it had not been in the first place.

He wanted to scream.

Wanted to, but his throat was constricted down to a pinhole. Shaking now, he held the candle out towards the retreating black mass. It moved quickly now, seeking darkness in which to hide in. One crazy, insane moment he could see it fluttering and shifting, the next it had vanished into the shadows or become the shadows.

Menhaus stood there helplessly, the candle flickering wildly in his trembling fist, throwing nightmare shadows over the bulkheads. He wanted to collapse, to cry, to yell, but his lips were glued tight.

Makowski, however, found his voice.

It was a high, mad wailing that filled the cabin, reverberated and pounded through the still air. He fell to the deck and screamed and howled and sucked in great, wheezing lungfuls of air in-between. He fell against Menhaus who nearly dropped the candle, knowing damn well he could not drop it. For if it went out, if it went out…

Makowski was clutching his legs like a terrified toddler, his mouth frozen open, spraying spittle and horror: “IT’S ALL OVER ME CAN’T BREATHE CAN’T-”

Menhaus first tried to kick him away, then went down on his knees, setting the candle on the floor, letting its radiance keep the darkness at bay. He took hold of Makowski and shook him, tried to shake the madness out of him. Makowski fought in his arms like a freshly landed salmon, twisting and turning and clawing at him, out of his mind with panic.

“STOP IT!” Menhaus cried. “STOP IT! MAKOWSKI! STOP IT! IT’S GONE DAMMIT! IT’S GONE AWAY, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Finally, he slumped into Menhaus’ arms, weightless, powerless, curled up on his lap like a sick child, just shaking, damp with sweat. His hands furled and unfurled.

Saks was out of his bunk by then. “What?” he demanded. “What the fuck is it?”

And what was Menhaus to say? The shadows, he was attacked by the shadows? But saying something like that sounded even crazier that seeing something like that. So he said nothing, feeling his heart racing and his breath coming hard.

Saks was staring at him. “Well? What in the fuck are you two pussies screaming about?”

Menhaus had a sudden, irrational need to laugh. But he didn’t. Instead, he found his voice and told Saks what he’d seen. “I saw it. By Christ, Saks, I mean I really saw it.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Saks said bluntly.

“Fuck you, Saks. What the hell do you think happened?” Menhaus said fiercely, his eyes glaring with rage. “You think we both goddamn well dreamed it?”

Makowski was not saying a thing. His eyes were wide and glassy. Wherever he was, it was a lonely place and certainly not a very good place.

There was a pounding at the door, Cook saying, “What the hell’s going on in there? Unlock this goddamn door.”

Saks, tittering under his breath, did. “Hey, Cook, c’mon in… we got a ghost in here.”

Menhaus helped Makowski into his bunk. “I never said ghost,” he told them. “Ghost is not what I said.”

“Okay, peaches, call it what you want. Ghost, spook, oogie-boogie man. Jesus H. Christ, Menhaus, I bet you still wet the fucking bed.”

“Kiss my white ass.”

“All right, all right,” Cook said. “Settle down. Just tell me what happened and Saks? Just zip it for once.”

Menhaus, sensing an ally, told Cook everything. There really wasn’t much to tell and by the time he was done, he wasn’t even sure if he believed any of it. Sounded like some bullshit story you told around a Boy Scout campfire.

Cook said, “But the light drove it off?”

Menhaus nodded.

“All right. Keep a candle burning then.” Saks didn’t say a word.

Menhaus knew Saks might be acting like some hard-headed rationalist asshole, but he believed, all right. He believed everything Menhaus had said. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit it was all.

“Saks?” Cook said. “Come over to my cabin. I want to talk with you. You okay here, Menhaus?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”

He was thinking about the black tissue, wondering what it was and what it wanted. Was it trying just to suffocate Makowski? Was that it? Or, given time, would it have devoured him, bones and all? It all made Menhaus remember when they’d first rowed through the weed around the Cyclops. At the stern, there had been a patch of oily darkness in the water, shifting in the weeds. Not a shadow exactly. Like a shadow, but more solid. Cook had seen it, too.

And what had Crycek said?

Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…

Yeah, Menhaus did not doubt that at all.

He could hear Saks and Cook out in the corridor, arguing with lowered voices. Knowing Saks and his ways, it could go on for some time.

“It was my turn,” Makowski suddenly said.

Menhaus turned, his flesh gone rigid. There was a chill moving up the small of his back. “What? What did you say?”

“It was my turn,” he said again. He turned and looked at Menhaus, his head revolving with an almost mechanical slowness like that of a puppet. His eyes were glistening and mad. “It was my turn tonight and you ruined it.”

“I… saved you,” Menhaus mumbled.

But Makowski just shook his head. “She’ll come again… when she’s ready. Maybe tonight or tomorrow. Maybe this time she’ll come for you…”

19

“It’s just something you need to see,” Saks was saying. “You’re in charge and you have to know about things like this. I’ll just be glad to wash my hands of it.”

Cook didn’t like the idea. Didn’t like it at all. Going on a walk with Saks made you wonder if you were going to come back again. Made you wonder a lot of things. Fabrini was against it, of course. He did not trust Saks and never would. Cook told him just to stay with Crycek, that they were going to look at something and Saks said it was the sort of thing that Crycek definitely should not see.

“You think I’m up to something, don’t you?” Saks said to him when they were moving down the companionway to one of the lower decks. Just them and that great creaking ship, the kerosene lantern creating macabre shapes around them.

“Are you?” Cook said.

“No, I’m not. Shit, Cook, I’m just trying to help you out here. Way I see it, you the man. You’re in charge. Okay… then you better see this. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something. You don’t wanna? Fine. You think I’m luring you down here so I can knife you, then let’s go back right now.”

They went down that fungi-strewn corridor past staterooms that were rusted shut. The air was congested with a briny, stagnant odor. After a time, you almost got used to it. Almost.

Saks stopped before a stateroom door. “It’s in here. I found it after we first came aboard, when I took my little tour.”

Cook nodded. He remembered Saks coming into his cabin after his little tour, as he called it, saying he heard scratching in the walls, thought it was maybe rats. Had a real funny look in his eyes that Cook had thought was either fear or something like it.

Cook said, “I think Fabrini and I checked this door, it was locked tight. Rusted shut.”

“Well, it wasn’t rusted shut when I came down here,” Saks said. “It was open.”

Those words hung heavy in the air, full of dark implications Saks wasn’t about to put into words.

Cook said, “Maybe… maybe it was just locked from the inside. Maybe Makowski was hiding in there.”

Saks smiled. “You think so?”

Cook took hold of the latch, the door groaning as he pushed it inward. The sound was sharp and creaking like nails pulled from a coffin lid. It went right up his spine, sounding to him as if the door was screaming. In the light of the lantern, dust motes and flakes of filth swam like sediment disturbed in the bowels of a sunken ship. Everything in there was dirty and crumbling, like what you expected in an Egyptian tomb. The porthole was so thick with grime it looked practically furry.

But what paused Cook at the doorway was the smell in there. He could not immediately associate it with anything else. Certainly, there was a dry tang of age and nitrous decay and rust, but there was more, too. An inexplicable odor that reminded him of ozone, a sharp and heady almost chemical odor mixed with older corruption.

Right away, Cook figured that was trouble.

“You don’t want to go in there, it’s okay with me,” Saks said, maybe smelling it, too, or feeling it down deep as Cook had.

But Cook shook his head. He was expecting some smartassed comment from Saks, something about him being afraid of the dark and pissing himself… but it did not come. Saks’s eyes were wide and bright, almost fearful. There was a tic in the corner of his mouth. As they entered the room, Saks started to say something half a dozen times, but promptly shut his mouth. There was an almost infantile sense of confusion about him in this place. He would start in one direction, stop, reverse himself, then start again only to take a faltering step back. That’s how Cook knew that it was inside Saks, too. That like himself, he could not find his center here, could not get his bearings. This place had a strong, withering negative psychic charge that filled your mind with whispers and reaching shadows. Psychologically, it felt like the end of the world… beyond even, shivering blackness trying to suck you down into nothingness.

“Jesus, but I don’t like this fucking place,” Saks said.

Cook did not either. A terror, vague and half-formed, was prickling the back of his neck. This place was sucking him dry. He felt something like a wild, hysterical scream building inside him.

“Show me,” was all he would say.

Saks led him over to a writing desk pushed in the corner. The dust on its top was disturbed, maybe from Saks’s earlier visit. The metal of the bulkheads was riddled with holes like great ulcers. You could see into the cabin next door through them. In the far corner, amongst the debris and settled dust, there was something like soap flakes strewn about. Looked like somebody had scaled a fish in there, a big fish… but many years back, for the flakes were curled and brown like autumn leaves.

Cook did not want to think about what that might have meant.

Saks pulled open a drawer on the desk and took out an old leather-bound book with a clasp on it like a journal or a diary.

“You better read what’s in here,” he said.

So this was it. Another goddamn book, another confession of nightmares. Cook, his hands trembling now, began to page through it. The first ten pages were blank. Then they began to be filled with stunted paragraphs, quickly scribbled odds and ends written in a woman’s flowing hand. She claimed that her name was Lydia Stoddard. That she had been aboard a sixty-five foot two-masted schooner called Home Sweet Home with her husband, Robert, and five others. They were apparently en route from Bermuda to Antigua in January of 1955 when they found the fog or it found them. Entry after entry told of the Home Sweet Home floundering in the becalmed, fog-enshrouded sea. Of people disappearing until it was just her and her husband. The entries began to get very jumbled and incomprehensible, the handwriting was practically illegible. About all Cook could figure was that the Home Sweet Home had to be abandoned for some reason. That Lydia and Robert packed up a dinghy and floated for days until they found the hulk of the Cyclops.

Cook sighed. “Why am I reading this?”

But the look Saks gave him told him it was important, so he read on:

January 26? 1955

I have not written for several days. I do not wish to write now. I am so alone in this place and I think I have lost my mind. I do not know where I am now. This ship is the Cyclops, I know that much. It disappeared during the First World War and I remember hearing something about it. But I can’t seem to remember exactly what.

This place is purgatory or limbo, some borderland on the outskirts of Hell. Perhaps God is punishing us. I do not know why he would punish us. Robert and I have been good people. We have done nothing wrong. We do not deserve to be marooned in this awful place.

Oh dear God, why? Why?

What have we done?

Robert is very sick now. I think he may be dying. He is feverish and disoriented. He thinks I am his mother and I do not know who I am. My mind seems to wander and I’m not sure what is dream and what is reality.

Last night or maybe a few days ago… I can’t be certain… I walked on deck and I saw something like a huge and glistening snake laying over the decks. When I approached it, it moved, slid away back over the side. It must have been the tentacle of some sea monster. There are horrors in the fog. Strange beasts and worse things, things that try to get inside my head. But I will not let them inside my head.

Oh, God, I hear things. Things on the ship. But I must not be hearing them. It must be in my head.

I am so scared now.

So scared.

If Robert dies, I will be alone.

Oh, God, give me the strength to take my own life. Please.

January 27? 1955

I am not alone here.

There is another.

A woman.

I hear her at night.

She hums to herself out in the corridor.

Humming, humming, humming.

January? 29

Robert is dead. He must be dead. He does not move and he is so very cold. There is no pattern now. Life is a maze, an arabesque, and I can find no way out.

I cannot sleep.

When I close my eyes, I hear Robert calling out to me. Why does he call out to me when he is dead? Sometimes I think he moves, but the dead do not move and I wonder if maybe I am dead, too. Can I be dead? For surely I am not alive in this place.

No, I cannot sleep.

Last night or tonight, I can’t be sure, I awoke feeling hot breath in my ear, smelling something decayed leaning over me. I could not see it, but it was there. It was telling me awful things. It wants me to commit suicide. I hear it at night, I hear it whispering to me out in the corridor. I lock the door tight and huddle with Robert. But it can see me through the door and I can feel it smiling at me.

I think it is a woman.

Yes, just like I thought.

I think the other is a woman.

Perhaps she is mad and perhaps she is trapped here, too. But she is dangerous. She is a lunatic. She has been hiding down in the black, stinking confines of the ship. I think she eats rats. She must live on rats. Oh dear God what must she look like after all these years eating rats and living like a mushroom in wet darkness?

She cannot be human. Not like me.

Oh, the voices? How long must I hear those voices?

February 5?

I am afraid all the time.

The woman will not leave me alone. Even during the day… what I think is day here… she haunts me. She chases me through the ship. I barely made it back today. And then she was out there, scratching at the door. She knows my name. Somehow she knows my name.

Food is running short. What will I eat next? I will not eat what she says I must eat.

Robert opened his eyes and spoke to me. He said: “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything, my pretty little darling.”

No, no, no, I wasn’t going to write that down. None of it.

Robert is dead, dead, dead. I must remember that he is dead and the dead do not speak.

Not like me.

Not like me.

Not like me.

February 10?

Yes, I am scared all the time.

How long can you be scared before you stop being scared?

Only a little bread left that is moldy. I will eat the mold, too. Yes, I will. Watch me eat the mold. It is green and yeasty-tasting. It turns my stomach.

I killed a rat.

It was delicious.

February 11?

I am not afraid of the woman.

She wants to be my friend and tells me so.

Last night or today or maybe last week I heard her humming down the corridor. That incessant, lunatic humming. I took my knife with me. My knife and a candle. I will stop that humming or it will stop me.

I saw her.

A misshapen, dwarfish creature in rags. Her face is white as a corpse. Her eyes are yellow. She was waiting in a darkened cabin for me. I wanted to kill her. She would not speak to me. She would only hum. She has a puppet. I saw it. A little puppet on wires that she makes dance. Oh dear God, it is not a puppet… it is a mummified infant. It has yellow eyes, too. It smiled at me and began to drool. It was wrapped in a dirty blanket and I could see things moving beneath that blanket. The puppet infant has too many legs.

I locked myself in my cabin.

Something has been eating Robert’s corpse. Rats. They must come in when I am out. Come in and chew on him.

Terrible.

February 15?

The woman is not my friend. She is horrible.

She does not hum now. She sits outside the cabin door and whistles. The whistling is melodious, yet eerie. She likes to whistle as I eat my dinner. That whistling makes me think things and do things I cannot remember later.

Why does she torment me? What does she want?

Why does she keep scratching at the door? Fumbling with the latch.

I will not let her in.

She wants my food and I will not share it.

She and that puppet-baby are hungry. Let them eat rats.

Robert says our food is not to be shared.

It is secret our food. Our secret food.

Let them be hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Cook stopped reading there.

It was terrible, like a dirty window looking into a madhouse, a guided tour of a woman’s mind going to rot. It was very unnerving. There were things she was not writing about. Awful things. Like what she was eating and Cook had a pretty good idea what that might be.

“Why do I need to read this?” he asked Saks.

“You’ll see. Just keep going.”

“This is pointless.”

“No, it’s not. It’ll make sense to you when you’re done.” His eyes were bulging, his face twisted into a grimace. “You don’t like it, do you? Well, I didn’t like it either. You know what it was like for me? Down here… alone… reading that warped shit, sure I was hearing things out there. Funny things. At least you got me with you…”

Cook sighed, picked up the book again.

February 21?

I hear things at night or maybe in my head.

Different things now. Like snakes crawling against the door. How can there be so many snakes? And why do they whistle? But maybe it is that insane woman and maybe it is me.

I am confused.

I do not know.

The walls make me crazy. The bulkheads have rivets only they are not rivets. I know they are not really rivets. Yes, they are tiny yellow eyes that blink and watch and see. They like to watch me to stare at me I am never alone now. Never ever never. Those eyes want to know my secret things that I have locked up in my head. But only I have the key. Yet they stare and leer and watch. They’re waiting for something. Waiting for me to do something.

But what?

I cut smiling mouths into my palms with the knife.

The mouths wake me up.

They like to scream.

February 25?

The insane woman still haunts the corridor.

Oh, she thinks I do not know what she wants.

But I know because I can think with her mind as easily as with my own. Ha, ha, ha. She didn’t expect that.

Still, she creeps in the corridor. The sounds she makes. Patter, patter, tink, tink, tink. She must have a dozen legs to make sounds like that.

The creeping.

The hideous creeping.

Oh, how it echoes even now.

February 26?

I woke spun in webs.

She must have gotten in while I slept. She is very sneaky with her loathsome creeping. The webs were all over me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. Oh, sticky and clinging and wet with spider mucus. Gossamer strung with pearls that must be eggs. Eggs for puppet-spider babies. Hee, hee. What an image that conjures? But I know it to be true, so very true. Out there, walking and creeping about with all those legs.

Do they think I do not know?

Yes, I woke spun with webs.

As I walked through my cabin, they were strung everywhere. Like spiderwebs breaking across one’s face… but imagine a thousand million spiderwebs breaking over your face at once.

Be quiet. They’re out there now… the lady and the puppet-baby. Can you hear them creeping? They have a thousand legs.

I know their game.

I know her game.

Creeping out there and staring through holes in the walls.

Does she think I cannot hear her whispering those profane things?

March

That puppet-spider baby is crying.

It cries out in the corridor, creeping on those long black legs. It is hungry. It wants its milk. It sucks the milk from things wrapped in silk high up in its web.

I hear it nursing at night.

It wishes to nurse on me, little puppet-spider baby. I saw it through a hole in the wall and it saw me. It has many eyes and they are all black.

It needs to nurse.

I will let it nurse on me, sweet evil puppet-spider baby. Yes, yes, yes. It scratches over my bare belly. It is hairy and plump and gurgling. I let it nurse at my breast. Its teeth are very sharp. Its mouth is slimy.

Sucking and sucking.

The feel of its tongue lapping makes me scream. I like to scream.

March?

Creeping in the corridor.

I hear her creeping even now.

She has more than one child and they all have many legs. A thousand creeping legs.

I have only two.

But I have ten fingers.

I can make them crawl.

See how they crawl.

Over walls and over faces.

Lovely spider legs, see them creep.

March 27 i creep up walls robert does not like it does not like what i have webbed up tasty things in webs yes i have many legs with which i creep and crawl up walls and down walls over floors and under cabinets it is such good fun the face of my lover: flyblown and grinning, soft and pulpy with white bone bearing teeth marks. i paint his face with kisses he tastes sweet beneath the cobwebs i have spun over him he is safe in a gray coccoon. she will not have him i have chased her and her leggy babies down below for i am queen and i eat children with yellow snapping teeth i eat spider babies their meat is rich their blood brown like gravy cold gravy i seek dark damp corners to spin my webs places i can creep and crawl and slink i dream of basements and cellars and webby places i hang over Robert he is my lover so i cocooned him laid my spider eggs in him creeping always creeping waiting for my spider babies to be born when they are born we will eat my lover tastes so sweet robert like candied meats love his taste like candied meats i creep and i wait

The entries as such ended there.

Cook was sweating and shaking. It was all the mad ramblings of an insane mind, yet he almost half-believed it, crazy and improbable as it all sounded. His heart was pounding and he could not hold the book still. He was angry. Angry at a God that would allow this woman to become a lonely, deranged thing that maybe had to eat her husband’s corpse to survive. Angry at Saks for showing it to him and maybe angry at that woman herself for invading his mind, spinning lustrous webs in the corners where things breathed and crept and light would never touch. He did not want to see these things. Did not want to ever feel them.

“You’re not done yet,” Saks said.

“No, you’re fucking wrong, I am done,” Cook said, filled with hatred now. “You can stay if you want, but I’m going.”

“No, you’re not,” Saks said, blocking his way. “There’s more. Just look at it.”

Cook toyed with the idea of hammering his way through Saks with his fists, but instead he just picked up the book. Blank page after blank page. All of them yellowed and going to pieces.

What was the point?

Then he saw. More writing.

A single sentence repeated, but at the intervals of a year each time:

March 27, 1956

Another lovely day!

March 27, 1957

Another lovely day!

March 27, 1958

Another lovely day!

In fact, the rest of the diary was just this repeated again and again every March on the anniversary of Lydia Stoddard’s madness. Something about that really sucked the wind out of Cook. The funny thing was, the real disturbing thing, was that these cryptic little entries continued right to the present year… but went no farther. As if Lydia’s ghost showed up once a year to scribble in the diary.

“She must… she must have written these entries back in 1955,” Cook said, knowing it sounded thin as a sliver.

“And she just happened to pick this year as the year to stop?”

“C’mon, Saks. You’re a little too hard-headed to believe in ghosts.”

Saks smiled. “Ghosts wasn’t what I was thinking. Not exactly.”

“Then what were you thinking?”

But Saks did not answer that. “Do you know what today’s date is?”

“No. My watch stopped working-”

“Well, my digital works just fine. Today is the twenty-seventh of March.”

Cook felt a chill on his arms. Sure, it was easy to believe absurd, frightening things like that and especially in this cabin with the drifting dust and age and that oppressive atmosphere that just seemed to drain you dry minute by minute. But Cook wasn’t going there.

He said, “Maybe… maybe Makowski forged this shit.”

“You don’t believe that, Cook, and neither do I,” Saks said. “Unless you’re willing to take a real wild leap here and say he wrote the entire thing. But that’s a woman’s writing and we both know that. The entries from the fifties are faded, the newer ones pretty fresh… now how would that fucking idiot pull that off?”

Saks was right. The forgery angle was silly… but there had to be an explanation, didn’t there? Or was it just this place? This goddamn nameless dimension where anything went. Because, deep down, that’s what he was thinking. Lydia Stoddard went slowly and completely insane here. All alone, her mind went to pieces. Who could blame her? She was long dead, certainly, but what if her madness was not? What if it came back once a year? If that was even remotely possible, they were all in serious danger.

Saks said, “You heard what that freak Makowski was saying, stuff about her coming back and her not wanting us here. Jesus, Cook, I’m getting some ideas here and I don’t like ‘em.”

“We better get back. I don’t like the idea of leaving the others alone.”

Saks picked up the diary, paged through it. “What the hell?” he said. He dropped the book on the desk, backing away from it.

Cook knew and did not know. He picked up the diary, thought it felt warm in his hands, like something alive. He saw today’s entry.. . then he saw something else which had not been there five minutes before. What he was seeing could not possibly be… but it was there, glaring and fresh, daring him to talk it away with nonsense like logic and reason. But Cook could not talk it away, could not make sense of it, he could do nothing but stand there, terror oozing out of him like bile… hot and sour and rancid-smelling. He could hear himself breathing with a dry, rattling sound like a dying breath blown through straw.

He kept staring at the diary and what he saw, just beneath what had been the last entry, was this:

March 27 i am waiting i am waiting waiting waiting hear me creeping i am coming now

Cook dropped the diary with a little cry of revulsion, for in his mind, he suddenly saw it sprout segmented legs, becoming not a book, but something bloated and pale and hairy. Something that like to creep.

He looked over at Saks and Saks’s face had gone bloodless, his eyes were huge and wet and filled with a wild sort of horror.

“Listen,” Saks said. “Listen… ”

And there it was, coming down the corridor: a high-pitched, mournful whistling/wailing sound, like some eerie dirge piped from a throat stuffed with ashes and dry things. It carried a profane melody to it.

Jesus. Cook felt his heart suddenly just stop dead in his chest like something had gripped it… it stopped, then began to beat so fast he thought he would pass out. Droplets of cold sweat burst out on his forehead. His lips felt as though they’d been tack-welded shut.

Saks was scared.

Scared like Cook had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. All that tough-guy machismo had melted away into a tepid shivering puddle. The gray streaks in his hair looked positively white and those bags under his eyes were like pouches.

Cook could only imagine what he must have looked like.

That whistling came again… only it was not so distant now, it was closer and more shrill. And there was something morbidly seductive about that melody it carried, made you want to stay put until you could see the mouth that sang it.

“She’s coming,” Saks said.

Cook had his gun out.

He took hold of the lantern and walked out into the corridor and it took every bit of strength he had. There was nothing out there. Nothing but clutching shadows that seemed viscidly alive and coiling. Motes of dust spinning in the light. No, there was nothing there, but there soon would be. He was smelling that sharp stink of ozone again because lightning was about to strike. Something was about to strike… something creeping and leggy and impossible. Something grinning and insane and lonesome. The sort of grin that haunts your childhood nightmares… just a smiling mouth with long yellow teeth and no face to go with them.

The whistling came again.

Came with a volume that made them curdle inside.

It was so close… it could only be around the next bend in the corridor. And Cook thought… yes… thought he could hear her coming, all those legs scratching along the bulkhead like a thousand scraping nails.

Run for godsake! a voice was shouting in his head. Get the fuck out of here… if you see what comes around that bend, if you see what comes creeping along the wall…

They started running, pounding through that fungus and nearly going on their asses half a dozen times. They went up one companionway, then another until they reached the deck. They could hear that mad, insectile skittering behind them, something like a braying laughter echoing through a black and shuttered attic… and then Saks slammed the hatch on the deckhouse shut, secured the latch.

And almost immediately, on the other side, the sound of many things rasping and clawing against the rusted steel door. Things like knives and hooks and awls.

They ran until they found their cabins.

And did not dare breathe until their doors were shut and locked.

20

They were rowing and making some distance, according to Gosling. It was an ungainly craft they had roped together, the lifeboat on one side and the oblong raft on the other. But with two men on either side pulling with the oars, they were indeed moving.

Marx and Gosling took their break together, as the other four pulled.

“We’re going to come onto something,” Marx said. “I can feel it now.”

Strange thing was, Gosling could feel it, too. They were going somewhere and he could feel it in his bones. A certainty that they were getting close to something.

“Way I’m figuring this whole shitting thing,” Marx was saying, “is that we’re going to be finding some boats. We’ve got to. And maybe people, too, because this drift leads somewhere. A dumping ground, a junkyard… whatever in the Christ you want to call it. Wouldn’t you say, First?”

Gosling nodded. “There’s something out there. I know that much. I guess I keep wondering, thinking that if we survived this, then others must have, too.”

“You… you try your VHF?” Marx asked him.

“Yeah. There’s nothing out there, nothing you want to hear.”

“We tried it for a time… but some of the shit we heard out there, well, it didn’t do my boys much good. Didn’t do me much good either. Just that static out there… never heard static like that before. Now and again…”

“A distress call?”

“You got it. But crazy, spooky shit. Maybe we imagined it.”

“Not unless we imagined it, too.”

Marx looked thoughtful. “You ever see any of them Devil’s Triangle shows on Discovery or one of them?”

“Sure.”

“You probably heard about Flight 19, then?”

Gosling had. Happened in 1945. Five Navy torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale and flew into oblivion. A search plane sent out to look for them vanished, too. No wreckage found, not so much as a slick of oil. Even all these years later, it was one of the great Bermuda Triangle mysteries, a point of great controversy.

“Well,” Marx said, “we kept picking up distress calls. Some fellow saying how they were flying into ‘white water’ and then later, one about being ‘lost in the fog, the bottomless fog.’ It was pretty spooky stuff. I didn’t link it up with Flight 19 until I heard something on the VHF a few hours later. ‘FT, FT, FT, FT’… just repeated on and on like that. You know what ‘FT’ was?”

Gosling shook his head.

“That was part of Flight 19’s call letters.” Marx swallowed. “You’re probably wondering how it is I know that, how I might remember such a thing.”

Gosling, staring out into the fog, was wondering exactly that.

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Marx rubbed his eyes, looked very uncomfortable suddenly. “Had me an uncle, named Tommy. My old man’s younger brother. I never met him. He was a radioman on one of those Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared out there all those years ago. Now and again, my old man would get in a funny mood, start talking about the Brooklyn neighborhood he was raised in. Soon enough, he’d be talking about Uncle Tommy and what happened to him. The old man didn’t buy the official U.S. Navy line about them just going down… all those planes, without a spot of wreckage. He didn’t believe any of it. The old man was of the mind that something out there reached out and grabbed Tommy and the rest of them boys. He would never say what he thought it was. But it haunts him to this day.”

Marx went on to say that his old man was in his eighties now. And every December he went down to Florida on the anniversary of Flight 19’s disappearance, out to Ft. Lauderdale and just stood there for a few hours, staring out over the sea, remembering his brother and praying for him.

“Yeah, the old man’s getting on in years, First, but sometimes he still talks about it. Told me he talked with some of the other crew members’ families and none of them believe what the Navy said either. Still don’t.” Marx shrugged. “I’m thinking Flight 19 ended up here. In this goddamned place. Maybe, maybe if I could find some trace of it out there and get my ass out through one of them doors Cushing was talking about… well, I think my old man could die in peace finally knowing. But one way or another, First, I got to get out of here. I don’t want my old man dying thinking that something out there took his son, too.”

Gosling patted his arm, knowing it had been hard for Marx to admit any of that. Like most sailors, he wasn’t given to airing his family secrets in public. Wasn’t given to showing a hint of the softness all men had at their core. What he had shared with Gosling was almost a sacred thing and Gosling knew he had to treat it as such.

“I’ll do anything I can to help,” Gosling told him.

“Hell, I know that, First. I knew you would without me even squeezing my soul out to you. That’s the kind of man you are. Everyone on the Mara knew that.”

Gosling managed a smile, uncomfortable as always with anything approaching praise. He swallowed, said, “What happened to Pollard?”

But Marx just shook his head. “Don’t know exactly. Like I told you, when the ship went down, I was treading water… then along comes the lifeboat with Chesbro in it. We didn’t come across Pollard until we got into the weed. He saw something, I know that… something that peeled his mind raw. But he won’t say what.”

Gosling could just imagine. For he remembered after the fog first encased the Mara Corday, remembered Pollard running on deck, half out of his head then, saying how something had grabbed Burky… the guy on watch… and pulled him out into the fog. Pollard had been in bad shape then… but what had he seen since?

“I tried getting that little shit to talk,” Marx said, “but all he wants is his mommy and I ain’t his fucking mommy.”

Gosling laughed. “I love you like a brother, Chief, but you’re not exactly real sympathetic.”

“Never claimed to be.”

“What Pollard needs is someone real easy to talk to. Somebody with some compassion.”

“You for chrissake?”

“No, not me. But I know just the guy.”

Then they were both looking over at George and he was looking back at them and wondering what in the hell he was doing wrong to get those hard-assed swabbies staring him down like that.

Marx went over to relieve Pollard on the oars, gave him a ration of shit for being crazy and spooked, said the first sea monster they came across he was throwing his shitting ass to that mother. Might even season it first so it tasted better.

Gosling smiled as he replaced George at the oars.

Marx. Jesus, he was something else, all right.

21

Saks would not tell Menhaus or Makowski where he had gone with Cook. He refused to say anything about it, just that they had business to hash out in private. But Menhaus saw how Saks had looked when he came back. Like he was all bound up, needed to shit something out but couldn’t find the proper opening.

After that, for the longest time, in the flickering orange candlelight, Saks just sat there with his knife in his hand and a dangerous look in his eye. Now and again, he’d cock his head as if he were listening for something he just did not want to hear.

“Rats,” he finally said after a time, “ship’s full of rats.”

“Rats?” Menhaus said.

Saks nodded.

Menhaus was beginning to believe that to Saks, ‘rats’ was the key word for anything he couldn’t or wouldn’t put a proper name to. A metaphor for just about everything unex-plainable aboard the Cyclops.

“I ever tell you, Menhaus, about the rats in Vietnam? Jesus, but we had rats there. Millions of rats. Bastards big as cats, sometimes bigger. They loved our dumps. They’d come into camp at night.”

Saks looked sullen with the memory, as if he could see them running in packs in his mind. Smell them and hear them squeaking.

“Did you poison ‘em out?”

But Saks didn’t seem to hear the question. “I was a Seabee, Construction Battalions. We put in air strips and docks and roads, threw together camps in godforsaken places.” He shook his head. “My first classification was gunner’s mate. So when the river rats, the river patrol sailors, took some bad causalities and were under strength, they would yank guys from other units to build the riverine forces back up to strength. Yeah, they pulled my ass off a big Cat dozer and stuck me in the stern of a PBR, a river patrol boat, on the fifty cal. Had to pull that shit for a month until the replacements made it in-country. What a clusterfuck that all was. Cruising around that stinking brown water down in the Delta, blowing the piss out of little villages. Taking fire and giving it back. Riding herd on all those sampans out in the channels. Most of ‘em were just gook fishermen, papasan and his fucking net, but now and again you’d run across some VC.”

Menhaus wasn’t really in the mood for war stories. He was watching the shadows and thinking about that black, oozing tissue that had nearly consumed Makowski. Wondering if it was coming back and if he’d really seen that woman’s face in it.

“What’s the rivers have to do with rats?” he said.

So Saks told him. “One day, the chief gets a call from an A-6 pilot. There’s some barge drifting downriver, looks derelict. We gotta go check it out. Quick-and-dirty like everything else. The brass says that hulk is a hazard to navigation and the chief is pissed. Hazard to navigation? Down there in the fucking mud flats? Sheee-it. Command says for us to take a peek at her, if she’s derelict, they’ll have some UDTs or SEALs go in there and blow it.”

“So you went aboard the barge?”

“Sure as shit we did.”

“What did you find?”

Saks clenched his teeth, then said, “It was like this tub… dirty and rusting, taking on water. Full of spiders and slime and stinking of decay. Thousands of flies. We found a weapons cache and called it in. Then we found the bodies…”

About twenty VC sappers had been using the barge as a staging point. They had weapons and ammo, explosives and det cord, the works, Saks told him. All the shit they needed to cause all manner of suffering and trouble. The bodies had been there over a month and were just black and rotted, the worms all done with them. Just husks like mummies. But they were chewed-up looking, their bones full of teeth marks.

“About then, the rats show,” Saks said. “Hundreds of ‘em. Their eyes were red in our flashlights. Red and glaring and hungry. Those rats were hiding in the dark corners and debris… but when they saw us, they were hungry enough to come out. Just starving and slat-thin, having picked those bodies down to bones, they wanted some meat and they were going to have it.”

Saks said they came charging out of the darkness, all squeaking and chittering and snapping their teeth. The sailors opened up on them, drove most of ‘em back, but still dozens got through, biting and clawing and drawing blood.

“What did you do?”

“We got off her in a hurry. But you know what?”

Menhaus shook his head.

Saks grinned. “Those fucking things were so hungry, they dove off the ship into the water, started swimming after our launch. Hundreds of ‘em. The chief flooded the water with fuel oil and lit it up. Fucking barbecue. What a smell. Jesus lovely Christ, I’ll never forget that smell. The A-6 pilots came in and dropped napalm on the barge until she was nothing but a blackened, smoking hulk. They put a few missiles into her and down she went.”

“Damn,” Menhaus said. “Of all things.”

“You know what?” Saks said to him. “That’s why I hate this fucking hulk, because it smells just like that barge. Like vermin and bones and death.”

22

Of course George didn’t know much about Pollard, thought he’d seen him around on the Mara Corday once or twice, but had never actually spoken to him. It was Gosling’s idea for him to have a chat with Pollard. Pollard needed someone to talk to, a sympathetic ear. That’s what Gosling said. So while the others pulled at the oars, George was sitting with Pollard in the back of the raft.

“There’s some bad shit in this place, isn’t there?” he said, trying to break the ice.

Pollard didn’t even look at him.

“I hear you were adrift by yourself for a time.”

Pollard shrugged.

“Must have been tough being alone out there.”

Pollard cleared his throat. “I wasn’t alone.”

Contact. “Who was with you?”

Pollard looked at him briefly, as if he couldn’t believe George was quite that naive or stupid. And you could almost see it in his eyes: You’re never alone here, George, haven’t you guessed that yet?

“I went overboard with Gosling. We bobbed around in our lifejackets, Christ, for hours and hours, maybe most of the day… what a day would be back home… and then we found this raft. Thank God for that.”

He hoped that would be the wedge he’d need with Pollard, but Pollard still said nothing. He just stared off into the fog, now and again squinting his eyes as if he were looking for something, suspicious of something.

“Whatever you’re looking for,” George said. “You won’t find it out there.”

That got the thinnest of smiles from Pollard. Other than that, his face was still dead as cemetery marble. His eyes were hollow, blank things which emoted about as much as bullet holes in driftwood. Now and then, his lips quivered as if there was something he really needed to say… but that was about it.

George gave it another shot. “What is it you hope to see out in that soup?”

Pollard said nothing.

Jesus, this guy. Getting into his head was like trying to pick a lock with a hairbrush.

“Do you know why I’m sitting here with you?”

That got Pollard’s attention. “Because they told you to.”

“You’re right,” George said. Maybe being truthful here was the proper tact. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I might have come chatted with you anyway… but, yeah, well, they’re worried about you.”

Pollard seemed unimpressed by that.

So George said, “I know Marx has been riding you like… how would he put it? Like a swayback mare? Like a five-dollar mule?”

Pollard almost smiled at that.

“Marx is a hard guy, I know that,” George said to him. “Gosling has his moments, too. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them or write them off as assholes. They’re dealing with all this the best way they know how, which is toughening up. They won’t allow weakness in themselves or others. Gosling told me you were in the Coast Guard once. Well, you know how it was in the Coasties, you know how those guys get bullying each other. It’s the same here.”

Pollard was looking at him now.

“Sure, think about it. Marx is a tough guy. That’s pretty easy to see just looking at him. Looks like he should be riding with the Hell’s Angels or one of those outlaw biker gangs. He’s not a guy I’d want to piss off. But you know what? You know why he’s riding you?” George asked. “It’s because he’s fucking scared. He’s scared like I’m scared and you’re scared. He just shows it different, is all.”

Pollard blinked his eyes. “I know.”

That was something. George worked it, thinking maybe when he got back — if he got back — he was going to get off the construction gangs and become a therapist. George Ryan, blue-collar therapist. The Dr. Phil of the working class. “Sure, you know. Marx is all wigged-out about you and you know why?”

“Because he’s scared?”

George shook his head. “Partly… but mostly because there’s only a handful of us. And me, you, Cushing, and Chesbro? We’re the meat of their command, Marx’s and Gosling’s. They need us as much as we need them. They’ve got some ideas on what we’re going to do here and I think they’re pretty good ideas, but without us, they’re screwed and they know it. They need us. And the idea that their command, their crew is disintegrating around them, well, that’s enough to put them over the edge. Do you see?”

George was just rolling with it, wasn’t even sure he believed everything he was saying, but, dammit, if it all didn’t sound pretty convincing. Regardless, it was enough to begin thawing Pollard a bit. And that was something.

Pollard didn’t say anything for a few moments, then, “I keep looking out there… I keep looking for Mike.”

“Mike?”

Pollard nodded. “Mike Makowyz. We called him ‘Macky’.” Pollard smiled for a moment at the memory of it. “Macky. He was my bunkmate. Me and Macky and another guy, we shared a cabin.”

“Did he go down with the ship?”

“No. We both made it off her okay… Mike’s arm, I think it was broken, but other than that he was okay.”

Pollard opened up then, like a flower he bloomed and let the sunlight in. And once he started, nothing could stop him: “We… me and Mike… we had lifejackets on, we were drifting on a crate. I don’t know how long. Only that we got into the weeds, the real weeds like here, before the rest of you. I don’t know why.”

“What… what happened to him?” George asked.

Pollard shook his head, his face sallow and drawn. “We were hearing things… things in the water, other things roaring out in the fog. Awful things. Big things moving out there and roaring… like some sort of prehistoric monsters. We were scared shitless. Mike was thinking we’d went through one of those time warps like in a movie he saw, that maybe we were trapped on the back side of the Jurassic or Triassic or one of those. I thought he was nuts at first, but then.. . well, those sounds, Jesus. I guess I was sort of expecting one of them monsters with the long necks and the big teeth… they got one in Chicago at the Museum there, thing’s gotta be seventy, eighty-feet long, has flippers like a whale… one of those things, those sea serpents to come gliding out of the fog and bite me in half. Christ, I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that I was scared shitless and I couldn’t believe any of it had happened. Maybe I still don’t.”

George licked his lips. “Did something come out of the fog?”

But Pollard shook his head. “No, not really. Something came out of the water. Two things came out of the water.”

“What were they?”

“They got Mike,” Pollard said, his hands balled into fists now. “They came out of the fucking water and they took him.”

Pollard started talking fast then, not making a lot of sense to George, but purging what needed purging. He started talking about another guy, someone called Burky. How Burky was a good guy and all the crazy shit Burky would do in port, always with a couple black hookers on his arms, crazy old Burky taking the boys to back room card games and shows with dancing transvestites. How Burky had been on watch and Pollard had come to relieve him right after they went into the fog. And how Burky had been just fine, saying how he was hearing flapping sounds out in the mist like big Jesus birds, joking around about it, but kind of scared, too. And everything was just fine and then Burky lit a cigarette and, bam, something out there… like a bird or a bat with big scaly wings and a sideways beak like a sickle… swooped out of the fog and took him right over the side into the mist. Right in front of Pollard. Just goddamn took him and it was like nothing you ever saw in your life. Just swooped down and took him without breaking stride. And Pollard saw it carry him into the mist and the goddamn evil, horrible thing was laughing and laughing.

“Laughing?” George said, feeling the flesh at his spine moving now.

And Pollard nodded, his eyes dark as flint. “Yeah, laughing… it was fucking laughing, but an insane, shrieking kind of laugh like a laughing hyena. The sort of sound… just echoing, mocking… Christ…”

George just sat there, feeling numb, feeling doped-up, unable to say a single comforting or reassuring thing.

Pollard was breathing hard, squeezing his fists so tightly you could hear the knuckles popping. “And Mike… oh then those things got Mike. That bird just went past me and got Burky, then… then those others, they got Mike, you know? Came right up and got him. Not me, but Mike.”

And maybe that was it, George was thinking. Twice now, two of his friends had been snatched away by things and Pollard himself had gotten away without so much as a scratch. Guilt. Maybe that was what was burning a hole through his soul. Guilt. Never him, always his friends.

George found his voice, said, “What got Mike?”

Pollard opened his mouth wide, looked like he was going to scream, then his mouth slowly closed as if the jaw muscles were being gradually paralyzed. “That fog, that terrible goddamn fog… you know how it looks? How it’s dirty and vile and polluted-looking and you hate it. Deep-down you just hate that filthy stuff, like smog just hanging there like a fucking blanket. But other times… those sounds, dammit, you’re almost glad it’s there. It hides you, you can hide in it and those things out there, you can’t see them and they can’t see you. Me and Mike… we were hearing those goddamn awful sounds out there. Things screaming and growling, making slobbering sounds like mud sucked through a hose. We didn’t want to know what those things were, we were afraid of what those things would look like

…what they would do to us…”

George understood perfectly. “There’s bad things out there.”

Pollard gripped his arm. “You know? You know what I was thinking while we waited out there? I was thinking… Jesus, it’s crazy.. . but I was just thinking that those things, them eating us wouldn’t be so bad, because there were probably worse things they could do.” Pollard cradled his head in his hands. “But Mike… what got him, it didn’t come out of the fog, it came up out of the water. Out of that slimy, stinking water. They came up quick and I thought, I thought they were people… they looked kind of like people, people covered in seaweed. Green tangles of seaweed. Those faces came out of the water, except they weren’t faces, but weeds, weeds that were alive and crawling like worms. One of them had an eye and that eye looked at me, right at me and it was a human eye, but… but crazy and psychotic, not human any more at all. They wrapped their weedy arms around Mike and Mike fucking screamed and I think I did, too, and those arms… all them weeds coiling and squirming like snakes.. . they pulled Mike down and he never came up. And I waited… yeah, I waited for hours and hours and maybe it was days, I just waited for those hands to take hold of me, those cold and worming hands…”

Sure, there was guilt and there was horror. There was a lot of horror, George figured. Pollard seeing those weed-people… for lack of a better name… taking Mike like that, taking him down into those black, oozing depths. And then Pollard alone, just waiting and waiting for those hands to take hold of him. Well, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped completely.

“It’s over and I know it’s over,” Pollard said, somehow defeated and wasted now. “But… I keep thinking I see Mike out there. I think sometimes I hear him calling to me…”

George said, “We all hear things out there. But none of it’s real. Maybe it’s in our heads and maybe it’s something toying with us, but it can’t be real unless we make it real. We believe. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Just take it easy,” George told him. “If you see anything or hear anything at all, just call me over, okay? I’ve seen things, too. We all have.”

George went and spelled Cushing at the oars and Pollard did the same for Chesbro. He was feeling pretty good, feeling like maybe he had some sort of sympathetic gift here. He could pull guys out of their shells and maybe, just maybe, he could even talk monster jellyfish out of eating people in rafts.

“Well?” Gosling said.

“He went through some bad shit,” George told him. “I think he’ll be okay. But you might want to tell Marx to go easy on him.”

“Already did,” Gosling said. “Thanks, George.”

George just smiled, thinking, well that’s my place in all this, I suppose. Marx is the engineer and Gosling is in charge, Chesbro’s the minister and Cushing is the scientist. Me? I’m the therapist.

Christ, of all things.

23

Menhaus had been watching the candle burn down. Watching the wax run down the stem and pool at the base. He kept thinking that all he really wanted to do was to keep that candle burning. Somewhere during the process, he must have dozed off even though he had pretty much given up on sleep now as an impossibility. Yet, it had happened.

It must have happened.

For the next thing he knew his eyes were opening and he was seeing not the candle, but Makowski standing there, head cocked like a dog listening for its master. He seemed to be swaying on his feet to some unheard music.

Or was it unheard?

Menhaus was hearing something, he thought. But something distant, a sound, a melody… but coming from far away and resonating only in the back of his head.

“Slim,” he found himself saying. “Slim… what the hell are you doing?”

But Makowski did not answer.

He was staring at the door, hearing something that seemed to be intended only for him. His mental shortwave had locked onto some channel and that was obvious. He was receiving and the rest of the world had ceased to exist for him.

Menhaus turned and looked over at Saks.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” Saks said. “The only one sleeping here is Slim Loony, I think.”

And it did look like he was sleeping. Drugged or hypnotized, the way sleepwalkers often looked, that morphic gleam to their eyes. Makowski looked much like that. His eyes were fixed and staring, he was rubbing his hands against his legs. His conscious mind was locked-up in a box somewhere and his subconscious was at the wheel now.

Menhaus knew they always said you weren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but it was probably just one of those old wife’s tales, a whaddyacallit, urban legend.

No, he thought, I won’t wake him… unless he makes for that door.

“What do you think?” he whispered to Saks.

Saks just shrugged. He didn’t give a shit one way or another.

Makowski just stood there, listening.

Menhaus thought he was hearing that sound again… or was he? A weird, uncanny humming or was it a whistling? He could just hear it, but not clearly enough to decipher its nuances, its rhythm and flow, not enough so that he could say without a doubt that, yes, he was hearing it.

He looked over at Saks and Saks had his knife out, like he was expecting trouble. His eyes were narrowed, his teeth set.

“What’s going on here?” Menhaus said, because he knew something was. The atmosphere of the cabin had never been exactly cheerful and sunny, but right then it had gone positively bleak, crawling with something. A something you could sense, could feel like poison in your blood.

Saks waited, drew out that silence, said, “There’s someone out in the corridor.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“There is,” Saks said with complete certainty. His eyes were filled with a dim, brooding light. Maybe it was just candlelight reflected and maybe it was something more. “There’s someone out there waiting for Makowski. He can hear it, whoever it is… he can hear it just fine.”

Menhaus swallowed, had trouble doing so.

Sure, he was picking up on it now, too. He wanted badly to tell Saks how wrong he was, but it just wasn’t in him. Because he was hearing something… a creaking or groaning out in the corridor and that sound, subtle as it was, set him on edge. Made his nerve endings tingle and the muscles of his abdomen pull up tight. More than just an old ship settling, more than just a creaking or groaning… this was the sound of occupancy, of someone waiting in the dankness out there. A secretive sound, one that was calculating and deceitful… and disturbing because of it.

Like someone sneaking into your house in the dead of night to steal your children or slit your throat, Menhaus thought.

He did not like it at all.

Makowski went to the door and stopped. Just stood there dumbly like a zombie in a canefield awaiting his orders. Menhaus sat up now, careful to make no sound whatsoever. And he thought: C’mon, Slim, don’t open that door, please don’t open that door… I don’t want to see what’s out there…

“Saks-”

“Shut up,” Saks snapped, but under his breath, trying damn hard to be quiet.

And now Menhaus knew why that was.

There was a very good reason to be quiet.

Because he was hearing it fine now, too. You could call it a humming or a whistling or even a singing, because it seemed to be all these things. It was a woman’s voice, high-pitched and piping. A discordant and vapid melody that rose and fell, an eerie off-key wailing that sounded hollow and distant and haunted… like a little girl’s voice echoed through the ductwork of a house, becoming something metallic and jangling and oddly perverse.

It created a tension in Menhaus, he felt his muscles bunch and his jaw clench tight. He thought it was the voice of an insane woman mourning at her child’s grave in a windy, midnight cemetery. For nothing sane could sound like this… it was the voice of something that crawled in dark places, hid in shadows.

Makowski reached up for the latch and undid it.

The sound of scraping metal was thunderous in the silence.

And a crazy voice in Menhaus’ head said: He’s just going to take a piss or something. That’s all it is. Nothing more than that.

But dear God, Menhaus did not believe it, for Makowski was bewitched by that strident melancholy wailing, he was being summoned and there was no way around that.

Saks was holding his knife now, gripping it tightly.

There was a momentary sound from down the corridor… a skittering, scratching sound.

Menhaus felt unreality settle into him, because this was how the human mind processed abject, overwhelming terror: It shut down and refused to believe the madness its senses fed it. And maybe his mind would not accept, but his heart believed with a black certainty. For he could feel it at his spine, a cold and prickling horror that electrified his ganglia.

Makowski opened the door and right away, you could smell something dark and sweet and noxious.

Menhaus didn’t know what he was expecting when that door slid open, maybe something with chattering teeth and long white fingers.. . but there were only shadows out there, knotted and spreading and bloated with some sort of spectral life.

That’s when Menhaus got to his feet.

He was not a brave man, but there came a time when you had no choice. For that wailing voice was gaining volume now and there was a sense of creeping, slinking motion just beyond view. That door had to be closed before, before-

He grabbed Makowski by the shoulder just as he stepped across the threshold, the stink out in the corridor just black and repellent. He saw something… thought he saw something… creep stealthily into the shadows, just a blur, a suggestion. He tried to yank Makowski back into the cabin and Makowski slapped his arm away, looking at Menhaus with a venomous, rabid leer. It was the look a starving, mad dog might give you if you tried to steal its food. Just utter loathing and anger.

Before Menhaus could step back, because that’s exactly what he was going to do, Makowski shoved him back with a flat palm against his chest. Menhaus was lifted off his feet and slammed into the bulkhead and with enough force that it knocked the wind out of him.

When he found his breath, he said, “Saks… Saks we better stop him… he’s not right…”

But Saks just shook his head, his upper lip hooked in a scowl. “No, not me. Not out there…”

The door to the cabin next door flew open and banged against the wall. Cook came through the doorway with the Browning 9mm in his fist. His eyes were wild and pissed-off.

“What in the hell is going on in here?”

“Makowski went for a walk,” Saks said. “Menhaus tried to stop him and he knocked him on his ass.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t go after him,” Saks said. “You heard it… I know you heard it… she was singing…”

Cook just said, “Lock this fucking door and don’t open it again.”

He stepped out into the corridor and told Fabrini the same thing. The door slammed shut over there. Menhaus passed a lantern to Cook, didn’t try to talk him out of it, knowing that his own bravery was all used-up now.

“Shut that door,” Cook told him and started off down the corridor.

When the door was shut and locked, Menhaus leaned with his back against it and glared at Saks. “You know what the difference between you and Cook is, Saks?”

Saks just stared.

“Cook has balls.”

24

Cook did not want to go after Makowski.

He did not want to do anything but get behind that locked door in his cabin and wish it all away. But it was not that simple. Some part of him had accepted its responsibilities now. It had accepted that he was in charge and knew that if he did not do anything, did not set an example for the others… they would sit and rot and die.

He could hear Makowski going up the companionway to the deck above.

He was running.

He was in a damned hurry and Cook could just about guess why. That eerie, strident wailing was distant now, but still audible enough to create an awesome, childhood terror in Cook, one that made him want to run himself.

The hatch clanged open.

Cook could hear footsteps on the deck above.

He knew he should be hurrying himself, but he just could not bring himself to. For there were limits to everything. Limits to what you would allow yourself to do. He mounted the steps, taking them slowly, listening, feeling, watching, on guard now.

At the top, he stood before the hatch.

It was open two or three inches and in his mind Cook could hear Gosling yelling at the men about leaving hatches open. Dear God, there was a sort of comfort in hearing the memory of the man’s cursing voice.

Cook pushed open the hatch, was ready to put bullets in the first thing that moved, even if it was Makowski. But nothing moved, nothing stirred. The decks were wreathed in shadows, the booms and coaling derricks rising up like alien tombstones. Cook stepped out, smelling the sea and the mist. The fog was thicker than earlier, churning like stormclouds. It was luminous and sparkling, reflecting a stark illumination like moonlight against the ship.

Cook walked further out on deck, looking in every direction, some giddy voice of self-preservation in him saying, well, so much for that. Makowski’s gone, so you might as well turn back and get your ass below, because there’s nothing to see here, nothing at all-

And, no, there was nothing to see.

Nothing but that yellowed light dappled by reaching shadows, but there was certainly something to hear: the woman. The thing she was or the thing that pretended to be her. It was singing its mourning dirge, loud then soft, pure and then dirty. It bounced around the decks, echoing off the superstructure so that it could have been forward or aft or three feet away.

Footsteps.

A creaking.

Then… oh Jesus, what in the hell was that?

It was a sound of motion, a busy tapping/scratching sort of sound ringing off the rusted metal decks. Like a hundred pencils tapping simultaneously and Cook knew that it was her. That she was making that sound, the sound of a thousand spidery legs.

The boat deck.

Yes, Cook saw now.

A shadow up there… it was Makowski’s shadow thrown against a bulkhead by the ghostly, shimmering illumination of the fog. Cook could not see him, but he could see that shadow. It looked stiff and artificial, its owner more mannequin than man. An effigy and nothing more. The singing was louder now, the tapping, the creeping of too many legs.

Cook made to climb the ladder up to the boat deck… then he paused.

He was smelling that acrid, ozone-like stink again. It was sharp and nauseating, filled his mind with a sickly plastic warmth that was consuming, that shut him down on some primary level.

Cook teetered.

The voice was loud, very loud. Sweet and profane and somehow soothing.

He shook it off, put a foot on the ladder… and got no further.

She was coming.

Cook could not see her, not really, and he was grateful for it. What he saw silhouetted against that bulkhead above was her shadow approaching that of Makowski’s. His was an inert form, something cut from black paper and immovable. Hers was hunched and contorted and bulbous, a chimeric thing that was not really a woman, but maybe two women slinking along in a gunny sack, trying to look natural. But whatever she was, whatever the lunatic memory of Lydia Stoddard had mutated into, subsisting on blackness and stark remembrance, it was not natural. She skittered along, hunched-over and lurching. She moved with the sound of crackling static electricity, with the sound of a thousand fingernails drawn over a thousand blackboards… squeaking and scraping and tapping and rustling.

Cook felt something die inside of him.

Felt it gasp its last breath and fall to moldering bones. Just the see-sawing shadow of Lydia Stoddard was enough to fill your mind with venom, enough to leech the light from your soul… but to look upon it, to actually see it in the flesh, moving and writhing and staring at you with a cold, remorseless appetite… that would have stripped your mind barren.

Cook knew he had to run.

Knew he had to get away before he saw something that would haunt his nightmares far worse than what he’d already seen, but he had to look. His thinking brain demanded proof that this could possibly be.

And it got it.

Got it as a scream filled Cook up, needing to be vented and coming out in a pitiful, airless gasp.

When the woman’s shadow got within a few feet of Makowski’s… she opened up, she bloomed like a spider orchid, erupted into a hideous collection of waving, clicking appendages that reached out like a hand, reached out and grasped Makowski.

And then Makowski screamed… screamed his soul out. Screamed like his guts were being pulled out with cold metal hooks. And maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth. Cook turned away, the shadows above combined into one busy, clicking, chittering profusion of things moving and things rending, things spinning and things vibrating like the needles of sewing machines.

As Cook made it back through the hatch, he heard a wet and meaty snapping from up there and then sucking sounds.

He ran.

He ran down the steps, not going on his ass, nearly floating down them. He found the corridor, his mind shut down, but his belly demanding that he stop and vomit it all out. But he knew that if he did, that if he let his knees find that slimy fungus-covered deck and let his mouth purge it all, it would not stop with what was in his stomach. He would keep retching until everything he was, was voided, until he was an empty shell lying on the floor, shaking and gasping and utterly mad.

There was no stopping. No hesitation. No nothing.

He made it to the cabins and pounded on the doors, the bulkheads, anything his fists could find.

And when those faces appeared, Cook said, “Pack it up… pack it all up. We’re getting the fuck off this goddamn morgue and we’re getting off right now…”

25

They moved fast.

Nobody asked questions, they just did what Cook told them, knowing there was a good goddamn reason for him wanting them off the Cyclops. They worked as a team and it was good for them, it was reviving and necessary. Crycek pitched in wholeheartedly, just glad to be leaving that ghost ship and its attendant nightmares behind. They packed up blankets and survival gear, filled three lanterns with kerosene and took the candles.

Then they made the corridor and Saks told them to stop.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen… ”

And they all heard it, heard her coming for them. Heard that creeping, skittering sound of her moving along the corridor and maybe not on the deck, but over the walls or ceilings, but definitely coming now. She was singing that unearthly dirge and maybe singing their names and counting their bones and drooling for their blood.

“Go the other way,” Cook told them.

He kept the flashlight pointed down the corridor as Saks led the others off to the other companionway. Cook did not see her. He ran after the others just as she would have rounded the bend. He ran along, slopping through the fungi and he was the last one up the companionway ladder that echoed with frantic footsteps. His mind reached out for that door, for freedom, long before he physically found it and he was certain, dead certain, that at the last moment she would drag him back into the darkness, take hold of him and suck him dry of juices.

“C’mon, Cook!” Fabrini cried.

He got a hand hooked around the hatch frame and she was right behind him, hissing and breathing and clawing, coming on with a mind-numbing stench of mucus-licked cobwebs and dried carapaces. And then, just then, something looped around his ankle, then his knee, the bend of his left arm. Silk. A living, coiling, snaking silk roping over him and her breath was on him smelling of violated caskets as she tried to web him, pull him down.

Somebody screamed.

Cook brought the Browning back and squeezed-off three shots.

And broke free.

He did not really see what he hit. Just a chitinous-fleshed blur that was oily and leggy and what might have been a chewing black mouth dripping brown sap.

And then he was out, pitched face-first on the deck.

From the mouth of the companionway came a screeching, squealing roar.

“Close that fucking door!” he heard himself shout.

And then Fabrini and Saks threw everything they had into it and Cook heard it slam into something, something pulpy and moist like rotting fruit and then the door was shut, the latch secured.

And on the other side, she was scratching and grinding and rasping with all those needle-tipped legs.

They ran.

They made it to the boarding ladder and went down one by one while Cook stood there with the gun in his fist. When it was his turn, he looked one last time and saw a flurry of limbs come bursting out of the mouth of a ventilator shaft. He did not wait to see what they were connected to.

When he made the lifeboat, Saks didn’t bother untying the nylon rope, he sawed through it with his knife and planted a foot against the derelict and kicked off with everything he had. The lifeboat drifted out into the weeds. By then there were oars in hands and everyone was paddling madly, pushing the boat out towards the channel through that clotted weed.

“Row!” Saks was crying out. “For the love of God, row!”

And then the bow of the lifeboat cut through the weeds and into the channel and they were well out of her range. But they’d looked back, looked back just once as they pulled away from the ship. And she was waiting there, up at the top of the boarding ladder. Her face was a white blur like an out-of-focus photograph. But you could see her eyes and they were like yellow dying stars sinking into black godless nebula. Those eyes hated. They raged. But mostly, they hungered.

Cook saw her and so did the others.

But what he was really looking at were her hands above, hooked over the railing. They were not hands. They were discolored thorny claws.

Then the mist took her.

Took the Cyclops and buried it in a shroud of coveting fog.

“What… Jesus Christ… what was that?” Menhaus said.

But Cook would not say. Would never say. “Row,” he said. “Just keep rowing and don’t stop.”

26

The fog was getting thicker and the men were getting tired.

Their arms were beginning to feel like rubber from all the oaring they’d been doing. But it was a good sort of tired. A physical exhaustion that none of them had felt in days and days and it sat on them just right, that weariness. They’d been mentally wrung-out for too long now and it felt good that their bodies were catching up.

They were deeper into the weed all the time and as yet, they had not seen a single thing worth noting except some debris out there. Bits of wood and what might have been part of a seat cushion once. Maybe these were things from the Mara Corday and maybe things from another ship.

The fog was a constant, of course.

Once again, it was growing thick as cotton fluff.

Opaque, expanding and blooming, rising up in dirty-yellow sheets and sparkling white tarps like oozing swamp gas. Boiling and surging and brewing with a boggy, filmy haze. Just a crazyquilt fusion of dirty sackcloth and moldering canvas with absolutely no boundaries. You could sit there, like George, and watch it happen. Watch the fog move and breathe and convolute, full of whirlpools and eddies and secret gloom, something fermented and distilled feeding off its own corroding, steaming marrow. Smell its sewer-stink of stagnant leechfields and leaf-clotted cisterns.

It was an odious thing, a misting desert that could swallow you alive, turn you around, smother you gradually in its own smoldering weave.

And as it grew thicker, the world went darker. That’s how they knew night was coming on, what passed for night in this place. It had been brighter out for some time now, the fog and sea suffused with that dirty illumination that was and would never be a sunny day back home, but more of a rainy and gray overcast afternoon. But even that was coming to an end now. A darkness was being born out in the fog, a creeping murk and the light was fading.

But for how long?

That was really the question. How long was night here and how long was day? There had to be some rhythm to it, some pattern. According to what Gosling had told George, the only way he could accurately calculate how long they’d been out there was by his system of rationing food and water. And according to that, what they’d used so far, they were four days into the mist now.

Four days.

Jesus.

The first day, George knew, had been dark, the only real light was that coming from the fog itself. That must have been night. Though it was never nearly as dark as a dark night back home. That first day was night then and they’d had something like three days of daylight since. Did that mean it would be shadowy for a few more days?

Christ, the idea of it was almost too much.

And George was thinking: I’m trapped in a fucking Roger Corman movie.

Or maybe a Skinner box. Rats running the maze, enough food and water to keep them alive and a piece of cheese dangled before them to keep their minds from going completely to slush. And that piece of cheese, of course, was the possibility they’d find land or another ship trapped out there. Anything would have been welcome. Just to put their feet on something solid, something big enough that you could walk around on and pretend you weren’t trapped in that Dead Sea.

When things got really desperate, it didn’t take much to satisfy the human mind.

But nobody has really gone mad yet, George thought. Not stark raving slit-your-own-throat mad. Not just yet. Sure, Pollard’s disturbed, but that’s not quite the same thing, now is it?

And it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. But it was coming and he could see it in everyone’s eyes the way they could see it in his. Madness was out there, just up ahead maybe. Waiting. They couldn’t drift in this murk forever. Because if they did, lack of food and water would be the least of their worries. The human mind could only take so much and that fog was suffocating them slowly and surely.

George looked out at the sea which was slimy and scummed in a membrane of algae and rotting organic matter. To all sides were those huge and heaving islands of decomposing weed. Yes, mentally it would kill them eventually and maybe physically, too. God only knew what sort of poisons they were breathing in minute by minute.

George sat there, feeling sleep heavy on him.

He was staring at the back of his hand when he realized there was light shining on it. A dim, dirty sort of light and it wasn’t from the fog. He didn’t know how long he’d been seeing it.

He looked up and saw where the light was coming from.

Everyone else was seeing it, too, staring up blankly at what was above them, above the mist.

“Well, I’ll be a cocksucker,” Marx said.

For above the mist, hazy and obscured, but still quite visible, the moon had come out. In fact, two moons had come out. The first, which seemed to be directly above them, was much larger than the full moon back home. This one was the size of a dinner plate and the color of fresh blood. The other, farther off behind them, was small and a dirty yellow-brown like an old penny pulled from a sidewalk crack.

Cushing just said, “Shit.”

Gosling and Chesbro just stared up at those moons in rapt fascination, savages considering the face… or faces… of their god. Pollard refused to look, did not want to see them.

George stared dumbfounded, thinking for one moment that they were not moons at all, but eyes set in some gigantic misty face. But they were moons, all right. Alien and somehow spooky, but moons all the same. Satellites caught in the orbit of whatever this place was called.

“Well that settles it,” Marx said. “This ain’t the Gulf of fucking Mexico after all.”

And that made George laugh.

Bad thing was, he couldn’t seem to stop.