Dead Sea

1

SO THEY DRIFTED THROUGH the weed for what might have been hours upon hours, or possibly days and weeks and maybe a year. Time was compressed in that place, flattened, drawn-out… it was plastic and shifting and refused to hold shape. It moved painfully slow or ran so quickly it left you dizzy. And maybe, just maybe, time did not move at all. Maybe it was stagnant here. Dead and rotted like everything else.

“And maybe it’s all our imagination,” George said.

They were on the oars again, pushing through that congested sea, through the heavy, grim fog which was a fuming mass of vapors and veils and contaminated brume. It drifted over the raft and lifeboat in snaking tendrils that looked like they wanted to strangle you, wanted to crawl down your throat and nest.

“What’s that, George?” Gosling said, working the oars behind him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud, I guess.”

George felt the oar in his hand, liked the feel. It was something to hold on to, an extension of your own muscles and sweat and drive. It was a good thing meeting the Dead Sea as they were, meeting it and fighting it and maybe besting it with nothing but human compulsion, will, and hard work. And when your muscles were taxed, were aching and throbbing and flexed tight as bailing wire, well, it tapped your strength and that was a good thing. Because then your mind did not have all that extra energy to feed itself with, to create fantasies and nightmares that made your flesh crawl.

That’s what George liked about rowing.

That’s why he liked the feel of that oar in his hand and just wished he had two of them.

Because lately, well, his mind was turning a little too quickly and the old bullshit machine called imagination was spinning tales with the best of ‘em. Things George shouldn’t be thinking about. If he thought about them too much he was afraid they would become obsessions and that was only a few feet away from a full-blown psychosis in his way of thinking.

No time for that. Not here. I’ve got to keep on my toes, George thought, and not just for myself, but for the others. They need me and, dear Christ, I cannot let them down. Not in this horrible place.

And what of this horrible place? George’s mind put to him. What about it? Have you ever really, really thought about where you are? And not in the context of whether this is an alien world or some dead-end dimension stuck between two universes, nothing like that. Because, George, you know that point is mute. It doesn’t matter where this place is. Just a black corridor of cosmic insanity with earth at one end and something unknowable and unthinkable at the other end. There. That’s it. But have you ever thought about what this place is and who might be behind it?

And, honestly, George had not.

Had not and did not want to. Sure, he’d given some thought to his little theory of the Fog-Devil, the Nemesis of this place. But he had never, for one solitary moment, let himself believe that this Fog-Devil was calling the shots. For Earth, they said, had its own devil, but he was not in charge of things. The creator, they said, had brought light and breath and life into the world; the Devil just corrupted it when he or she or it got the chance. And George had applied this old world thinking to this new, awful place. This was not Hell, this was just a back alley of creation where terrible things crawled and slithered in the evolutionary soup. That’s all it was. A dimensional sewer of the sort science fiction writers and even some scientists themselves had confessed might exist. That’s all. Nothing more and this purely figurative, hypothetical Fog-Devil was just another of its natural/unnatural occupants.

But what if he was wrong?

Not about the Fog-Devil or any of that business, but about the very nature of this place? What if it was all the playground of some demented and arcane intelligence? Something that watched and learned, but showed itself no more than the watcher of a TV showed himself to the actors being taped? What if this was all some grand amusement for something alien and omnipotent, so far above man it could rightly be called a god? It was crazy thinking, but George thought it regardless. If any of that were true, though, then maybe all of this was in his head, maybe it was all images projected into his mind by something with the power to do so. It reminded him of an old Outer Limits episode where the crew of a downed bomber were trapped in a weird sea

…only to discover it was a drop of water beneath some immense alien microscope.

“George,” Gosling said. “Why’d you stop rowing?”

“I’ve just been thinking some bad shit,” he said.

To which Gosling simply said, “Well, stop it for chrissake. Grab that oar and fucking pull on it.”

You couldn’t beat stripped down logic like that.

George started rowing.

2

“Jesus,” Gosling said, “lookit this damn fog now.”

Marx was standing up in the lifeboat, the mist so heavy he looked ghostly. “Shitting bad,” he said. “It’s like the peas without the soup.”

The fog had come in now, really come in. Before it had only hinted at its arrival, but now it had come. It was easily as bad as it had been on the Mara Corday when they’d first entered its sucking, execrable depths. It was not a casual envelopment. The fog fell over them in winding sheets and moldering rugs, an immense and billowing fleece, encompassing them in its viscous, woolen gulfs which were moist and decayed-smelling like coffin linings. It was steaming and hazing and brewing like a dirty, greasy mantle of steam rising from a black and bubbling cauldron. It carried a briny, gray stench to it and it literally descended on the raft and lifeboat like a blizzard, like a sandstorm… blinding and dense and coveting.

George saw it come.

Saw it come rolling over the weeds and dank waters like a storm of ectoplasm, felt it find him and cover him. Find and cover them all, bury them in its fetid, leaden depths. Within seconds, he could barely see the men in the lifeboat just to his left. They were wrapped up in the stuff, frosted in it. Just grainy silhouettes working their oars and, at times, completely invisible through that hungry mist.

“Should we lay-to?” Marx said.

Gosling considered it. “What in the hell for? We’re just in a pocket of this shit, we might as well row ourselves out.”

Everyone was happy for his decision. The idea of waiting in fog that thick was unpleasant, unsettling somehow.

“These weeds are getting thicker than ever,” Cushing said, scraping a glistening green tangle of them off his oar.

And they were. Maybe, in this heavier fog, they had lost their channel and maybe the channel was just simply gone in the profusion of the weeds. They floated in great, leafy masses, wet and rank, oozing tendrils of vapor. It looked like you could walk across them.

“Start pulling,” Gosling said.

They did. The bow of the lifeboat slit through the weeds easily and the raft seemed to slide right over the top of them. But you could hear bushy thickets of seaweed brushing along the bottoms like scraping fingers. In some places, that weed was so thick it brushed along the sides, too.

Before it had been getting dark, those lurid moons coming out.. . and now? No, it was like day had returned again. The fog and everything else was lit with that glimmering, dirty illumination. Maybe it was the fog itself and maybe there was truly no day or night there.

“What the hell was that?” Cushing said.

Something had passed beneath the lifeboat, bumping its entire length. Marx told him, whatever it was, it wasn’t trying to eat him so keep fucking rowing. They pressed on, making good time, George was thinking, moving along at a pretty good clip despite the weed. From time to time, things bumped into the raft and boat, but they never saw what they were. But they were big things, some of them.

“Hold up,” Marx suddenly said. “Look here what we got.”

Just before the bow of the lifeboat there was what looked like an old plank, waterlogged and knitted with mildew. There were other scraps of wood in the weeds. Off the starboard side of the raft, George was seeing something long and green and fleshy.

Gosling prodded it with his oar. “It’s… it’s a log, part of a fallen tree. Something like a palm, I’d guess.”

“Maybe we’re near land,” Chesbro said.

“Maybe.”

The log was from no tree George had ever seen. It was pea-green and scaly, something very primordial-looking about it. Like a backyard weed grown to fantastic proportions.

“Looks like sort of a primitive cycad,” Cushing said. “Sort of a prehistoric palm.”

“And that’s fine,” Marx said. “As long as the prehistoric wildlife don’t come with it.”

They kept rowing, the fog enshrouding them, thick as ever. They continued to bump into things and most of the time, the fog hid them before they could get a good look. But from time to time they saw more logs and planks. Once, something like a bush torn from an Oriental garden. Chesbro said he saw what looked like a styrofoam cooler, but it was gone before they could all see it. Regardless, each man was given hope. Because they all knew that they were getting closer to something.

“Just don’t be disappointed when you see it,” Pollard said more than once.

It seemed they pulled through the weeds for hours and then came revelation of a sort. They bumped into something else, only this something was not moving. They thudded into it and stopped dead, everyone almost getting thrown forward.

“What in the hell now?” Gosling said.

They went forward, not knowing what it could be this time and, generally, expecting the worst. But what they saw was harmless, just immovable. To George it looked like the roof of a house jutting from the tangled weeds, the peak sticking up, but set with crusty marine deposits.

“It’s a hull for chrissake,” Marx said. “Goddamn shitting hull from a ship. She must have turned turtle here in the weeds.”

They could see about fifteen or twenty feet of it, the rest was under water and weeds. George got a weak feeling in his belly looking at it, almost like he was getting some disturbing psychic vibe from the thing. But he supposed that wasn’t surprising, for whatever had happened to the ship was probably a dark, depressing story and one that had taken lives.

They rowed around it, deeper into that grim cultivation of seaweed. Pausing only to clean off their oars from time to time. But every man was expectant now. The signs were there — planks and logs, the hulls of sunken ships — and they were getting optimistic. They felt it in their bones and blood, they were very close now to something.

And George was thinking, I just hope it’s something good. God knows we need something good-

And those thoughts had barely exited his mind when they passed by some huge and amorphous shape in the fog, something vague that disappeared into the mist before they could really get a good look at it. But they knew. They all knew.

“A ship,” Gosling said. “I think it was a ship…”

And that stopped them from rowing, stopped them from doing just about anything. The ship had been off their port side, but now it was gone. The question was: Did they stop rowing and try to find it?

Which was pretty much what Gosling was thinking about when something happened that stopped him from thinking. Stopped them all from thinking or doing anything else — the fog began to lift.

It ran thin, then thinner, became diaphanous like something sheer and clingy. It began to unravel and unwind, casting aside motheaten rags and guazy wrappings and misting cerements. Disintegrating and pulling apart like moist blankets and ancient shrouds. Yes, like a stripper, the fog disrobed, tossing its dressings aside, and revealing the bare bones beneath. And that was pretty apt… for everywhere, bare bones.

Cushing said it before anyone else could: “The ship’s graveyard. Jesus, it’s the ship’s graveyard…”

And they saw, they all saw.

The mist was still there, but it was more of a haze now. The weed stretched in every direction, a watery, seeping matted carpet of green tendrils and coiled leaves, stalks and bladders and rotting creepers snaking through it. It was green and yellow, tinted with flowering pink buds. And set in it like tombstones in viscid, crawling vegetation… wreckage. Keels and undersides, bows and bulwarks, bowsprits and spidery tangles of derricks latticed in marine growths and slimy bloated ivies which were pulling them down deeper into the weed itself. Here were shattered skiffs and gutted scows, the ribbed frameworks of schooners sunk in the weed on their sides. It was some endless, weedy junkyard of the sea, of dead ships stripped of meat and masts, crumbling skeletons encrusted in shells and barnacles and growing things. Dozens and dozens of them thrusting up from the verdant bed of weed.

There was so much of it, it literally took your breath away.

But it wasn’t just sunken and dismembered ships, but nearly intact derelicts and hulks, some riding up high and others dipping down into that creeping green proliferation. This was the fabled graveyard of the seas, hundreds of ships held immobile in the fields of thick seaweed. Freighters and tankers, fishing vessels and yachts, tramp steamers and whalers. Some were recent additions, but some… old beyond old, barks and packets, clippers and 18 ^th century brigantines. George saw a moldering, weed-infested relic laying low in the growth and black polluted water that could have been the worm-holed, riven cadaver of a Spanish treasure galleon.

Many were mastless and bilged, punched through with great cavities like torpedo holes. Caught by the weed, they were unable to sink completely, slowly deteriorating, their crews long dead, their superstructures atrophied to sagging beams and leaning uprights. Some of the old sailing vessels looked almost seaworthy, but most were listing badly to port or starboard, dead and decayed things looking for a grave.

These were the ships that caught the eyes and imaginations of the men in the raft and lifeboat. Not the modern iron ships, but those flaking mummies from centuries gone by: brigs and schooners, four-masters and square-riggers. Their sails had long ago decomposed to dingy rags, but you could almost feel the history behind them, feel them riding high, creaking and groaning, shrouds snapping and flapping. But that had been long, long ago. For the weeds had claimed them now, held them in a green fist like cemetery dirt and would not let them go, would not let them seek the oblivion they deserved. No, the weed had ensnared them, grown up over their hulls, completely engulfing some so you could only see the general shape of a ship under all that growing, glistening, knotted weed. It sprouted from open portholes and roped over taffrails, noosed halyards and wreathed deckhouses.

But it wasn’t just the weeds, for here in this steaming, stagnant swamp, fungi had settled thickly over topmasts and mizzens, meshing jibs and topgallants. It was born in the putrescent hothouse nurseries of the weed and grew up over the masts in snotty lacework and nets, filaments and oozing vines, festooning like cobwebs, drooping and hanging like Spanish moss.

Yes, so thick was the weed and creeping gray fungi, that it was hard to say where the seaweed gardens ended and the ships began. For most of those derelicts looked not like things made by man, but things fashioned by nature out of roping green and yellow growing things that were mockeries of man’s work.

“Oh, my God,” George said, feeling an exhilaration and a despondency he could not shake. “How long… how long has this been going on?”

Marx just stared. “How long have men been plying the sea, son?”

There, of course, were newer vessels, too. Sleek ferries and frigates with ice-cutter bows and radar beacons, satellite dishes and radio aerials. There was, in fact, few ships, few types that were not represented in either pieces or in whole.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gosling said. “In all your born days?”

Cushing just shook his head. “No… but I was expecting it, I was expecting something like this. Weren’t you all? Down deep, weren’t you all?”

Cushing told them that this was the real Sargasso Sea, the real ship’s graveyard, the great boneyard of the world’s oceans… except it wasn’t anywhere on earth as sailors had long thought, but here, here in this pestilent cellar. This dripping, miasmic, vaporous sea which was just about due south of nowhere.

“This is what they saw,” Gosling said, excited now. “All those old stories you heard of the Sargasso, the ship’s graveyard, the devil’s graveyard… Jesus, just like you thought Cushing, this is it. It ain’t just a story, it’s real.”

“Aye, that it is,” Marx said. “Ships must have passed through here, saw all this, and passed back out to tell the story… maybe thinking the whole time they were stuck in the real Sargasso.”

George liked none of it. He felt like a white man finding the fabled elephant’s graveyard in Africa. He was seeing something that he was not supposed to see. No man was meant to see this and live to tell about it. Some things, he knew, were best left as folklore and twice-told tales.

There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.

“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water… but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”

“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”

Gosling nodded. “Maybe. But even with big diesels or steam turbines, you’d run out of fuel sooner or later, wouldn’t you? And then what?”

“Then you’d drift,” Marx said.

“And be brought right back in here.”

They all thought about the hopelessness of it all, those hundreds of ships trapped here, fossils in some grim collection. They looked out over them. They looked eerie and haunted in the mist, backlit by whatever made the mist glow. Those twin moons had come out again, the huge red one casting a bloody glare over mastheads and yards, stacks and cargo booms.

Pollard was saying nothing. He did not look exactly surprised about any of it. Chesbro, however, looked downright scared.

“I don’t like this place,” he said. “It looks… it looks like a cemetery.”

And it did.

The cemetery of the seas. Only in this unhallowed sea, the cemetery was restless and uneasy, a loathsome necropolis of dead and drowned things, slimy things ribboned with weeds and crepuscular fungi. It vomited back up what it could not hold down in its black charnel belly: waterlogged tombs and mildewed caskets, wormy coffins and crumbling sepulchers, floating crypts and oblong boxes draped in floral tributes of rotting kelp and vaporous green shrouds. They rose from the noxious weed, in whole and in part, clustered with morbid shadows, leaning this way and that like ancient headstones and webby monuments. The ships here were mummies and husks, cadaverous hollow-eyed things made of pipes and bones and ossuary girders. Derelicts welded from yellowed femur and gray ulna, mildewed rungs of rib and stark meatless vertebrae. They were alien exoskeletons and spectral ghost ships, exhumed wraiths resurrected from moldering abyssal mortuaries.

Yes, just skeletons and things that wanted to be skeletons. Things that sought blackness and depths, sluicing vaults cut in muddy sea bottoms, bathypelagic catacombs of drifting sediment and burrowing marine graveworms.

Jesus, George was thinking, it’s like some fucking shrine.

But not a good one. Not one that inspired cherished memory or peace, but one that inspired an almost atavistic horror. A place of malignance and spiritual violation. They were all so alone here. So far from everything decent and warm and caring. All those ships, just dark and hollow and scratching with a secret darkness that was devouring them bone by bone.

George was seeing those ships and feeling them, too, swallowing great black silences and tenebrous echoes, feeling the memory of those ships fill him, drop his dreaming brain into some pit where he could hear voices. Yes, the voices of those lost souls who had perished aboard those ships or simply went mad. But they were all there, all those tormented voices shrieking at him, showing him dark truths that made him want to scream. He was at the bottom of a dripping, brine-stinking well, feeling them feel him, touch him, whisper and laugh and cry. They were many but one, a single withering presence, a monster of deranged mourning with ten thousand hands and fifty-thousand steel fingers. George listened because he had no other choice. Just as Cook had channeled the last sensory impressions of Lieutenant Forbes aboard the Cyclops, George was channeling them. Knowing their thoughts and memories, their pain and sorrow and rage.

He saw all those great ships, all those three- and four-masters ghosting along beneath a pall of moonlight, slicing through high seas and thrashing water. Spars were creaking and blocks whining shrilly. Rain dripped from sail and rope and backstay. The masts and yards rode up high and cutting. Sails snapped and whistled. Hands hoisted and lowered cordage and shrouds. And the sea was a constant, a raging and rolling and pitching thing. Those sharp bows sliced through it and the seas broke before them like wheat before a scythe. He felt the coming of that cemetery fog. The stars blotting out, the breathable air sucking away, ship after ship after ship drawn into a misting tunnel of non-existence.

Ship’s bells ringing.

Voices shouting.

Oh, please, oh, please, get us out of here, oh God above get us out of this awful place, Lord.

Please.

We’re lost.

We’re becalmed.

We’re adrift.

We are dying.

We are losing our minds.

The fog is eating the flesh from our bones.

And the ships drifted on, enshrouded and doomed and despairing. Falling one by one into the weed and into rot, bathed in that slimy tideless sea, pulled into crawling depths and moist graveyards of weed where there were things with unseeing eyes and bloated tentacles and slavering mouths. And maybe, oh yes, something far worse that would come drifting from that misting effluvium, something vile and diseased and burning, smoking and sparking and vomiting ice.

And the voices screamed at the memory of that which walked alone.

The well vibrated and shuddered with their screaming, howling voices blown from contorted mouths fed by terror-wracked minds that were going to pulp and ash. And those ships, they became coffins. Lids snapping tight and weeds ringing them shut while white fingers scraped at satin and silk and-

“Jesus H. Christ, George,” Gosling was saying. “You all right?”

They were all looking at him.

Gosling was shaking him.

And he realized his mouth was wide and his eyes bulging and he was screaming silently. But then it was gone and he was on the raft and there was nothing, nothing but a lot of derelict ships and a handful of men wanting to know what in the hell he was doing.

But he couldn’t tell them. He could just say, “I’m… fine.”

Nobody bought it, of course, and long after the other eyes had abandoned him, Pollard was watching him, knowing things he shouldn’t know, but that was just the way of this place. It was the amplitude or something. For sensitive minds could hear things they had no business hearing and maybe Pollard had heard that scream of his though no one else had.

And maybe they would have all questioned him over his little episode, but there were other and more important things to be considered.

“Look at that,” Marx said. “Did you see it? Just at the edge of the mist there.”

They saw it. Some huge, nebulous shape had passed beneath the weed or maybe through it, a colossal luminous form that dipped beneath the wreck of an old three-masted brig and vanished from site.

“What the hell was that?” Gosling said.

Maybe they wanted Cushing to give them some rational scientific explanation for it, but all he said was, “I don’t know… but I hope to hell it doesn’t come back.”

3

“Hungry,” Menhaus was saying. “I can’t seem to remember what it is not to be hungry.”

Saks thought that was funny. “Yeah, but look at yourself. You’ve already dropped pounds. You’re looking good. Just imagine how good you’re going to look after a month, two months, a year-”

“Okay, Saks,” Cook said. “Once again, quit trying to piss people off.”

“I’m kidding, for chrissake. In case you don’t know what that is, Big Chief, it’s also called a joke or a funny, a laugh. Boy, Cook, ever since you decided you were the big cheese, you’re a real fucking pain in the ass.”

Cook could only sigh.

In command? Oh Christ, of all things.

Command of what exactly? A lifeboat with four men who were ready to tear out each other’s throats at the drop of a hat? Even Fabrini wasn’t weathering any of it real good now. After what they’d seen and experienced on the Cyclops, something in him had shut down. What was left was irritable and angry and looking for something or someone to vent on. Cook had tried to draw him out more than once, but each time he did Saks was there, asking if he wanted to breastfeed Fabrini, too. Maybe wipe his ass and tuck him in to boot. And Cook had to wonder how long it was going to be before Saks and Fabrini really went at it, how long before their knives came out and blood was drawn. At least on the Cyclops, they’d settled down, had enough room to get away from each other.

Sure, Fabrini had been very good about it, when you considered things. Like the fact that Saks had cut off part of his ear with a knife. Most guys, they’d be wanting payback for that, but Fabrini let it go. That was big of him. But now? Well, Fabrini kept touching his bandaged ear and staring at Saks. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what he was thinking.

And Saks knew it, too.

Cook had to watch them all the time.

And he pretty much had to do it alone because Menhaus was pretty much whiny and pouty twenty-four/seven now, withdrawn really, talking from time to time, but more to himself than anyone else.

And Crycek? Well, Crycek had his moments.

So, essentially, Cook was wading these dark waters alone. He had to keep them from each other, offer them hope, squelch Saks, reassure them that they were not going to starve to death or get eaten by horrors out of the mist. Then, if that wasn’t enough, Cook had to keep directing them, giving them something to hold out for and this when he was dying inside, had considered more than once how easy it would have been to slit his own wrists.

“How do you like this fog, Crycek?” Saks said.

Saks had been asking him this question about every half an hour or so, needling him, trying to get under Crycek’s skin… and pretty much trying to get everyone riled up. Because Cook knew that’s what Saks was: a catalyst. That’s how he saw himself. The more disorder he could create, the sooner Menhaus and maybe even Fabrini — God forbid — would want him back in charge.

Crazy thing was, Cook had even considered handing back the reins to Saks. Wondering if maybe that arrogant, selfish piece of shit might have some ideas about what they should do that he would only share once he was firmly back in the driver’s seat. But, ultimately, Cook had weighed it out like a man deciding whether or not to emasculate himself with a paring knife… and decided it wasn’t exactly prudent.

“You hear me, you crazy shit?” Saks said. “How do you like this fog?”

Cook was ready to intercede, but Crycek turned and said, “Compared to what?”

Cook laughed.

Saks smiled, but he was seething beneath. Who was Crycek to smart off to him? To undermine the disorder he was sowing?

“Compared to Fabrini’s hot ass on a cold night, you freak.”

But that didn’t get him anything. And you could almost hear the reels spinning in Saks’s mind, hear him scratching that one off his big list of Things To Do. Hear his pencil scribbling up there: Note to self, Crycek is impervious to gay cracks. Try a new approach. Maybe insult his mother or father, talk about banging his kid sister.

Cook was watching the curtain of fog ringing them in. It was thick as woolpack now and you could barely see three feet to either side. For a while there, it had gotten dim and those mystic, eldritch moons had come out… Crycek nearly coming out of his skin at the sight of them. But then the fog had blown in or seeped in, and things had gotten lighter out again. Though it seemed like it was thinking about getting dark again, it just couldn’t make up its mind. Things were dimmer, yes, but they could still see each other fine and Cook was almost praying for darkness so he wouldn’t have to see their faces for awhile. The disappointment in them. The way they had been ravaged and lined by terror.

The weeds were very thick. Much thicker than earlier which told Cook they were getting closer to the heart of the seaweed sea. From time to time, he had his little crew row, but that never lasted because Menhaus would complain about his back and Saks would call him a pussy and Fabrini would tell them both to shut up and Crycek would start getting gloomy, asking Cook just what their hurry was. What was waiting out there for them was endlessly patient.

Damn. What a bunch.

“Hey, Crycek,” Saks said. “What’s your view on cannibalism?”

“Oh, knock it the hell off, Saks,” Fabrini said. “You’re really getting on my fucking nerves.”

Saks giggled. He looked satisfied. Well, maybe he couldn’t torment Crycek much, but he could still push Fabrini’s buttons just fine. He seemed happy with that.

“No, I’m serious, Fagbrini. I think we should all just sit down and discuss this. We may drift like this for weeks… in another month, we’ll be out of food and water. What then? I mean, we have to be practical, don’t you think? We have to decide who’s going on the spit. And when that times comes… what’re we gonna do? Flip a coin? Draw straws? Or just decide who’s most expendable?”

Fabrini was breathing real hard, veins pulsing at his temples. “I’m telling you, Cook, shut that prick up or I will.”

“Shit, Fabrini, settle down,” Saks chuckled. “You’re scaring the piss out of me over here.”

“Knock it off, Saks,” Cook said. “Or we’ll all throw your ass into the drink.”

“Yeah,” Menhaus piped in. “Quit being such an asshole.”

Saks chuckled again. “Listen, Menhaus, a man has to go with his strengths.” Dammit, it never ended.

Nobody had come off the Cyclops in real great shape. They were all haunted after that. Those monsters in the sea and fog… well, they were terrible things, but you could fight them and they were not intelligent. But that spider-woman on the Cyclops… well, she was an entirely different bag of chips, now wasn’t she? Even now, nearly a day since they’d fled from that mausoleum, Cook was having trouble putting any of it into context. For, really, what in the hell had Lydia Stoddard become? A ghost? A mutant? A crawling and skittering representation of the raw and shivering insanity that had peeled the skin from the Cyclops and everyone on board? Was she a physical manifestation or something supernatural? Jesus, it all boggled the mind and wilted the soul. But the very scary thing about it all… or scariest might have been apt, because it had all been scary and withering… was that whatever that woman had become, it was intelligent. It could plot and scheme and lure men to insanity and death. And as far as Cook was concerned, you could not fight something like that. Something that was equal parts madness, ectoplasm, and nightmare biology driven by a predatory, deranged mind.

No, none of them had been unscathed by the implications of that business. Even Saks, Cook figured, had had his stomach ripped out by it. He might not show it, but if you looked real close, you could see it in his eyes: fear.

“Now listen,” Saks said. “I don’t want to alarm you dipfucks, but food is something we have to be concerned about. Eventually, we’re going to run out… then what? What happens then? What happens if one of us starts getting crazy ideas?”

“You already got that covered,” Crycek said under his breath.

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t talk, psycho.” Saks held his hands out before him to show that there was nothing up his sleeve. “This is something we have to think about. You guys are all hungry and I know it. This goddamn rabbit food Cook has been doling out isn’t keeping our bellies full.”

He had Menhaus’ full attention now. You could see it in his eyes, that caloric lust. Here was a guy intimately familiar with buffets and second helpings. Maybe his belly was shrinking, but his eyes were filled with an unflinching desire to sink his teeth into something.

“All right, Saks, that’s enough,” Cook said, once again the only voice of reason. “We’re all hungry. I’d love a cheeseburger or an order of prime rib, but there aren’t any restaurants out here that I can see. So just shut up about it. And as far as cannibalism goes.. . I’ll shoot anyone who even mentions it again.” He had everyone’s attention then and his eyes were flat and dark and menacing. “And you better believe that I mean it.”

Even Saks wasn’t smiling then. No, he had a new game now. Which was really old and just plain worn out through repetition. You saw it every day in prison yards and factories, boardrooms and barrooms… the stare. Any place men were gathered, you saw the stare. The intimidation game. My dick is bigger than yours and my muscles are harder than yours, don’t you look at me ‘cause I can kick your ass any goddamn time and you better believe it. You don’t intimidate me, I intimidate you. Yeah, it was childish and self-defeating, the last resort of weak minds. The sort of thing that should have been left in the high school locker room along with your dirty jock. But men never left it there. Cook knew they didn’t. Men were essentially weak, frightened creatures scurrying through life, seeing just about anything and everything as a challenge to what swung between their legs. Great stuff. You could see monkeys and lions practicing it on TV and men practicing it just about everywhere else.

And as Cook knew, the only men who practiced intimidation were those that were intimidated.

“Okay, Saks, you can quit staring me down now,” he said. “The playground is closed and I don’t play the big dick game.”

Fabrini burst out laughing and even Menhaus did.

“You might wanna watch it with that, Cook,” was all Saks could say. He had been cornered now, his infantile macho games dragged out into the open for all to see.

“Yeah, okay, Saks.” Cook smiled. “And Saks?”

Saks looked at him, never seemed to stop.

“Grow the fuck up already.”

Saks was boiling and Fabrini was laughing at him.

Poor old Saks, Cook thought, he never even realized that all his life, people were laughing behind his back.

“What’s that shit on your arm?” Menhaus asked.

Saks looked at him. Gave him the stare, too. “What the hell are you talking about, mama’s boy?”

But Cook was seeing it, too. All over his forearm… things like sores, great spreading red sores that did not look so much like abrasions or scrapes but like ulcers.

Saks pulled his sleeve down. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“You better let me look at it, Saks. Doesn’t look good at all. Fabrini? Grab me the medical kit.”

But Saks said, “Keep away from me, Cook! All of you just fucking keep away from me! Be a cold day in hell I’d let a cock-monkey like you dress my wounds.”

“Then dress ‘em yourself.”

“Mind your own goddamn business.”

Cook folded his arms, shaking his head. “C’mon, Saks, you’re talking to the Big Cheese here. The health and well-being of all of you is part of the Big Cheese’s job.”

Saks recoiled a bit when Cook moved toward him and Cook stopped. Saks’s eyes had gone feral and simmering. He looked suddenly like he was capable of just about anything.

“If that shit’s catchy, Saks, you’re going over the fucking side,” Fabrini said.

And the thing was, even with the brief look at it Cook had had, those ulcerations did look catchy. There was something unpleasant and unnatural about them like skin tumors. Something morbid.

“You just try, Fagbrini.”

Saks shifted and they were all watching him, ringing him in now like wild dogs and he was feeling it, too, feeling cornered and threatened. A guy who liked to be the center of attention, but not prey. His hand inched towards the knife in his belt and Cook knew he’d cut anyone that got close.

Fabrini got a little closer. “What is that? Between your legs.. .”

Saks recovered now. “That’s my dick, and, no, I’m not putting it into your mouth.”

But it wasn’t his dick they were all looking at. There was a little greasy flannel sack that he had hidden under his leg. And now everyone saw it.

“Okay, Saks, what is it?” Cook put to him.

Saks grinned, knew they had him. He was caught in their snare with nowhere to run. He did two things real fast right then: he brought out his knife and picked up his little flannel-wrapped package that was about the size of a fist. “It’s mine and you fucks don’t get any.”

Cook said, “Saks-”

“Fuck you, too, Big Chief.”

He unwrapped it and it held something pale and fleshy marbled with pinkish-brown lines. Salt pork. They could smell its saltiness and meatiness in the air and everyone began to drool almost immediately. And Saks was loving it. He brought it up and licked it.

“Where’d you get that?” Menhaus said, slavering like a dog now.

“You cheap, selfish sonofabitch,” Fabrini said.

Crycek just blinked his eyes rapidly.

Cook shook his head. “He got that off the Cyclops.”

Everyone stopped salivating about then. To them, the idea of eating anything off that hoodoo ship was akin to stuffing your mouth with worms. They wanted meat and fat… but they weren’t ready to go that far.

Cook said, “Saks, Jesus Christ, don’t eat that stuff… you don’t know what kind of germs got into it. That shit is almost a hundred years old.”

Fabrini was looking sick, like maybe Saks was licking a piece of carrion.

Cook didn’t like this at all. The salt pork had an odd grayish cast to it.

Saks wouldn’t let them near it even if they wanted some. “It was in a sealed cask, you knothead, it’s just fine.”

“You mean you’ve been eating it?” Cook said.

“Sure, just like this.” Saks took a bite out of it and then another.

“Jesus, Saks! Don’t!” Cook cried out.

But he was powerless to stop him. Saks ate the entire wedge of salt pork and seemed to enjoy every bite. When he was finished, he licked his lips.

“How much, Saks… how much did you eat?”

But Saks just smiled.

“Let him poison himself,” Fabrini said. “Who gives a shit?”

Cook was watching him and thinking about those sores on his arm. Maybe there was no connection. Maybe it meant absolutely nothing and maybe it meant everything.

After that, nobody said a thing, but they were all thinking plenty.

The lifeboat drifted through that bunched, leafy weed and into the perpetual mist that floated over it in tarps and sheets. There were occasional sounds out there… splashings, but they never saw a thing. Not until they rammed into something.

“What the hell?” Fabrini said.

Crycek was in the bow. “It’s… shit, I think it’s a boat.”

Then everyone was up there, trying to pull the boat alongside. It was another lifeboat, a dead ringer for their own. Crycek tried to read the stenciled letters on her bow, but there were weeds everywhere. Somehow, some way, those profuse and winding weeds had climbed right up into the lifeboat, filled it like a window box. But they could still easily make out its general shape and bright orange fiberglass hull.

“How’d all those weeds get in there?” Fabrini wanted to know and you could hear something cracking just under his voice like ice.

Cook was up there, too, now.

He and Crycek were trying to bring the lifeboat around, but it was knotted and braided with creeping weed, just way too much of it and they were all painfully aware of that fact.

So much weed… had it grown in there? Cook pulled and the lifeboat would only move a few feet before it reached the end of its leash. The weeds were lush and bountiful and fibrous, tangled and snaking like the roots of an old banyan tree. You would have needed a chainsaw to free that lifeboat. As Cook and Crycek pulled, their own boat swung around until it was next to it lengthwise… or as close as those verdant weeds would allow.

Cook leaned over and Crycek did, too, while Fabrini and Menhaus held the lifeboat so it would not snap back from the elasticity of the weeds that held it.

Using their knifes, they began cutting through all those creepers and rootlets, tendrils that were thick as fingers and strong as cable. There was a dank heat coming off those weeds, heavy and steaming and sickening to smell. They were set with small, greasy leaves and damp fans, bulbous little floats and thorny stalks. Cook was certain more than once, that he felt them move in his hands… but it must have just been gravity. He took his knife… a knife he’d liberated from the Cyclops… and hacked and cut and sheared away green, glistening stems and hot-feeling vines.

“These things… they’re moving,” Crycek said, pulling his hands away.

Fabrini said something, but Cook wasn’t listening. Yes, they were moving, but very slowly, sluggishly. They were actually pulsing like newborn things, hot and vibrant, unpleasantly fleshy to the touch.

Cook found a bloated tuber that just struck him as wrong. It was pink like a vein, throbbing beneath his fingers and it disgusted him. Plants could not feel like this. They could not be like this. He slashed his knife against it and a dark, inky fluid sprayed against the back of his hand.

Fabrini swallowed something thick in his throat. “It looks like…”

“Blood,” Cook said. “It’s… I think it’s blood…”

Maybe it was the others’ unwillingness to help him hack through those pulsing vines and tentacles of green and pink growth and maybe it was just his instinctive hatred for them, but Cook began to slash and cut his way deeper into the mass and soon wished he hadn’t.

There was a body under the weeds.

The body of a man, probably a crewmember from the Mara Corday.. . but it was really hard to tell. He was lying in the bottom of the boat in about two inches of slopping black water, noosed in garlands of pulsing weed. His face was sharp and bony, sallow and lifeless, his body terribly wrinkled and shrunken. And he was breathing. Shallowly, but breathing all the same.

“He’s alive,” Cook said.

But the others wanted no part of this. There was something diabolic and utterly macabre about a man entwined in all those stalks and tubers and pink tentacles. Cook started pulling the weeds away from him… and recoiled as a single distended and oily run of weed came away from the man’s throat with a popping sound like suction cups pulled from vinyl. There were oval sucker marks on his neck. Yes, the weeds had encircled him, tucked him down deep in their own vegetable profusion and-

“They’re… they’re sucking his blood,” Menhaus said in a high voice, just absolutely filled with an irrational horror at the idea of it. “Those fucking weeds… they’re sucking his blood away… ”

And there was no arguing against it.

For that’s what those weeds were doing. The pulsing pink tendrils had suckers on their undersides like little rubbery mouths. They felt like viscid arteries in Cook’s hands. The man beneath them was slowly being leeched, he was being bled white drop by drop by drop.

Cook looked down at his hands and they were red with blood.

Something like a dry, rasping scream came from his mouth. He fell back into the lifeboat and the other one pulled back into the mist and they all distinctly heard the sounds coming from it. Busy, stealthy sounds. Rustlings and slitherings as if the lifeboat were filled with serpents. But it wasn’t serpents, it was something far worse.

Cook hung over the gunnel, washing the blood off his hands manicly.

“Unclean,” Crycek said in a hurting voice. “Oh, so terrible and unclean…”

4

“That ain’t no boat,” Marx was saying, squinting through the thickening mist. “Not sure what the hell it is.”

Thing was, nobody was sure. Just another vague gray shape licked by tongues of fog, murky and indistinct. Large, like a ship, but splayed out and low in the weed. Gosling’s idea was, with night apparently coming on, to find a ship they could rest on. Not the haunted skeleton of some old fungus-shrouded sailing vessel, but something more recent. A bulk carrier or container ship, something he was intimately familiar with. Something that would have fresh water in her tanks and possibly real food in the pantry. But whatever they were seeing at the edge of the fog, it had everyone’s curiosity up.

“Maybe we don’t want to know what it is,” Pollard said.

That got a quick affirmative from Chesbro, who was only interested in finding shelter and food, nothing more.

“Oh, shut your mouth,” Marx said.

So, they rowed deeper into the ship’s graveyard and the mist settled over them like a canopy, obscuring everything and making all those old dead hulks look incorporeal and ethereal. They rowed around shattered bows and masts dripping with weed and belts of fungus. The seaweed was so very thick they could barely move through some of it. Huge banks of it rose above the water and even that which was at the waterline or just submerged, was tangled and ropy, ensnarling oars and the bow of the lifeboat. The raft took it easier, sliding over the stuff except where it grew in great islands of steaming vegetation.

The farther they got into the graveyard, the thicker the stuff was

…and the more ships were captured in it. Some riding on top of it and some on their sides sinking into it… or somewhere in-between. They passed overturned hulls crusted with sea shells and the mastless wreck of a racing yacht and once, they saw something like the prow of a Viking dragonboat jutting up, but it was so blanketed in that engulfing sea grass that it could have been just about anything.

The closer they got to the mysterious object, the more certain they were it was no boat, no ship. They came around the side of a fishing trawler, its high derricks and winches rising above them in the fog like Medieval gallows, and then they got a good look at it.

“It’s a plane,” Cushing said. “A goddamn plane.”

And it was. It was a dusky green in color, easily over a hundred feet in length, just laying there in a great reef of weeds like a toy plane in a bed of peat moss. It had high-mounted wings with turboprops and an upswept finned tail section. The weeds had not begun to grow over it yet.

“That’s a Hercules,” Marx said. “A C-130. Transport plane… Army and Navy use ‘em, all the services do. The old workhorse of the military.”

“What’s it doing here?” George said.

But they just ignored him, awed by this huge bird that had fallen from the sky and died in the seaweed sea. It was a stupid question anyway and he knew it. It got there the same way everything else did… it was pulled in. They had only seen two other planes so far. One was a little Piper Cub immersed in trailing weeds and the other was just the wing of some unknown craft rising from the waterlogged vegetation like the dorsal of a shark, slicked green with mildew.

“Hasn’t been here too long by the looks of it,” Cushing said. He shook his head. “Makes you wonder how many ships and planes the military loses in this damned place.”

“Yeah, and how many they really admit to,” Marx said.

George could imagine what it must have been like for that big, proud plane. Getting sucked into this place, instruments gone haywire, the crew going out of their minds circling in the grim fog until they had to ditch. He wondered what had become of them… or what had gotten to them.

As they got in closer, they could see that the cargo bay doors in the massive tail were open, the aft loading ramp down, pressed into the weed. And maybe they were all thinking the same thing: a fresh transport plane beat the shit out of an old freighter any day.

They rowed in as close as they could get, which was about thirty or forty feet. At which point the weeds became so thick the lifeboat was stopped dead. They all climbed into the raft, cutting the lifeboat free and tying it off with a length of nylon line which George fed out loop by loop as they pushed the raft in closer to the boarding ramp. When they got there, Marx hopped out, securing the raft with the line from its sea anchor. Gosling helped George tie off the line to the lifeboat and they went inside.

It was dark in there.

Gosling broke out the two flashlights they had and everyone went in. It smelled damp and musty inside, but it was great to be walking again. To feel a firm surface beneath their feet. The interior of the C-130 was immense. You could have packed a hundred men comfortably in the cargo bay. There was a row of a dozen pallets to one side, each stacked up to a height of eight feet, and, to the other side, two Hum-V reconnaissance vehicles with more pallets in front of them. All of which were secured with trusses and stanchions to the floor. There was a walkway in between.

“Now, if we just had some land to go for a spin,” George said.

“I wonder where all this stuff was going,” Cushing said.

“Middle East or Europe, probably,” Gosling said.

Marx climbed up atop one of the Hummers, played his flashlight along a heavy gun mounted on top. “This would be a fifty-caliber machine gun, boys. If we just had some ammo for it, we could cut anything in half out there with it.”

Up front of the vehicles, there was an open space with web seats on either wall. There was some loose gear stored there in green nylon canvas bags. Gosling checked them out one after the other. “Medical gear,” he said. “We can use this stuff… antibiotics, pressure bandages, disinfectants. Must have been some medics on board…”

They found a few battery-powered lanterns and used them, conserving their flashlights. Marx and Gosling kept checking everything out.

“I don’t see any survival rafts here, First,” Marx said. “My guess is these boys ditched and headed off across the weed.”

They moved forward up to the cockpit and it was empty, save for a lot of avionics and navigational systems which were beyond them. Many of the screens were still lit which meant the batteries still had a charge. Marx turned on the VHF and scanned the channels, picking up nothing but that breathing, listening static. He turned it off before they heard something worse.

George and Cushing stepped down to the passenger door just behind the cockpit. It was open, too, weeds and water having insinuated themselves there now. It was getting dim out in the seaweed sea, the fog hanging in a ghostly membrane, flowing and covering, shimmering like burning marsh gas, will-o’-the-wisp. Great patches of it drifted over the weeds and assorted wreckage.

But maybe ten feet out in the weeds was what they were looking at.

Snagged in green mats of the stuff were the remains of three bodies, possibly a fourth. You couldn’t see much of them, just slats of white bone showing through greasy emerald and yellow-green ropes and flaps of creeping weed. Though the others were face-down, sinking in the growth, one of the skulls was grinning up at them, tendrils of pinkish slime oozing from its eye sockets and seaweed on the crown dangling like hair. Down there, in that misty growth, that skeleton looked like it wanted to get at them.

“Oh, boy,” George said. “That must be the crew… or some of them…”

A fat brown worm slid from the skull’s nasal cavity and sought the weed.

“They’re just dead. They can’t hurt you,” Gosling said, leading the both of them away.

But George was thinking that it had already hurt him, seeing those men stripped to bone like that had hurt him in ways he could not begin to catalog. But that was the reality of this place: one wound on top of another. One heartbreak and nightmare after another. You could expect no more here in this feral dimension.

Like gravity, it sucked.

5

Cook thought: Look at them, just sitting and waiting, hoping. They all have something to return to. Lives. Things they want and need to take up again. All except me. I was alone in the old world and I’m alone in the new one. And they know it, they all goddamn well know it. They talk about girlfriends and wives, sisters and brothers and children. Me? I say nothing. They want to get back. And look at their eyes, will ya? They all doubt that I’m the man that can get them there.

Cook could feel it all draining out of him now. All the poison, all the doubts and uncertainties and anxieties. It came out of every pore and nearly drowned him, left him gulping for air up in the bow. He sat there, staring off into the mist and the weeds, not wanting any of them to see the weakness on his face. He was wrung out and just plain out of answers. All of this had gone on too long and these men were going to die and it would be his fault, all his fault, because he didn’t have a goddamn clue as to what to do next.

No, he couldn’t let Saks see it on his face.

Because Saks would see it. And if he saw it, he would recognize it. Because guys like Saks are predators and they can smell fear and personal anguish same way a mad dog can smell panic on you. And once that happens, forget it, it’s only a matter of waiting for those teeth and that frothy, hot breath. And that’s exactly how Saks was: he smelled it on you, he tasted it on you, he sensed it on you, he’d sink his teeth in and never let go. You had any flaws or frailties and Saks got hold of them, he’d exploit the shit right out of them. He’d rub it all in your face until you either killed him or just simply broke down and he won.

And if he won… look out.

Cook wasn’t exactly sure when it had started coming apart for him. Maybe it had been coming on for a long time and maybe what they’d found in the other lifeboat had just kicked it into high gear. Because he was having trouble with that, having trouble with what he’d seen.

Blood. Those weeds had been full of blood. They’d been milking the poor bastard lying in the bottom. He was unconscious and beyond pain, but what if he was paralyzed or something? What if he had known what was happening, but could do nothing to prevent it? Was just too weak? Jesus, how long could the mind string itself together when parasitic weeds were sucking the blood out of you?

And I left him there, Cook thought, just angry and guilty and full of wild, self-defeating things he could not name. I left that poor bastard there… to be drained to a husk…

What kind of death was that? By the look of the guy, he’d probably already lost too much blood. Even if they cut him loose, he would never wake up. Cook tried to tell himself that, but it did not make him feel better. Because the least he could have done was to have killed the guy. Put a bullet in his head or drawn a knife across his throat… something.

But he hadn’t.

He hadn’t done a damn thing.

When he’d sliced through those damn weeds… and they’d bled, squirted hot blood over his hands… well, it had just been too much. And when he’d pulled those little suckers off the guy’s throat, that’s when things had snapped for him. The grim and shocking realization that those plants fed on blood, were designed by nature to leech things… it was just too much.

Even now, he could still feel the greasy flesh of those plants, the blood on his hands.

Saks was watching him.

Cook did not turn, did not have to. He could feel that hungry gaze on him, those probing eyes. Oh, yes, he could feel them just fine. Searching for a sign of weakness, something to take advantage of, to use and abuse.

Cook, feeling a raw heat in his belly, turned around and sure enough Saks was giving him the eye, that cocky grin on his face.

“What the hell are you looking at?”

That grin, growing, knowing it was on to something here. “What’s the matter, Cook? You seem a little touchy? Something eating you?”

“What could be eating me, Saks?”

“I don’t know, but something is. Playing the big boss man too much for you?”

Cook felt his lower lip tremble. “It’s too much for anyone, isn’t it?”

“Poor Cook. He just bit off more than he could chew.” That grin was so big now it was like a knife cut in Saks’s face. “Some guys just aren’t up to it, Cook. Some guys just don’t have it. And you, my friend, you don’t have it.”

“Well, maybe not, Saks, but who else is there?”

Saks shrugged. “Let me think. How about you, Fabrini? You ready to take charge here?”

Fabrini just looked from him to Cook dumbly, an almost bovine emptiness in his eyes. “No… no, I don’t want no part of it.”

Saks shrugged again. “Well, there’s always Menhaus. He’s a true pillar of fucking strength. And Crycek? Sure, maybe a crazy situation needs a crazy leader.”

Crycek ignored him.

Cook tried to control his breathing, felt like he was about to start hyperventilating. “Which leaves who? You, Saks? You?” Cook started laughing. “Saks, no offense, but putting you in charge is like putting a child molester in charge of a little boy’s school.”

“Fuck you mean by that?”

“I mean, you’re a goddamn zero. I mean you don’t have the guts for the job. Yeah, I’ve been watching you, Saks, and when the shit gets deep, you’re the first to run. All you care about is your own skin. You can play tough all you want, you can run those fucking intimidation games of yours until the cows come home, but it won’t change the fact… you’re weak. Inside, you’re soft and gutless and spineless and-”

“You shut your goddamn mouth!” Saks cried out, his voice echoing out through the fog.

Ah, now who was pushing whose buttons?

“Take it easy, Saks,” Cook said, feeling calm now. “We all know it, we all know you aren’t fit to run a fucking hot dog stand. But you know what? It always amazes me how gutless, stupid fucks like you always end up in charge. Just blows me away. But, you know what they say, shit always floats to the top.”

Well, there it was.

Saks’s invitation to take up his knife, lunge and cut. And he’d probably make a good show of it before Cook put a bullet in him.

Saks just sat there, eyes narrowed and filled with hate. But that’s all he really did. He sat there and stewed and made with the hard eyes. All bluster and blow, no thunder to go with it.

Fabrini chuckled. “Boy, you pegged old Saksy, Cook. You sure as hell did. Anybody smell something? I think Saks just shit his pants.”

Saks had his knife out then.

Maybe he could take it from Cook, but not Fabrini. No way. Not ever. He brought that knife out and his eyes went black and Fabrini brought his out and here it came, all those boiling black poisons were finally being lanced and Menhaus and Crycek weren’t about to get in the way and, the thing was, neither was Cook.

Not this time.

He had murder on his mind. As they said, it only took one rotten apple to ruin the bunch and Saks was rotten, all right. Just dirty and dark and seething to his core like something that needed to be cut out before it infected the whole body. So Cook was not going to intervene, he was going to let Fabrini kill him and if he didn’t, Cook was going to. Because he couldn’t go on day after day in this nightmare world with that asshole picking at everyone.

“Go ahead, Fabrini,” Cook said, his voice low and even. “Kill that useless fucking prick. You’ve got my blessing.”

That made Fabrini smile.

Something like doubt crossed Saks’s face. See, this wasn’t how it worked. Cook was the voice of reason and he was supposed to stop this, get in the middle of them, cool heads prevailing and all that. But Cook wanted it to happen. Really wanted it and that was the last thing old tough guy Saks expected. He was no stranger to violence. He did not back down easily… particularly when the odds were in his favor. He had been in knife fights before, but what he wasn’t liking was that Fabrini was young and strong and muscular. Had been pushed too far now and was beyond all the societal taboos ingrained in him that had stopped him before. He was capable of murder now and Saks knew it.

Fabrini was on his feet, the lifeboat rocking.

Saks stood up, knowing it was coming now.

“Bring it on, you faggot,” he said.

And Fabrini started to move, down low and stalking, knowing he had physical advantages here. Maybe Saks was experienced at this sort of thing, but he was pushing sixty, going to fat, and his glory days on the docks and construction gangs were far behind him now.

“What’s that?” Menhaus said. “Over there… what the hell is that?”

Saks did not look, but the others did. Fabrini included.

There was something there. Something that looked pretty much like a large patch of weed that had broken loose and was drifting… drifting right toward the lifeboat.

“Weeds,” Cook said. “Weeds.”

But even as the words fell from his lips, he wasn’t so sure. Weeds? No, this did not look like a harmless patch of weeds, in fact, Cook was thinking it looked like… well, it looked like a head of hair just beneath the surface. That was crazy bullshit, but that’s what he thought momentarily. Like the gargantuan head of a woman, her hair fanning out in every direction. If it was just weeds, then it was different weeds. For these were not the average creepers and stalks, leafy branches like kelp that made up the weed banks. No these hairs or tendrils or whatever in the Christ they were, were fine, were wire-thin and as that patch got closer to the boat, Cook was thinking that they looked much like waterlogged pasta, thin and reedy and pale.

“Put those blades away,” Menhaus suddenly said.

He was soft and friendly, your favorite uncle or brother-in-law. A good neighbor or a guy to drink beers with or cookout in the backyard, bowl with… but he had no real balls and they all knew it. So when he barked out an order in that I’m-taking-absolutely-no-shit tone of voice, it was uncharacteristic and everyone listened.

Now Saks was watching that submerged shape moving at the lifeboat, too, and there was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind: it was not accidental, that thing was moving at them on purpose.

“Get ready for the shit,” Saks said.

Sure, and that’s exactly what everyone was doing… except, they did not know exactly how to get ready for this. At sea, in a normal body of water, you saw a shark or a jellyfish or sea snake moving in your direction, your mind had some ready ideas because it knew what these things were and what they were capable of. There were certain evasive maneuvers you could attempt. But what about this… thing? How could you prepare for something that looked like nothing you’d ever seen?

Cook was watching it.

It was circling around the boat and seemed to be moving in the general direction of the bow now, where he was. It was brushing aside clumps of weeds and there was no doubt it was a solid object. But looking at it, you wouldn’t have thought so. It had come up out of the water maybe two or three inches now, just enough so that it broke the surface of that algae-scummed sea. What Cook was seeing was an irregular, somewhat oval hump that seemed to be made of those wiry strands of material. They were yellow and green in color, incredibly thick and profuse and tangled like discolored angel’s hair. They radiated out from that shaggy hump in twisting filaments that were snarled and matted in places, others free flowing and incredibly long.

“What is it, Cook?” Menhaus said. “What does it want?”

And Cook was thinking that what it wanted would not be a good thing… for this thing inspired a shivering primal disgust in him like seeing a spider under a microscope, a bulbous body covered with fine hairs. Something so alien and abhorrent it could not truly be alive. He watched the thing, seeing that it had no eyes… just those wire-thin projections cast about in the water from that hump. As he looked upon it, those cilia-like hairs seeming to twitch and writhe in the water, he saw his own death. It came on him suddenly and with complete conviction, this thing was death. It was his death, the same death that had been dogging him for thirty-eight years. It was here now and it was ready.

Cook saw this and knew it to be true and the knowledge of that was like a razor scraped across his brain. It was painful and destructive and emptying. He had an odd, almost hallucinogenic sense that something inside him wanted very badly to rip through his skin and escape. He couldn’t seem to breathe and he could feel his heartbeat slowing, as if preparing for the inevitable.

“I don’t like this, Cook,” Saks was saying. “Shoot that fucker.. .”

And they were all telling him to and he figured they were right, but then he also knew that this new and mystical certainty which had bloomed in him like a death-orchid was simply beyond them. It was not their time.

“Cook…” Fabrini began.

The thing began to rise up before the bow… and, Jesus, what was it? It came up out of that stinking, vile sea, dripping water and slime and clots of decomposing matter, plumes of steam rising from it. It came up ten or twelve feet, viscid and alive and utterly impossible.

Menhaus gasped.

It had a nebulous, abstract sort of shape, something made of bumps and mounds all threaded with those tendrils of hair, matted and knotted and sweeping and moving. It was a flowing thing and a braided thing, a diaphanous spider clustered in hairballs and filigree. A snaking expanse of living cobwebs that were in constant, creeping motion. That hump they’d first seen rode atop the mass like a head, but it had no face, no anything… just a net of that webby hair hiding something black and glistening beyond. And it had two limbs or maybe three… boneless things that were not tentacles or the appendages of a crab, but just long and scaly sticks that shuddered and dripped ooze.

In a high, panicked voice, Saks said: “What… what are you going to do about it, Big Chief?”

Good question.

Cook looked upon it and it was hideous, an abomination, something that could not possibly be alive… but was. Very much alive. A creeping, evil mesh of fibers and hairs and dirty gray lace. Strands and plaits of those growths were extended out in a random pattern like limbs, but they were not limbs. Just free-flowing and wavering hairs, others bunched into great masses and knotted strands, all interconnected by long fleshy cords.

Cook started shooting.

He emptied the gun into it and then it took him. That is to say those long and scaly limbs knocked him into its central mass. But it had no mouth as such, nothing to rend him with. He fell against it and they all heard him scream, scream with the guttural and blank and inhuman sound of an animal being tortured to death.

Menhaus was pounding on his seat, screeching and shouting and crying, his mind flying apart in his head.

And Fabrini, he was just in shock.

Cook… Jesus. All those hairs and cilia were blanketing him, webbing and caressing and sliding over him, knotting him up and he was thrashing, tearing at those growths, coming out with handfuls of them that sounded like bunches of grass pulled from muddy soil. All those webs inherited him, coveted him, flowing up his nostrils and down his throat and in through his eyes, crawling and undulating things like the dendrites and synapses of nerve cells. They were growing into him like roots, into him and out of him.

They all saw it.

About the time his screaming stopped because his throat was filled with a bail of those slithering cobwebs, tiny hairs began to sprout from his face and throat and hands and arms. They burst forth like rootlets on time-lapse photographs, wiry and fibrous, just millions of them erupting from Cook until there was no longer any Cook… just a hairy, twitching thing with the general shape of a man that was being absorbed into the thing’s rustling mass.

The others sat there because there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. Fabrini stood up once, brandishing an oar and took maybe one step before Saks told him to sit the hell down, he knew what was good for him.

It happened very fast.

One moment Cook was there and the next… he was part of the thing.

Menhaus was whimpering and Fabrini was making a strangled gagging sound in his throat and Crycek refused to look upon it. And Saks? He was scared shitless and wanted to put a gun in his mouth and blow his brains out through the top of his head. But as terrible and offensive as this all was, that scheming mind of his took it all for what it really was: opportunity.

So, he reached down inside himself, found his voice quivering in darkness, and pulled it up his throat and past his lips. “Okay,” he said in a squeaking voice. “Okay… just sit still and do not fucking move.”

It was an easy order to follow; nobody had a problem with it.

The thing was still there, a huge and breathing network of webbing and tissue and floss, all those fibroid and ropy sinews shuddering and wriggling like long stringy worms. It looked almost pregnant with the mounded form of Cook tangled in it. Its limbs, those branching scaly sticks, were busy there, pulling nets of hair over him, tucking him away, a cocooned fly. And the really horrible thing was, Cook was still moving. Shuddering and jerking in there, trying to die and having a hard time of it apparently.

The men in the lifeboat knew what was happening to him.

They knew he was not being eaten exactly or drained of blood or de-boned… although, essentially, all these things were happening, just not in the way they understood them. For Cook was being absorbed and digested by those hairs, dissolved and assimilated into the general mass of that nightmare. The creature was the sort of thing you whacked with a broom and swept into a dustbin, except in this place, it did the whacking.

It was moving now, lilting slowly from side to side like it was drunk. Saks saw this and figured it probably wasn’t a good thing. For if the beast was full, it would have just sank back into the sea.

It brought those limbs forward, resting them on the gunnels of the lifeboat and all those wiry gossamer tendrils began to twist and curl and spread out like when it had first seen… or sensed… Cook. A surging, rustling growth of them flowed from the thing and covered the bow, filling the boat now, seeking new flesh to subvert.

And Saks found himself thinking that those hairs were not just a body covering, but possibly general appendages and sensory instruments to boot… muscle fibers and nerve fibers, organs of taste and smell and digestion.

Menhaus tried to climb overboard and Saks clapped him on the ear. “Give me one of those kerosene lamps and a flare,” he said very quietly as those hairs crept steadily forward, just a moving mat of them creeping in their direction, covering the bow seat and progressing, progressing, a tidal wave of surging, living hairs.

Fabrini put one of the lamps in Saks’s hands and Saks shattered it against one of the amidships seats, scant feet from those tendrils, and splashed kerosene over the advancing horde. He capped the flare and a bright red tongue of flame lit up the boat and reflected off the fog like neon. The creature did not know fire. It could not see as such, but Saks was willing to bet it had nerve endings. He tossed the flare at those kerosene-drenched fibers and they exploded with a gush of flames, catching like tinder, spreading up toward the thing’s body.

It began to thrash wildly, cheated out of easy pickings, and it had a mouth or something like one, for it began making a high, strident e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound like a dying insect, the sort of sound you expected a spider to make as you crushed it to pulp under your shoe. It withdrew, flaming and smoking, filling the air with a nauseating, acrid stench.

It sank back into the sea, sizzling and steaming.

But it did not go away. Its hump was still visible just above the waterline.

“What now?” Menhaus said. “Oh, Jesus, what now?”

“Put that fire out,” Saks said.

Fabrini and Crycek splashed water on the dying flames in the boat and Menhaus grabbed the flare which was burning a trench in the hull of the lifeboat.

The hump began to move, vibrating and shaking, rising up now maybe three or four inches out of the water. It began to elongate and then there were suddenly two humps and they began to pull apart with a tearing, moist sound.

“Oh, what the fuck is it doing?” Fabrini said.

Crycek licked his lips. “I think… I think it’s dividing.”

And it was. Binary fission, asexual reproduction. Like a protozoan, it was splitting itself into two parts. The humps continued to move apart, both vibrating madly, strands of pink and yellow tissue connecting the halves as genetic material was shared and the cellular plasma membrane was sheared and reformed. Coils of white fluid like semen filled the sea around it. And then division was complete and there were two humps out there. Neither were moving.

Menhaus vomited over the side of the boat.

Crycek said, “It might be dormant now… we better get out of here while we can.”

Saks thought it was a good idea. He passed out the oars. “Now row, you sonsofbitches,” he told them. “Row like motherfuckers…”

6

It had been threatening for hours and now darkness came.

It was born in the stark depths and the black silent bellies of the derelict ships. It came rushing out in a plexus of shadows, shifting and pooling and spreading, connecting finally in a blanketing ebon sheet that fell over the ship’s graveyard until even the fog was consumed. The only hint of light being that dirty, reddish haze from the larger of the moons overhead.

“And how long, I wonder, will it last?” Cushing said to George.

They were standing on the boarding ramp with one of the battery-powered lanterns while Marx and Gosling went through the crates, calling out what they were finding. So far, they had found blankets and tools, three crates of boots, two of desert-camouflage tents. And about two dozen boxes of MREs, Meals, Ready-to-Eat, in military jargon. The replacement for the old C-rations. So they had a new food source. And probably enough to last them for months and months.

Gosling had a crowbar and Marx had a roofer’s hatchet-hammer for splitting crate ends. Both supplied by the U.S. Army loadmaster who had supervised the loading of the plane.

“Lookee here,” Marx said. “Satchel charges… pre-packaged, too. Set the fuse, toss one, and boom! These could come in handy, you know what I mean.”

They did.

George had used charges like that when he was in an Army engineer battalion. Had used them a lot more for blasting at construction sites. Packed with C-4, you could do some serious damage, you were of the mind to.

Chesbro and Pollard were up in front of the Hummers, sitting in the web seats. Chesbro was praying and Pollard was just staring off into space.

“Who can say what sort of orbit this place is in?” Cushing continued. “Night might be a few hours or a few weeks. Who knows?”

“Shit,” George said.

The fog was bad enough, but to be in complete darkness that long… well, he doubted that they’d all be sane by the time it lifted.

He tried to distance himself from it all. He kept thinking of Lisa and Jacob and how much they meant to him. Even the things he’d once dreaded seemed reassuring now. Jacob’s dental bills. Lisa’s chiropractor bills. The two ex-wifes and the alimony. The mortgage. Christ, it all sounded so good now. So comforting and safe. It was funny what the thought of impending death and madness could do to a person.

It could just change your outlook on everything.

“We can live like shitting kings,” Marx said, overjoyed at all the goodies they were finding. “Look here… flares! Now don’t that beat it dead with a stick?”

Gosling said, “We’ll never get all this stuff into the boats without sinking them.”

“We’ll just take what we need, come back again if we need to.”

“Yeah,” Gosling said. “If we can find this damn plane again.”

“Oh, but I got faith in you, First. Even here in the Devil’s own asshole, I got lots of faith in you.”

Gosling laughed and Marx launched into some dirty story about three nuns and a leper whose dick kept falling off.

George looked out into the mist. It was thick and roiling and lacey beyond the boarding ramp, something woven out of smoke and steam. The light from the battery lamp made it maybe ten feet before giving up the ghost. “What keeps you going?” George asked Cushing. “I mean, what keeps you sane here? Me? I’ve got a wife and a kid back in the world. I know I have to get back to them, one way or another. Every time I feel like I can’t do this anymore, that my mind is coming apart on me… I think of them. I think of how it’s gonna be to see them again. It gives me something to hold onto. But what about you? You’re not married, are you?”

Cushing shook his head. “I told myself I wouldn’t get married until I was forty and then when I turned forty, I told myself fifty sounded good.”

“Fifty’s soon enough,” Marx said behind them, balancing his hatchet-hammer on one muscular shoulder. “Christ, I was married six frigging times. Six. And all of ‘em meat-eaters and ball-collectors. Don’t be in no hurry, Cushing, to lacquer your balls and put ‘em in a glass case with a DO NOT FUCKING DISTURB sign on ‘em. You get married, only time she’ll let you see your balls is when it’s time to dust ‘em off. Oh, I speak from experience. My last wife, Lucinda… holy Jesus Christ, you had to see this one. She could de-nut the best. Even when we divorced, evil bitch only gave me one of ‘em back. I think she ate the other. She was special, that Lucinda. A week with her was like ten years hardtime. Her mouth was so big you could’ve slapped a sewer cover on it. Yeah, she was some kind of ball-buster, all right. Girl like that made a man want to suck dick and hang curtains and walk funny. Just the sight of her made my pecker go soft and my wrists get limp.”

“So why the hell did you marry her?” Gosling asked.

Marx winked at him. “Oh, because I loved her, First. Loved her dearly.”

The talk moved on to Marx’s other wives, all of whom sounded like growling, long-toothed things that had slipped out of the House of Carnivores at the zoo. Marx said his second wife was so pissing mean, he used to wear body armor to bed and carry a whip and a chair to tea.

“You want to know what it is for me, George?” Cushing said, now that Marx was on to the snakepit of his third marriage. “What keeps me going? Curiosity.”

“Curiosity?”

Cushing nodded. “That and nothing more. I don’t really have much back home, unless you want to count my golddigging sister who married Franklin Fisk who got us all into this mess. But what I do have is curiosity, see? For natural history and biology and living things. I like folklore and general history, philosophy and literature. A lot of highbrow crap like that. And this place? Shit, it’s awful, but I’m seeing things few men have ever seen. Ever lived to tell about. All those ships out there… you know what they are? Mysteries. The kind of things people write about and make movies and documentaries about. Things people will never really explain, all those vanished ships and planes. But we have the answers to all those riddles. We know what happened and I think that’s kind of a gift, don’t you?”

George didn’t think that at all, but he nodded. “We’ll die smart, anyway.”

He was listening to Marx extol the virtues of his fourth wife who apparently was some kind of cannibal who sharpened her teeth with a file and had razor blades shoved up her wahoo.

Cushing cocked his head to the side. “You hear that?”

George thought he had heard something, too. He just wasn’t sure what. But now he was hearing it again: a stealthy, sliding sound. It came and then went. “What is it?” Gosling said to them.

But neither of them could say and now Marx had fallen silent, too. The night was pressing down, misty and moist and clotted. The cargo bay of the C-130 made everything echo. They could hear water dripping and Chesbro mumbling prayers. Then… then something else. That sliding sound again. To George, it sounded oddly like somebody was dragging ropes over the outer shell of the cargo bay. But he wasn’t thinking ropes. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Only that to him, it was not a harmless sound, but an evil sound full of menace and danger.

Marx had joined them now. “What in the Christ?” he said.

And then, just beyond the lip of the loading ramp, the sea suddenly lit up with a grim and ghostly phosphorescence that spread out for what seemed hundreds of feet. It lit up the fog and made the weeds go luminous. Just some eerie incandescence coming from beneath the water and weeds themselves.

And then it faded and the darkness swam back in.

“Get away from that door,” Gosling said.

They could hear that stealthy rustling again, something — many of them, in fact — brushing against the outside of the cargo bay.

George and Cushing backed away, but Marx was not moving.

Gosling dropped his crowbar, came around the side of the Hummer in front. It was facing outward and he clicked on its headlights, two pillars of light stabbing through the darkness and fog. But there was nothing out there, nothing at all. Just the fog swirling about, the glistening expanse of weeds.

Then there was a splashing sound like something heavy had fallen back into the sea followed by a squeaking sound like a finger drawn over glass.

But what had caused it, no one could say.

They were all watching the fog out there in the Hummer’s headlights. It was thick and boiling and damp. There was another of those rustling sounds and then a tentacle came sliding out of the mist. It emerged with a sort of scraping, scuttling sound like some fleshy, blind caterpillar looking for a juicy leaf. It crept up the boarding ramp, looking almost curious. A slimy and undulating thing about the width of a pencil at the tip and bigger around than a man’s waist where it disappeared into the weedy depths. It was bright red with pebbly flesh and obscenely bloated, stout and powerful and flexing with muscle.

It carried a sharp, gagging stink of ammonia about it.

“Jesus lovely Christ,” Gosling said.

Marx was stepping back now, too.

The tentacle had not come up into the cargo bay as yet, it was busy searching around on the ramp itself like an investigative worm, like it knew something appealing was there… or had been.

Sure, George found himself thinking, us.

It coiled about on the boarding ramp, fat and full. Its beaded red flesh was the color of boiled lobsters and beneath, they saw, were triple rows of dun yellow suckers, puckering and expanding, a brown chitinous hook like a cat’s claw emerging from each one. These are what made the scraping sounds.

“Squid,” Marx said. “Big, shitting squid. Saw this big mother floating off the Canaries once, it-”

But he never finished that, for the tentacle shuddered and froze-up like maybe it had heard him, it twisted up upon itself, exposing those puckering suckers and hooks, and then slid back off into the fog. And you could almost feel the relief spread through the men, but it was short-lived. Very short-lived.

Two more tentacles came out of the mist. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth. They came out fast, sliding up the boarding ramp like blood-red pythons searching for something to constrict. Marx barely got out of their way and he didn’t get out of the way of the sixth and seventh. They darted out of the mist like rattlesnakes striking, one corkscrewing around his waist and the other looping around his left arm.

It happened just that fast.

So fast, in fact, that everyone managed to gasp and that was about it. Those tentacles found him like they knew exactly where he was, like they could see him. There was no hesitation. They came out of the fog and wrapped him up and with such force, all Marx had time to do was utter a low grunting, ummfff as if he had been kicked in the stomach, the wind knocked right out of him. The hatchet-hammer fell from his fingers about the same time and clattered to floor of the cargo bay.

“Oh my God,” Gosling said, simply surprised.

Those tentacles twined him up like a fireman’s hose, tightening and squeezing and Marx screamed, a high and shrieking sound of primal agony. And then like a vise, those vibrant red tentacles crushed him with immense strength. You could actually see their alien musculature flex and contract like a clenching hand. Marx’s eyes bulged and his face went a vibrant red, just as red as those tentacles, then purple and finally black. The tentacle around his waist had squeezed his midsection to the thickness of a forearm and you could hear bones snapping and things pulping to sauce inside him. He looked like a livid water balloon a child had squeezed in its fist… his torso and head, legs and hips swelled-up to the point of bursting from internal hydrostatic pressure. He gagged out foam and blood in snotty tangles and something bleeding and fleshy which might have been his stomach or intestines.

He looked like a deep-sea fish that had undergone fast, massive decompression.

And this happened in the span of about five seconds.

Five seconds that passed with disturbing, hallucinogenic clarity for the men that witnessed them.

George screamed and fell on his ass.

Gosling came running, shouting and screeching, the crowbar magically in his hands again and he made it right to the bloody, smashed hulk of Marx just as those tentacles gave him a final squeeze to make sure the fight was taken out of him. A gout of blood and tissue vomited from Marx’s distorted mouth and splashed across the front of Gosling’s shirt, but it didn’t even slow him down. He came on swinging, hammering the crowbar into two slimy tentacles that sought him out. They recoiled instantly and were replaced by two others that did not recoil.

Marx’s corpse was upended and yanked out into the mist with such force that his head struck the loading ramp, his bloody scalp peeling free.

George was on his feet by then.

Or was for a moment or two. As he got up, a tentacle swung out for Gosling and he ducked under it and it hit George in the chest, hit him like a railroad tie. Knocked him up and against the wall of the cargo bay and he slumped over, barely avoiding another which snaked back around in a question mark, seeking his head.

Dazed, confused, the wind kicked out of him, George saw another tentacle coming at him, coiling and slimy and evil, and all he could think was what it was going to feel like when those hooks sank in him and those muscles squeezed his insides to paste.

“Look out, George!” someone cried. “Oh, Jesus, look out…”

7

Cushing heard that voice cry out and saw that tentacle squirming in George’s direction and he reacted without thinking.

He grabbed George by the ankle — that slick tentacle passing so close to his face that he could smell the stink of the rotting sea bottom on it — and dragged him over near the Hummer. And did it fast, that tentacle coming back around like scythe, looking for something to squeeze. At any other time, he knew, he would have had to grab George’s legs in both hands and then done a lot of puffing and struggling… but at that moment, his adrenaline was amped so high, he just grabbed that one ankle and yanked George away like he was stuffed with dry hay.

As he turned, he saw something that nearly drove him insane.

Just a momentary glimpse, but it was sheer poison. Fifty or sixty feet away, the mist parted momentarily to give him a view of something that curdled him straight to the marrow. Spotlighted in the Hummer’s headlights, he saw Marx’s corpse being fed into a gargantuan puckered mouth the size of a train tunnel. Saw that tentacle stuff Marx’s remains in there like a tasty treat. Into that gigantic chewing hole that was filled with a corkscrewing series of flabby tongues that peeled him down to a skeleton in seconds.

Then the mist closed in, covered the atrocity of that mouth and Cushing saw something like a huge yellow eye big as a wagon wheel looking right at him. Then it was invisible, too.

Three more tentacles swooped in out of the mist with a surprising, violent speed. One of them knocked Gosling on his ass and another entwined his ankle and still another brushed across his chest, those glistening hooks ripping open the front of his shirt and his chest with it.

“Get back!” he screeched to the men, his men, his voice raw with pain. He thrashed and panted and howled. “Get back oh Jesus get back-”

Cushing jumped forward, dodging under and around whipping, angry tentacles, picked up Marx’s hatchet-hammer and swung it with everything he had at another tentacle reaching for Gosling. The blade split open that greasy, beaded red flesh and a spray of brown blood broke against his face with a burning sensation.

The tentacle which had been dragging Gosling off jerked as Cushing chopped into the other one. It jerked violently and unclenched, tossing Gosling through the air. He slammed into the front of the Hummer, collapsing over George. His ankle where the squid had him was eaten right down to the bone.

George was dragging him off then, mumbling and whimpering under his breath and Chesbro and Pollard had been finally shocked out of their stupor. They came forward, helping George pull Gosling back into the plane, beyond the Hummers.

Cushing dodged and ducked and made it to the Hummer. One searching tentacle tripped him, but he made it out of its reach and then the shit really started to rain down. For that grotesque monster squid knew there was food in the shell of that plane and it intended on having it.

More of those tentacles came in through the cargo door. And not just two or three, but a dozen, two dozen, filling the door with a squirming, seeking multitude of boneless arms that were draped with seaweed, many bigger around than dock pilings and concrete pillars. They flowed through the door like a mutiny of red, bloated worms, those suckers pulsing open and close, the tearing hooks scratching along the metal floor seeking flesh to rend.

And Cushing thought: This is no squid, this is no fucking cuttlefish, I don’t know what sort of blasphemy it is, but it can’t be real, something like this cannot be alive…

The tentacles were not just inside, but outside, too.

They were rustling and slithering over the outer hull with a rubbery, squeaking sound, those hooks scratching away over the metal shell like thousands of nails.

Then the plane began to shake.

The squid had seized it, was hugging it in a crushing embrace. The metal shell groaned and squealed with metal fatigue. Rivets popped like bullets, ricocheting off the floors and walls. Cushing was thrown down face-first, then rolled under one of the Hummers. Then the plane shifted again and he was tossed back up against the crates.

There were so many tentacles invading the cargo bay now, you could not see the night and mist beyond. They were just as thick and knotted as tree roots in a drainpipe. Writhing and convoluting things, a fleshy, living helix of ruby-red ropes.

Then there was a flash of blinding light and Cushing had to cover his eyes in shock.

But it was just the squid. Its flesh was studded with millions of tiny photophores like that of a luminous deep-sea fish and without warning, it had lit them all at once. Cushing had an image burned onto his retina of dozens of stout and coiling tentacles glowing just as bright as Christmas bulbs.

He was up near the Hummer in the rear now, hanging onto its bumper as those tentacles surged deeper into the cargo bay, wriggling and scratching madly like snakes in a bag. And that’s when he saw another and different sort of tentacle slide into view. This one was smooth like oiled rubber and ended in a concave sort of club that looked very much like the trap of a Venus fly-catcher. It was roughly the size and shape of a sixteen-foot canoe, tapping its way along like a searching finger. Then it rose up like a cobra spreading its hood until it was perfectly vertical, the upper tip brushing the roof of the cargo bay.

Cushing knew he screamed.

He thought he might have pissed himself, too.

The club was toothed with jagged spines all along its perimeter that were long and sharp enough to gut a man. The underside was fleshed in bubble-gum pink skin that was bumpy like chicken flesh. And as Cushing watched, that pink skin retracted, opened like the petals of an orchid with a whining sound like a punctured aerosol can and beneath… beneath was something like a huge, vagina-shaped mouth oozing tears of clear bile. A mouth set with dozens of black teeth that rasped together like cutlery. Surrounding them was a ring of red golfball-sized nodules that looked very much like eyes.

The mouth hissed at him.

But that’s all Cushing saw.

All he could bear to see.

He began crawling rapidly deeper into the plane as it shook and trembled and groaned, more rivets popping. Getting constricted by those other tentacles would have been bad enough… just ask Marx… but that obscene, toothy club was somehow worse. Cushing could almost feel it taking him, biting into him like the leaf of a man-eating plant, watching his agony with that circle of cruel red eyes. He was certain in his mad flight that the squid would crush the plane like an empty beer can and drag it down into those black, gelatinous depths.

All he could hear was the constant pounding thunder of those tentacles crawling and slithering in the cargo bay and the ones outside, sliding and scraping against the outer hull like a thousand windy tree branches rasping against the siding of a house. And amplified to the point that he could not hear anything else, just those tentacles in his head, moving and skating over the metal shell, animated vines and creepers and pulpy ribbons. It was the sort of sound that made something shrink inside him, offended and disgusted him the same way a million maggots boiling on the carcass of a road-killed dog would… all that twitching, slinking obscene life, it repulsed the human mind to its very depths.

Made you want to do anything before the sight and sound of that busy, fleshy profusion ripped your mind wide open.

The specialized tentacle with the club had retreated now.

The others had no intention. They found the first Hummer and spiraled around it, encircling it and deciding it was something they wanted. With a great rending snap, the Hummer was torn from its metal bracings and shorings and dragged out into the mist. The tentacles dropped it into the seaweed sea, where it went down in an explosion of air bubbles, then rose straight up like a steeple, lights pointed skyward. It began to sink again, but not quickly enough. More tentacles found it and pulled it under, its lights still working, strobing beneath the weeds and winking out, one after the other.

And then the squid sank away with it.

All those tentacles withdrew, leaving a slime of jellied emulsion behind them like mucus. The cargo bay was glistening with it, as if the gelatin from a canned ham had been sprayed around in there. And through it all, the battery lantern they’d hung just inside the mouth of the bay was surprisingly still out there, still working. But the only thing it was illuminating now were the snarled weeds and plumes of rising mist.

Nothing else.

George and the others had brought Gosling back into the plane as far as they could, up near the cockpit door. They had lit another battery lantern. Cushing was with them now, breathing hard and hearing the roar of blood rushing in his head. He was just beside himself, feeling like he was going to throw up one minute and go out cold the next. His face felt hot and cold and tingly.

Gosling was laying there, under a waterproof tarp. With shaking hands George was bandaging him as best as he could. Gosling was unconscious, moaning in his stupor.

“It’s gone,” Chesbro said. “It’s gone now, it’s really gone.”

“It’ll be back,” Pollard said.

Chesbro clutched his head in his hands, saying: “‘Behold now behemoth… he maketh the deep to boil like a pot…’”

George stopped what he was doing and turned to Chesbro. “You fucking idiot,” he said, feeling it all coming out of him now. “You fucking stupid piece of shit.”

Chesbro looked up at him just in time to see George’s clenched fist coming at him like a piston, something propelled and deadly like a torpedo. It caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back and mashing his lips against his teeth. Had George any more room to swing, any more space with which to build momentum, he would have probably busted out a few teeth. But as it was, he split Chesbro’s lower lip wide open and slammed his head against the cockpit door with a hollow clang. Then George’s other fist was coming, but it was wild and just managed to clip the top of Chesbro’s head as he curled up like a hedgehog in a defensive position.

By then Cushing was on George, pushing him back. “Enough,” he said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough, George.”

But maybe from where George was sitting, it wasn’t. His teeth were clenched and his mind had gone stupid with hatred. The color drained from his face and he took a deep breath, his body going limp. “That fucking idiot… spouting that shit, spouting that shit at a time like this.”

Pollard just stared at it all dumbfounded.

Chesbro was whimpering now, something in him just shearing open at this latest indignity. He was hugging himself, rocking back and forth on his ass while his mouth filled with blood and it trickled down his chin.

“Just take it easy now, everyone,” Cushing said. He pulled a bandage out of one of the green nylon medical bags and made Chesbro press it to his mouth until the bleeding stopped.

Then he took a good look at Gosling. A real good look.

The bandages George had wrapped around his ankle were already turning red, same for the ones at his chest. Cushing was hardly a medic, but he’d been through a couple Red Cross first aid classes when he’d worked at a foundry years back. He searched through the Army medical bag. It had just about everything you could imagine, most of it centered around treating battlefield wounds. He saw the suture sets and given the enormity of Gosling’s wounds, he knew a good medic would be thinking of stitching him up. But Cushing didn’t know the first thing about suturing and now wasn’t a good time to learn, he figured.

He removed the bandages at Gosling’s chest and poured some QuikClot, clotting powder, into the deeper ones. Then he took out a pre-loaded syringe of what the label told him was triple antibiotic and injected it right into one of the gashes from the squid’s claws, hoping he was doing this right. Then he placed self-adhesive fast-clotting bandages over the wounds and repeated it all at Gosling’s ankle. But he wasn’t too hopeful with the latter. The tissue damage was so severe, he doubted anything less than a modern medical team would be able to fix it.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” George asked him.

Rubbing his trembling fingers against his legs, Cushing said, “Some of it from first aid courses, the rest I winged.”

If nothing else, the clotting agents and bandages stopped the bleeding or slowed it to an acceptable rate.

“Let me take a look at your mouth, Chesbro,” Cushing said.

But he just shook his head.

Cushing told Pollard to keep an eye on Gosling and George and he slipped up behind the remaining Hummer. From the light thrown by the lantern, they could see that the nylon line they’d tied off the lifeboat and raft with had been snapped.

“Oh, shit,” George said. “If that raft is gone…”

And Cushing understood the implications of that just fine: marooned. Without the raft or lifeboat, they were marooned. Trapped in the steel coffin of the C-130 and like candy in a dish, the monster-squid would keep coming back until said dish was empty.

“I wish this goddamn night would end,” George said.

“We just have to hang on.”

George said, “If I can get at those satchel charges, we can take care of that ugly bastard.”

“No,” Cushing said. “You go back there… no, you’d be exposing your ass to that thing.”

Pollard came walking up. “I think… I think the First is coming around.” He looked out into the mist. “That thing… it can’t get us way in the back, can it?”

“No,” George told him.

But it was a lie and they all knew it. Cushing had gotten the only real good look at the thing out of any of them. And from the dimensions he’d seen, however briefly, he knew the squid was at least a couple hundred feet in length, maybe more. The tentacles themselves, he figured, were probably well over a hundred feet long. What they’d seen were just the ends. If the squid wanted, it could easily crush the plane or root around in there until it got all of them. Cushing was certain of this. Those tentacles would find them even in the cockpit.

“Look,” George said. “Jesus Christ, look…”

The weeds and mist were glowing again, which meant the squid was still there, still waiting. There was a gentle, rolling splash and a tentacle slid out of the sea and up the loading ramp, uncurling as it came on. It was one of the specialized tentacles with the convex, hooded club at the end. The club was very smooth and shiny, reflecting the glare of the battery lamp hanging above. Cushing figured it was six or seven feet at its widest point and probably nearer twenty feet in length than sixteen as he’d originally thought. The tentacle it was hooked to, was smooth and suckerless, big around as a centuried oak where it vanished in the weeds.

George made an involuntary gagging sound. “What the fuck is that?” he said.

But Cushing was beyond words.

The club rose up vertically as before at the edge of the cargo bay, revealing its pink, moist underside and the barbed spines gleaming at its perimeter. That pink flesh shriveled back from that immense concave mouth and black gnashing teeth. They all saw that circle of red orbs and were all certain they were watching eyes. Pink slime was dripping from the mouth, dropping in clots to the ramp.

“Don’t move,” Cushing told them, locked down hard inside like January ice.

Nobody did.

They just stood there, peering around the Hummer.

It was an insane, nightmarish scenario. The club moved up into the cargo bay inch by terrible inch. Once inside, the tentacle itself paused, but the club turned slightly to the left and then to the right like the head of a man looking or listening for something. Cushing had a sudden, unsettling memory of watching the movie, War of the Worlds, as a boy. That part where the couple are trapped in the farmhouse with the Martian war machine hovering outside and the sensory probe that looked like a Martian head came sliding in through the shattered window, trying to locate them. This was very much like that, for he had no doubt whatsoever that this club was looking for them.

No, no, not looking, but sensing, it occurred to him. It can’t see. Those things look like eyes, but they’re not eyes, not really. More like the eyespots around the bell of a jellyfish… looking very much like eyes, but actually light-sensing ocelli. Except in this case, maybe not light-sensing at all, but possibly heat-sensing like the pit organ of a desert rattlesnake.

It was sheer speculation on his part, a wild leap of logic at best based on what he understood of sensory physiology, but it sounded about right.

Yet, it was hard not to believe those orbs weren’t eyes. When that hooded club swept around, they glittered like jewels, like something with awareness and intelligence behind them.

Cushing was wondering if maybe that monstrous cephalopod and its attendant tentacles might just leave, figuring the food source in the plane had made its escape. But he would never know because Pollard was getting antsy. He was shaking like a man with a tropical fever, sweat rolling down his face in rivers.

“I can’t do this,” he said under his breath. “I can’t do this.. .”

And then he moved, turned and ran back towards the cockpit. The club jerked back suddenly like a startled cobra and that mouth hissed in alarm. It had sensed Pollard’s whereabouts now, whether through motion or heat or maybe both. And the sea beyond the ramp began to boil and the mist began to blow around as dozens of tentacles came pouring out of the weeds and up the ramp, coiling and looping like serpents from a snake charmer’s basket.

George and Cushing ran back to join the others.

Ran back and looked at those sweating faces and shocked, glassy eyes that were expecting to hear what their plan was. Hear about their defense or escape route, except George and Cushing didn’t have one. Because this was it. This was endgame.

The beast knew where they were and now it was coming for them.

George saw the first of the tentacles slide over the roof of the Hummer, three more slide under it and emerge with a swimming, serpentine side-to-side motion.

“Into the cockpit,” Cushing said. “Right now.”

George and Pollard lifted up Gosling and started carrying him through the door.

Chesbro was just pale and paralyzed.

“Move, goddamn you!” Cushing said, the stink of the beast bathing them. When Chesbro didn’t, he slapped him across the face. “Now, you dumb shit, unless you want your Behemoth to find you.”

That got Chesbro moving.

He leaped through the cockpit door and Cushing wondered, as the tentacles came worming and slithering forward, wondered how long that flimsy steel door was going to protect them.

And maybe he would have kept wondering it except he saw an eruption of light outside, from somewhere in the mist. A flickering, orange-yellow light like that of a bonfire. Whatever it was, the tentacles and their master became aware of it, too. They froze on the floor, in midair, hanging from the ceiling by their suckers. They began to quiver like a cat watching a bird. More of that flickering light and very close now.

Fire.

It was fire.

Out here… but how?

A tongue of flame brushed up against the plane, throwing a greasy, churning light that jumped and flashed. Gosling, looking down towards the passenger door saw the flames quite clearly. The weeds were on fire. And either they had ignited themselves or someone had done it for them.

“What the hell is it?” someone in the cockpit said.

And Cushing was wondering just that when a shadow cut through the flames outside the passenger door. A shadow hunched and jumped through the doorway. Cushing fell backward through the cockpit hatch, expecting the very worst.

But what he saw was a human being.

A human being with a pail of something in one hand and a burning flare in the other. They tossed the bucket at the tentacles and threw the flare. Flames erupted in a gushing, spreading cloud and the tentacles retreated instantly like worms on a hotplate. They disappeared in a column of funneling smoke.

And it was then that Cushing got a look at their savior.

It was a woman.

8

They saw it.

They all saw it, if only for a moment or two. Something sticking up out of the weed. Something circular, disc-shaped, and very large. It wasn’t a boat and it wasn’t a plane… at least not of the world they came from. There was a word for what it might have been, but nobody dared say it out loud. They saw it for just a few fleeting seconds, then it was lost again in the fog. Thankfully.

“What do you think it was, Fabrini?”

Saks said this to him, not really expecting a reply anymore than he would expect one from a pet beagle. Because he figured that, intellectually, Fabrini was on the same level as your common ball-licking, shit-on-the-carpet, drink-from-the-fucking-toilet beagle. On a good day, that was. Most days, you could play fetch-the-goddamn-stick all afternoon with that boy and he still wouldn’t get it. Sit there, wagging his tail and waiting for you to tell him what he should be doing and what he should be thinking about it all.

At least, this is how Saks was seeing things.

His crew of misfits and ass-fuckers, as he liked to call them, were his pets now that Cook was in hairball-heaven. Old Al Saks was holding that leash and you got out of line, he’d whack you in the nose with a rolled-up Chicago Trib or rub your pink, wet little nose in your own shit, see if he didn’t.

Fabrini kept swallowing, looking around in the mist for a door that said EXIT and not finding one. “I don’t know, I don’t know what it was.”

“You hear that, Menhaus? He don’t know what it was. Fagbrini, you’re a goddamn moron, you know that?”

Ah, here we go.

Fabrini was filling up with that hatred that was just as dark as bootblack and just as searing as hot oil. His hand was going for that knife in his belt, because maybe he was thinking that this was it. This was the time he punched Saks’s ticket and Cook wasn’t there to talk reason and the other two — Menhaus and Crycek — were out of their heads more often than not and could have cared less if Fabrini killed that bullying, foul-mouthed sonofabitch.

Just as long as he did.

Saks sighed, really bored with it all. “Go ahead, Fabrini, pull that fucking blade,” he said, not bothering with his own knife. “Come over here and kill my ass. Personally, I don’t believe a neutered she-bitch like you is up to the job. But, go ahead, prove me wrong. Bring it on, you cheap ass-licker. Come on, I want to see this.”

Fabrini had his knife out, was never aware even for a moment that his buttons were being pushed and he was being manipulated by a master puppeteer.

He came on.

“Boy,” Menhaus said, “you two are starting to bore the piss out of me.”

Crycek said nothing, didn’t seem to realize any of it was happening.

“C’mon already, Fagbrini, kill me,” Saks said. “I’ll have the last laugh and you know it. Because when I’m gone, it’s going to be funny as all hell watching the three of you trying to survive out here.”

That slowed Fabrini. Stopped him, even.

You could see the doubt creeping over his face in the light of their final lantern. You could see the indecision. And finally, yes, you could hear that hot bag of air in his belly leaking.

“Go ahead,” Menhaus said, his eyes bloodshot and fixed, a crazy look about him like a guy on a three-day caffeine binge watching the WWF and wanting blood, wanting violence. “Slice the bastard! Nobody’s gonna stop you. Nobody’s gonna give a high, randy shit. You’ll be doing us all a favor shutting that goddamn mouth of his.”

Saks chuckled. “Sure, Fabrini, do what Fat-Boy says.”

Fabrini didn’t know what to do. Looked like he was ready to start chasing his own tail.

“Well?” Saks said. “No, I didn’t think so. Because without me, you three are dead as Menhaus’ dick and you know it.”

Fabrini put the knife away and took his seat up in the bow again. Saks had finally broken him and he knew it. He needed Saks. They all needed that macho, trash-talking asshole and it was a hell of a thing to have to admit to yourself. Like saying you needed a pushpin in your left nut or a needle through your tongue. It hurt about that much.

But it was true.

“Okay, then,” Saks said, happy now. “Since we’ve all come to the conclusion that none of you donkeyfucks could find your own wee peckers without rubbing your crotches with rock salt and seeing what turns red, let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Fabrini wasn’t liking it, but he listened.

“Now, I’m in charge here whether you gay bastards like it or not. You don’t have to love me, but if you cooperate, I’ll keep your asses alive and maybe, just maybe I’ll get you out of this pissing sewer and back to your pathetic little lives. How does that suit you boys?”

Menhaus shrugged. “Yeah, whatever it takes.”

Saks turned to Fabrini. “How about you, Richard fucking Simmons?”

Fabrini managed a nod.

“Crycek?”

Crycek was staring out into the fog.

“Yeah, well, we’ll take that as a yes since you’re shit-crazy to begin with.”

So they sat there by lantern light in that lifeboat, listening to Saks’s view on the world in general which was about fifty-percent truth and about fifty-percent bullshit. But it was something. Unlike the others, he had not retreated into his shell, hoping somebody’d pull him back out again. He had some ideas and some scenarios on how they were going to stay alive and be one big happy-assed family.

They were deep into the weed now, into the ship’s graveyard like Cushing and the others. Although the fog was thicker than oatmeal and night had come on, black and eternal, they had seen things out there. The overturned hulls of ships, wreckage, an occasional glimpse of some old-time schooner or modern cutter rigged with fungus and weed, things like rotting old ghost ships. But never more than a glimpse. Just enough to make them realize that they were in a place of legend.

“Sooner or later, maybe when the night ends,” Saks said, “we’ll find us a decent ship. Something that hasn’t been here too long. And when we find that, we’ll call it home.”

“Home,” Menhaus said. “I like that. Home. Jesus.”

“Shut your hole,” Saks told him. “The point being we can’t drift around in this goddamn boat for the rest of our merry lives. We need something better. Something that might have a store of food and water, maybe some weapons or a good motor launch on her.”

“A base of operations,” Fabrini said.

“Exactly. That’s our first order of business. Find a place that’s dry and safe, then we can spend our time getting the lay of this place and weighing our options.”

Nobody argued with any of that. One thing at a time.

Menhaus and Fabrini began debating what kind of place this was, to have all those ships trapped in the weeds.

“Sargasso Graveyard,” Saks told them. “That’s what the old salts called this place. The Sargasso Graveyard. Even the big steamships and diesel jobs end up here… they run out of fuel and drift into this cesspool. No way out. Then the weed grows all over ‘em. But some of these ships, well, they have to have motorboats on ‘em. That’s what we want.”

“Graveyard,” Crycek said. “That’s exactly what this place is: a graveyard.”

“Lots of dead ships out there,” Menhaus said. “And lots of dead crews to go with them, I’ll bet.”

The idea of that paled Fabrini somewhat.

But that wasn’t what Saks wanted to talk about. He wanted to mention that other craft they had seen. The very thing that had prompted this entire line of conversation. Because they had seen something jutting from the weed and it was like nothing any of them had ever seen before.

“What the hell was that?” Saks put to them.

No bullshit, no insults, no bullying, he honestly wanted their opinion on what it was they had seen before the fog swallowed it again. Because, he knew one thing, he hadn’t liked it. Just looking upon it for those few fleeting seconds had made something in him close up like an oyster. Made something else in him begin to shiver. For there were some things you honestly never wanted to see and particularly not in a place like this.

“It was a spaceship,” Fabrini said, finally framing it into words for all of them. “Some kind of spaceship.”

“Spaceship,” Menhaus said. “My ass.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Saks said.

Menhaus just shook his head. “Oh, come on, you two. A fucking flying saucer? You hear what you’re saying?”

They heard what they were saying just fine. Whatever it had been, it was sticking up out of the weed, the edge of something circular and streamlined. Blackened-looking like it had burned up. And it had been making a low, muted humming that was barely there. But they’d heard it, all right.

It was crazy stuff, to be sure. The stuff of pulp fiction and late-night movies. But when they’d seen it, they’d all been thinking the same thing. The monsters in the mist were bad enough and the slimy things in the Dead Sea, but this was something else entirely. This was the last thing they wanted to see. The last thing anybody ever wanted to see, despite all the claims to the contrary. For the sight of something like that made your guts turn over and your head fill with a funny kind of noise. Because things like that were not supposed to be. Not really. And when you saw them, something in you cringed, the way a healthy cell might cringe at the idea of an invading alien microbe.

Particularly when you started wondering if there had been a crew aboard.

“I’m not buying that flying saucer shit,” Menhaus said, about as stubborn as they’d ever seen him. “I don’t believe in any of that shit. We only saw it for a few seconds. Could have been anything.”

“Like what?” Fabrini wanted to know.

“Like… like maybe a hovercraft. They’re round, right? Could have been one of those.”

“A hovercraft?” Saks said, laughing now. “A fucking hovercraft? Didn’t look much like a hovercraft to me.”

“You know damned well what it was,” Fabrini said. “We all do. I knew the minute I’d saw it and I didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. And you know why?”

Menhaus looked at him. “You tell me.”

“Because it scared me, same as it scared all of you. And don’t you goddamn try and deny it, any of you. It scared the shit out of all of us. Those dead ships are one thing, but-”

“That’s enough,” Menhaus said. “That enough already.”

So that was it. They all knew something was eating him and here it was. He knew what it was they had seen, he just wouldn’t admit to it and the reason for that was it had him scared silly.

“Yeah, that’s enough,” Saks said. “Menhaus isn’t buying it, are you Menhaus?”

“I certainly am not.”

“See, Fabrini? Menhaus don’t believe in little green men from Mars. He’s too damn sensible for that.”

“Damn right I am,” Menhaus said.

“It’s all a big stupid joke and Menhaus isn’t buying it.”

Menhaus swallowed. “Well…”

“Sure, it’s just a joke.” Saks looked amused. “A big, stupid, silly-assed joke. All right, Fabrini, let’s come clean already. This has all been a joke. The fog, the sea, all those big ghost ships out there. We set the whole thing up just to fuck with you, Menhaus. Candid Camera, right? Fabrini? Tell Alan Fundt to turn off that pissing fog machine and bring the lights up. We’re not fooling Menhaus with this shit, he saw right through it. I told you that flying saucer would tip him off. Menhaus, he’s just too smart for shit like this. Isn’t that what I said? Isn’t that what I told-”

“Fuck you,” Menhaus said.

“Yeah, fuck me is right.” He turned and looked at Fabrini. “Break them oars out, we’ll row back there. I wanna show Menhaus how I made that prick out of coat hangers and old garbage bags. He’s going to love this. Hey! Somebody turn the lights on already, enough is enough. Menhaus has had his fill.”

Menhaus looked like maybe he wanted to cry.

“Take it easy,” Fabrini told him. “So it’s a fucking dead flying saucer and there’s a couple little green men floating in the weeds. So what?”

“So what?” Menhaus shook his head. “What if they’re not dead? What if they’re alive right now and watching us? What then?”

Saks laughed. “Then you’ll get that anal probing you’ve always been wanting.”

“Fuck you, Saks. Just fuck you-”

“I think I saw it.”

They were all looking at Crycek now who had kept out of the entire discussion thus far. He was still gazing out into the fog, but apparently he had been listening. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw that thing come down.” He turned and looked at them. “Before we picked you guys up… when it was just me and Cook and Hupp… I saw this sort of glowing blue light pass over us. It was up high, kind of hazy in the fog. I could only see that blue glow, nothing else. I been thinking… I been thinking that maybe it was that flying saucer coming down. Why the hell not? This goddamn place might have a hundred doors to it. Maybe that ship got sucked through one of ‘em, same way we did.”

“But if they can build a ship like that, something that jumps around from star to star like in those shows,” Fabrini began, “then they’d have to be real smart. That kind of technology is about a thousand years or a hundred thousand from where we are. You wouldn’t think a race like that could get sucked in here and even if they did, you’d think they’d know how to fly back out.”

Saks said, “Maybe the thing was damaged. It looked kind of burnt or something. Crusty.”

Menhaus was just sitting there with his arms folded.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Menhaus,” Saks said. “We’re leaving you out of the loop again. See, we’re talking about this movie we saw once about these queers lost in the Bermuda Triangle. This big, dumb fat lick of dogshit named Menhaus don’t believe that these ass-raping little green fuckers from the Andromeda galaxy have come to sodomize him. Movie was called Invasion of the Butt-Guppies or I Married a Leather-Boy from Outer Space. Something like that. It was one hell of a flick, I tell you.”

Fabrini joined in, laughing now with an almost hysterical sound. “Sure, I remember it. But I think it was called It Came in My Inner Space or The Man from Planet XXX.” He couldn’t stop laughing. “Remember that movie poster, Saks? It said: In space, no one can hear you squeal. Oh, oh, oh, that was a good one. What a movie!”

Menhaus was just staring off blankly now. There were tears coming down his cheeks. He just looked… broken. Used-up and violated like something important in him had been handled, dirtied-up and then stuffed back inside of him. That’s how he looked.

Crycek finally said, “None of this gets us anywhere.”

He was right, of course.

Saks said, “Let’s find us a ship somewhere so Menhaus can cry in private. Jesus H. Christ.”

Fabrini got out the oars and Crycek and he started working them. It was hard pulling through that weed. Anything with a keel on it was going to have trouble cutting through that growth. But they kept pulling and pulling until they sighted a fishing boat.

“She ain’t much,” Saks said. “But she’ll do for now.”

About then, a sound rose up out in the fog. Something like a high, insane chittering. The sound of a beetle just completely out of its mind. When it sounded again it was closer. And they were all starting to imagine the mother of all crickets coming out of the mist.

“Let’s make that boat,” Saks said. “I think our number is about up.”

9

It was the sort of wild, implausible rescue that, looking back on it later, George could scarcely believe had happened in the first place. There they were, about to be eaten by that monster-squid and then flames began to spread over the weeds… and out pops a woman, tossing fuel oil at the beast and driving it off. She said her name was Elizabeth Castle. That they had about two minutes to get out of there before Mr. Squid came back, probably not in the best of moods.

After that, to George’s thinking, things were a little fuzzy.

Everything happened very fast. They threw what gear they could into her boat… one of those flat-bottomed things that looked like a big box, you saw them on TV, people poling around the bayou in them

…and carefully brought Gosling aboard, still not knowing what any of it was about and just goddamn happy they were being rescued.

Of course, Chesbro had to get some preaching in, saying, “You were sent by God, Miss, you surely were.”

To which she politely replied, “If you say.”

George and Pollard grabbed poles and joined the lady in directing them wherever it was they were going. That flat-bottomed little scow was really something in the weed. It glided right over the most tangled and knotted patches. Elizabeth Castle was apparently an old vet, because she steered them through the congested weed, darkness, and mushrooming fog where you couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. She brought them back to a big sailing yacht that said Mystic on her bow and couldn’t have been in the weed for too long.

On the way, Elizabeth had Chesbro toss pailfuls of fuel oil over the water at irregular intervals and light them up.

“The squid,” was all she would say. “For the squid.”

Then they were on board the yacht and had hoisted her flat-bottom aboard and that was it. It all came down quickly and efficiently. Elizabeth Castle was some kind of woman, all right.

And the Mystic?

Oh, she was big and beautiful.

That’s what George thought as she came up out of the mist, sleek and proud with a bow sharp enough to slit paper. He never thought he could love something so abstract as a boat, but he loved this one. He loved her size, her sleek lines, her draft in the sea. She was a big sailboat and he was in love. And, admittedly, he would’ve loved her had she been but a leaky barge loaded with sewage and buzzing flies.

After that U.S. Army-issue tin can that wasn’t much more than a buffet for the squid, yeah the Mystic was a beauty. Sure, she’d been through some rough weather and tough times-the sails were hanging like dirty rags from the shrouds and the masts themselves looked haggard, leaning awkwardly like they were ready to come down any minute-but all in all, the Mystic was looking pretty damn nice in comparison to the other hulks and derelicts going to rot in the weeds.

They went into the main cabin. Like the rest of the boat it smelled of dampness and dank mildew. It was carpeted in a thick, rich burgundy shag that nearly swallowed your feet. And it was dry, warm. Nice. There was a fixed oak table in the center of the room and a settee along each wall upholstered with fat cushions the color of blood. There was a bar with a leather bumper bad encircling it. It was a big, roomy place and George figured twenty people could’ve lounged around in there comfortably. In the back of his mind he could almost hear the laughter and drinks being poured, smell cigarette smoke and women’s perfume. He didn’t know who’d owned the Mystic, but he was willing to bet that whoever they’d been, they’d been rich.

“Is this your boat?” Cushing asked.

Elizabeth Castle shrugged. “Now it is.” She went into the next room, a galley probably and they could smell wood smoke. Again, it was nice. When she came back, she announced, “I’ll heat some coffee.”

They had Gosling stretched out on one of the couches. Cushing had given him a preloaded syringe of Demerol and he was feeling no pain. Which was about all they could do for him. Everyone introduced themselves and George gave her an encapsulated version of how they’d ended up in the Dead Sea and how it was they’d been on the transport plane.

“I watched you,” she told them. “I saw you coming through the mist on my telescope while it was still light. I had hoped you’d choose a better vessel than that one.”

George felt oddly like he’d been chastised. He swallowed. Elizabeth Castle was the first woman he’d seen in… Jesus, it was getting so he couldn’t remember anymore. But it had been awhile. Since they’d sailed on the Mara Corday from Norfolk. He wasn’t sure exactly how long that had been now. Days and days. Maybe weeks. Regardless, he hadn’t seen a woman since the docks. He supposed, at that moment, he was in love with Elizabeth Castle as he figured they all were. She would never be called beautiful, he decided, she was simply too hard-looking, too intense, but she was certainly striking. Tall and sleek, a sort of feline intensity about her green eyes, a full-lipped mouth that was unabashedly sensual.

She wore clothes that looked homemade… gray woolen pants and a matching baggy-sleeved shirt, worn leather vest and high black boots

…like the outfit of a 19 ^th century sailor. They were shapeless garments, designed for practicality rather than vanity, but she fit them very well. With her long auburn hair tossed over one shoulder and those green eyes blazing, she made you want to stare and keep staring.

“Your friend,” she said, standing over Gosling, “the squid?”

George nodded.

She didn’t look exactly concerned, but not unconcerned either. She was oddly emotionless, toughened by this anti-world, wore a mask that you didn’t dare try to lift.

“If you battle the squid,” she said, “you’d better understand the squid.”

With that, she went back into the galley. They could hear her in there, rattling tin cups.

“Maybe I’m dreaming all this,” George said.

“Maybe we all are,” Cushing said. He went to Gosling, checked his pulse and then his eyes. Did not look exactly optimistic about any of it.

The woman returned with tin cups steaming with coffee. Just the aroma was enough to make George want to weep. Maybe he did. He took the cup she offered him and it was warm and soothing in his hands. The coffee wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but right then, he couldn’t remember ever having any that good.

“The squid only hunts at night,” she explained to them. “During the day, it dives deep. It does not like light.”

“I take it you’ve had dealings with it before?” George said.

She ignored him, was watching Cushing with Gosling. Watching him very intently. There was almost a softness around her mouth when she looked at Cushing, like maybe he reminded her of someone else. And maybe he did.

“Are you a doctor, Mr. Cushing?”

He shook his head. “No, I’ve had a little medical training. Just enough to get by.”

She stared at him for a time, turned away. “The squid only surfaces at night. Your lights might have drawn it in. I think it hunts by motion, by body heat… it may have been curious about your light. And then… its claws are venomous. Your friend could die.”

“You know a lot about that creature, don’t you?” Cushing said.

“It’s been here long as I have.” She considered that a moment. “I think it may live in the bottom of one of the old derelicts.”

“How long have you been here?” Chesbro asked.

She sighed. “I’m not sure. For a time we kept track, but not anymore. It seems like I’ve always been here. It’s been years, I know that much.”

“You said ‘we’… are there others?”

She shook her head. “There is myself, my Auntie Else… nobody else. There were ten of us once. The squid killed three the first week. The others… they were attacked by other things. My Uncle Richard, he died… was it last year? I can’t remember. He died of a heart ailment, I think. He went in his sleep. Now it’s just we two.”

George was struck by her almost formal mode of speech. It was peculiar. The sort of diction people used at one time in written correspondence. The idea of that started giving him some funny ideas about how long she’d been there.

“Where is your aunt?” Chesbro asked.

“Sleeping. She’s old… she’s not in her right mind most of the time. Please understand that when you meet her. She’s been through a lot.”

“How do you live here?” George asked. “I mean, what do you eat? Where do you get your food?”

She told him that they lived basically by scavenging. New boats showed up in the seaweed sea all the time, many each year. She raided them for food and supplies, clothing and blankets and fuel oil, anything she could get. She was always looking for survivors, too, but most of them were either dead, missing, or mad by the time they made it this far.

“I’m not the only person here, you know,” Elizabeth said. “I know of five or six others. Most of them are mad, though. You’re all welcome to stay here with us for as long as you want.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” George said, smiling, but getting nothing in return.

Your boyish charm doesn’t shine shit with this girl, he told himself. So just cool it. Besides, quit thinking what you’re thinking

…you’ve got a wife and kid back in the world.

True enough, he knew. But Elizabeth Castle was desirable. There was something very savage and untamed about her, exotic even. Those eyes, that lilt of hungry mouth, the long-limbed muscular grace she exhibited. But George told himself to stop right there. For he was married and even if he wasn’t, this woman looked at him about as cold as cold could be. You got out of line with her, she’d scratch your eyes out. That was the feeling he was getting from her. She reminded him of a warrior maiden. A woman you knew could out-fight you and probably out-think you, too.

Besides, he thought, you see how she’s looking at Cushing. Ain’t the way a sister looks at her brother, you catch my drift.

Sure, Cushing. He had an easy, open way about him. You knew looking into those blue eyes of his that he was intelligent and compassionate, loyal and steady. He was also tall and blond-haired, handsome in a Nordic sort of way. Women probably always went for him.

She told them that she couldn’t honestly remember much of her life before the ship she was on — the Catherine Belling — was pulled into the mist en route from Savannah to Bermuda. George figured she could, but didn’t want to. She said that, after a time, the only thing that really mattered was survival, staying alive. That it became a mantra after awhile. There was always work to be done and her days were occupied, so there was very little time to think about what was and what could have been. George figured that was bullshit, too.

“We have a lot of food,” she told them. “Canned and dried, salt pork and bacon. Often, when a new ship arrives, I find fresh meat and fruit, a variety of things. I grow vegetables on another ship in soil that came in boxes. Things grow very fast here.”

“Like the weed,” George said. “That fungus.”

“Yes.” She looked very stern. “You must always be careful about what you eat or drink. You have to boil the water out there before you drink it. It’s salty, but not as salty as the seas back home. But it has germs in it. They can make you very sick. Mostly, I drain water from the tanks of ships. One more thing. You’re welcome here, but understand that there are rules. And the most important is that you never leave this ship unless I’m with you. Later, once you know this place, you can… but not until then.”

“How long does the night last?” George asked her. “A day? Two days?”

At that question, it seemed like Elizabeth was real close to a smile. Close, but not quite there. “I’m so used to this… sometimes it’s hard to remember day and night back there, back where we came from.” She sat on the settee, placed her hands on her knees. “The day here… what we could call the day… lasts about three of our days, sometimes four. The night lasts about two days.”

She said that the mists were so thick that you never actually saw the sun there, though at certain times of the year you could catch a glimpse of it. But never for long. Not like you could with the moons when they were full. Which got George to thinking that if there was a sun and moons, well, then this wasn’t just some cosmic dead-end, it was a world. A planet caught in the orbit of some star he’d never heard of. One that no earth astronomer had probably ever heard of either.

Cushing asked her how large the seaweed sea was and she couldn’t tell him. It was vast, she knew, maybe hundreds if not thousands of miles in diameter, but the exact dimensions were unknown. “I know that you could travel for two days straight and never find anything but weed and water. I’ve never seen any land and never heard of anyone that has.”

“There must be thousands of ships and planes out there,” George said.

“And they keep coming,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes nothing for months and then, suddenly, three or four, five or six. In batches, they always come in batches. But as far as you go in the weed, you’ll find wreckage. Some of it very, very old.”

Chesbro had his head bowed over, praying silently.

Elizabeth Castle was watching him intently. “Is he a minister?” she asked.

But Cushing just shook his head. “No, he just has a deep and abiding faith,” Cushing said with all sincerity.

Good for you, George thought.

Anyone else might have said that Chesbro was a Jesus freak, a religious nut… but not Cushing. He wouldn’t go there and you couldn’t make him. That’s the kind of guy he was.

“You are very quiet, Mr. Pollard,” Elizabeth remarked.

He nodded. “I guess… I guess I don’t have much to say.”

“He’s okay,” Cushing told her. “He’s been through a lot.”

She and Cushing sat there discussing the specifics of this mad new world, the sort of things that lived there and all the people that must have perished there through the centuries, through the eons. It was real cheerful stuff. Elizabeth spoke of this place as something to be beaten down, something you had to fight at every turn, but nothing you could ever conquer. She was a stubborn, hard-headed woman by all accounts and maybe that’s how she had survived here — through ingenuity and rigid persistence. Maybe all the death she’d seen had made her cling to life all that much more tenaciously.

George thought she looked healthy. Her eyes were bright and her hair was lustrous, her teeth white and strong. But she was pale, her complexion like flawless porcelain. But that was probably due to the lack of sunshine. If people lived here generation by generation, breeding in this place, sooner or later they would have lost all skin pigment.

“All we’ve been holding out for,” Cushing said, “is a way out.”

“There is no way out,” Elizabeth said, her voice stern.

“Have you ever tried?” George put to her.

She gave him a hard, withering look and he felt himself sneak about two inches closer to death. But he didn’t give a shit if it offended her or not. He hated that smug certainty in her voice. Maybe she was satisfied with this place, but there was no way in hell he ever would be.

“Tried? No, I haven’t. Where would I begin?” She kept looking at him. “After a time, there’s only survival. That’s all you can think about.”

“How long have you been here?” Cushing said. “You said years, but-”

“What year did you sail to Bermuda?” George asked, getting right to it.

“What year? Well, I remember that very well. It was March, the second week of March, 1907.”

That landed like a brick and now everyone was staring at her, eyes wide and mouths hanging open.

“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “1907? Oh my God…”

There was a sudden vulnerability to her, she looked lost and confused and she was certainly those things. She chewed her lip. “I… I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?”

10

“I’m just not up to it,” Menhaus announced. “I just don’t have what it takes. I know that now. I played the game and did my best, but, Jesus, I just don’t have the stomach for this.”

Fabrini said, “C’mon now, you can’t give up.”

“Why can’t I?”

But Fabrini didn’t have a good answer for that. He figured Cook might have, but not him. It just wasn’t in him, all the right answers to the right questions. “Because you fucking can’t, that’s why.”

They were sitting on the deck of the fishing boat, an old side trawler out of Florida according to the paperwork in the wheelhouse, trying to figure out what it all meant. What it was all about now that Cook was gone and they were under Saks’s hand again. Something nobody particularly cared for. Saks was down in the captain’s cabin sleeping and Crycek was next door, not sleeping, but lost in one of his blue funks. When he got like that, he was pretty much unreachable. When he spoke, it was all doom and gloom and devils in the fog, prophecies.

“I don’t trust Saks,” Menhaus said. “We had a chance with Cook, I think we really had a chance… but now we’re screwed. Saks doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.”

Some great revelation, that. “No, and he never did. That’s the kind of prick he is. But I say we just play it out, see what it’s worth. Saks wants to be Mr. Big Man? Okay, let him. Give him the ball and let him run with it.”

Menhaus nodded glumly, barely visible in the darkness. “But I think we had a chance with Cook. I think we really did have a chance.”

Fabrini didn’t like thinking about Cook. He’d come to trust Cook, to like Cook, and his death had not been an easy one and living with the memory of it was harder yet. “Saks has a plan,” Fabrini said.

“Does he?”

“Sure. He’s got an angle. A guy like Saks has always got an angle.” Fabrini sketched out for him what Saks had said. “So, we do like he said: we wait for the fog to lighten, for day or whatever it is to come back. That’s what we have to do. When that happens, we start exploring. Start seeing if there’s any people out there. Maybe find us a decent boat, look for some land and maybe some answers to this mess.”

“There’s no answers.”

“Sure, there is. You just have to be patient. One day at a time. Trust me, Menhaus, and just play along with him. I hate that guy more than anybody.” He touched his bandaged ear in the dark. “But one thing I do know is that guys like Saks are survivors. They have a way of staying alive and if we throw in with him, we’re probably going to stay alive, too.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. Believe me, if there’s a way out of this rathole, Saks is just the sort of guy who can find it. So we hang tight, we follow his plan and maybe… who knows… maybe we’ll find some others out there. Somebody who’ll know the way out or have a good guess about it.”

“I still don’t like him,” Menhaus said.

Fabrini chuckled. “Nobody likes that asshole. But if we wanna stay alive…”

“Then we play the game.”

“You got it.”

But Menhaus didn’t look exactly pleased at the idea of playing any game where a guy like Saks was making up the rules. It was a good way to die.

“I don’t like that shit on his arm,” Menhaus admitted. “I don’t know what it is, but it looks catchy.”

“So don’t dance with him,” Fabrini said.

Menhaus uttered a tiny laugh. “It’s so easy for you, Fabrini, it’s so damn easy for you.”

“No,” Fabrini said. “It’s not.”

11

The way Cushing had it figured, time was probably horribly distorted in the Dead Sea. When you passed through the vortex, you weren’t necessarily coming out on the other side in the time period you’d left. Time here was not in any direct linear alignment with the world you knew. This is how he explained it to George. Maybe you got swallowed by the fog in 1950, but you came out on the other side in 2010. It was pretty wild fringe science but it made as much sense as anything else. At least it could explain Elizabeth Castle who was certain that she had sailed in 1907 and hadn’t been here more than four or five years at most.

“I mean, she says she came through in 1907 when she was twenty-three,” Cushing said. “Look at her, she’s no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. Her time frame works, doesn’t it?”

George had to admit that it did. “Unless… unless there is no time here as we understand it.”

“There has to be. It’s a universal constant. Tine and space are interlinked, they do not exist without one another. They are the nail, George, upon which everything is hung. Time may slow down as Einstein said or even speed up, but it never ceases to exist. The days come and the nights come. Time passes. If it wasn’t passing at all, if we were trapped in some sort of time loop, then those ships out there would never begin to rot in the first place. And we… would look exactly as we did when we’d come through. And we don’t.” He laughed, scratched at the growth of beard on his face. “I shaved that morning before we ran into the fog. Now I’m growing a beard… which means what?”

“You lost me.”

“It means that my body’s processes aren’t in suspension. Everything’s chugging along like normal. And if I’m here for another month or two, I’ll have a real beard. And if I’m here for fifty more years, I’ll have a long white beard.”

Okay, that worked for George. Time had to be passing. Maybe Cushing’s theory was viable. It would explain things. Like how some of the modern-day freighters out there looked like they’d been languishing in the weed for centuries and some of the old brigs looked comparatively recent. Full of weeds and fungus, but nowhere near the state you’d expect.

“Which means that, next week or next month, an ancient Arab sailing galley drifts in or a Roman triremes comes oaring in, don’t be too surprised,” Cushing said.

Which gave George some disconcerting ideas on the whole. What if they did find a way out and were vomited back into the Atlantic in the 2 ^nd century A.D. or in 1931 for that matter? What then? What then? But thinking like that was pointless. Really pointless. Time would have to take care of itself.

Bottom line, things were distorted in this place.

And it wasn’t just time either. Because the next morning… still pitch black, but seemed like it might be morning… Cushing and George got to meet Elizabeth Castle’s Aunt Else. And that was quite an experience. She was just this little thing that might have been put together out of sticks and twine, her hair frosted white, her face lined and sallow. She walked with a cane and looked very confused when she was introduced to Cushing and George like she had been woken suddenly from a dream.

“My Auntie is ill sometimes,” Elizabeth said, helping her sit on one of the sofas.

“Bosh!” said Aunt Else. “I’m perfectly fine. Never felt better.”

Her eyes were glazed by time and she had a habit of losing concentration and staring off into space for extended periods of time.

When Elizabeth was off making coffee, Aunt Else said, “Well, I had long suspected that you would return, Captain Dorrigan.” She said this to George. “I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed to see you. Time has not erased your misdeeds. You, sir, are guilty of gross misconduct.”

George waited for the punchline, but none came. “Misconduct?”

“You should consider your position, Captain, and be quite careful of what you say,” Aunt Else warned him. “Your transgressions are unforgivable and I can assure you that my husband will arrange for a Naval board of inquiry to look into your negligence. A man like you has no business piloting a ship.”

George got it now. “Um… I think you have me confused with someone else.”

“Nonsense! Don’t try that tact with me, sir. You’ll find me most unforgiving when it comes to subverting the facts. You are guilty of negligence. A negligence that has cost the lives of your crew. Perhaps you and your attorney -” she was looking at Cushing now — “have cooked up some scheme to keep yourselves out of the hands of justice, but you are guilty in the eyes of God.”

“I… ah… I was under the weather that day, Madam.”

“Drunk is more like it.”

Man, this was sweet, George was thinking. The old lady thought he was the captain of her ship and she was holding him personally responsible for whatever the disaster had been.

“I’ll throw myself on the mercy of the court when we get back,” George said.

“And so you should. So you should.”

She lapsed into another one of her silences, humming softly under her breath and George was wondering if she ever really came out of her fugue. If not, it would be tough to deal with something like this on a permanent basis.

“It was a clear day as I recall,” Aunt Else began again. “A very lovely day and Richard… where is Richard? Have you seen him, Captain?”

“I… I think he’s up on deck.”

“Of course he is. As I said, it was a very clear day and the night proceeding it was clear and the sky was filled with stars. You never see that many stars unless you’re out at sea. Just beautiful. Then that fog… it was terrible that fog. We were trapped in it for weeks, long weeks. Hmm. I wonder if it’s cleared yet. Has the fog cleared yet, Captain?”

“Any day now, Ma’am.”

George went over with Cushing to see to Gosling. His eyes were open, but he looked like he was trapped deeper in dreamland than Aunt Else. When he saw George he reached out his hand and clutched George’s own. He blinked a few times, looked like he was trying to hold something down.

“How you feeling?” George asked him.

“Like… shit,” he said.

“Please tell your sailors to refrain from profanity,” Aunt Else said.

Elizabeth came back in with more coffee. Gosling took a little, but he was terribly weak and it was tough seeing him like that. He’d always been so rugged and healthy, so very full of life. Always in charge. Seeing him laid low like that wasn’t an easy thing to take. He would say a few words and drift off, come awake again and shake his head.

“I ain’t long for this world, George,” he said.

“Sure you are. You just need to knit up.”

“Knit up? Shit. I’m done in and I know it.” His eyes flickered closed, then open again. “I just want to sleep now. That’s all I want to do. Don’t… don’t be looking like that, it’s not so bad. That woman… not the crazy old bitch… but that other one, she might know a way out.”

Cushing shook his head. “She says she doesn’t.”

“And you believe that?”

“Well…”

“Well, nothing. She knows more than she’s saying. You keep at her, you keep at her.” He swallowed a few times. “Either of you boys… you make it back. I got… I got a daughter up in Providence. You look her up. You tell her how it was for her old man. You tell her that.”

Gosling lapsed into slumber and did not wake again. He wasn’t dead, but George could tell from the look in Cushing’s eyes that he wasn’t very far from it now.

“I wish there was something I could do for your friend,” Elizabeth said. Cushing offered her a thin smile.

“A spring party is always the best,” Aunt Else was saying. “Particularly on Bermuda. A lovely garden party under the palms. Oh, it’s just wonderful. The sea air and the sunshine. Lots of fruit and cold drinks. A steel drum band…”

“I found your boat,” Elizabeth said.

“My boat? Oh, I had a lovely little skiff when I was a child on Cape Cod,” Aunt Else said. “Do you remember that? It was white with an ocean-blue stripe around the hull. We used to go fishing. I can’t remember what we used to fish for… do you remember?”

Cushing looked surprised. “You went out there?”

“Only to get the boat. It was drifting just off the stern,” Elizabeth explained. “It’s torn up a bit, but it looks to be in good shape. It’s filled with air, isn’t it? I’ve seen other boats like that here. Mostly, there’s no one in them.”

“Boats full of air! Bosh!” Aunt Else said. “Something’s full of air around here, but it’s certainly not boats!”

“Well, at least we have the raft if we need it,” George said.

Elizabeth stared at him. “Yes, I suppose.”

George could almost feel the panic coming off of her. The idea that they might shove off and leave her with her crazy aunt was scaring her. “Well,” he said, “not like we’re going anywhere right now anyway.”

“I’d like to go to France,” Aunt Else announced.

“Maybe in the summer,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah, I hear it’s nice there in the summer,” George said.

Cushing looked at him, suppressing a smile.

“You never mind, Captain,” Aunt Else said. “France is not where you’ll be going.”

“Please, Auntie,” Elizabeth said. “Just drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

Else rapped her cane against the table. “And you would think, wouldn’t you, in this day and age, that someone would invent an olive without a pimento stuffed in it. Is that too much to ask? Is it really too much to ask? A pimento-less olive? My husband refuses a martini with a pimento-stuffed olive in it. Can you blame him? Can you honestly blame him?”

“Auntie gets confused,” Elizabeth said under her breath.

George nodded. “That’s okay, we-”

“I heard what you said, young lady. I would have thought you were brought up better than that. What would your mother think? What would she say if she saw you dressed like that?”

Cushing helped Elizabeth make their breakfast, which was just canned fruit and dry cereal. But there was oatmeal and bacon, too. And Cushing made some scrambled eggs from the MRE pouches. It was simple fare, but it tasted like a gourmet meal after being on the raft so long eating crackers and petrified survival bread.

Chesbro and Pollard showed soon enough. They looked better than they had in some time after a real sleep in a real bed. It did wonders. Chesbro was still taciturn, but Pollard seemed to be in good spirits.

“Well, I see we finally roused you boys,” Else said. “Well, eat up and then off with you. Is there school today? No, oh well. Go out and play. Eat up! Eat up!”

“She thinks you’re her sons,” Elizabeth told them. “They died years ago.”

Pollard and Chesbro looked like a couple of actors who’d just walked out on stage and couldn’t remember their lines.

“Just play along for the time being,” Cushing told them.

As she ate, Aunt Else would pause from time to time, gesture with a fork full of scrambled eggs. “I’m trying to remember all the details, trying to keep it fresh in my mind. I think it’ll be important at the trial.”

“What trial?” Pollard said.

George just shook his head. “Never mind. She thinks I’m Captain Hook or something.”

Which got him another one of those acidic looks from Elizabeth. He supposed he could have been more understanding, more compassionate. But the truth of the matter was that he’d seen too much, experienced too much by that point, and things like sympathy were hard to come by. He was just making friends all over the place. Chesbro wouldn’t even look at him anymore since he’d punched him out. Thing was, George didn’t give a shit. He honestly just didn’t give a shit.

He thought: Give me another six months of this bullshit. Give me a year. By then there won’t be much human left in me… or in any of us.

Pollard, who seemed relaxed now, at ease for the first time since George had met him, finished his food. “It was nice to sleep in a bed. I can’t tell you how nice it was to finally sleep in a bed. I was beginning to think there weren’t such things as beds anymore. I know how stupid that sounds, but, shit, that’s exactly what I was starting to believe. Maybe… maybe once we’re settled, we can start giving some serious thought to where we are and how the hell we can get out.”

Cushing raised an eyebrow at that.

Elizabeth just said, “There’s no way out.”

“She likes it here,” George said. “She never wants to leave.”

Which got him yet another evil look from her. “Did I say that? Did I ever say I liked it here? That I wanted to stay?”

George was loving it. The old ice queen was beginning to thaw a bit. Apparently, there were some decent human feelings under the permafrost.

“Yes,” Aunt Else said, carefully counting the tines of her fork over and over, “but what you say, dear, and what you mean might be two different things.”

Elizabeth was looking really pissed-off now. They were forcing her into a corner and her claws were coming out. It had been a long, long time since she’d had to answer to anyone, to justify her actions or her lack of them.

“All right,” Cushing said. “Let’s take it down a notch here.”

“Prisoners,” Pollard said. “I don’t think I can live like that.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes, Aunt Else?”

“How long are you going to keep us here as prisoners?”

“Aunt Else…”

“Don’t deny it,” Aunt Else said, shaking a finger at her recalcitrant niece. “You’ve kept me here under lock and key for far too long. I think I’m within my rights to ask how long you intend to keep this up. Well? What have you got to say for yourself?”

Elizabeth had nothing to say for herself. She just stood there, under attack by her own aunt, looking suddenly older, heavier, ungainly like maybe she just didn’t have the strength to hold herself up anymore. She looked at Cushing, because he was the only one she felt a connection with. Then, blushing, she cleared plates and cups onto a platter and took them into the galley.

“Where’d she go?” George said.

“Oh, silly girl,” Aunt Else said. “Probably off to pout. You’ll find her sleeping in the cabbage with one purple wing.”

George tittered under his breath. “What?”

“ Don’t encourage this,” Cushing told him.

He stalked off after Elizabeth, leaving George with the perpetually-brooding Chesbro, the unconscious Gosling, the very-confused Pollard, and… yes, Aunt Else of course, who was maybe a little of all of those things and a few others, too.

“I think what we need here is a man in charge,” Aunt Else said, stroking her chin thoughtfully. “Yes, yes, yes. A man in charge. I don’t think my niece is up to it.”

“Looks like she’s done okay so far,” George said.

Aunt Else was looking over at Gosling like she was having the conversation with him. She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, listen to that, will you? Men. They only want one thing and they’ll say just about anything to get it!”

George was laughing now. “Did I miss something here?”

“Maybe she’s right,” Pollard said.

“About me wanting one thing?”

“No, about somebody else being in charge. Maybe Elizabeth needs a break. Maybe she’s been here way too long. Maybe she can’t see the forest through the trees. Maybe you should take over.”

“Me?”

“Why not you?”

“Cushing’s in charge.”

But Pollard shook his head. “No, he’s not. Ever since the First… well, ever since Mister Gosling has been sick, you’ve been in charge. Cushing’s like an advisor or something. He’s smart, but he doesn’t like making decisions. You should be in charge.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Aunt Else said. “He’s only a boy, Captain. A lying little boy and you can’t trust lying little boys. He’ll say anything to get his way. He’s always been like that. Manipulative.”

George felt overwhelmed. He was having trouble keeping up. “That’s a hell of a way to talk about your son.”

“Captain,” she said. “I’ll ask you not to interfere in family matters.”

“I’m just saying that maybe you’re the guy to be in charge is all,” Pollard said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

George held his tongue. He didn’t want to be in charge. It was the last thing in the world he really wanted… yet, if Elizabeth was going to maroon them all here without a single hope of deliverance, then maybe they did need different leadership. But then again, she knew this place. She knew what they were up against… and what really did he know?

“I prefer a democracy,” was all he would say.

“Just an idea,” Pollard said.

“I’ve never cared much for politics,” Aunt Else told them. “I lost interest after McKinley was assassinated. I think Roosevelt was an idiot. A lot of us thought Roosevelt was an idiot. But he was smart, wasn’t he? Crafty, wasn’t he? He knew the common man believed as he did and he used that power, that popular appeal. My father lost money during the coal strike.”

Cushing came back in. “What are you people talking about?”

“Politics,” George told him. “Did you favor Roosevelt, sir?”

“Bully,” was all Cushing would say on that matter.

12

Saks had it all figured out.

Maybe they thought he was really stupid, but he saw what was going on. He knew what Fabrini and Menhaus were up to. Same way he’d known what Fabrini and Cook had been up to. Jesus, you try to help these guys and first chance they got, they started scheming behind your back. Now that was gratitude. And it was just too bad, just too damn bad when you thought about it, because Saks had been starting to think that maybe Fabrini wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe he could mold the guy, make him into a real man, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Minute you trusted a guy like Fabrini, you were finished. First time you turned your back on him he’d slit your throat.

All right then, all right, he thought as he laid there on the captain’s bunk. You guys want to play it this way, you want to play games with me? I’ll show you a couple fucking games you never even heard of. This is where you sonsofbitches learn what it’s all about.

Saks calmed himself.

No, he wasn’t going to kill them. At least not Menhaus or Crycek, but Fabrini was a different matter. That little prick had to be made an example of. He was the same rotten apple that had gotten Cook thinking funny and now he was turning Menhaus.

Saks didn’t know how he was going to do it, but it was going to be spectacular. Those who saw Fabrini’s end would never forget it. Not in this lifetime.

Rubbing the sores along his arms and chest, Saks began to plot.

13

One minute there was life and the next there was death.

You could guard against it and fight it at every turn with drugs and disinfectants and healing bandages, but you only beat it back into the shadows. And it was there, in that damp and sullen darkness, that death grew like a tumor, reached out and clutched, squeezed, became something huge and hungry and inevitable. Breathing toxins and fevers. Its cold fingers were iron once they had taken hold and no man could hope to pry them loose. You could try, but death only grabbed that much harder, recognizing its own and determined to take what belonged to it. And it would not stop until life had been uncorked and spilled to the floor and there was only darkness, a whispering darkness that pulled you down and down…

When Gosling died they wrapped him up in a waterproof tarp from the raft and had Chesbro quote some scripture over him. It was the best they could do. Elizabeth managed to keep her Aunt Else out of the entire affair and that was a good thing. Because George was taking it hard, was feeling Gosling’s death like his insides were filled with tacks and ground glass. Whichever way he turned, he hurt and hurt badly. And had Aunt Else laid into him about his negligence as captain of the ship, he would have shared some of that pain with her, he knew. Said things to her that would have waxed her lips shut forever.

They performed the threadbare service out on the deck by lantern light. It was a grim and disturbing affair, those lanterns flickering and shadows jumping and that fog pressing in like corpse-gas.

Then Gosling was put over the side in his weighted shroud. At first, he just languished on the weed and George thought, with a terrible sinking feeling inside him, that the body would never sink. It would lodge itself right there and make him look at it day by day… but then, slowly, it melted into the weed and the last remains of Paul Gosling, first mate of the Mara Corday, sank from view and something in George sank with them.

As George watched the body disappear, he kept thinking: Message in a bottle, message in a bottle.

14

When Cushing saw the boat, it took his breath away.

For one crazy, reeling moment he thought it was bearing down on them, a ghost ship coming at them out of the weed. But it wasn’t moving. It was just dead and vacant-looking, another derelict caught in the creeping weed of the ship’s graveyard. Ribbons and filaments of mist were rising from its decks and derricks as if it were exhaling pale swamp vapors. It was an old wooden purse seiner with a black, scathed hull and a white wheelhouse that had gone gray and dingy with mildew. Her prow was sharp, looked like it could slit open the underbelly of the weed quick as a razor… but beyond that, it was simply dead.

Forgotten.

Abandoned.

Cushing saw it there in the fog and he could tell right away that Elizabeth wanted no part of it. The way she looked at it and then at him, told him that this vessel was shunned like the neighborhood haunted house. And it did look haunted. More than just empty. Occupied somehow, but not lived-in.

Day had broke now… what day there was in the Dead Sea… and Cushing had joined Elizabeth on one of her little expeditions in the graveyard. She had shown him the old barge where she tended her gardens, the freighters which had more fresh water in their tanks than you could drink in a lifetime. And now, there was this old fishing boat, a sixty-eight footer of the sort that had not been seen in years. Cushing was willing to bet her keel had been laid back in the 1920s.

“We should get back,” was all Elizabeth would say.

But Cushing had no intention of leaving. He was standing there in the scow with her, one of the flat-bladed poles in his hands. “Tell me about that boat,” he said.

“Just another wreck.”

“No, it’s not. I can see it in your eyes… this one is different. What’s its story?”

She just stood there a moment, like maybe she was trying to come up with something good that he would believe and would get them out of there and back to the Mystic. Finally, she sighed. “It’s… it’s where the Hermit lives. It’s his boat.”

“The Hermit?”

She nodded. “Some old man. He was here when we first got here. He doesn’t like people much. He has a gun.”

But, for some reason, Cushing wasn’t buying that. “Have you ever talked to him?”

“He’s crazy.”

“And he was here when you got here?”

“Yes.”

Which, of course, added fuel to Cushing’s time-distortion theory. If Elizabeth and the others had arrived here in 1907 and this boat was already here, something that looked like it couldn’t be any older than the ‘20s, then it all came together, didn’t it? This fishing boat was built much later than the ship that had brought Elizabeth’s people to the seaweed sea… yet it had arrived before them.

“I want to board her,” Cushing said. “I want to talk to this Hermit.”

“Mr. Cushing, please…”

“You don’t have to come.”

Cushing smiled.

Elizabeth frowned.

Standing there, seeing it in the weed like that, all wrapped up in tissues of mist, it did look like a haunted house jutting from some overgrown, neglected yard. It was big and ghostly and soundless, the wheelhouse windows boarded shut, the bowline hung with a caul of weed. The decks were wreathed with shadows, a mat of fungus growing up over the aft stanchions and winches. There was a lot of wreckage on the foredeck… metal and fused plastic and all manner of debris that were blackened as if by a fire.

Cushing just watched it, let it fill him up. It was just another boat, yet he was certain that it was saying something to him.

“Let’s take a look,” he said.

She shook her head and they began to pole through the weeds until they were close enough that he could grab hold of her bulwarks and pull them along side.

Cushing pulled himself up and over the railing. The decks were moist and slimy and he almost went on his ass. The planking creaked beneath his weight, but held okay. Elizabeth tossed him a line and he tied off the scow to the fencerail. He helped her aboard, but she was very strong and lithe and didn’t seem to need his help. She looked nervous, uncomfortable, something. Her right hand clutched the hilt of the machete she wore at her waist.

“He won’t like us being here,” she said.

Cushing stood there, feeling the boat under him and around him and he was certain that it was empty. There was nothing here but memory. He could feel it.

He moved forward, up around the mast tower, and up the short steps to the wheelhouse door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing.. . just the echo of his rapping knuckles inside, but nothing else. The door opened with a grating, groaning sound. It was dark and grainy inside. He found a lantern and lit it. Better. The Hermit had turned the wheelhouse into his quarters. There was a cot along one wall, books piled on the floor and in shelves. There was a writing desk scattered with papers and a table crowded with old charts. It smelled like an old library in there, like musty pages and rotting bindings.

Cushing went to the chart table.

Most of the charts were of the Atlantic, the Cape Hatteras region. But there was one that was not. It was hand-drawn. He studied it carefully in the lantern’s light. The longer he studied it, the more excited he became. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

Elizabeth looked at it. “Yes,” was all she would say.

It was a map of the ship’s graveyard rendered very carefully in ink. It was very detailed, though uncompleted, and must have taken years. Apparently the Hermit had spent his time exploring the wrecks and he had put all their names down. “By God, look at these names.. . the Enchantress, the Proteus, the Wasp, the Atlanta, the Raifuku Maru, the City of Glasgow… these are all famous disappearances tied in with the Devil’s Triangle.”

“The what?” Elizabeth said.

Cushing just shook his head. “Nothing.” He was going over that chart. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships listed, from old galleons to modern container ships. Many were named, others were tagged as “Unknown”. The Hermit had sketched out where the weed was thickest, where the greatest fields of wreckage were to be found, places nearly impassable on account of the great concentration of wrecks. To what would have been east and west on a normal chart were just labeled UNKNOWN or UNEXPLORED. Some ships and some areas of the weed were tagged with skulls and crossbones.

“What do you suppose that means?” he asked Elizabeth.

She studied the chart. “I can’t say what all of them mean… but this one -” she put her finger on one labeled UNKNOWN BARK — “I think… yes… I think this is the one the squid lives in. In the bottom.”

So, then, that made sense. The skulls and crossbones indicated dangerous places. Other ships were marked with circles. The Mystic was marked thus and Cushing figured it meant that they were occupied. There weren’t many marked such. The Hermit had marked the open channels through the weed, the location of planes including what Cushing thought was the C-130. At the southern edge of the weed, was written SEA OF MISTS. And beneath that, OPEN SEA. In the latter there was a red X. It was large and circled several times.

“This must be where he figured he arrived,” Cushing said. “Probably where the vortex dumped him. I bet that’s where we came in, too.”

There was a dotted line leading from the red X to a smaller black X that was labeled Ptolemy, which must have been the name of the Hermit’s boat and its position in the weed.

As Cushing went through the ships, he found dozens of others he had heard of or read about, famous vanishings. About midway into the Sea of Mists, the derelicts were more spread out. But he found the Cyclops, a Navy collier that had disappeared during the First World War. It was marked with a skull and crossbones. To the north of the ship’s graveyard, the derelicts were fewer and the Hermit had marked channels cut through the weed that led to an area of what might have been open water. This was labeled OUTER SEA, and just about everything up there was tagged as being unknown or unexplored. Except, at the upper edge was another seaweed bank with a long rectangle lodged at its lower extremity, indicating a ship. S.S. Lancet, it said. There were a few other wrecks, most unnamed. Above the Lancet was what appeared to be another seaweed sea with wrecks, most of them labeled as being unexplored or unknown. And just above this, SEA OF VEILS. The Hermit had put a series of skulls and crossbones here. Whatever was up there, it must have been pretty damn bad.

“What do you make of this?” Cushing asked her.

Elizabeth didn’t even look where he was pointing. She just shrugged.

“And the Lancet?”

She sighed. “I’ve never been up there. It’s some kind of huge sailing ship… a ghost ship, my uncle said. Nobody comes back from up there.”

“What’s up there?”

“Let’s just go,” she said, avoiding the question.

Cushing rolled up the chart and went over to the writing desk. All the papers were covered in weird notations and complex mathematical symbols. Some of it looked like geometry or possibly calculus. There were dozens of pages like this. Cushing was starting to wonder if this guy was just some lost fisherman or possibly something else entirely. He didn’t suppose he’d ever know for sure.

He opened the desk drawers and found a. 45 Colt auto. It was well-oiled and maintained. He ejected the magazine from the butt and it was fully-loaded. In the top drawer, there was a letter that went on for several pages in a cramped, economical script.

“Look at this,” he said.

Elizabeth pretended interest. “We’d better go.”

But Cushing wasn’t going. Not yet. He began to read:

December 2, Year Unknown

To whom it may concern,

I, like you, have been trapped in this abominable place for more years than I would care to admit. But unlike you, my exile into this void has been self-imposed. Yes, that is true… I chose to come here.

Allow me to explain. I was part of a group of scholars and researchers, yes, mathematicians and physicists and quantum theorists, who had long been aware of the time/space anomalies associated with the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area. Betydon, Connors, Imab, and myself. We had long studied these aberrations… though privately, to avoid the ridicule often associated with such things publicly. Publicly, I say for each of us were at one time involved in what the ONR, the Office of Naval Research, called Project Neptune. Which was and is (I imagine) an ongoing investigation into sundry and shadowy areas of theoretical physics with potential marine/military applications. The group I and the others were involved in were concerned with the aforementioned time/space anomalies. The Neptune Project, of course, is highly classified. But I see no reason not to violate my loyalty oath here. At any rate, our little group studied these things privately after leaving the ONR. We called our little inquiry the Procyon Project. Now, after long years of formulating countless hypotheses (basically, a furtherance of what we had been doing with Neptune), we decided it was time to test our theories. I won’t go into all of it. Just let me say, that we were proven correct and pulled into this place.

Connors died in the Sea of Mists, attacked by some type of sea monster. And the others? Well, I won’t go into it. I’ll only say that we were reconnoitering the Sea of Veils and particularly the S.S. Lancet, a vessel lost in this place in the 1850s and certainly the mother of all cursed ships.

Regardless, I am as surely marooned here as you are.

But what is this place? Where is this place? How can it possibly be? You may well wonder and it has taken me some years to put together the pieces of this puzzle and, even now, much of what I know or think I know is pure speculation ranging from the informed to the fantastic to the downright absurd. Before you toss aside this letter, this confession, and call me a crazy man, I think you owe it to yourself to read on.

First off, understand that if you are here — in this place — then you have undergone what could be deemed hyperdimensional travel. More on that later. No doubt you arrived here by passing into what appeared to be a cloud or fogbank which was luminous. As you may or may not know such phenomena has been reported for a great many years in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area, a place where curvature of space and time is most pronounced. And your ship or plane was, of course, somewhere in this somewhat vast geographical area. The cloud you saw, were pulled into, was actually a sort of matter-energy vortex, a warp or rift in the space-time continuum. To understand how such a thing could be, let me touch on 4 ^th dimensional space a moment. You are probably familiar… or maybe not… with the three dimensions of space — x, y, and z — which are mathematical representations of the perpendicular dimensions of length, width, and depth. Now into this, let us factor in t, which is time, the 4 ^th dimension, and is perpendicular to the other three. Time is not lineal, but cyclical, looping over itself. Imagine a helix and you’ll grasp the general idea. Before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, according to classical mechanics time was an absolute, but we now understand it to be fluid.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, when you passed through said vortex, you were actually passing through the Fourth Dimension. The dimension of time. Though the actual travel time through fourth dimensional space seemed minute to you… you will recall the sudden lack of air, the momentary derangement of gravitational forces as you passed through… probably seconds or minutes at most in your memory, thousands of years may have passed on earth or time may not have passed at all. It may have moved in reverse from your point of entry. Anything is possible.

Trust me, I am doing my utmost not to bore you to tears with celestial mechanics and quantum theory.

Where are you? You are in another spatial dimension, possibly a fractal which, according to non-Euclidian geometry, cannot be assigned a whole number. It would be represented not as the third, fourth, or fifth dimension, but as the 3.5 dimension or the 4.1 dimension etc. At any rate, as I said, you are in a spatial dimension far from home. How far? So very distant it probably could not be measured even in parsecs. Yet… through 4 ^th dimensional space… quite close. Einstein explained in his Theory of Relativity that dimensions or worlds could exist side by side, yet be invisible to one another because they occupy different planes of space. But why are they invisible? Probably for the same reason that if you were suddenly transported to, say, the 5 ^th dimension… and you may be there now… you would not be aware of it. Why? Because you are a three-dimensional creature who is designed by evolution only to detect the three dimensions of length, width, and depth. You do not have the necessary sensory apparatus to detect anything else. Confused? Excellent. Now this spatial dimension or fractal that you are in is a universe unto itself. In that, yes, you are on a planet which no doubt circles an alien star in some unknown void of space. Likewise, this star… though I’ve never seen it through the cloud cover, but do feel its heat… is part of a galaxy which is part of a universe in some deadend space that can probably only be represented mathematically. You’ve probably seen our two moons, but I believe there is a third. My studies of the orbital paths of the other two suggest a third satellite. No matter. We are on a planet with moons and a star somewhere out there. The day here lasts anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-three hours, the night thirty-six to forty-five. This anomaly may be in flux due to the unstable field of this dimension or due to seasonal changes or, perhaps, because that time in this place is distorted from what we know.

But you’re probably asking yourself how one dimension can possibly link with another. To understand how such things can exist, let us picture the birth of the universe — the so-called Big Bang. Evidence suggests that the universe as we understand it was born out of what physicists call a “singularity”. A speck of infinite density occupying zero volume. Boggles the mind, don’t it? Now in the first split-second of the Big Bang, this point of infinite density — which contained all the mass and energy that would become the universe-underwent an exponential diffusion or expansion, an inflation of sorts. This diffusion or explosion created matter, time, space, energy, everything known and more that aren’t. Now this primordial explosion is not simply three-dimensional, but multi-dimensional, and thus creates not only our universe, but all of multi-dimensional space in one fell swoop. This explosion or implosion, would create an endless number of spatial dimensions… those of real space and those of hyperspace.

Now, if you are from the “modern” world… I use this loosely, as I left earth as such in 1983… then you are familiar with black holes. A black hole or “singularity” is created when a large star exhausts its nuclear fuel and implodes, collapses into its own intense gravity. This singularity becomes a sort of matter-energy whirlpool which sucks in anything, even light, and cycles it somewhere else. It may implode on our end, but explode open somewhere else. These singularities, in essence, may become wormholes, passages from one spatial dimension to another. Many cosmologists believe that the known universe is but one of countless parallel universes, sort of like an unknown number of soap bubbles suspended in mid-air. Normally, these universes or dimensions would be out of reach of one another, but according to Einstein’s equations, there may be a series of tubes or channels — wormholes — that connect these universes. Technically, these wormholes would be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, tunnels that connect two distant spheres of time-space. And you, my friend, have proven their existence for you have passed through one!

Wormholes. According to the most radical and theoretical particle physics of my day, these wormholes would be composed of a sort of exotic matter, a “negative matter” which is not antimatter, in case you were wondering. This negative matter would possess a naturally powerful antigravity field and it would be this field that would hold these wormholes open forever or for short periods of time. Let me give you the classic wormhole analogy to illustrate this. If the universe was a pear, say, then an ant wanting to travel from the front to the back would have a long trip ahead of him, but if a worm had tunneled through the pear, then the ant could take the shortcut. And, essentially, wormholes are just that: time-space shortcuts.

Now, to simplify things, from here on in, where we are is called Dimension X (to borrow the name of an old radio show). Now I believe that an infinite number of these wormholes were created during the Big Bang. Some have closed up and others are still open and new ones are being created by star implosions all the time. Regardless, even those that have closed are as precarious as earthquake fault lines, in that a certain combination of forces can rip them back open as easily as a poorly-mended hem. Here, in Dimension X, where the energy field is somewhat unstable, these wormholes are something of a naturally-occurring phenomena much like tornadoes. When the proper atmospheric conditions exist, an energy flux of some type here opens one of these wormholes… sometimes to our planet and probably sometimes to many others. So, if you can imagine our dimension and Dimension X lying side by side, grids of a sort composed of perpendicular lines, then you can understand that now and then these lines would, simply by random chance, line up, become parallel to one another and maybe it would be this, more than anything else, that would weaken certain areas of space so that wormholes would be sort of an inevitability.

Okay, so you’ve passed through a wormhole, you’ve experienced what could be called interspatial teleportation through interspace. You have passed from one spatial cycle to another without having to transverse the limitless space itself. If you’ve been paying attention and I hope you have, then you realize that the shortest distance between two points is through the 4 ^th dimension. Instead of climbing over a mountain or going around it, you tunneled straight on through. You’ve bypassed the curves. What the vortex did was to propel you like Captain Kirk and his warp drive. Hyperdrive, would be the actual term, passing through the curves of limited three-dimensional space by dropping out of it and then back in somewhere else.

Now what? Well, you’ve made the trip, can you make the trip back? Theoretically, yes. You can return. It will be a matter, I think, of returning to your stepping off point into this world. Which I am certain is somewhere in what I have called the Sea of Mists (see my chart). It really will be a matter of waiting for the wormhole to open and being in the right place at the right time. If it opens, using a boat or plane, I think you can punch your way back through. But, by all means, do not enter a wormhole in any other geographical location or you will find yourself God-knows-where. If my theory is correct, the wormhole that brought you here… all of us here… will only open in that locality. Now beware of one thing. If you are lucky enough to pass through to our world, consider the time distortion factor. Einstein discovered that gravity and other forms of linear acceleration can cause a distortion in the curvature of fourth-dimensional time-space. Essentially, this acceleration can bend time. And you, my friend, accelerated through hyperspace at an impossible speed… well, you may be in for a surprise. What may happen is what’s known as temporal stasis or the slowing down of time. You may return to the world you knew or you may return a million years in the past or future. It’s impossible to say. Conversely, the bending of time may counteract itself when you pass back through.

Again, I’m just guessing.

This brings my little sermon to an end. Once again, I am traveling to the Sea of Veils, to the Lancet. Because what the three of us — Imab, Betydon, and myself — discovered there, was revelatory indeed. When I say that the Lancet is the key, I know of what I speak. If we had had more time… well, no matter. I will go up there again. To satisfy my own scientific curiosity, if nothing else. For that ship holds secrets. And it is, I believe, the focal point for what caused the horrible deaths of Imab and Betydon. For, if you have been here any length of time, you may have felt the presence of another. What this thing is, I cannot say, only that I believe it to be destructive and sentient. Something that may lie dormant or inactive for extended periods of time. A sort of potential energy waiting to spend itself. Lately, I’ve felt it building. I believe it is about to become kinetic.

God help us, God help any creature with a conscious, reasoning brain when that happens.

I will die, perhaps. But I will die knowing. Not just the nature of that thing (something that boggles the mind), but of the secret of the Lancet. For there, I think, are the keys to deliverance from this place.

This, then, is my mission. I leave you this letter, my chart. Help yourself to my gun and supplies. For I no longer will need them. Please, do not come after me.

May God protect you,

John R. Greenberg

That is where the letter ended.

Cushing stood there, amazed and informed, depressed and confused, feeling a great many things. Maybe there was hope now and maybe there was a complete lack of it. There were certainly a lot of questions he needed answered and, unfortunately, this Greenberg… the Hermit… was not there to answer them.

“What do you know about this guy?” Cushing asked Elizabeth.

She just sighed and shook her head. “He was a crazy old man who didn’t like people. My Uncle knew him… visited him sometimes.. . he was out of his head.”

“Maybe not.”

“We should go,” Elizabeth said.

Cushing found himself staring at her. “You didn’t want me seeing this, did you?”

She shook her head.

“You knew he was gone?”

“Yes.”

“And-”

“And I didn’t want you filling yourself with his crazy ideas. I didn’t want you to get filled with false hope,” she said to him, “because it is false.”

It was confession time. She told him her Uncle Richard had been something of an acquaintance of the Hermit. That he believed implicitly in the Hermit’s science. Uncle Richard spent days on end trying to find that vortex that would carry them out.

“But he didn’t find it?”

She shook her head. “No. He never did… and it broke something in him. Destroyed something in him. Made him give up. That’s what killed him… he had no hope left. None at all.”

“And Greenberg never returned from the Sea of Veils?”

“No one ever does.” She swallowed. “Can we please leave now?”

Cushing had a fair idea that Elizabeth was not telling him all she knew. The letter… it was dated in December. But this December or the last or five past? He knew Elizabeth wouldn’t tell him. At least not yet. But for his money, Greenberg had probably only just set out for the Sea of Veils a few months back. He didn’t know that to be true, yet he was certain it was.

“Please,” Elizabeth said. “We need to go.”

Taking the chart, letter, and gun, they did just that.

15

Maybe Gosling’s death had shut something down in him and maybe it had opened something else up. George was never able to figure exactly how he felt about any of it. He’d liked Gosling, trusted Gosling, had faith that Gosling would somehow, in the end, get their asses out of there. And now that he was gone? What was left? Sadness? Hopelessness? Maybe even something as crazy and improper as betrayal? Because it was there, all right, that insane sense that by dying, Gosling had abandoned them all. Abandoned them to Cushing’s theories and George’s own indecision, to Pollard’s weird sensitivity and Chesbro’s blind faith. That what they had now, was all they’d ever have… dead ships and crawling weed and stinking mists and fear. Yes, fear. Fear that every decision they made was wrong, that every turn they took was the wrong one, every road leading back into itself, a maze, a hopeless fucking maze. Without Gosling there, without his guiding hand and no-nonsense practicality, they were screwed. Literally.

For Gosling had been important.

Gosling had been necessary.

He was the heat and boiling steam and hot wetness in a pan and, without him, they were just the residue clinging to the lid. Yes, Gosling had been their motion and energy and drive. He kept them going. He kept them sane and together and hopeful. Gosling was the can-do guy, the quit-feeling-sorry-for-your-pussy-ass guy. Get your ass in high gear, boy, or swear to God, I’ll kick it there. That was Gosling.

Without him?

Residue.

Just residue clinging to the lid of the pan called the Dead Sea. And who was going to scrape that residue off? Who was going to be the one now to kick this little group of theirs in the ass and get it moving? That was the question and George didn’t seem to have any good ideas. In his mind, he could see them unraveling day by day until none of them gave a shit and they became like Elizabeth Castle… just beaten and squashed and accepting.

And George thought: Is that what you want? Is that what you really want to become?

And it wasn’t.

Gosling was gone, but they had to carry on in his spirit. He would have respected nothing less and nothing less was acceptable. George was thinking about the things Marx and Gosling had been talking about: finding a boat. Something with an engine, something that could plow them out of the weed and back out into the sea itself. Because George had been thinking that very thing himself all along. With a child’s simple logic he knew that if you came in through a door, then you had to go back the same way. And maybe it took quantum theory and Einsteinian physics for a certain Mr. Greenberg to arrive at this deduction, but George knew it intuitively.

16

The screaming came in the night.

Except, of course, it was not night really. George had been laying in his bunk, napping, and he had come awake to screaming. His cabin was dim and he stumbled out into the corridor, more than a little confused, his head full of fuzz.

Screaming.

Who in the Christ was screaming?

George made it up to deck shortly after Pollard, both dazed and shocked and they didn’t know what. Didn’t know what in the hell they were going to be staring in the face this time, only that it would not be good. Could not possibly be good.

“What the hell’s going on?” George heard himself say.

Pollard mumbled something incomprehensible and George was right behind him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as they scrambled along those salt-whitened decks, trying to locate the screaming.

“There,” Pollard said dumbly. “Oh, there… there… ”

It was Chesbro.

He was out into the weed about thirty feet maybe from the Mystic, in a run of oily, slopping water, stumbling about in the raft as it sank around him, seeming to deflate before their eyes. But it wasn’t deflating, it was… it was coming apart. It was fraying and shredding and collapsing. That dirty water around it was spraying up in gouts and boiling in foam.

“Christ, we gotta do something,” Pollard was saying.

And George knew they had to, too, but what? They had no boat to get to him and what in the fuck was he doing out there anyhow? But George could pretty much put that together. The dumb sonofabitch was trying to escape. He’d been in a weird, introspective mood ever since the squid attacked them on the C-130 and now he had simply lost his mind and was trying to escape.

George could see quite clearly now what was happening and it made something in his belly take a sickening, empty roll. The raft was getting hit by things… luminous things, like the fish he and Gosling had been hit by. Except these were smaller, fist-sized creatures darting and diving about with such speed you could not get a good look at them. Just shining, glowing little things, perhaps hundreds of them going after the raft, hitting it like sharks in a feeding frenzy, teeth tearing and ripping and biting.

He’s a dead man, George found himself thinking.

And Chesbro surely was at that, but George couldn’t stand there and do nothing. The idea of leaping out there and helping him was suicidal, those little razor-toothed fish could have stripped a Holstein calf to the bones in minutes.

Pollard was shrieking. Slamming his fists against the rail helplessly, just completely frustrated by it.

George saw a life ring and rope hanging from the cabin bulkhead. It was a waste of time and he knew it. But he pulled it off and Pollard seemed to like the idea. In fact, Pollard yanked the ring right out of his hands and gave it a mighty toss out into the mist. It landed with a splatting sound about four feet from the raft.

Chesbro was wailing.

The raft was disintegrating around him. Even all those multiple buoyancy chambers the engineers had designed into the life raft were no good against those little eating, hungry fish. Chesbro was like a man trapped in a burning room, starting first this way and then that, shrieking and moaning and whimpering. It was probably the most piteous thing George had ever witnessed. The entire stern section of the raft had sunk now, filthy water and slimy weeds sluicing up into the forward section.

He’s gonna fall, George thought, gonna fall and then and then-

Chesbro slipped and fell, his left leg bicycling in the water just long enough for about twenty of those little fish to find it. His pant leg came apart in fragments that almost looked like blue sawdust spit from a wood chipper. There was a spray of blood — the reddest Technicolor blood George had ever seen — and so many fish converged on his leg that you could no longer see his leg. Just what seemed like a hundred silvery, flapping, chomping bodies, all driven mad by the smell of blood, the taste of blood, the warm saltiness of blood. Chesbro clawed his way back up into the raft and the fish fell away momentarily, except for a few whose tiny, cutting teeth were imbedded simply too deeply. George saw raw meat where those fish had been, punctured and gashed. Then a flash of gleaming white that must have been bone.

“Grab that ring!” Pollard was calling out to him. “Chesbro! Grab that ring! Grab that ring! Grab that fucking ring you goddamn idiot!”

His face was red and his eyes were bulging, tears streaking down his face. His fists were gripping the life ring rope and had Chesbro been able to just get a hand on it, Pollard would have probably yanked him fifteen feet with the first pull. Because he was half out of his mind, something in him hot and arcing and violent with the need for action. Any action.

But it was too late for anything.

The raft was not a raft anymore, was looking more like a kid’s blow-up pool toy that had deflated. The water was thrashing and those fish were hitting Chesbro from every possible direction, tails flapping and jaws working like the needles of a sewing machine. The water and weeds were red and frothing. Chesbro managed to rise up once, about six of them hanging from his face and they had managed to nearly chew all of his clothes from him. Before he came back down, George noticed with mad hysterical laughter echoing in his head that a pod of them were hanging from his crotch like the remoras on a shark, emasculating him.

There was nothing to do but watch.

That was the really heartbreaking, maddening thing about it all. They could only watch as hundreds of those luminous little fish with their serrated, scissoring jaws reduced Chesbro to a pulped and bitten husk, to a bleeding and stripped thing that looked oddly like a raw and living shank of beef. But you had to hand it to him, you really did. Because Chesbro had a lot of life in him, he was coming apart like the raft… a red and gored thing composed of fleshy flaps and folds and scratching bloody digits… but he did not die easily.

Pollard had lost his anger now. It was replaced by a sort of frightening, paralyzed shock, his mouth contorted in awe and revulsion. “Gah… gah… gahhh,” he kept saying. “That blood… all that blood… how can there be so much goddamn blood? Have you ever in your life seen so… much… fucking… blood?”

And George didn’t think he honestly had.

Chesbro’s face broke above the bloody, boiling water and it had been stripped down to tendons and muscle and they were going fast. He looked up toward the Mystic, what remained of his eyes splashed down the basal anatomy of his face in a pink, snotty slime. A mist of seething blood was expelled from his mouth in a cloud and then… then he just sank in that luminous sea of tearing mouths. Like meat in a piranha tank, he was divided and peeled and torn until he was just a red-stained skeleton and then nothing at all.

Pollard looked over at George or maybe right through him. Then he turned back, looked down at the red, greasy slick that marked Chesbro’s passing, and promptly vomited right down the front of his shirt.

And George was thinking, oh, Chesbro, oh Jesus Christ I’m so sorry I never ever meant to hit you oh my Christ…

And then he felt himself sliding down the railing to the deck, empty. Just completely empty and so numb, so cold and frozen he thought he might shatter if someone touched him.

And then there were three, he thought.

17

When Cushing came back, he knew something had happened.

Maybe it was the atmosphere on the Mystic, which was positively tense and guarded, worn just as thin as an old blanket. If Cushing, coming down the ladder into the main cabin, had to put a name to it, it would have been apocalyptic. Because it was there on everyone’s face: doom and gloom with an extended forecast of dread. Pollard was just sitting there and so was George, both looking pale and despondent.

Cushing knew it was something more than Gosling’s death.

Whatever it was, it was recent. The wound still open and bleeding. It hadn’t even had the chance to scab over yet.

“Okay,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “What now?”

Pollard and George looked at each other, maybe both hoping the other one would put it into words. Pollard finally just looked down.

George cleared his throat, said, “Chesbro… he’s dead.” He paused, swallowed something down. “I think he was trying to escape in the raft… it got torn up and him with it.”

George gave him the quick version and from what he said and what Cushing could see in his eyes — a simmering black horror — he was glad he had not seen it. He’d seen plenty of bad by that point, but this he could do without.

“Well, I guess… I guess it was his own fault.” It was cold and cutting, but Cushing did not retract it. Did not even consider doing so. He pulled something out of the duffel bag hanging at his side: a fifth of Jack Daniels. He tossed it to George. “Looks like you guys need one.”

George’s eyes lit up. He broke the seal and threaded off the cap, took a good pull off it. Pollard practically fell off the settee trying to get a taste himself.

After he had, he just shook his head. “Fucking civilization,” he said, the whiskey filling him with something that had long been missing.

Cushing smiled, dug a carton of cigarettes from his duffel. “Here, George. Bad for your health, they say, but piss on it.”

George’s eyes lit up. “Cigarettes? No shit. My perverse addiction thanks you.” He fired one up and smiled. “Oh baby, oh yeah.”

“Goddamn junkie,” Pollard said. He took the pack and fired one up himself. “I’m supposed to be quit… can’t see it mattering now.”

“Where’s Elizabeth?” George said, blowing out smoke. “Aunt Else has all but accused me of kidnapping her.”

“She’s coming,” Cushing said. He cocked his head. “You sure as hell aren’t gonna believe what she found.”

They heard her coming down the steps, saw her enter the cabin. She offered Pollard the thinnest of smiles and gave George the obligatory death-stare. He winked at her. Maybe she didn’t like him and his mouth much, he figured, but she understood him. Understood him just fine. She stepped aside and four men stepped in behind her.

“Jesus H. Christ!” George said, jumping to his feet. “I can’t.. . holy shit!”

Pollard was up, too.

They both looked like they were seeing ghosts.

But there was nothing spooky there, just Menhaus, Fabrini, Saks, and Crycek. And for all them, it was like the ball had just dropped at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Saks gave him his porcine, wicked smile. “Well, can’t say I’m surprised, George, figured you and Cushing were holed up somewhere swapping spit.”

That made George laugh. Didn’t seem like he could stop. “Yeah,” he gasped, “but the whole time we were thinking of you, Saks.”

“Shit,” he said.

George shook hands with Fabrini, his favorite muscle-bound Italian. Fabrini looked so glad to see him, he had tears in his eyes. And Menhaus? Same old Menhaus. Thinner, certainly, more lines on his face… but the same old Menhaus.

“Jolly Olly,” George said and they hugged, slapping each other on the back.

“Boy, I’m glad to see you guys.”

“Glad to see us?” Menhaus laughed. “Shit, after… what? A week with Saks here? We’re definitely ready for some human company.”

Fabrini chuckled.

Saks laughed despite himself. “And after all I’ve done for you.”

“Or to him, don’t you mean?” Fabrini said, very little humor in his words.

“Kiss my ass, Fagbrini.”

There was tension there, but it faded about the time the bottle started making the rounds. Jokes and insults passed around like cold germs. Cushing said very little, though there was plenty he wanted to enlighten them on. But not yet. Not now. Not until they settled in.

Elizabeth just stood there, looking uncomfortable like she’d just wandered into a men’s club. The talk was both salty and spicy, the language a little rough. She looked a little surprised and taken back by it.

Cushing figured she wasn’t used to it, but with this bunch, she’d have the chance. That was for sure. Fabrini kept looking at her as if he just didn’t believe there could be something like a woman. But every time she looked in his direction, he averted his eyes like a shy schoolboy. Not so with Saks. He was eyeing her up and down like she was fresh off the grill and he was hungry. Like maybe he wanted to stuff an apple in her mouth and cut himself a slice. She saw it, too. It was hard not to. And the look she gave him… well, Cushing figured Saks was lucky she didn’t have a gun in her hand.

Gradually, the talk turned to more serious matters.

It was confession time. What happened and to who and what the hell did you do when the ship went down? Then it seemed like everyone was talking at once.

“Soltz?” Menhaus asked.

George just shook his head. “No. What about Cook?”

Menhaus shook his head this time.

Pollard was filling Crycek in on their shipmates. “Yeah, Marx.. . the chief. Squid got him and Gosling, too.”

“The First? Oh, shit,” Crycek was saying. “Not the First, not the First.”

George sketched basically what had happened to Gosling and Crycek told him about someone named Hupp, that George did not know. Whoever it was, you could see that Crycek felt the pain of his loss as he felt the loss of Marx and Gosling.

Saks was the only one unmoved by any of it.

He seemed oddly at ease with it all. But maybe that was because the gears were already turning in his head. Gosling would have definitely stood in his way, but without him? Maybe there was still hope to rein this bunch in.

All in all, the stories that passed now were grim. They had all survived the seaweed sea and its innumerable terrors. And you could tell by the way they told those stories that they knew damn well that none of it was over with just yet.

About that time, when there was a lull in the horror story competition as it were, Elizabeth announced. “You men must be hungry. I’ll get you some food. Will you help me, Mr. Cushing?”

That got Saks laughing. “Mister Cushing. I like that.”

Cushing smiled and went into the galley with her. He had things to say and George could see that, but he wasn’t ready just yet.

When the door was closed to the galley, Saks said with his usual subtlety, “Cushing? He banging that shit?”

“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said.

George just laughed. Saks. Always the sentimentalist. “Could be. She’s taken a real shine to him. She’s okay, Saks, don’t give her a hard time. Wait till she brings out the food… better than that survival shit.”

George explained to them how Elizabeth was something of a professional scavenger. All the food she had stockpiled, the garden she had growing on a barge somewhere.

“Jesus,” Menhaus said, rubbing his hands together. “Real vegetables… sweets… goddamn bacon and bread, you say?”

“Well, don’t be in any hurry, Menhaus,” Saks said. “Cushing’s probably putting the meat to her right now.”

“They always go for the big Viking types, don’t they?” Fabrini joked.

Saks grinned. “Maybe we need to put more men on the job. Maybe I better go in there, show dumbfuck Cushing how it’s done.”

“Maybe you better just keep it in your pants, Saks,” George warned him. “This lady is tough, she don’t fuck around. You keep it in your pants or she’ll cut it right off. Trust me.”

“Listen to you,” Saks said. “You even got a dick, George?”

“Your wife thinks so.”

Saks flushed, looked like maybe he might go after George, but he kept it in check, offered up a little hollow laugh. And maybe his laugh was hollow, but Fabrini’s wasn’t… it was loud and booming. Menhaus was laughing, too. You could see that Saks didn’t like that. You didn’t go around laughing at Al Saks.

“Now listen to me,” George said. “I’m not trying to give you shit, Saks, but you’ve got to remember a few things here. This woman is letting us stay here and she don’t have to do that. And don’t give me that ah-she’s-just-a-fucking-broad look. This girl is tough. She’s a survivor. She knows how to survive. You cross her and you’ll find out. She’s been living here for years, fighting to stay alive. You think for a minute she won’t slit your throat she sees you as a threat, guess again. Leave her be. That’s all I’m saying. She likes Cushing and that’s the way it is. He gets some and you don’t, too damn bad. Go fuck your hand. Because you get out of line and you might screw it up for all of us. And I tell you what, Saks, I won’t put up with it.”

“Oh, you won’t?”

George gave him back his look. “No, I won’t. You don’t think so, try me.”

Fabrini was eating it up. Menhaus just looked tired by it all. Like maybe he’d been living on a steady diet of this kind of shit and the only thing it did now was fatigue him.

Saks smiled then, because it was all a joke, couldn’t they see that? Cushing was throwing the pirate-girl the old bone? More power to him. It was okay with Saks; he wasn’t the sort of guy to shit on a romance. “Okay, George,” he said, very calmly. “Don’t get your pecker hard, I was just kidding around.”

“Sure,” Fabrini said, touching the bandage at his ear. “Saks is like that. He’ll kid you right to death. See if he don’t.”

And, damn, what passed between those two… it wasn’t good. Like homicide put on ice, George was thinking. He didn’t need Menhaus spelling it out for him, because he already had a pretty good idea of what it had been like in that lifeboat. Saks and his mouth. Fabrini and his short fuse. It must have been really something.

“Well, Captain,” a voice said, “I see you’ve wasted no time in inviting your drunken cohorts aboard?”

Aunt Else. Fresh from her nap and ready to charge. She looked over the new faces and grimaced, apparently wasn’t caring much for what she was seeing.

“Who’s the old bag?” Saks said, around the back of his hand.

George made a quick round of introductions, but Aunt Else wasn’t exactly listening. Her eyes were sharp, but her mind was dull and drifting. She had, no doubt, already assigned Saks, Menhaus, Fabrini, and Crycek roles in her fantasy and that was enough for her.

“So, what now?” Fabrini said. “We’re all here-”

“And some of us are queer,” Saks said.

“Queer? Queer?” Aunt Else was looking over at the bar. “There’s a great many things queer, I would think. I’m finding this entire voyage queer. I’m finding your actions, Captain… or lack of them… certainly queer.”

“You tell him, sister,” Saks said, enjoying it.

She turned and looked at him. “I find you extremely queer, sir.”

Fabrini burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, old Saks… he’s as queer as they come.”

“I should say so,” she said.

George nodded. “Without a doubt. Good Mr. Saks was in the Navy, you know. I’m certain he was doing a lot of queer things in there. Tell us about it, Saks, tell us how queer you were in the Navy. I bet you were about as queer as they came. Yes, our Mr. Saks, he’s a queer sort, all right.”

Menhaus was giggling. “Queer. I like that. Queer. She’s saying and you’re saying and… ha, ha, that’s pretty good.”

“Shut the hell up, you moron,” Saks told him.

“Like I was saying,” Fabrini began, “we’re all here… what now? Where do we go from here? We got ourselves a nice base here, but I’m not about to kick my feet up and take root.”

“Oh, you’d take any root offered,” Saks said.

George shook his head. Christ, it was like being in the tenth grade locker room. Maybe not even that sophisticated, you came right down to it.

Fabrini went on. “We have to make plans. I don’t know what comes next, but we have to be ready. And we have to think about getting out of here.”

“Captain, will you please tell your subordinates to lower their voices?” Aunt Else said. “I’m working on something vital here and I can’t be disturbed.” She held up a book, shaking it at him. “This is a legal manual I have here and I am currently putting together the case against you.”

George saw that it was a romance novel with some woman on the cover busting out of her bodice. It was okay, though, there was some big Fabio-looking stud there to tuck things back in for her. Thank God.

Saks said, “Yeah, that Captain George… he ain’t much, ma’am. I’m about ready to mutiny here. What a mess he got us in. Captain, sir, you ain’t worth a happy fuck.”

George winced, wondering what kind of outburst profanity would bring from Aunt Else, but she was studying her legal manual. That was the way she was, though. She only seemed to hear fragments of conversations, the rest went out the window. She filled in the blanks as she saw fit.

Menhaus took a sip of whiskey. “Saks… you should watch your language, you know. We’re not out on the dock here.”

Saks slapped his knee. “Captain George? I sure as hell hope there isn’t an Uncle Else, because Menhaus is popping wood over the old bat.”

“Okay,” George told him. “That’ll do.”

“Sure, sure, Captain. Don’t throw me in irons or nothing.”

George was getting his fill of Saks real fast here. “Oh, I won’t. At least, not yet. As long as you’re a good little sailor-boy, I won’t have to do anything unpleasant. But I’m a hard master, so don’t cross me.”

It was a joke, but maybe not much of one. Maybe George was saying certain things without actually saying them.

“I can’t believe, Captain, that after all of this, you would still behave like such a terrible brute. Throwing your weight around and threatening your men,” Aunt Else said. “Have you learned nothing from any of this? Generally, I stay out of the affairs of men, but this has gone far enough. You’ve been hard enough on that poor boy as it is.. . just look at him! Dear God, he’s frightened of you.”

Fabrini barked a laugh.

George just shook his head. “I’ll be gentle.”

“See that you are.”

“You’ll protect me, won’t you, ma’am?” Saks said. “You won’t let him beat me or do any of those other awful things he likes to do?”

But she was gone again, scribbling with a pencil in her book. Throwing together an unimpeachable case against Captain George. At least it seemed that way until she looked up and said, “I’m afraid you’ll hang, Captain.”

“Damn,” George said.

“Don’t be swearing in front of the lady,” Saks warned him.

“Shut up.”

Aunt Else slammed her book down. “This has gone far enough! I won’t have you bullying the men! Do you understand me? My husband will have a thing or two to say to you when he returns. Mark my words, Captain.”

“You better listen to her, Captain Bligh,” Saks said to George. “You can’t go on treating us like this.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Menhaus said. “He can’t help that big mouth and small brain of his.”

“I don’t see where this is any of your affair, Doctor,” Aunt Else said. “As I recall you were invited as a guest, not to stir up trouble in general. Why, I’d be surprised if your degree is even from a reputable university.”

“Me, too,” Saks said.

“This place… it’s goddamn crazy,” Crycek said. “Well, you ought to fit right in then,” Saks told him.

Crycek didn’t say anything to that. But George could see it wasn’t just some off-handed jibe. There was more to it than that. A lot more. Crycek had that dazed, scared look in his eyes much like Pollard had when he first met him. He’d seen something that he just couldn’t get past.

“Crycek thinks there’s a boogeyman out in the fog,” Saks said.

“Knock it off,” Fabrini told him.

Crycek wouldn’t even look at any of them. He sat there with Pollard, looking almost queasy that any of it had been brought up in the first place. He buried his face in his hands like he wanted to cry.

“See?” Saks said. “He’s having one of his headaches. You know what that means? That means that the thing out there is getting at him again. Right, Crycek? It’s trying to eat your mind again?”

George reached over and yanked the whiskey bottle from Saks’s hands. “I think you’ve had enough of that on an empty stomach.”

Saks rose in his seat an inch or two, his face red as a ripe tomato. “You do that again, Captain George, and I’ll break that bottle right over your fucking skull.”

Fabrini was ready. “Why don’t you try it, Saks? Because whatever part of you George don’t stomp, I will.”

“I think you’re all forgetting why you’re here,” Aunt Else said. “This is a court of law and you should all behave in accordance. Let’s try and act civilized here. We know who the guilty man is. Let us come together on that.”

George kept watching Saks, trial or no trial. “What makes you think there isn’t something out there, Saks? C’mon, regale us with your wisdom.”

But Saks wasn’t biting. “Because Crycek is crazy. He’s a nutjob and that’s all there is to it. You got to be crazy to believe shit like that, Captain.”

“Then you haven’t felt it?” George put to him.

Everyone was watching them now. Everyone but Aunt Else. They were all watching and listening, wanting, maybe, to have this subject broached. Something they had all thought of, but didn’t dare speak of.

“I haven’t felt shit.”

George just nodded his head. “Well, I have. And I’ve felt it more than once. Go ahead, Saks, smile like an idiot. But you’ve felt it just like we have, only you don’t have the guts to admit it. But that’s okay… because I don’t know what’s out there, but something is. And that something? That devil or boogeyman, it believes in you, Saks. You better believe it does.”

“Crazy goddamn shit,” was all Saks would say. “Kiddie stories.”

“You really think so?” George looked over at the others, one by one. “How about the rest of you? Any of you agree with Saks? You think there’s nothing out there in that mist but weeds and bones and crawly things? Any of you honestly believe that? No? I figured as much. Guess that makes you the odd man out, Saks.”

Saks stood up. “Pussies,” he said. “You’re all a bunch of fucking pussies that are afraid of your own goddamn shadows. I don’t believe in any devil. Not here, not back home. There ain’t no such thing as a devil.”

“Oh, but there is.”

Cushing had come out of the galley and there was a tone in his voice that told them he was not kidding around. “It’s out there, Saks. And it’s not some half-ass Christian oogy-boogey man with a pitchfork and horns, it’s the real thing and it has plans for us. You can believe that.” He sighed, looked around. “But enough of that. Let’s eat, then we’ll get down to business.”

18

Business, then.

They were all sitting there and the whiskey was gone and now there was just coffee and bloodshot eyes. Some of the men were smoking. George and Saks and Pollard were studying the chart of the ship’s graveyard and environs beyond that Greenberg had drawn. Crycek was looking over the letter Greenberg had written. Cushing had the floor and he was pacing back and forth saying, “So, like I said, this Greenberg… the guy Elizabeth knew as the Hermit… he was one of a group of scientists that got sucked in here because they wanted to. They believed all along that those planes and ships and people in the Devil’s Triangle and Sargasso Sea were getting funneled somewhere. They just weren’t sure where.

So, somehow… who knows… they got themselves pulled in here same way we did.”

Saks looked up from the chart. “So these eggheads, they worked for the Navy at one time? Part of something called Project Neptune?” He shook his head. “You expect me to believe that the Navy wastes time on shit like this?”

“They wasted time on the Philadelphia Experiment, didn’t they?” Pollard said. “Who knows what kind of crazy shit our government is up to?”

“Philadelphia Experiment? What the hell is that?” Saks waved it away like he didn’t honestly care. “You telling me our government knows about this shit and don’t do nothing about it? I can’t buy that. You buy this shit, George?”

But George didn’t say; he just studied the chart.

Fabrini laughed. “You’re naive, Saks. You know that? You think those politicians ever tell the truth? All they do is lie and cover-up shit.”

Menhaus said, “You won’t get Saks to believe that, Fabrini. He believes whatever those lying shits tell him. Blind faith.”

Saks slammed his hand down on the table. “Menhaus, you’re a fucking idiot and we all know it. I don’t believe anything those lying fuckwigs in Washington say. I was in Vietnam, dipshit, I know all about lies and cover-ups. Don’t you be telling me what I believe, because you don’t have a clue.”

“All right, already,” George said. “We’re not talking politics here. We’re listening to Cushing. Maybe if you all shut up long enough he can say what he’s got to say.”

There was no argument about that.

“Point is,” Cushing said, “that these scientists got themselves trapped in here same as us. They know something about this place and how it can exist. Greenberg called it Dimension X and that’s good enough. We’re stuck on some rotting, misty world on the dirty backside of Dimension X…”

He went on to cover pretty much what was in the letter and Greenberg’s theories about wormholes and interdimensional passage. It was heavy, heady stuff, but Cushing tried to explain it as simply as he could. Even he, with his scientific leanings, was pretty confused about it all, he admitted. But it all made sense in the long run, he told them. Greenberg explained how they got here and maybe, just maybe, how they could get back out.

“Sure,” Fabrini said. “But if what Elizabeth here says about her uncle is true, well, what chance have we got? He looked for that vortex to open and it never did. So where does that leave us?”

“You’re missing something, though,” Crycek said, pointing at Fabrini with the letter. “In here, Greenberg says that he’s going back to that ship, that Lancet, says that it’s the key. That it’s the key to deliverance from this place.”

“That’s right,” Cushing said. “The Lancet. What Greenberg referred to as a cursed ship. I don’t know what he means by that, but obviously this ship is important. He doesn’t say anything about us waiting around down in the Sea of Mists hoping that vortex’ll open. He seemed to think that the only way out was through something on the Lancet or through maybe the Lancet itself.”

“He also said that if we go back through, we might end up in some other time,” Saks said. “Maybe that’s just some voodoo crazy bullshit, maybe not. If it isn’t… Christ, who knows where we’d end up?”

“Who gives a shit?” Menhaus said. “I mean, does it really matter? Maybe the time-thing would reverse itself like he said and if it doesn’t? Fuck it. The tenth or fifteenth century beats the shit out of this place, way I’m looking at it.”

George looked up from the chart when he said that, smiled. That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? Good old Earth in the good old third dimension beat the shit out of this place any day of the week. For there you had sunshine and blue skies and people and, yes, hope. When you were home, there was always hope. That’s how George was seeing it. He wanted his time back, wanted it back in the worst way because he had a wife and a kid, but he’d take earth any way he could get it.

“Okay, Cushing,” Saks said. “Since you’ve appointed yourself as the half-ass expert on this science-fiction bullshit, let me ask you something. That egghead… he’s talking about time bending or curving or whatever… so what happens if we come back two hours before we sailed? We go up to ourselves and say, hey, knothead, don’t get on that fucking tub?”

“If we have to.”

Cushing explained that all the time curvature business was highly theoretical. He told them about something he’d read once, the “Grandfather Paradox”, wherein you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather before he married your grandmother. Hence, your parents would never have been born and neither would you… so how could you possibly have traveled back in time? One theory said, he told them, was that time was self-perpetuating, that it would maintain its own integrity. So that at the moment you killed your grandfather, you would cease to exist… as would everything that had anything to do with you, your parents, etc. Bam, it was all gone, never happened. It was all pretty much fringe-thinking and open to endless debate. He said that everyone knew the Ray Bradbury story where a guy goes back in time to the Jurassic, steps on a butterfly, comes back to the present and the world has been completely changed by that one insignificant butterfly’s death which set up a chain-reaction that totally subverted the future.

“But that’s all speculation,” Cushing finished by saying. “And we don’t have the time to worry about crap like that. What we need to decide is how we’re going to go about getting out of here.”

“Maybe we can’t,” Saks said. “Maybe Crycek’s boogeyman, maybe he won’t let us out.”

Maybe it was Saks’s attempt at some cruel joke, but nobody thought it was funny. On the subject of that mysterious other, they had absolutely no sense of humor.

“The Fog-Devil,” George said.

“Good name as any,” Cushing said.

“Oh, Christ,” Saks said. “Here we go.”

But nobody was paying him any attention on that subject anymore. They had all pretty much written off his skepticism as fear. He could not accept such a thing, could not live with the idea of such a thing, hence it did not exist. Simple. George figured it was the same sort of self-denial you had back in the world concerning UFOs or aliens… the very idea of such things existing was too much for the human mind, so it denied and ridiculed. Sort of a psychological self-preservation so you could sleep at night and not lose your mind wondering when the little green men might come for you.

Crycek said, “Greenberg talks about that, too, in his letter. How that Lancet might be the focal point of this thing.”

Which, Cushing said to them, had to make you wonder about that ship and what it was exactly. According to Greenberg it was a cursed vessel, but a place of revelations, too. The keys to deliverance and also maybe the hopping off point of something incalculably dangerous.

“Was it it, though?” Menhaus asked. “What is this thing?”

But nobody was even going to hazard a guess on that one. They had ideas in their heads, but they wouldn’t speak of them. Not just yet. Maybe it was some sort of alien ghost and maybe it was the very thing that had inspired the idea of Satan on earth… and a thousand other worlds.

“Listen now,” George said to them. “Right now, it doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve felt it and so have all of you. It’s out there and that’s enough. I don’t know how many times out there in that goddamn fog I felt like I was being watched, felt like something was getting close. I saw things, too. Things that couldn’t be. I think the Fog-Devil is responsible for a lot of that.”

“I think I’ll take a walk until story-time is over,” Saks said, getting up. “You run out of ideas, there’s the one about the guy with the hook-hand out in lover’s lane.”

“Sit down, Saks,” George said.

“What?”

“Sit… down.”

“Fuck you think you are, bossing me around?”

George was up on his feet now and so was Fabrini. “I think I’m the guy that’s gonna put you on your ass and make you listen whether you fucking like it or not.”

“Think you’re up to the job?”

“Maybe not. But I’ll bet Fabrini is.”

Saks sat down. “All right, all right, go ahead. Tell me your fucking spook stories. Hey, Elizabeth? You got any popcorn?”

But if he thought it was some big joke, the cocky grin on his face didn’t last too long. Not when George brought out the VHF radio from the lifeboat and set it on the table in front of him. His grin faded and his eyes widened. The blood drained from his ruddy, unshaven face drop by drop.

“This is bullshit,” he managed with little conviction. “Fucking parlor games.”

“Let’s see,” George said. “Let’s see what’s out there…”

Elizabeth helped Aunt Else up. Aunt Else had dozed off now and Elizabeth woke her and helped her to the doorway leading to the cabins. But in the doorway, Elizabeth paused. “You… all of you… you better think about what it is you’re doing, what you might be invoking out there…”

Then she left on that ominous note.

George started up the VHF and the air in the cabin was heavy, leaden, so thick you could barely pull it into your lungs. The VHF whined for a moment or two, then there was static, rising and falling as before. A snowstorm of static that reminded George of distant, windy places, stormy and blowing places where there was no escape, but only waiting, solemn and grim waiting. Like maybe outposts on hostile worlds or lonely bases coveted by Antarctic maelstroms. Just that static rising and falling like it was breathing. But the bad thing was, he was almost certain that it was louder than it had been before

…more palpable, cognizant.

“Sounds…” Menhaus began, his voice full of dryness. “… sounds like wind blowing through an empty house…”

George was thinking that, too. A lonely, loathsome sound of dead places. An eerie sound of wind blown through hollow gourds and catacombs. You kept listening, though, listening to that rushing, angry field of static, you started hearing other things, sensing other things.

“Makes my fucking skin crawl,” Menhaus admitted.

George was with him on that. For his skin was crawling. The static was the sound of voids and distance, black fathomless zones and dead moons. The noise a haunted house would make when no one was there to listen to it. Just that thrumming, listening static that was not entirely lifeless, but not living either. Sterile, unborn, thinking about birth. It got right inside your head and made something in you flinch and curl-up. George knew if he was stuck in a room by himself listening to it for any length of time, he would have put a gun in his mouth.

“Okay,” Cushing finally said, almost startled by the sound of his own voice. “Broadcast, George. Put your voice out there…”

But George hesitated. The idea of his voice being sucked into that storm of skeletal, dead air was almost too much for him. Like maybe, whatever was out there making that noise, would reach out through the receiver and pull him in.

The static suddenly changed in pitch or something out there did. There came a muted beeping like a Morse Code key being frantically tapped. At first he thought he was imagining it and then he was certain he was: because there was a voice out there speaking, but lost in that field of static. Gradually, it became clearer and it was a man’s voice, garbled and lost, but you could hear it, all right. A high-pitched, almost whimpering sort of voice. “… out there, out there… out there, out there…” Then it faded, echoing in the static, coming right back again like it had bounced off something. “out there… please, please, please… don’t come after us.. . don’t follow us… dear God don’t follow us…” And then it dropped back down into the static again and everybody in the cabin found their lungs and started to breathe again. And this time another broadcast came up, but just for a second or two. A woman’s voice now, desperate and insane-sounding, whispering over the mic: “… help us… help us… help us… help us…” Yes, just a whisper like she was afraid someone or something might be listening to her.

“Turn it off,” Saks said, breathing hard. “Turn that shit off.”

But George didn’t. He clicked on the mic, said, “This is an SOS… this is an SOS… this is an SOS…”

Then he clicked it back off and the effect was immediate. The static got louder, became something akin to the buzz of hornets and there was that weird, echoing ping buried in it, coming and going and sounding very much like the pinging of a sonar unit, only oddly hollow and alien-sounding.

Cushing nodded and George shut it off, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Now,” Cushing said. “What you’re hearing out there… that noise… it’s not of natural origin and we all know it. The only time that buzzing or pinging rises up is when you put your voice out there. Something, something out there reacts to it.”

Pollard was shaking. “Those people… those poor, lost people…”

“Those people are long dead,” Cushing told him. “Those are just echoes of old broadcasts I’m willing to bet, but in this place, somehow they keep repeating.”

He let everybody relax a moment before he went on and by then Elizabeth was back. She sat over on the settee by Crycek and Pollard. She didn’t say a word. She looked disturbed by what they were talking about, but wouldn’t say so.

“All right,” Cushing said. “Greenberg knew this thing existed, he felt it the same way we’ve all been feeling it out there. Though he doesn’t say so, I think we can read between the lines and say that this thing… the Fog-Devil… it got his friends when they were at the Lancet. Greenberg said he thought the Fog-Devil was cyclic, meaning that it went through periods of dormancy and gradually cycled itself back up from time to time. And I’m guessing that we just happened to drop into this place about the time it’s ready to wake back up.”

Fabrini stood up. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right. I mean, think about it… why aren’t there more people here? Christ, should be lots of people here. We survived and they should have, too. Where are they? What happened to them?”

“They were purged,” George said, jumping in.

Everyone was looking at him now.

“I don’t have a better word for it, people. Whenever that Fog-Devil wakes up, goes kinetic like Greenberg said, then it goes hunting minds, human minds. And the next time it comes, none of us’ll be left.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said.

Fabrini was scared. You could see that. But he wanted to say something and he did: “When we were on the Cyclops, Cook and I found the ship’s log and…”

He told them what he remembered about it, breaking off again and again and saying how he wished Cook was alive, because Cook could tell it better than he could. But he got most of it right. The crew from the Cyclops visiting a Danish ship called the Korsund and what they found there… the burned men, their eyes cremated from their skulls, their brains boiled to jelly. All the horrors of that dead ship. And how what happened there, happened then to the Cyclops… one man at a time until there was no one left but the first mate who had gone mad, waiting for the Fog-Devil to come for him. When Fabrini had finished, he was breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and a tic in the corner of his lips.

“I never saw that fucking book,” Saks said. He looked to Menhaus and Crycek and they both shook their heads. “Where was it?”

“Cook,” Fabrini said. “He tossed it overboard. Did something with it. He didn’t want you guys reading it, getting freaked out.”

Saks made some derogatory comment under his breath.

Menhaus just said, “Cook… he was a good one. A real good one.”

“So that gives us an idea of what this thing does,” Cushing said to them. “It might be radioactive in nature. Regardless, it’s extremely dangerous. If we don’t want to be part of the next purge-”

“Then it’s time to shit or get off the pot,” George said.

“Meaning what?” Saks asked him.

George looked at him, at all of them in turn. “It means, Saks, that we can either head our asses back into the Sea of Mists and hope like hell that vortex opens for us again or we can go up to the Lancet.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s our only chance,” Cushing said. “We go up there and find Greenberg if he’s still alive or we find out the secret of that ship, find out why Greenberg thought it was the key. Deliverance, maybe.”

“And?” Menhaus said.

“Maybe death.”

“Well, you girls have fun,” Saks said. “Drop me a line from hell.”

“He’s right, Saks,” Menhaus said. “It’s our only chance and we got to take it.”

They voted on it right then and there and everyone but Saks was in favor of making the trip and taking the chance. Elizabeth voted to go along, too, but she figured it was more to protect Cushing than anything.

“You don’t know what that place is up there,” she said. “You don’t know all the souls that have been eaten up there… you have no idea what it is you’re going up against.”

“Do you?” George asked her.

But all she would do was stare holes through him.

19

Later, when George went up on deck, he found Cushing and Elizabeth up there. His first reaction was to go back below, like maybe he was interrupting something. But he saw he wasn’t. They were both leaning on the rail, looking out into the fog.

“Anything going on?” he said.

Cushing shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

George started watching, too.

The fog was very thick, thicker than it had been earlier. But it was still day and the mist was still backlit by itself, though heavy and roiling like some crazy fusion of smog, steam, and smoke. A gushing gaseous envelope. You could smell the dankness of it, feel its moisture on your skin like jungle damp.

“What is it I’m looking for?” George said, lighting a cigarette,

“Just wait,” Cushing said.

So George waited. Waited and smoked and wondered when the real question would be broached, that of when they were planning on making their pilgrimage up to the Lancet. Way he was looking at it, it was something they had to do and soon and also something that might kill them.

“There,” Cushing said. “You see it?”

George did, all right. A dull blue glow off in the fog that brightened, flickered for a few moments like a loose light bulb and then vanished. About two minutes later it did it again, then not for another five. Irregular, but artificial-looking. Like maybe somebody was turning on and off a light out there or something, something electrical, was shorting out.

“Like neon or something,” George said.

Of course, Cushing was quick to point out that it was more like argon. Electrified neon gas had a reddish glow to it, but electrified argon was blue. And this was definitely blue. “What do you make of it?” George asked him.

But he said he didn’t know. “Could be just about anything… could even be some weird chemical reaction, you know, some sort of gas mixing with the fog.”

But standing there, watching it, George was thinking it was not random. Like maybe it was being directed.

Fabrini came up on deck next. “Well, when are we going to go? I’m in a hurry to get out or die trying.” Then he saw that glow out there pulsing. “What in the hell is that?”

George was thinking that a searchlight seen through coastal fog might look like that.

“You don’t think it’s that… that Fog-Devil, do you?” Fabrini asked.

“No,” Cushing said. “I don’t think so.”

George said, “Elizabeth… have you seen this before?”

“One or twice in the past few days,” she admitted. “But not before, never before.”

George could tell from her tone that something about that light was getting her hackles up. It was disturbing her, putting her on her guard, but she didn’t seem to know why… or want to say why.

“Okay,” Fabrini said. “I’m curious. What are we waiting for?”

Cushing shrugged. “Let’s do it.”

20

The blue glow was coming from a freighter.

When they got up close and it came up out of the mist at them, they all felt it down in their guts like some wasting disease, something pernicious and destructive. The ship was just another old derelict listing in the fog, a container ship with great holes eaten through its sides, rusting and silent with weed growing up its hull… yet it was so much more. There was something grimly monolithic about it, unhallowed like a moldering tombstone over a heretic’s grave or an ancient altar where human sacrifice had been practiced. Whatever it was, it felt like doom and insanity. Tendrils of mist wrapped up its superstructure, oozed and drifted like fingers of ectoplasm.

Go away, the ship seemed to be saying, this is none of your damn business. Just go away while you still can.

But they weren’t heeding its warning.

They were all there, save for Crycek who had stayed behind with Aunt Else. In Elizabeth’s boat, they poled closer to the wreck through the weeds, feeling its weight and ominous pull.

George felt like it had reached out and taken hold of him, held him tightly in a cold fist and would not let him go until it had squeezed all the good, decent, human things out of him.

“Christ,” Pollard finally said. “It… it gets under your skin, doesn’t it?”

Everyone agreed wordlessly.

Even old tough-guy Saks was having trouble pretending there wasn’t something, something bad you could feel, smell, and taste.

If ships could go insane, this one had. There was something decidedly wrong about it. Empty maybe, but not untenanted. And how long it had drifted alone and derelict, no one could say. But it might drift for another hundred years or maybe a thousand, a worm-holed, mist-shrouded coffin bobbing in the weed, holding darkness tight in its belly like black earth. A thing of silence and mist and dire memory. If anything called it home, then it could not possibly be sane. Could not possibly be anything you would want to look in the face.

“Boarding ladder’s down,” Saks said.

“Just like the Cyclops,” Fabrini said.

They tied off the scow and went up one after the other. They carried lanterns and flashlights. George carried the. 45 that had been Greenberg’s. The others had axes and gaffs. Menhaus had a pike.

The decks were covered in slime and mildew, were almost spongy in places. The beams of their flashlights bounced off the heavy fog. The lanterns threw weird, crawling shapes over the bulkheads. That blue glow was coming from this ship. They knew that much. They’d seen it strobing as they approached it, but now they had not seen it in ten minutes or more.

Like somebody turned off the light, George thought.

The idea of exploring another old hulk didn’t sit well with anyone, but they had come this far and no one mentioned turning back. The decks were crowded with orange plastic containers stacked one-high that appeared to be bolted down. They stopped before a row of them.

“What do you suppose all this shit is?” Fabrini said.

The plastic containers held yellow metal drums. In the light of the fog, it was easy enough to read what was stamped on the containers themselves:! RADIOAKTIVE MATERIALIEN DER GEFAHR! GEFAHRLICHE VERGEUDUNG! And beneath that, a symbol for radiation.

“German,” Saks said.

Cushing nodded. “Radioactive materials,” he said. “Must be barrels of radioactive waste they were taking to dump or store somewhere.”

“Oh, shit,” Fabrini said.

“Relax, they look sealed,” Saks said.

They did, but no one liked the idea of being on a freighter full of stuff like that. It was not exactly reassuring. Especially with that funny blue glow they’d been seeing. Cushing explained what it meant to Elizabeth.

“We better get our asses out of Dodge,” Menhaus said.

“Maybe not,” Saks said. “Look…”

There it was again, that pulsing pale blue glow. It lit up, flickered, painted one of the aft cabins an electric blue. Then it died out again.

“What do you make of it?” George asked Cushing.

“I know what I make of it,” Fabrini said. “Some of this shit leaked. That’s what we’re seeing and we’re probably all fucking contaminated now.”

“Well, at least your dick’ll glow in the dark, Fagbrini,” Saks said. “Menhaus ought to get a charge out of that.”

But Cushing just shook his head. “Radioactive waste might glow.. . maybe… but not like that.”

“Let’s see what does then,” Saks said.

He led them aft, beneath a framework of winches and derricks, around great chasms eaten through the deck plating, and to the cabin beyond. The hatch to the companionway was open.

“Shall we?” he said.

They started down after him, his flashlight beam cutting through the murk, revealing motes of dust and grimy bulkheads, iron steps that were warped and buckled. Near the bottom of that ladder, the blue light pulsed again, casting a ghostly, ethereal illumination over them. They saw it was coming from an open doorway.

George smelled something rank that made his eyes water. The air was thin and dry, rarified like gas in a vacuum tube. It was hard to breathe, but then, maybe it was just panic on his part. His throat felt tight, constricted to a pinhole now. He was smelling something like rotting fish. But other odors, too, hot and acrid smells.

They stepped through the doorway, flashlights and lanterns held before them, weapons at the ready. The first thing they saw was some sort of machine on the floor of what might have been a machine shop once. It sat on a crude frame of welded bars that housed a large oval disk of shiny metal. Above that was something like the scope from a hunting rifle, though three feet in length. Connected to the disk by two-foot rods at either end were two large, circular mirrors set upright… at least things that looked like mirrors. The entire contraption was making a low, humming sound. Charged particles of luminous blue danced across those mirrors, then faded.

Looking at it, George could not say what it was. But it appeared as if that scope-device was lined up dead center of those off-set mirrors. And what could the point of that be?

The machine thrummed again and George could feel the deck vibrating beneath him. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. Static electricity crackled in the air and there was a sudden, gagging stench of burnt ozone and fused wiring. Then the machine made a funny whining sound and a transparent pencil-thin beam of light like a laser beam came out of the back end of the scope and struck the rear mirror. The mirror was suddenly suffused with white light, making a sharp sound like rustling cellophane. It glowed and reflected a series of prismatic beams at the front mirror which broke them up into a blue beam of light like a searchlight, directing that blue radiance at the bulkhead. You could see that blue energy crawling, rippling, making the bulkhead beneath seem insubstantial.

Then the scope cut out again.

“What the hell is that?” George said.

And maybe somebody would have answered him, but that’s when they saw that they were not alone with the machine. There was something else in that room and it was not a man. What it was… they couldn’t say at first, it was so utterly alien in appearance. It looked at first like an elongated lizard squatting on its hands and knees, but it was no lizard. It was not anything that anyone had ever seen before. It rose up off the floor, a corded and rawboned thing made of rubbery blue-green flesh. It did not have legs as such, but something like a tripod of stout and boneless limbs ending not in feet but in pads like those of a treefrog.

“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said.

“Keep away from it,” Cushing said, as if that needed saying.

It had the general body shape of a pond hydra — cylindrical and up-curving like a banana, but hunched and contorted, set atop that tripod of legs that looked more like pythons than legs. It moved back a step and those spade-feet made wet, sucking sounds as they were pulled from the metal deckplates. It stood there, tall as a man, a nightmare sculpted from wrinkled, convoluted flesh with a bony head full of hollows and draws like an irregular, knobby cone pressed flat on top. From which, there was a nest of coiling blue-black tendrils, each as thick as a man’s thumb. They could have been some kind of alien hair, but they looked more like bloated worms looking for blood to suck.

“What the fuck is that?” Saks demanded to know.

“I think… I think it’s the thing that made that machine.”

It had three blue-green leathery arms ending in whipping clusters of root-like tentacles that might have been called fingers on some distant world. From throat to legs, there were a series of short, blunt, hollow tubes running down its underside. They looked like sheared-off sections of garden hose… but greasy, horribly-alive, twitching. They could have been organs of speech or reproduction for all anyone could say.

And that was the crazy thing about this horror: you couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t look at it and say, yes, it’s invertebrate. Yes, it’s a worm or a snake or an insect. There was no possible frame of reference for this thing on earth. Its anatomy was completely alien, its evolutionary biology unguessable.

Now George knew where that revolting, dead fish smell was coming from. But closer like this, it wasn’t exactly the smell of dead fish. Like that, but sharper, higher, with an almost gagging chemical smell mixed in.

Everything about the creature inspired revulsion. And the worse part was that it had a face. If you wanted to call it that. A fissured, wizened sort of face with a triangular arrangement of close-set eyes, each pink as strawberry milk, glistening and oozing with mucus… all three of them. And each about the size of a tennis ball. But those eyes, they soon saw, were not pink. Not really. There was only a membrane of pink skin over them. Like drapes opening, the membranes pulled away in tandem, slitting open in the center and revealing eyes that were red as rubies. The membranes did not pull back all the way… just enough so that the eyes looked pink with a luminous and jellied red slit in them.

And those eyes… they sucked the spirit right out of you.

What was to be done?

What really was to be done?

They watched it and it watched them, checkmate.

There was a pair of short, powerful-looking tentacles at its mouth. One to either side like they might have been used in feeding. They were a bright, cobalt blue with pink undersides, tiny razored suckers set into them. The creature stood there, rubbing those tentacles together with a slippery sound like a man stroking his chin, thinking what to do, what to do.

George watched it, noticing now that it was making a sort of shallow, gasping sound and as it did so, those tubes on its underside inflated, then deflated. Sure, it was breathing. That’s what those things were. Aspirators of some type. Probably not anything like human lungs at all, but more like the book lungs of a spider or maybe the gills of a fish. Organs of respiration that separated breathable gases from the toxic ones. And in this place, George knew, that could have been oxygen… but with all the rotting weed out there, it could have been methane, too. Maybe a little of both with some nitrogen mixed in.

Nobody had made any threatening moves on it yet and it had not done a thing to provoke any. But it was coming. If not from the thing itself, then from the people gathered there. You could almost smell it in the air: a hot, seething intolerance for this creature. And you could see it on the faces of those gathered there: an atavistic, marrow-deep race hatred that was involuntary and automatic. This thing did not belong. It was spidery and evil and obscene. It was offensive to the human condition. You wanted to crush it. To kick it. To stomp it. It was an abomination that disgusted you in ways you could not comprehend… so it had to die. It had to be purged. It was simply too different to be allowed to live.

No, none of them were truly aware at a conscious level of what they were truly feeling, but it was there. A race memory, an inherited predisposition that was acid in their bellies and electricity in their veins. That communal need to destroy, to kill, to rend for the good of the tribe. Slay the beast, kill the monster, protect the hive…

And everyone was suddenly very aware of the weapons in their white-knuckled fists, how their muscles bunched and their nerve endings jangled. Those weapons needed to be put to use.

“Let’s kill it,” Saks said and you had to expect it to come from him first. “Ugly cock-sucker, let’s put it down.”

And everyone there seemed more than willing to let that happen. They were like the same animal with the same bones and claws and teeth. The same wide, predatory eyes.

But Cushing said, “Now take it easy. Just take it easy. It… it must be intelligent. To build something like that.”

Menhaus felt his mouth begin to speak: “You… you know what it is, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Saks said, his voice hollow-sounding.

“That flying saucer… that ship in the weeds… that’s where it came from.”

Cushing didn’t even bother inquiring about that one, he just said, “It’s smarter than we are… it might be able to help us, to get us out of here…”

George just stood there, feeling numb and stupid. His body was thick and ungainly like he was stuffed with wet rags or had been shot up with Thorazine. If the thing had moved suddenly, he knew, it would have had him. There was just no way he could have hoped to evade it. Maybe this was from fear and maybe it was the result of that thing looking at him and into him. And he wondered if that wasn’t it… because with those alien eyes burning into his head like arc lights, he had a mad desire to draw a razor over his wrists.

Those eyes were bad.

Nothing on earth had eyes like that.

Glaring and hateful and insectile. And this was only accentuated by its mouth which was little more than an oval, puckered hole set off to the side… like the mouth of an old man without his teeth in. The total effect was that of a wicked, evil alien face.

It stood there, watching them, not directly threatening, but infinitely repulsive. Maybe it was intelligent, but it had no right to be so. Not in the thinking of anyone looking at it. The idea of this slinking nightmare being intelligent was like the idea of an intellectual spider or centipede… appalling.

Fabrini took a step towards that weird machine and the thing tensed. Those tubes running down its belly shuddered. Something like black saliva ran from them and when it struck the deck plating, it sizzled like butter on a hot griddle.

“I don’t recommend pissing it off,” Cushing said.

George had to stay his hand now from bringing up that. 45 and putting a few rounds into it. Maybe more than a few.

Yes, he was thinking, it is intelligent. You can see that. But it’s the wrong kind of intelligence. It’s not our kind, but a profane, blasphemous sort of intelligence. Cold and cruel and arrogant. Looking at it, he was struck by its unflinching superiority, its… arrogance. Because, yes, it was arrogant. You could see that. It hated them. It hated them with the warped, inborn bigotry and aversion that its entire race felt for lower orders of life.

“We should try communicating with it,” Cushing said. “So it can understand we mean it no harm.”

And George almost burst out in hysterical laughter. Cushing suddenly reminded him of that dumb scientist in The Thing from Another World, the old 1950s sci-fi/horror flick. The one that tries to reason with the hulking, blood-sucking vegetable man from Mars and gets swatted aside by the bastard for his trouble. This scenario was too much like that. Mean it no harm? That was a good one, because George did want to harm it and he knew that, if there weren’t so many of his kind around, that hideous Martian or whatever in the fuck it was, would have killed him without a second thought.

Because George was getting a strong vibe from this thing.

Looking at that pissed-off face and those glaring, hating eyes, he was understanding this creature. Yes, it was intelligent and methodical… but so was a cruel little boy who pulled the wings off of flies and lit the tails of cats on fire. The intelligence of this thing was like that — tyrannical, sadistic, and maybe more than a little fanatical. That’s why it had started when Fabrini took a step too close to its machine. Because it had built it and inferior things like men had no right to touch it. Men were nothing but mice to it, shit-eating apes that belonged in cages with dirty straw. Something to be gawked at or laughed over, but certainly not equals. So don’t be touching my machine, you stupid rutting ape.

“So, go ahead, Cushing,” Saks said, badly wanting to hack the thing to bits, “try talking to that fucking puke. Go ahead. Take us to your leader, you ugly shit.”

Cushing opened his mouth, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

It always looked real easy in those old movies, but the reality of such a situation was a little different. This thing was such an angry, grotesque creature that talking to it, trying to reason with it would have been like trying to reason with a spider when you were caught in its web. Don’t sink your fangs in me, okay? Don’t suck my blood out and cocoon me up… can we agree on that?

Yeah, it was ridiculous, George knew.

Maybe this thing had harnessed the power of the stars and the secrets of life and death, but there was no hope of communicating with it. Yes, its intellect was vastly superior, but cold and unreasoning. It had a mindless, stupid hatred for any but its own kind. You couldn’t barter with such a creature. It got its hands… or tentacles… on you, most you could hope for was to be dropped into a jar of preservative and labeled or maybe dissected alive. And if it was in a particularly dark mood — it was — then maybe it would yank out your nerve ganglia and prod it with a knife, study your agony with an icy, alien detachment.

Fabrini said, “Fuck this. Let’s get out of here. I can’t handle that prick looking at me like that… looks like it wants to suck my eyeballs out of my head.”

And George was thinking, why don’t we just get it over with? We’re going to kill it and we know it, so let’s just do it already.

“Let’s just go,” Elizabeth said, the last sane voice to be heard.

For now the men were moving. Slowly, but moving all the same. And the thing was aware of it, but maybe uncertain as to what to do about it. The men were forming sort of a loose ring around it and its machine. A nauseating, sour stench came off of it and George wondered if it was afraid. If it sensed what was about to happen. It must have felt like a modern man being ringed in by Pliocene apes. So vastly far above them, yet no match for their numbers and brute strength.

It started to move with a writhing, fluid motion. Wiry muscle flexing with a smooth, serpentine grace under that rubbery flesh that was seamed and sinewy like old pine bark or driftwood. Those tubes on its belly began to undulate, pissing more of that black juice to the deck where it steamed and sizzled. The tentacles at its mouth drew back and apart like the pincers of an ant. And its face… dear God, that wrinkled, bony face positively leered. The membranes of the eyes pulled completely back, exposing the glistening red jewels of those eyes themselves.

And nobody seeing those eyes in their multi-lensed, scarlet glory had ever seen such raw, blistering hatred before.

Nothing in the universe… or out of it… could hate like this monstrosity.

The mouth distorted into a shriveled ovoid like it wanted to scream and those eyes, they narrowed in their sockets, filled with a deranged wrath. If such a thing could go insane with rage, it was pretty damn close.

Pollard was the one who started it.

He didn’t mean to. He stepped to the side, maybe trying to get away from that monster and almost tripped over the alien machine. He stumbled, knocked it aside… surprised at how very light it was… and found his feet again. And you could see the thing’s anger consume it like lye. Hot and bubbling and lunatic. The tentacles it had for fingers began to coil and writhe, those tubes on its underside shuddered and the thing began to make noise. It had been silent thus far… but now it began to make a sibilant, hissing sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss sort of sound like that of a rattlesnake preparing to strike. The crazy thing was that the sounds came not from its mouth, but from those tubes that spit acid and sucked air.

Saks said: “Watch it-”

But that’s all he got out, because the thing moved. Jumped, slithered, something. It moved in too many directions at the same time and its blue flesh seemed almost plastic and oozing. Nobody noticed in the midst of this that the alien had something like a small cylinder of golden metal in one of its tentacle-hands. By the time it brought it up, it was too late to do anything.

It aimed it right at Pollard.

It was a weapon. What came out of it was not a laser beam like on TV, but a sparking cloud of pale green gas that hit Pollard in a wet mist. He froze-up solid and… and in the space of a second or two, his flesh went liquid like hot wax and melted from the bones below. And this almost before he had time to fall over and die. He collapsed in a fleshy, steaming blur and George caught one insane glimpse of his face running from the skull beneath like tallow down a candle stem, his left eye sliding down his chin. Pollard hit the deck like a Halloween skeleton with clipped strings. He folded up in a bony, smoking, bubbling mass.

And George started shooting.

He put three rounds into the thing and it screamed with a high, keening sound, those tubes standing erect for just a moment. It slumped over, pulled itself up, and Elizabeth tossed her machete at it. It struck the arm that held the golden cylinder and with such force it nearly severed it. The cylinder hit the floor. The thing crab-crawled around, like some half-crushed spider, watery green blood spurting from the holes in its hide, its shattered arm, gouts of it pissing across the floor like lime Kool-Aid… and the crazy thing was, it had about the same consistency.

And it stank… Jesus, stank like spilled bleach.

The men closed in from all sides with their weapons, moving now purely on automatic for it was time to slay the beast, this alien defiler, this absolute violation of all that they knew. Bleeding and damaged, the creature knew it, too. It looked upon them with absolute hostility, those bright red eyes narrowed and hating. Maybe there was horror there, too, or disgust at the sight of those animals that hemmed it in… those four-limbed, two-eyed, pink-skinned monstrosities. To it, they were a crawling pestilence that needed to be stepped on, purged. Vile, idiot things with their crude weapons and simple nervous systems. Yes, maybe there was disgust there, but more than that there was simply hatred and rage that these pale apes would dare kill it.

And that’s what George was seeing as he leveled the. 45 at it again: a cheated fury. For it was a master of time and space and all other life forms were its slaves. Yes, the alien looked on him, scarlet eyes smoldering like electrodes, and George felt his mind boiling to mist. It was so easy for this thing to dominate and crush a single human mind. Maybe even two or three. And it wanted George to know this, wanted him maybe to understand what waited for men at the dark rim of the universe.

Cushing saw what that monster was doing to George. Maybe they all saw it. Saw how that awful thing was sucking his mind dry. Cushing, however, did not wait for completion. He swung his axe at the thing, bringing it right down on the crown of its skull, slicing through those blue-black writhing tentacles and splitting open the top of its head. The axe did the job neatly… but upon impact, there was a flash and Cushing was knocked senseless on his ass, the axe still buried in its head. The thing let go with a shrill, grating, oddly metallic scream that was pure rage and agony. It sounded like the starter of a car whirring or iron placed against a grinding wheel.. . sharp, piercing, deafening.

Everyone fell away from it as it thrashed and whipped and leaped, more of that green juice spilling from its cloven skull along with a brownish sort of slime. The axe was still in there, the handle hot and smoking now. Saks didn’t get out of its way quick enough and one of its tentacles… because they were not arms as such, but coiling tentacles… lashed out at him, catching him across the knee and he cried out, fell right over. That tentacle had burned right through his pants to the kneecap below.

George put three more bullets into its head, splattering goo and green steaming blood against the bulkheads as the thing twisted in upon itself, screeching and thrashing and whipping, corkscrewing over the deckplates like it had no bones… squirming like a salted slug and worming like a leech, then dying, dying with a bellowing, cacophonous scream of violence, frenzy, and absolute dementia. The sound echoed through that steel-plated room and dropped more than one of the thing’s attackers to the floor, sick and vomiting from that overwhelming sonic intrusion.

Ten minutes later, there was nothing but the stink of the thing and the survivors standing there looking down at the remains of Pollard and the corpse of the alien. It was just as ugly dead as alive. It was still steaming and smoking. Its flesh was decomposing fast, seemed to be liquefying. Its eyes had filmed yellowed, fallen back in its skull and it seemed to be decompressing, collapsing, fragmenting. The green blood had pooled around it now, its body creaking and cracking, limbs falling free, tentacles curling up like dead snakes. Everything about it was hissing and bubbling.

If it had a soul, they decided, then it must have been a black and cancerous one.

“Pollard,” Menhaus kept saying. “Oh, Jesus, look at him… oh shit.”

There didn’t seem much to say about it. Pollard was dead. He had died very quickly, but also quite horribly.

“I’ll send flowers,” Saks said with his usual compassion.

Menhaus glared at him. “How can you be… you’re an asshole, Saks. That’s all you are. Just an asshole.”

“Have I ever denied it?”

The palms of Cushing’s hands were badly burned. “When I hit it with the axe… Christ, it was like swinging an axe into a live two-twenty line. Knocked me right on my ass. It must’ve… I guess the thing must’ve carried an electrical charge to it like an eel.”

Saks’s knee was burned, but it wasn’t bad. “Ugly cocksucker,” he said. “Looks like Fabrini’s mother. Smells like her, too.”

“Fuck you-”

“Look,” George said. “Look at that…”

Everyone was numb and senseless in the aftermath. Elizabeth was bandaging Cushing’s hands and fawning over him. Nobody seemed particularly interested in looking at what George was seeing, but they did, all with that same oh-God-what-now look on their faces.

The hindquarters of the alien were shaking. Quivering. The tripod of its snaking legs were trembling. There was a wet, sloshing sound and a puddle of green-gray jelly spread out behind the thing. There seemed to be bubbles, bubbles about the size of softballs trapped in that flux of jelly.

“What… what the hell is that?” Menhaus said. “Those things, like…”

But they could see what they were like and what they were. All those bubbles were connected by a network of tissue. Not bubbles, but sacs or membranes of transparent, pink skin and inside each one…

“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said in a squeaky voice. “Pregnant, it was pregnant, pregnant…”

It was. Birth sacs. A dozen oval birth sacs with grayish-looking fetuses veined with blue. And the worst part, the very worst part is that those fetuses were not dead. They were wriggling and slithering, all those tiny unformed limbs moving and trembling.

Saks got to his feet, hobbled over there. “Ugly little bastards,” he said.

He took up a gaff and began squishing them. Ripping open the sacs and smashing what was inside. Elizabeth made a disgusted sound and turned away, as did the others. Saks didn’t stop until he was done, going at it like a little boy smashing earthworms after a rain. One of the fetuses splashed out of its sac and undulated sickly at the toe of Saks’s boot.

He stepped on it.

George let go with an involuntary shudder at the sound… like stepping on a ripe, watery peach.

“So much for higher fucking intelligence,” Saks said.

21

“It was intelligent, you know,” Cushing said five minutes later. “That creature… it was smart. It was intelligent and we killed it, killed its young.”

“We were defending ourselves,” Menhaus said, still shaken by the sight of those squirming alien fetuses. “What else could we do?”

“Nothing.” Cushing shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

Saks said, “You wanna feel sorry for it, Cushing, then take a look at Pollard there. Take a good look.”

Menhaus clenched his teeth.

“I’m just saying that it was intelligent. That’s all,” Cushing pointed out.

George said, “I didn’t like the idea of killing it either. I don’t think any of us did, but it wasn’t exactly friendly. You saw that face

…Jesus, I’ve never seen such absolute hatred before. Those eyes could burn holes through concrete.”

“We should get back,” Elizabeth said.

Saks ignored her. “We saw its ship. Part of it sticking up out of the weed… looked like a flying saucer. Course, Menhaus thought it was a hovercraft.”

Fabrini chuckled under his breath. But it was not a happy sound.

“Bullshit,” Menhaus said. “I said it looked like a hovercraft. That’s all I said.”

But Elizabeth didn’t seem to care. “Please, let’s just go… I’m sick of looking at it.”

“But something that intelligent… just imagine the things it knew,” Cushing said.

Saks laughed. “There you go again. If it was so fucking smart, how did it get trapped here like us? You wanna tell me that, Einstein?”

Cushing shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was just an accident. Maybe something happened to its ship. That thing… a ship like you say, probably had the power to jump from star to star. Maybe it opened a wormhole into this place and something went wrong.”

Fabrini was crouched down, elbows on knees, studying the machine the creature had built. “What about this?”

Cushing stood up. He studied it carefully. “I think… I think it might be a teleporter. A teleportation device. A sort of machine that might be quite common where that thing came from, but is thousands of years beyond us.”

“You lost me,” Menhaus said. “What does it do?”

Cushing gave him his best guess. The alien was trapped here, in Dimension X, and its ship was damaged, so it decided to tunnel its way back out. It made the teleporter — if that’s what it was at all, he freely admitted — to punch a hole back through time/space to its own dimension, its own world.

“It might have had this on the ship,” he said. “Sort of like we carry liferafts, they carry something a little more sophisticated. But, Christ, this is a really wild guess on my part. It could be just about anything. Maybe some kind of communications device. Who really knows?”

Again, more randy speculation on his part. He told them it might have chosen this freighter because of the radioactive waste in the barrels. Maybe it was tapping that, charging its machine with atomic power.

“Hell, this contraption might run on cold fusion… the mechanics of the stars themselves. If it is a teleporter, though, then the mathematics and physics behind this thing are probably ten-thousand years beyond us. It boggles the imagination.”

George said, “I read Greenberg’s letter… he seemed to think there were wormholes everywhere. Maybe this thing just opens them?”

Menhaus was kneeling next to it. “Christ, there’s no buttons or levers or readouts. Nothing. How the hell do you turn it on?”

“Good question,” Cushing said.

Menhaus was checking out those mirrors at either end. They didn’t look much like mirrors really. There didn’t seem to be any glass in them or anything else for that matter. But there was something there… some see-through type of material like a shiny veil. He touched the front mirror with his hand, felt a tingling sensation. Shrugging, he thrust his hand in and… it disappeared. Well, not really. His hand was stuck in that mirror up to the knuckles, only his fingers didn’t come out the other side, they came out of the other mirror, from the back end.

Menhaus gasped, pulled his hand out. It was fine.

“Do it again,” Saks told him.

Licking his lips, he put his hand up to the knuckles again. His fingers wiggled from the rear of the other mirror. Separated by nearly six feet of space, yet whole, connected, alive.

“I think you’re sticking your hand into the fourth dimension,” Cushing told him, very excited now. “The usual rules of space and distance don’t apply.”

“That’s freaking me out,” Fabrini said. “You stick your hand in the front… it comes out the back? That’s some weird shit.”

“Does it hurt?” Elizabeth asked Menhaus.

Menhaus shook his head. “It feels kind of cold in there, tingly, but nothing beyond that.”

“Pull your hand out,” Cushing warned him. “If that thing cuts out

…well, your fingers might fall off on the other end.”

Menhaus yanked his hand back out.

Saks was kneeling next to him. He touched the scope-like projection on top and his fingers sparked. “Static electricity,” he said. He placed his hand on it. “Yeah… the whole goddamn thing is crawling with static electricity…”

Saks pulled his hand away and the machine began to hum. Quietly at first, then louder.

“I don’t think we should fool with this,” Elizabeth said.

But it was too late. Saks touching it had activated something. The humming rose up to a whining and the air around them crackled again with building energy. There was that smell of burnt ozone again, electricity and melted wiring. That narrow beam of white light came out of the back of the scope, struck the rear mirror and made it glow. The glow was reflected and broken into prisms of light that struck the front mirror or lens, were amplified into that blue beam of illumination that hit the bulkhead like a spotlight. There seemed to be millions of tiny dots dancing in the beam like bubbles in beer. Right away, buzzing with that blue light, the bulkhead looked insubstantial.

George was just in awe.

That blue glow on the bulkhead looked like the static on a TV screen, but busy and thrumming and alive. Like a blizzard or something. Looked like you could get lost in there and he had a funny feeling that you probably could at that.

“Don’t touch that beam,” Cushing told them. “You don’t know what might happen.”

George said, “We could use this thing, you know? Greenberg said that if you could find the spot where you first came into… into Dimension X, that it might open back up for you sooner or later. Maybe this thing is the key that could open it whenever we wanted it to.”

“Or maybe it would suck you into an alien world,” Cushing said.

Saks put his hand in the beam. “Kind of cold,” he said. “Funny.. . feels like something’s crawling all over my hand.”

“Be careful,” George told him, maybe secretly hoping that idiot would get sucked through and spit out on the sterile plains of Altair-4.

Cushing watched the beam, the dancing flecks of matter or energy in it. “Probably some sort of ionized field. Electrified gas or something. I wouldn’t leave your hand in there too long. Not if you value it.”

“Yeah,” Fabrini said. “You lose a hand, Saks, there goes half your sex life.”

Cushing was studying the machine closely. “That disk underneath could be sort of a generator, I suppose. That scope could be an accelerator. It directs a stream of particles at that rear mirror where something happens to them. Then they’re reflected to the forward lens and that blue light must tear open time/space. Jesus, the minds that must have conceived of such a thing.”

Fabrini was over near the bulkhead now. Before Cushing could tell him not to, he pressed his hand into the blue glow there. His hand went right through it. There was no wall there, just empty space.

“Careful,” George told him. “You read what Greenberg said. If that’s a wormhole, it could come out just about anywhere.”

“Yeah, and maybe back on home sweet home.”

“C’mon,” George said. “You really think that alien opened up a portal into our world? Why would it… she do that?”

Fabrini didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He was not a scientific type by nature or inclination. A lot of what Cushing told him was pretty much indecipherable. Too much theory, not enough fact. All he knew was that the teleporter was maybe a way out and he told them all that.

“No fucking way,” George said. “You’re not going through there.. . you know what the chances are of coming out anywhere?”

“He’s right, Fabrini,” Cushing said. “That alien was working on this thing. Elizabeth says she saw that glow for the past few days. Maybe it was fine-tuning this or something. You just can’t step through there. You could end up just about anywhere… on some planet a million light years from earth or somewhere with a poisonous atmosphere. Shit, your atoms might get scattered like rice at a wedding. You really want to take that chance?”

He smiled. “Damn straight.”

Saks started laughing. “You got to hand it to Fabrini. He ain’t much in the smarts department, but he’s got some serious balls.”

That was about as close to a compliment as Fabrini had ever gotten from Saks and he practically beamed.

Menhaus kept shaking his head. “You can’t, Fabrini. Listen to what Cushing is saying, it’s death in there. Don’t do it, okay?” He went over to Fabrini, laid his hands on his arms. “C’mon, please don’t do this. I don’t want to lose you.”

Fabrini was touched. He patted Menhaus on the back. “Don’t worry, Olly. I’ll be okay. I’m fucking Italian here. We got a great sense of self-preservation, us Italians.”

“Yeah, tell that to Mussolini,” George said.

But that went over his head like a high-flying bird. “I’m going through,” he said defiantly. “If I don’t come back, it’s my own stupid fault. But I’m telling you right now, all of you right now, that I’ve had it right up to here with this bullshit. This sitting around. This waiting. This hoping something don’t chew up our asses so we can make it maybe one more shitty day and find a way out. I can’t handle any more of that. Way I see it, it’s time for action and that’s that. Time to take a chance.”

George didn’t bother arguing: his mind was made up. That much was obvious. But what he was thinking was, Fabrini, you stupid shit! Quit flexing your dick already, that testosterone is going to kill you. This isn’t about who’s got the biggest balls, it’s about using your fucking brain and staying alive.

And, yeah, that’s exactly what he was thinking.

But he didn’t say it and he wished later that he had.

“He wants to go,” Saks said. “Let him go. Guy’s got nuts on him. Can’t say that for the rest of you pussies.”

That was it, then.

Fabrini was going.

Cushing said, “All right, all right. But at least let us tie a rope to you or something. Shit hits the fan, we can yank you back out.” That was what he said and it seemed perfectly reasonable, but there was doubt in his eyes. Bad doubt.

“There’s rope upstairs,” Saks said. “I saw it on our way down.”

“Get it,” Fabrini said.

Saks and Menhaus grabbed a lantern and went topside. They came back two minutes later with two coils of rope. Each had a hundred feet of line on them. They knotted the two ends together, figuring two-hundred feet would be plenty for Fabrini to see what was on the other side. Then they looped another end around his waist. Saks tied the knots. Square-knots strong enough to tow a car with.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” Elizabeth said, “to reconsider. Please, please don’t do this.”

Fabrini was unmoved and she turned away and stood in the doorway, her back to what she was certain was calculated madness.

“Just go in gradually,” Cushing said. “An arm or leg first, then just a peek. And hold your breath when you look in there. You inhale a lungful of ammonia or methane, not much we can do for you. Just go in easy.”

They tied the other end of the rope off to an iron bench across the room that was bolted to the floor. It would have taken a couple bull elephants to yank it free. Fabrini stood near the glowing blue wall, looking pale and tense. Maybe he wanted then to turn back, maybe he wanted to do the sensible thing, but his manhood was at stake now. He couldn’t back down, not in front of Saks.

“Good luck, Fabrini,” Saks said.

And George raised an eyebrow. There was something he didn’t like there. Saks was too… what? Too anxious? Too eager? Definitely, too something. Like he knew what was about to happen, had been waiting for it, and was about to see it all come together. If George had to put a name to that smarmy little smile on his face he would have said, contented.

That sonofabitch is up to something, George found himself thinking. He’s up to no fucking good.

George looked over at Cushing and Cushing seemed to be thinking something along those lines, too.

“Listen,” he said to Fabrini. “You back out, nobody’s gonna think less of you. This isn’t worth the risk. Just stay here. We’ll go up to that ship and-”

“Ah, don’t let em dick you around,” Saks said. “They don’t have any guts, Fabrini. Not like you. You’re the only real man here.”

“Take up that rope,” Fabrini said. “Play it out slow.”

He turned to that glowing blue field.

George heard something like cymbals crash in his head. His heart skipped a beat and the flesh at the back of his neck got very, very tight.

Fabrini stepped into the beam. He instantly looked liked he’d been dyed blue, those particles in there making him look like a man in a sandstorm. “Funny,” he said, his voice oddly muffled by the energy flow. “Yeah… like it’s crawling all over you.” He was running his fingers through it and those effervescing particles cycled around him in a sort of loose helix like bubbles in a glass of champagne. “Weird

…feels like I’m in a storm of tiny snowflakes or something. They kind of tickle.”

“Do you feel all right?” Cushing asked him. “Not dizzy or nauseous or anything?”

He shook his head in the flow and his movements were jerky like he was caught in a strobe light. Flickering, irregular, not a solid and smooth motion like a person in normal space.

Fabrini stepped forward, put his hand through and pulled back out. “Feels okay, I guess. Kind of chilly or thick or something.”

Saks was standing just outside the flow, a few feet away from him.

George and Menhaus had taken up the rope. Were gripping it very tightly like they were hanging on for dear life. Except it wasn’t their life that they were worried about.

Fabrini put both arms through the field and just stood there, maybe waiting for something to happen. But there was nothing. He turned his head to look at them with that same jerking, surreal animation like a TV cartoon with every other frame cut out. “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Cushing was standing there, breathing very hard. His hands bunching in and out of fists, the knuckles popping white as moons. Under his breath, he said, “That flow cuts out, it cuts out and he’ll be trapped in that bulkhead, he’ll become part of it…”

George heard him, some crazy picture in his mind of the teleporter clicking off like a light switch and Fabrini trapped there, his atoms mixed with those of the bulkhead, arms stuck in one side of the wall and out the other.

Fabrini stuck his face through and kept it there for a few moments. “It’s dark on the other side… real dark… but I think I see some lights in the distance.”

“Go easy with it,” Cushing said between clenched teeth.

Fabrini nodded, stepped through that blue and thrumming field. He created black, ghostly ripples as he broached it. Then he was gone and they waited for him to say something, but there was only silence. Yet, he was there, somewhere… both George and Menhaus could feel the tension on the rope.

“Why doesn’t he say something?” Menhaus said, sounding alarmed.

“Sound… sound might not carry through the field,” Cushing said.

Then, out of the field, Fabrini’s voice: “I’m… all right, all right.” But that voice was odd and wavering, tinny like it was coming through a distant transistor radio and not a very good one. His words were drawn out, then compressed, echoing with an unearthly and spectral sound. “… okay… I… it’s dark… I can see the dark… lights ahead, funny lights and… and… weird… weird shapes… blobs and bubbles… no they’re square or triangles… no they’re blobs… crystals, building crystals blowing and shining and what’s that? The rope is cut! The rope is cut! I can’t see it!”

“We have the rope!” George called out. “We can feel you on it!”

That voice again, echoing, splintering, bouncing around like a ball. “No… it’s okay okay… the rope it ends just a few feet from me like… like it’s broken… then it starts up again above me or below me… I can’t be sure,” he called back to them. His voice sounded fragile, like it was shattering and full of static. As if the sound waves were vibrating madly, flying apart. “I… my hands… they’re wrong… my thumbs are on the wrong side… I can’t see my feet… I don’t have any feet… my thumbs are coming out of my palms… where is my body… where.. “

“Pull him out,” Cushing said frantically. “Pull him the hell out of there!”

George and Menhaus yanked on the line, but it would not come. It felt like it was tied off to a slab of concrete. Saks took hold of it and so did Cushing, burned and bandaged hands or not. But the rope was stuck. They pulled and tugged until sweat ran down their faces.

“Fabrini!” Cushing cried out. “Fabrini? Can you hear me? Can you feel the rope in your hands? Follow the rope back through…”

“Rope… rope… rope… it’s stuck through me… I have too many legs, too many legs… what is that… that pale green face… no not a face… a cube… a living cube and a worm and a face of crystal… a million crawling bubbles… get me out of here! White faces without bodies… without eyes… don’t let them touch me… don’t let them touch me! GET ME OUT OF

HERE!”

Again, they yanked on the rope, everyone shouting and panicked and just utterly beside themselves. But the rope was not budging. It was hooked to something or around something and George doubted that even a bulldozer could have pulled it free.

“C’mon!” Menhaus shouted. “Pull! Pull! We gotta get him out of there!”

“It’s no good,” Saks said, panting.

George and Cushing gave the rope a final tug. It went limp in their hands, then taut, then limp again. It began to flop first this way, then that as if they had landed the mother of all trout. The field began to shimmer and then they could feel Fabrini’s weight on the other end again, he was screaming now, screaming something about “inside-out faces melting into hungry bubbles.” They gave the rope a good yank and Fabrini came through for just a moment, part of him did anyway.

But it wasn’t right, whatever was on the other side, whatever void or dimension or fractal between, had changed him, mixed-up his atoms maybe. They saw his back and his neck and the gold chain he always wore around his throat lit up like it was electrified. But there didn’t seem to be a head on top of his neck and his left arm was detached, floating above his head. His right arm was connected, but instead of the arm facing forward at the crook of his elbow, it was facing backward like it had been put back on wrong. And the rope…

The rope was not looped around him, it had passed right through his back and out the other side.

And he was screaming. God, yes, he was screaming with what sounded like a hundred spectral voices just out of sync with one another.

Elizabeth screamed and so did George.

Then Fabrini was pulled back into whereever he had been, but his left arm was still disembodied and it was alive, working, not bleeding or damaged in any way. Like when Menhaus had passed his hand into the mirror and his fingers came out of the other mirror. It was like that. Somehow, some way, through some obscene perversion of matter, that arm was still connected. Everyone watched it. It was gripping something and pulling itself along it.

“The rope,” George said. “The rope… it’s pulling itself along the rope…”

Then it, too, was gone.

Fabrini was just shrieking on the other side and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it.

The rope came alive in their hands again. Something on the other side took it and with such force, it nearly pulled George and Menhaus right into the flow, too. The rope burned through their palms, whipping and snapping, jerking to the left, the right. Up, then down. Then it dropped slack in the flow, but did not fall, as if it was caught in some unbelievable stasis of antigravity. It just floated like a length of hose floating on the surface of a river.

George and the others just stood there.

Menhaus’ jaw was hanging open, his eyes wide and unblinking.

Saks just stepped back and away from the flow.

Then George found himself and reached in there, took hold of the rope and it was so very cold it burned his hands. He squealed like he had been scalded, but yanked the rope out. Cushing took hold of it where it wasn’t in the flow and Menhaus joined him. They pulled and the rope came out of the field easily.

And so did Fabrini.

He stumbled out of the flow… except he didn’t stumble, he drifted. Like a balloon he drifted out of the flow. He was seized up tight, arms at his sides, frozen stiff as meat in a freezer. His face was locked in some frightening, inanimate cataleptic sort of stupor like Bela Lugosi’s trademark catatonic stare.

That’s when George noticed — as they all did — that Fabrini was transparent. They could see right through him. It wasn’t Fabrini, not really, but more like a reflection of Fabrini. Like he had been replaced by this empyreal, extradimensional wraith.

Menhaus muttered something under his breath and reached out, touched Fabrini. He instantly cried out, his fingers frostbitten as if he’d touched dry ice. Where his fingertips had made contact, Fabrini’s image fluttered, trembled, then began to dissolve and was suddenly not there at all. The rope shuddered in midair, looped around nothing that anyone could see. Then it fell limply to the floor.

Menhaus made a choking, gagging sound, trying to catch his breath. “He was solid, but he was gas… he was solid… I could feel him… but cold, so very cold…”

And then, from the other side of the field, they could hear Fabrini crying out for help. No, he was not just crying, but screaming, begging, pleading to be pulled out of there. Just shrieking his mind away and it was almost too much for anyone standing there. Even Saks looked like he was about to faint.

Cushing, knowing full well the futility of it all, took up a gaff and waded right into the flow, Elizabeth shouting at him to get out of there. He reached through the buzzing blue field with it, reaching around in there for something, anything. But the gaff wasn’t long enough to grab anything if there was indeed anything to grab.

Menhaus took up the rope, cut the loop off it. Then he unscrewed the hook off the end of one of the gaffs and tied it firmly on there. He stepped into the flow with it and, whipping it around over his head like a cowboy about to rope a stray doggie, he tossed it through the field. Then pulled it back. Tossed it and pulled it back. Kept doing it.

“He’s gone,” Saks said.

And he was… yet he wasn’t. You could still hear him from time to time screaming out there for help. That voice would get so loud it would pull your guts out, then so quiet it was like a cry for help coming from a house several streets away in the dead of night.

And George thought: It’s like they’re dragging a river for a corpse.

And that’s exactly what they were doing.

Cushing stayed in the flow with Menhaus and they took turns. Kept at it for maybe ten minutes until they caught a hold of something. They looked at each other with jerky motions in the flow. Whatever they had, they were reeling it in. They stepped from the flow and George helped them land it.

“Maybe… maybe you guys better not do that,” Saks said.

And he was probably right.

But they kept pulling until they dragged something through the field and out of the flow, something like a pile of dusty, filthy rags.

“Jesus,” Menhaus said, turning away.

It was Fabrini.

Or what was left of Fabrini.

Something shriveled and desiccated, dusty and shrunken like a mummy pulled from an Egyptian tomb. That’s what they were seeing. It was a man, but petrified like prehistoric wood. His flesh had gone to a wrinkled, parched leather, seamed and fissured and ancient. Two spidery hands were held out before the face in brown skeletal claws as if to ward off a blow. And the face… distorted, grotesque, almost clownish in its gruesome exaggeration. It no longer had eyes, just blackened hollows that were wide and shocked. The mouth was open as if frozen in a contorted scream… the left side of it pulled up nearly to the corner of the left eye like maybe that cadaverous face had been soft putty that was molded into a fright mask to scare the kiddies with.

Truth was, it scared everyone that looked at it.

But they kept looking and kept seeing it and kept feeling the absolute, almost cosmic horror of Fabrini’s degeneration. That grinning mouth of peg-teeth… gray, crumbling teeth like old headstones; the body that was more rags and bones and worm-holed oak than man; those eyes which were just hollow, mocking pits like maybe Fabrini had clawed his own eyes out rather than look at what and who was around him. Yeah, they kept looking and the reality, the truth of this particular nightmare covered them, drowned them, invaded secret places and defiled their very souls. For what they saw and what they knew, it had… weight. The sort of weight that would crush them, squeeze the pulp right out of them.

About then, they turned away.

Cushing was trying hard not to cry, not to rage, not to turn on one of them… maybe Saks, probably Saks… and take it out on them. George was feeling the same thing: like a dozen uncontainable emotions had suddenly burst in him like a shower of black sparks, and he was burning, just burning up inside, the heat turning his mind to sauce.

And they all had to wonder what awful set of circumstances could have mummified Fabrini like that and what… dear God… what had he looked upon to wrench and warp and buckle his face like that? To turn that handsome, swarthy face of his to something like a twisted tribal fetish mask carved from deadwood?

“No, no, no,” Menhaus was saying. “That ain’t Fabrini. No fucking way that’s Fabrini… this, this thing it’s been dead longer than Christ…”

“It’s him, all right,” Saks said.

And there really was no doubt of that.

Because they could see the tarnished chain around its neck that had once been gold and knew that this collection of rags and threadbare hides was Fabrini. But to look at him, at that scarecrow body and grisly deathmask, you could not get past the fact that he looked like he had been physically dead thousands of years like that Neolithic iceman pulled out of the Swiss Alps.

Physically dead… yet his voice raged on beyond the ionized field. Discorporeal, insane, and bleak, yet pathetically aware and alive. A disembodied voice screaming its sanity away in a buzzing, silent blizzard of nothingness: “Help me… help me… help me… oh dear God somebody please help me help me-”

Saks went over to the alien machine and kicked it. It made a popping, crackling sound and the flow instantly cut out. The generator fading to a low hum and then nothing at all.

And George was trying to pull his mind together, trying to hold it tight in his fist before it flew apart into fragments. He was not a physicist, but he understood enough of Greenberg’s theories now to formulate one of his own. Fabrini had jumped into some dimension where time was not what it was here. In that terrible place, time was subverted, bent, blown all out of sane proportions. Fabrini had died over there. Starved to death or suffocated, an insane and gibbering thing thousands of years before. Yet his mind had not died. His consciousness did not particulate and dissolve. It was eternal and aware. While minutes passed here, thousands of years passed there in a place where time had no true meaning. Imagine that, George thought, alone in that void for countless millennia with nothing but crawling alien geometries for company, things that could not probably even see you or know you were there. Alone, alone, alone… alone with the barren geography of your own mind for ten thousand years or a million. Jesus.

And Fabrini would always be alive in that black, godless dimension.

A stream of atoms forever drifting and dissipating, but alive and aware and insane beyond any insanity ever known or conceived of. A tormented consciousness fading into eternity, alone, always alone, undying.

Nobody said anything for a time.

Nobody could say anything.

At least Saks had had the sense to turn that awful machine off so they didn’t have to listen to Fabrini, to the blasphemy of his endless, bodiless agony. A tactile creature in a world of shadows and anti-matter and non-existence.

He was flaking away, just crumbling now like a vampire in the rays of the sun. Flecks of dust lit off him, bits of him went to powder and rained gradually to the deck like grains of sand. One of his arms fell off, hit the floor and shattered into dirt and debris like it had been sculpted from dry clay. Very dry clay. It was probably the sudden immersion in this atmosphere, after countless centuries in that other.

As they stood there, Fabrini kept breaking apart until he looked like a heap of debris dumped from a vacuum cleaner bag.

Menhaus looked positively slack like his bones had gone to poured rubber. He could barely support his own weight. He just slouched there, drained and beaten and broken, his eyes livid and hurtful.

“So much for Fabrini,” Saks said.

That warmed up Menhaus. He stood up straight, his eyes blazing with an almost animal ferocity. It was too much. First Cook, then Pollard, and now Fabrini. He went right at Saks. Went right up to him and punched him square in the face. Saks almost went down, a trail of blood coming out of his mouth.

“You!” Menhaus bellered. “You knew something like this would happen and you wanted it to happen!”

Saks nodded, a vile and bleeding thing.

Then he and Menhaus went at other with claws and teeth, hitting and kicking and scratching and it took both George and Cushing to pull them apart. George had to hit Saks three times until he fell away and Cushing had to toss Menhaus to the floor.

“Dead man,” Saks told him, spitting out blood. “You’re a dead man, you fucking faggot! I’ll kill you! Swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

And whether that was directed at George or Menhaus or both of them, it was really hard to tell. Elizabeth stood there, shaking her head, not surprised at the ways of men, but generally disappointed as she was now.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

And that sounded good.

Except Menhaus wasn’t done. He came up now with George’s. 45 in his hand. It had been on the floor where George dropped it and now Menhaus had it. He leveled it and George and Cushing got out of the way.

“What’re you gonna do with that, you pussy?” Saks said.

So Menhaus showed him.

He pulled the trigger and put a slug in his guts.

Saks gasped, a flower of blood blossoming at his belly. Drops of it oozed between his clasped fingers. He staggered back, looked like he’d fall, and staggered over to the doorway. They heard him stumbling up the companionway, swearing and gasping.

George slapped Menhaus across the face and he dropped the gun.

“He had it coming,” was all Menhaus would say. “That bastard’s been asking for it.”

And George, numb from toes to eyebrows, thought, yes, he did at that.

22

They couldn’t find Saks.

They looked and looked for over an hour, canvassing that ship and although their thoughts were still dark and their moods just as gray as stormy skies, getting away from that room and the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and that alien husk had been good for them. Searching for Saks, having something to do, it was even better.

Finally, they gave up.

Elizabeth said a few words over the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and they all bowed their heads, remembering things that made them smile and other things that made them cry. But mostly just bowing their heads because gravity seemed to be pulling them down and they had all they could do not to give in and go to their knees.

“All right,” George finally said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They poled their way back to the Mystic through the weave of dense fog, past the carcasses of dead ships caught in the weed. They took their turns on the poles and said very little and wondered a great deal.

Taking a break and lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers, George told Cushing what he thought had happened to Fabrini. About him being alone for maybe thousands of years in that other place, his mind never dying, just suspended, preserved like something floating in a corked jar of alcohol.

“Yeah,” Cushing said. “About what I was thinking. Time… well it wasn’t the same on the other side.”

“Where was he?”

Cushing just shook his head. “The Fifth Dimension? Sixth? Tenth? Shit, who knows, but a place so alien I don’t want to think about it.”

George was staring at the alien machine at Cushing’s feet. He had brought it along despite Elizabeth’s protests. Even now, she was glaring at it and him like it was Pandora’s proverbial box and she was afraid the lid was going to blow off it.

George dragged off his cigarette, blew smoke out his nostrils. “That alien… that Martian… whatever the fuck it was-”

“I doubt it was a Martian,” Cushing said, trying to laugh, but it just wouldn’t come.

“You know what I mean, smartass. That… being. You suppose it could have helped us? I mean really helped us if we could have talked sense to it?”

Cushing nodded. “Without a doubt. You have any idea of the sort of hyper-intellect it must have possessed? The secrets a race like that must know? Yeah, George, it wanted to, it could have calibrated this magic box and shot us straight to Disneyland if it wanted to.” He sighed. “But let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly the friendly type. You saw how it looked at us. You felt it look into you. I saw it doing that, that’s why I hit it with the axe. So much for my hands.”

“I owe you,” George said and meant it.

“What was that like? It looking into you like that?”

“I honestly don’t know. I felt like my mind was emptied, that I felt very small and helpess. Other that, I don’t remember anything.”

“Well, doesn’t matter. That thing was-”

“Evil,” Elizabeth said and dared anyone to contradict her. “You know it and I know it. Maybe it was an advanced life form, as you called it, but it was cold and diabolic. It looked at us like scientists look at mice in a cage… something to be toyed with.”

“You’re right,” Cushing told her. “As usual, you’re absolutely right.”

And George knew she was, too.

There was evil as in human evil and then there was the other kind. Cosmic evil. An evil so malign and ravening that it was practically supernatural to the human mind. The alien had been like that. Evil to the fourth power. Evil fucking squared. And thinking such thoughts, feeling embarrassed and, yes, liberated by thinking them, George found himself doing something he had not done since childhood: praying. Yes, in his head he was praying to anything that would listen to him. Hoping, begging for some sort of divine guidance and protection. He’d never had much use for religion, but now? Oh yes, he needed it. He needed to feel a guiding hand on him that would deliver them from this hell. And he thought that if there was no god, no superior consciousness out there, then the human race and all the other struggling dumbassed races in the universe were seriously screwed. Because things like that alien would crush them and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. If there was no creator, no divine protector… then, shit, that meant that the human race was just a bunch of upright, intelligent apes scratching in the dirt for meaning, for revelation. Trying to make sense out of something that was innately senseless.

The idea of that was terrifying.

They kept poling along and then, gradually, the Mystic began to come out of the mist at them, taking form and solidity as the fog abandoned it. George sat there looking at it, getting a funny vibe off of it that he could not classify. For some unknown reason, he was equating that ship with a tomb.

Menhaus paused on his pole, squinted into the mist. “It’s changed,” he said.

Elizabeth had stopped poling, too. The scow slid into the weeds and came to a stop. She was staring up at the Mystic and looking tense, looking concerned.

“Looks the same,” Cushing said, as if maybe he didn’t believe it for one moment.

George was suddenly aware that he felt very rigid. All his muscles were contracted and tight. His eyes were wide and his breathing shallow. His ears were open and his mind was totally clear of anything but the ship. He was feeling it, too. The ship had changed. But how? He could not put words to it, but something about it, about its aura maybe had been violated. It just felt wrong. He wasn’t about to put any of what he was feeling down to some latent psychic gift brewing in the basement of his being, yet it was surely something like that. Something tenuous, but there all the same. Some ancient network of fear powering up and telling him to get ready for the shit, because it was definitely coming.

Menhaus, very calmly, said, “Something happened after we left. Something… something was here after we left.”

Cushing seemed to be feeling it now, too. He swallowed and then swallowed again. “Let’s go see what it was.”

23

On board, that sense of danger became positively electric in George. It was here, something was here, something had passed in the fog and left… he wasn’t sure what it had left. But the atmosphere of the boat was certainly different. That sense of desecration was there, was very palpable. And George knew it the way you knew when something intimate to you was handled roughly, touched by hands that had no business touching it. Like the objects in your room had been touched, put back an inch or two out of place. Not so anyone would notice except for you.

They stood on the deck, fingers of fog drifting around their legs like hungry cats. The mist was luminous and pulsing behind them. If there could be a soundtrack to all this, George knew, it would be someone plucking the strings of a violin. Strings off-key an octave or two.

First thing they saw was that the aft bulkhead of the main cabin was blackened. When Menhaus prodded it with his axe, it flaked away like it had crystallized in a firestorm.

“Like what Fabrini said of the Cyclops,” George said. “That Swedish ship him and Cook read about in the log.”

“Danish. The Korsund, he called it. It was out of Copenhagen.”

Several sections of the deck had been charred black and there was a snotty tangle of something like fungus hanging from the main mast. It was glowing with a shimmering, internal light.

They all noticed that, too.

They went below.

The companionway walls were smeared with clots of some phosphorescent matter as if something huge had forced itself down the stairwell, bits of it breaking off above, below, and to either side.

“Don’t touch that shit,” Cushing warned them.

They made it into the saloon cabin. Everything was burnt. The carpet was ashes beneath their footsteps. Elizabeth was taking it all in. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her right hand locked tight on the hilt of her machete. Her lips were pulled into a tight line.

They found Aunt Else first.

There would be no more legal motions by her. There would be no more of anything. She was in her bunk, a twisted and incinerated thing. The stench of cremated flesh was unbearable.

Elizabeth made a choking sound and turned away.

George was sickened by it, yet he looked long enough to see that the sheets below her were not charred in any way. As if, Aunt Else had been tossed into a blast furnace, fished out, and dumped back here. By they all knew by that point what had happened and it was not from heat. Not as they understood heat.

They found Crycek next.

He was not dead, yet very close. He was badly burned, but his face was more or less unmolested. His hair had gone white and his eyes had gone white with them. He was laying in his bunk, gasping and drooling and coughing out tangles of slime that were suffused with a shine like the fungus on deck. A terrible transformation had overtaken him. And it was more than those eyes like mirrors whitened by steam or that glowing mucus running from his mouth. It was much more than that. For Crycek looked like he had aged a hundred years, had been taken high into unthinkable heights and at such momentum that he had been burned raw, worn to a nub.

Although he could not see them, he knew they were there. “Oh yes, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it came while you were out… it came with colors and fire and eyes and ice… it came and kept coming…”

George wanted to block his ears, because he did not want to hear these profanties. Did not want to feel them spearing into his brain, tearing him open in too many places at once. Because in Dimension X there were things that you could fight and others that were ghosts and malignancies and creeping haunted matter and you didn’t stand a chance, you just didn’t stand a fucking chance and how was that for divine guidance?

Crycek was still talking, alternately cackling and moaning and making high, lunatic sounds no sane mind could produce. “You… you ought to see it… oh it’s so cold… so bright and hot and cold and damp and dry… it pulls you into its mind and the blackness… the searing frozen blackness of forever… oh, oh, oh, you’ll see… you’ll feel it and it’ll feel you…”

Then he died.

In mid-babble he just went stiff as a board and stayed that way.

Nobody seemed capable of moving then. They were just as inanimate as Crycek’s corpse. They could only look at each other or not look at each other and just feel each other. Feel the settling, iron weight on one another’s souls and feel the indecision re-making them into statues and mannequins and silent, immoveable things.

But Cushing?

No, not Cushing. He knew better as they all knew better, he knew how dangerous it was to stay. How each passing moment was cellular death and chromosomal suicide. Like standing on a hot skillet, waiting to sizzle and sputter like greasy strips of bacon.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, leading Elizabeth away by the hand. “Don’t touch anything, don’t handle anything… this entire place is radioactive waste now…”

Sullen, wordless, they let him lead them back up into the fog and down into the scow. And when they were in it, he and Menhaus poled them away from the Mystic which was now little better than the leaking core of a nuclear power plant. And all Cushing kept saying was: “The fallout… oh Jesus, the fallout, the black rain…”

24

So there were four of them, then. Not a lot, but something. A collective mind, a collective force, a last flexing muscle of humanity in that godless place, in that Dimension X or Dead Sea, that awful and nightmarish place of rended veils beyond the misting, black looking glass. Yes, they had come in numbers and this place had whittled them down like hickory, scattering shavings and chips in every which direction. And now they were just this last flexing muscle, but they had motion and drive and one last, gasping hope before the darkness took them. And they were going to put that muscle to use, they were going to hammer this place like hot metal, punch a hole through it, make it work for them. Before that other came, before that devil of fogs and anti-dimensions chewed the meat from their souls, they were going to make a stand.

Just one stand.

Because it was all they had, all they would ever have.

So they rowed through the noisome fog, fought through the ship’s graveyard, clawing through the weed that was clotted jungle foilage and slipped around the carcasses of dead vessels until they cut their way into channels indicated on Greenberg’s chart. Then the real work began, filling that last, lone lifeboat with ugency and steel, propelling it through the channels of slopping water and into the haunted wastelands of the Outer Sea.

And somewhere above, getting closer like jaws ready to snap, was the Lancet and the fabled Sea of Veils.

Closer and closer still.

25

One minute there was the fog, enshrouding and thick and gaseous, something steaming and boiling and giving birth to itself in dire, moist rhythms you could not even guess at. Something hot and smoldering born in sulfurous brimstone depths, billowing smoke and fumes and noxious clouds of itself, something burning itself out with its own heat and pressure and wasting radium breath.

And the next… the next your eyes were seeing through that weave of October mist, separating fibers and threads and filaments, looking at something that made a speading fever ignite in your belly until you thought your insides would melt and run out through your pores.

When they saw it, they stopped rowing.

They held their breath and forgot how to speak.

For maybe they had not found the Lancet… maybe it had found them.

George had been resting, smoking a cigarette and feeling for that light at the end of the tunnel. He had not been looking up. Had not been taking too much notice that the clumps of weeds were getting thicker or more numerous, were often welded into shoals and married into great, creeping green and yellow reefs. He had not been paying attention to any of that because that would have meant he would have had to look upon the fog and he just couldn’t do that anymore. After days and days in its claustrophobic shifts, the more he watched it, the more it pressed in on him. Got up his nose and into his eyes, filled his pores and fouled his lungs. Made him feel dizzy, asphyxiated, a fish flopping on a beach.

So he was not looking when the Lancet made its appearance like the Flying Dutchman, like a plague ship with a seething, pestilent cargo in its belly. How he knew they had reached it, was that he simply felt it. Felt it coming up at them or reaching out with bony digits. He felt as if a thunderstorm were approaching or a Kansas tornado. There was something like an immediate drop in atmospheric pressure, a change in the air, a shivering in the fog. A thickness and a thinning and a roiling taint. A sense of time compressed and imploded. Everything seemed electric and engulfing and heavy as if the world had been drowned in a black wash of vibrant matter.

He looked up and, yes, there she was.

A big and long five-masted schooner, once high and proud and sharp and now just dead. A death ship. A corpse ship. Some wind-splitting leviathan that had strangled here in the ropes and mats of verdant, stinking weed. Yes, it had died here, thrashed and fought and raged, but finally died, an immense marine saurian dying beneath the pall of its own primeval breath. The flesh was picked from its bones. Its hide was riven by worms and gnawed by slimy things, moldered to carrion beneath a shroud of seaweed and alien fungi. And now it lay in state, a great petrified fossil, a labyrinth of fleshless arches and spidery rigging, skeletal masts and withered rungs of bone. A thing of shades and shadows and rolling vapors.

A ghost ship.

“There, there it is,” Menhaus said, his voice raw and grating like he’d been gargling with crushed glass.

Everyone nodded or maybe they didn’t, but mostly what they were doing was feeling it, that great ship which reeked of death and insanity and blackness. But that was what they were smelling in their heads. What their noses found was a repellent, odious stink of damp moldered earth and slimy bones rotting in ditches. The sort of smell that made your mouth go dry, made something pull up in your belly.

George was feeling that. Like maybe he’d just swallowed something rancid and his stomach was recoiling from it. It was like that, the fear that old ship inspired. It filled your belly in sickening waves, made you want to vomit just looking at it.

He could see it on all their faces — the dread resignation, that acceptance of ultimate doom. That look you saw in old photographs of faces pressed up against the fences of Mauthausen or Birkenau… an intimate knowledge of horror and an acceptance of it.

Cushing said, “Makes you… makes you want to row away from her fast as you can, don’t it?”

And, sure, that’s what they were all thinking as the terror threaded through them.

George had been afraid many, many times since entering Dimension X, as they now all called it. There had been times when he thought his mind would boil down to a sap and piss out his ears. It had been that bad. And more than once. He wasn’t sure if the cadaver of the Lancet was the worse thing yet, but it surely was in the running. Because the terror on him was almost palpable, getting under his skin like an infection and turning his nerve endings to jelly. And as he sat there, thrumming with it, he decided that real terror as opposed to book-terror or movie-terror was much like hallucinating. Like tripping your brains right out on some sweet microdot… reality, as such, was suddenly made of cellophane and there was a great, gaping tear in it. That’s what it was like. Exactly what it was like. It overwelmed you and sank you into a numb stupor.

“Okay, it’s just another dead ship,” Cushing said. “Let’s go see what we came to see.”

Hesitantly then, he and Elizabeth took to the oars and pushed the lifeboat through the weed and up close to that hulk. When they were so close that its shadow fell over them chill and black, Menhaus took the anchor and tossed it up and over the taffrail where it caught fast, striking the deck with a great hollow booming like an urn falling to a crypt floor in the dead of night. Menhaus pulled them in close until the moldering smell of that waterlogged casket was rubbed in their faces.

Up close, the Lancet’s bulwarks were veiled in sediment and marine organisms… things like tiny sponges and barnacles and, of course, a dense matting of seaweed that seemed not to just grow over the ship, but into it.

“Let me see if I can get up there,” Menhaus told them.

And George looked upon him with renewed respect. The guy was just as scared as the rest of them, but he was doing what had to be done and that was the true mark of a man, the true mark of a human being.

Menhaus tugged on the anchor line, made sure it held fast.

It did.

Which was surprising in of itself. The ship looked so rotten, so decayed, George thought that when Menhaus pulled on the line, the entire rail up there would come down on top of him.

Standing on the lip of the lifeboat, he reached up, took hold of the anchor line and pulled himself up it like a kid climbing a rope in gym class. And he did it pretty good, too. There was an unsuspected agility about him that made George think that old Jolly Olly had been an athlete back in the good old days. His feet skidded against the hull, scraping off shells and mildewed things. He shimmied up the rope maybe four or five feet, got hold of the railing and pulled himself up. Up and over.

Then he looked down at them. “I’m too old for this shit,” he said. He looked around up there, staring and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ

…you gotta… you gotta see this…”

And they supposed they didn’t really have a choice.

Elizabeth went up next. She was in good shape and she made it look easy. Cushing followed her with no problem. George figured he’d grab that rope, lose his grip and fall into the weed. But he didn’t. It took some straining, but he got up there, all right. A lifetime spent using his back and muscles paid off.

He flipped himself over the railing, hands pulling on him and then he was up, too.

The teak decks were filthy with dried mud and sediment, the husks of dead crabs and bony fishes protruding obscenely. The masts were bowed and swaying like ancient oaks, their wood discolored from seawater and advanced age. The sails hung in ragged flaps, stained gray with mildew, great lurching holes eaten in them. They looked to be made of graying, threadbare cheesecloth. From the mizzenmast aft to the foremast, all the sails drooped like moldered shrouds, ripped and dangling in ribbons. Most of the stays had rotted away, the jibs gone entirely. Drooping clots of seaweed and webs of fungi were tangled in what remained of the rigging, knotted around mastheads and yards, festooned like cobwebs over the mainsail boom. From forepeak to stern, the Lancet was a dead and decaying thing exhumed from a muddy grave, dripping with slime and netted with fungi and assorted unpleasant growths.

Everything just stank of brine and age and moist corruption.

As George and the others moved, those bleached, filthy decks creaked beneath them and the masts groaned overhead like they might fall at any moment. The main cabin was covered in a growth of something like yellow moss. There were huge tarnished kettles in the bows and behind the foremast was a large, imposing naval gun that was green with age. A rope of tangled fungi drooped from the barrel like it had vomited out its insides.

But these were things they expected, what they didn’t expect they found at the quarterdeck.

Something like wagon wheels were set upright and nailed to the bulkheads with rusty flatnails. And on them, spreadeagled, were scarecrows shackled down. Except they weren’t scarecrows, but the mummies of men… husks covered in leathery hides that had erupted open in innumerable places to reveal staffs and baskets of bone. Their faces were skulls set with membranes of skin, jaws sprung open. Tendrils of fungi knotted them up, hanging off their ribcages and ulnas and mandibles in threads and narrow intersecting ropes.

“Jesus,” Menhaus said. “What… what is all this?”

“You tell me,” George said.

Because it wasn’t just at the quarterdeck, but everywhere… the Lancet was a mausoleum. There were bones scattered everywhere, some attached and other just flung about like the scraps from an ogre’s meal. Skeletons were hung in cages suspended from the yards and in makeshift gibbets that you had to duck under. There were others lashed into the rusting sail hoops on the mainmast, leering down with grinning faces and empty eye sockets. What might have been either the remains of their clothing or rags of flesh dangled obscenely from them. Yes, everywhere, morbid shadows and grisly deathmasks peering out, riven agonized faces boiled down to bone and embalmed stick figures that looked much like cobwebbed death angels from a churchyard.

Menhaus tried to back away from it, but the dead were at every turn. He stumbled over a mortuary heap of yellowed, jawless skulls and let out a high little scream.

And it was too much. Just all too much.

There were grated hatchways set along the decks and under them, cramped little cells that couldn’t have been more than three-feet high. And in them… bones. Dozens and dozens of skeletons crowded and piled and tangled together. Had to be hundreds of them that looked to be mancled with shackles and leg irons. Ossuary pits. But it was more than that, for as Cushing shined his flashlight down into one of those death pits, he could clearly see something… incredible. The skeletons were not just crowded and intermeshed down there, but horribly charred as if they’d been burned. And they looked… melted. Yes, dissolved and fused together as if dunked in some sort of acid.

What kind of heat could possibly melt bones together?

“This is fucking insane,” George said. “A prison ship or something.”

But Cushing didn’t seem convinced. “I think it’s worse than that.”

There was a sudden creaking just beyond the aftermast and a voice said, “A slaver. This was a slave ship.”

George almost fell out of his skin.

A bent-over, emaciated man with long white hair and matching beard stepped out. His face was dirty, lined like old sandstone.

“Dr. Greenberg, I presume,” Cushing said.

26

“It was, of course, what the ONR had us doing with Project Neptune,” Greenberg told them. “We were studying electromagnetic gravitation. Trying to duplicate, under laboratory conditions, aberrant electromagnetic storms. Creating magnetic, cyclonic storms which would in turn, we thought, open a magnetic vortex that was self-augmenting for the purposes of interdimensionl transition. Do you see? That’s what the Navy had us doing. Creating a sort of electromagnetic tornado which is about as close to a black hole as you can get under controlled conditions.”

Greenberg had been talking non-stop.

God knew how long it had been since he talked to anyone and he was certainly making up for it now. The first thing he told them about was the Lancet, which was an illegal slave ship bound from the Gold Coast of Africa to Virginia… except somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, fate intervened and the ship ended up here in Dimension X. Its captain, a brutal fellow by the name of Preen, used his slaves as sacrifices to the entity, the Fog-Devil.

“But eventually, much as on the Cyclops and the Korsund, this creature, this Fog-Devil as you call it, began taking lives and minds of its own accord despite Preen’s offerings. Its radioactive aftermath must have killed everyone eventually, even Preen.”

He said that all he knew was pieced together from Preen’s log and pure speculation. There was no way to acurately know the level of desperation, horror, and madness that had taken this ship and its attendant souls.

Greenberg seemed uncomfortable with the subject of the Fog-Devil, preferred physics.

He said the ONR had been fooling around with high-intensity magnetic fields for years, trying to create the sort of pulsating or vortexual field that occurred randomly and naturally in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area… with varying results. Sometimes comical and sometimes disastrous.

“What we were doing with Project Neptune and, yes, later privately with the Procyon Project of ours was pretty much based on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory which, as you may know, was the great man’s attempts to explain the underlying unity between electromagnetic, gravitational, and subatomic forces. Einstein never finished it, but many, many others of us have been working to that very end for years. Trying to garner practical, applied results from theoretical ends.”

Basically, he said, the idea he and the others in Procyon were fooling with was that the attraction between molecules could be altered by an ionized field, a force field in TV jargon. This field, essentially, would create a tear in the fabric of time/space and allow the introduction or extraction of matter from another dimension. Essentially, the transference of matter from one spatial universe to another.

“And you did?” Cushing said.

“Yes, we did,” Greenberg said, but did not seem happy about it. “We engineered a generator that did not actually create said vortex or field, but one that, if you knew the location where these sporadic vortices occurred, could more or less force them to open.”

“And it worked and you ended up here?”

“Yes. The generator worked… but the amount of juice it had to cycle to create the field, well, it blew the thing into about a hundred pieces. It went up like the Fourth of July. By the time myself and the others on the Ptolemy got that fire under control, we had been introduced into this place. If you read my letter as you say, you understand that what happens is that the vortex shuttles you into the fourth dimension, then out again into this place which I firmly believe is sort of a fractal.”

“The passage through the fourth,” George said. “It goes pretty quick.”

Greenberg nodded, snapped his fingers. “Mere seconds. Although you pass through a limitless amount of actual space, you do it essentially in hyperspace.”

Elizabeth listened, but was not moved by anything Greenberg said. She did not like the man and made no attempt to hide the fact. He recognized her, of course, and she offered him only the coolest of acknowledgments. And what it came down to with her was that she thought Greenberg was a fool. A fool that had cost her uncle his life and would, no doubt, cost the others their lives as well.

So she kept silent.

Menhaus just listened.

Once Greenberg had espoused his theories of time/space anomalies, whether natural or artificially-induced, and had thoroughly exhausted them, Cushing brought the alien machine aboard. Greenberg was ecstatic. He had to hear the story again and again. For here was an example of alien technology concieved by intellects light years beyond man’s. The machine, the teleporter, was the very thing the members of the Procyon Project had dreamed of. But unlike their version — which took up all available deck space on the Ptolemy, weighed in at over a ton, took three generators working in tandem to produce the energy it needed, and blew apart after five minutes of operation — this was a miracle of engineering. Like comparing a horse-driven carriage to a supersonic fighter, he said.

He lifted it off the deck, set it back down. “Amazing… it doesn’t even weigh five pounds. I’ll bet… yes, I’ll bet that disk is some sort of cold fusion generator. You could probably power a dozen factories with it, maybe a city.”

But the excitement was too much for him.

He sat on the deck, breathing hard and trembling, finally coughing out some blood.

He did not look too good. He had patches of hair missing from his scalp and open sores on his arms and neck. “Radiation sickness,” he explained to them. “I’ve been exposed to toxic levels.”

He told them that when the Fog-Devil had passed earlier, he had hid below in a lead-lined safe that Preen used for his booty once upon a time. For, judging by the mounted gun, Preen had been something of a pirate in-between running human beings.

“Are… are we all exposed then?” Menhaus said.

“No… no, I have a Geiger Counter,” Greenberg explained. “Brought it along to make sure our machine wasn’t spitting out radiation on the Ptolemy. You’re safe enough, friend. The… Fog-Devil, it just passed by, but even then, the radiation levels were ungodly. Had it directed itself… well, I wouldn’t be here.”

George figured it must’ve have passed here on its way to the Mystic. Maybe sniffed around for something to devour, then went on its way.

“You need medical care,” Cushing said.

Greenberg chuckled. “I’m far beyond that, I’m afraid.”

He refused to discuss it anymore. The alien machine had taken hold of his mind and his imagination. Cushing showed him how it worked. He put his hand on the scope and right away, there was that crackling energy in the air, that weird vibration, then that blue field thrown up against the bulkhead of the aft cabin. Greenberg was smart, though. He did not put his hand in the stream, he used the handle of a broom instead.

“Fascinating.” He stroked his bearded chin and mumbled under his breath for a time. “You know… this may be the way out. If you were to take this device to your point of origin here, which is the same as mine, I would guess this machine could open up the vortex and you could escape.”

Which is pretty much what everyone wanted to hear.

“But how would we find the vortex?” Cushing asked. “We could search for weeks in that mist and never see it.”

“Compass,” Greenberg said. “Just an ordinary liquid compass. There are no poles here, nothing for a magnetic compass needle to point to. What they will point to are vortex sites, areas of electromagnetic instability, variance. Trust me, I spent some time experimenting with this.”

“Then let’s get to it,” Menhaus said.

“Yes, you should do that,” Greenberg told them. “Now is a very bad time for your little visit. A very dangerous time. The entity, it’s getting active and will continue to do so until it’s food source is exhausted.”

“You’re coming with us,” George said.

“No, no. That’s out of the question, I’m afraid.” He had a brief coughing spell, then wiped his mouth. “I’m too sick, you see. I wouldn’t have the strength for a trip through hyperspace… no, I’ll stay here. But you young people, you need to get out before it comes back and this machine should do nicely.”

“You saw what that contraption did to Fabrini,” Elizabeth said, “and you still want to use it?”

“We have to try, don’t we?” George said.

She just shook her head, disgusted by the idea.

Cushing explained what had happened to Fabrini in all its gruesome details. Greenberg listened, nodding the whole while.

“Well… I would hazard a guess that whatever vortex the alien opened was not a good one. This machine, its purpose, is no doubt to project matter between dimensions and across the void of stars… but we’ll never know what the alien was attempting. Maybe he had it trained on the fifth dimension or the twentieth for that matter. I can hazard a guess that this awful place your friend stepped into was alien both physically and vitally. A place where matter and energy are not as we understand them.”

He explained that Fabrini’s basic atomic structure was probably particulated, that he underwent something of an interdimensional metamorphosis. His molecules underwent a matter-energy transformation and then back again. A phase in matter, like water going from ice to liquid to steam, back to ice again. Fabrini dematerialized and then re-materialized, matter to energy and then energy back to matter. And probably in the blink of an eye. Except that when teleported to that other dimension, his atoms were re-assembled according to the physical laws of that nightmare dimension… a place where your limbs could be disconnected by miles, yet be connected. A place where your consciousness, through some freakish set of variables, could become disassociated from your body.

“But he was still alive,” Menhaus said, swallowing. “We could hear him… his mind was still alive.”

“Yes, yes, terrible. Again, we can only speculate. Unlike his body which was disorganized atomically… his mind must have remained intact. The energy of his thoughts, his consciousness, were somehow divorced from his physical self and will probably exist forever in one form or another.”

That just about took George’s breath away. Menhaus looked like he wanted to be sick. The idea of Fabrini existing until the end of time or beyond it as a conscious, aware, screaming cloud of atoms… it was unthinkable.

Greenberg said that time, as well as matter, must be horribly distorted in that place. While only moments passed here, thousands of years must have passed there. The best Greenberg could come up with for that ghostly image of Fabrini that drifted back out of the field was that it must have been some sort of reflection… one caught somewhere between the ethereal and the corporeal, but with a highly unstable molecular structure. Like a shadow, he said, the way shadows must be in that place of deranged physics.

“The Fog-Devil,” George said, plugging a cigarette in his mouth and giving it flame, “I’m guessing that it’s not native to this place, right? That maybe it slipped out of some other dimension, something like that.”

Greenberg nodded. “I suspect it to be of extradimensional origin. I can’t… no, I can’t even concieve of the sort of place where such a creature could be natural. Maybe that place your friend went. Regardless, it is a living and sentient being, I think. A sort of biological firmament of anti-matter that exists by ingesting or assimiliating fields of electrical energy. If you can imagine a nebulous, radioactive mass of cellular anti-matter that feeds on the raw, untapped electrical energy of thinking minds… actually sucks them dry, then you’d be close. Anti-matter with force, intellect, and direction… dear God, what an abomination.”

“It came today,” Menhaus said. “It got one of our friends and Elizabeth’s aunt… but it’ll come again, won’t it? I mean, you said in your letter that it cycles, that it builds up.”

“Yes, it’s cyclical in nature, I think. It’s pretty pointless to apply third-dimensional reason or rationale to something that technically cannot exist in the first place… but, yes, it seems to be cyclical.” Greenberg had to rest a moment. All the excitement and talking were taxing him. “If you know the stories of the Cyclops and the Korsund, then you understand the destructive, deadly power of this creature. I believe it shows irregularly, maybe not for ten years or fifty, but that when it does, it leaves nothing alive with a rational brain. It hones in on the electrical fields of these thinking minds and chews them down to the marrow, if you will.”

“You couldn’t hide from something like that,” Cushing said. “It could find you anywhere, anytime.”

Greenberg sighed. “Yes, exactly.”

“Something that eats minds,” George said. “Incredible.”

“That’s why you need to get out of here,” Greenberg warned them. “I don’t think it’ll come back until tonight… but when it does, well, it won’t leave any of us. If you understand my meaning.”

George exhaled a stream of smoke. “And you want us to just leave you behind?”

“Yes. I’m too sick to make the journey. There’s nothing that could be done for me even if I did make it back home… so I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here and get a good look at this Fog-Devil of ours before it kills me. Satisfy some scientific curiosity, you might say.”

George just shook his head. Selfless acts were to be applauded, but suicidal acts were just plain stupid and waiting for this monstrosity to pick your mind clean like a skull was just suicide. Plain and simple.

Cushing said, “How can this thing exist? An anti-matter entity in a matter world like this? I mean, this has to be a matter world like the one we left or we would have ceased to exist the moment we stepped into it… right?”

“Yes, yes exactly. I believe the entity must have some sort of membrane that protects it, a sort of field of energy that contains and protects it much like skin protects us. Is that matter or anti-matter or some sort of subatomic material unknown to us… who can say? If I could hazard a wild, irrational leap of logic here,” Greenberg said to them, “I would say that this creature not only emits radiation, but is radioactive by nature. That maybe where it comes from, life is based on radioactive isotopes just as life as we know it is based on the carbon atom. But the radiation of this thing… it’s probably a completely alien sort of radiation that we can only guess it.”

“It kills all the same,” George said.

There was no arguing with that. Nor was there any arguing with the fact that if they didn’t either get their asses out of Dimension X in a real hurry or find a way to destroy that thing, then they were going to learn all about it first hand.

Cushing said, “If there was some way to shoot it full of matter. That would probably destroy it or knock it back where it came from.”

Greenberg said, “Interesting idea. Exactly how do you put out a fire?”

“With water,” George said.

“Or sometimes you build another fire and let them burn into each other and cancel each other out,” Greenberg explained. “I think if we had, say, an atomic bomb we could do it. A bomb like that would deliver the sort of explosive punch to disrupt the thing’s membrane and at the same time flood it with matter. And not just any matter, but radioactive matter. Hence, my analogy… fire burning out fire.”

“Why not just a conventional explosive?” George said.

But Greenberg shook his head. “By itself, I don’t honestly believe it would be enough. Such a force might momentarily disrupt that field or membrane, but it wouldn’t deliver the knock-out punch… irradiated material. I think we need to saturate its guts, if you will, with a burst of radioactive material, fissionable material. That would… burn it out, I think. Dissipate it, kill it. Not that it could know death as we understand it.”

Pulling off his cigarette, George said, “How about a dirty bomb?”

Greenberg looked confused and Elizabeth, being from a different time, was just totally lost. The world Greenberg had left behind back in the 1980s didn’t have any worries about terrorists acquiring nuclear waste and weaponizing it. But Cushing and Menhaus were getting it just fine.

“Sure,” George said. “A dirty bomb. A conventional explosive hooked up to barrels of radioactive waste. We could do it, too. There’s a ship back in the weeds, a freighter loaded with barrels of radioactive waste. We wire some explosives to that… a lot of explosives… you got the mother of all dirty bombs.”

George explained to Greenberg about the C-130 and all those crates of pre-packaged satchel charges. How he had been an engineer in the army and he knew how to use them. Both he and Menhaus had done some blasting at construction sites. They could make this happen.

Greenberg was silent for a time. “Yes, yes, I think that would do it… just understand the implications of such a weapon. It would spread a deadly cloud of fallout… you would need to be far away when it went.”

“I could set a time fuse on it,” George said. “That would give us the time we need.”

But Greenberg shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t work. The only way we could know the entity was coming would be by the Geiger Counter. It picks up the creature’s radioactive emanations. And we would want the bomb to go off when the entity was right on top of it… that’s the best chance we have for success. So, there’s only one possible solution. You rig your bombs and I wait with the Geiger Counter, when it comes, I blow it.”

Again, they tried arguing with Greenberg, but he refused to see reason. He honestly wanted to get a look at the thing. It was more than curiosity, it was an obsession with him.

“Just understand one thing,” he told them. “Matter and anti-matter do not mix. When a particle meets its anti-particle, well, they tend to annihilate each other completely, knocking each other out of existence. And as they do so, immense amounts of pure energy are released.”

“An anti-matter bomb,” Cushing said.

“Exactly. If our explosion rips this membrane, then matter and anti-matter will collide in an explosion that will be devastating beyond comprehension.”

He laid it out for them, how a colleague of his once said that an anti-matter bomb would make a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb — about ten-thousand times as powerful as what was dropped on Hiroshima — look like a firecracker. A nuclear bomb, Greenberg said, only converts a small fraction of warhead mass to energy, but matter/anti-matter annihilation converts almost total mass-to-energy.

“Something like that… well, it could boil this sea to steam.” He shook his head. “You would need to pass through the vortex before I fired it.”

“It’ll be dark in about six hours,” Elizabeth announced.

“There’s no way we could arm that ship and then get ourselves to the vortex in time,” George said.

Greenberg smiled. “Not unless you had a speedboat.”

27

Cushing didn’t like any of it and he said so.

None of them liked Greenberg’s plan. What they wanted to do was quit wasting time and get on that speedboat of his and get out to the Sea of Mists and see what the compass showed them. The idea of letting Greenberg commit suicide for the sake of science was just unthinkable. Even the instinct to save their own asses wasn’t enough to make them jump at it, to leave this poor old man at the mercy of that… horror.

Even Elizabeth didn’t like it. “Please Mr. Greenberg… this is all ridiculous. You have to come with us.”

But Greenberg would not hear of it. “If there was a chance for me, dear, I would do just that. But… well I rather doubt this body has more than a few days left in it at most. I’m sick and you all know that. I’m terribly sick. Look at it this way,” he said sincerely. “I’m staying either way. If George can rig this bomb of his, then my death will be quick and painless, I won’t suffer anymore. Given that the alternative is the Fog-Devil turning my bones to liquid and my brain to soup, I’d say it’s my best chance. My death will be quick and maybe we can cancel that creature out of existence at the same time.”

After that, there was no more arguing.

“Let’s do this,” Menhaus said.

28

“Jesus,” Menhaus said when he saw the speedboat, “it’s a fucking cigarette boat. A racing boat.”

George thought it looked like a rocket. It was long and red and streamlined. It had to be nearly thirty feet in length and most of that was its nose which looked like a missile. Menhaus was real excited about it. When they got the lifeboat up to it, he jumped into the cigarette boat’s cockpit without hesitation.

“Drug runners use these babies in the Florida Keys,” he told them. “They can outrun Coast Guard cutters. I bet this baby can break a hundred miles an hour at full bore.”

Cushing just had one question as he looked at all the gauges in their anodized trim rings on the dash: “Can you pilot it? Can anybody pilot this sled?”

Menhaus was nodding. “Yeah, I think so. I’ve been on a few of these as a passenger, but, yeah, I can can make her go.”

George was thinking that the boat looked to be in nice shape. No encrustation or weeds as yet. It looked pretty new… save for a bloodstain on one of the white leather seats that he did not want to speculate on.

Menhaus was popping hatches, checking things out inside.

“You looking for drugs?” Cushing asked him.

“No… Jesus, look at that engine. A five-hundred horse Mercruiser coupled to a Bravo. Damn.”

Menhaus explained that when you raced these boats, you generally did it with three people. One guy doing the steering, another on the throttle, and another doing the navigating. He said it had a V-hull which made it plane over the top of the water.

“Okay,” he said, once the others were aboard and their equipment was loaded. He turned the key and punched the starter. The boat shook, sounded like it would never go, then the engines kicked in and all that power beneath them was thrumming.

“You feel up to playing navigator?” he asked Greenberg.

Greenberg honestly didn’t look up to playing anything, but he nodded.

When everyone was in their seats, they cast off the lifeboat and Menhaus took them through the weeds and fog. In ten minutes they were out into open water.

And their destiny.

29

Getting the satchel charges was child’s play.

The fog was still thick, it never really thinned much, but sometimes it was more transparent than at other times. In the glow of the fog and what passed for daylight in that place, George and Menhaus and Cushing quickly unpacked the crates of satchel charges. They went about it in a very business-like manner, trying not to think about Gosling or Marx though feeling them everywhere in the C-130 like maybe their ghosts had chosen this spot to haunt until time itself ground to a withering halt. Inside the crates there were thirty cases of satchel charges with two satchels per case, giving them a grand total of sixty charges.

“Hot damn,” George said. “This is going to be fireworks like you’ve never seen before.”

He told Cushing, out of range of Greenberg’s ears, that this much explosive… and he planned on using it all… would not only blow those drums of waste wide open and spit their poison for a mile in every direction, but it would probably turn that freighter into matchsticks at the same time.

When it was loaded, they ventured first to the Ptolemy where Greenberg had extra fuel. They filled the cigarette boat’s 100 gallon tank up and siphoned off another thirty gallons into plastic tanks. By that time, there was very little room to sit or stand in the cigarette boat.

Next stop, the freighter.

As they brought the cases of satchel charges up the boarding ladder, George was struck by a queasy feeling in his stomach. Part of it was that ship, he knew, and everything that had happened there. Even without it, that derelict was like a floating tomb. But it was more than just the ship or any of that.

And you know what it is, he told himself. You know damn well what it is. Things are going too smoothly here. Everything’s fitting into place like it’s pre-arranged and you’re just waiting for the bottom to drop. Because in this goddamn place, the bottom always drops sooner or later.

But he tried not to think.

Thinking was not a luxury he could afford at that moment. Night was coming soon and there was a lot to be done before the light faded. So he did not think of the Mara Corday and the positively bizarre chain of events that led him to this place on this day, because if he had… he figured he might burst out crying or start laughing. Maybe both at the same time.

“That’s the works,” Menhaus said. “Let’s rock and roll.”

They unpacked the individual satchel charges and respective priming assemblies. Then they got down to work. The satchel charges — M183 demolition charges, in army-speak — each contained some 16 blocks of C4 and five feet of det cord. The real work was breaking open the orange plastic crates that contained the drums of radioactive waste. That was a job unto itself. An hour later, they had some sixteen containers opened, thirty-two neon-yellow barrels ready. George and Menhaus went about arming the satchels, wiring them with primercord and blasting caps. When they had all sixty satchels ready, they attached them to the barrels using duct tape and rope, something the freighter had no lack of. After that, George connected six-inches of time fuse to each of the priming assemblies, leaving the time fuse and fuse igniters hanging outside the satchels. They they wired all the fuse igniters together with wire and tied a rope to that.

When Greenberg was ready, all he would have to do is pull the rope

…that would fire all the igniters simultaneously.

“And scratch one Fog-Devil,” George said. “Hopefully.”

“And one old man, too,” Cushing said.

“Try not to think about it, man.”

But Cushing was thinking about it. They were all thinking about it and trying not to, trying to turn their hearts very hard because how else were you going to get through something like that? How would you live with yourself later?

George went over it all one more time. It had been a few years since he’d wired any C4, but it looked right. The satchel charges were designed that so just about any idiot could make them go boom. So he went over all his connections once and then twice to be sure.

About the time he finished, a figure stepped out from behind one of the skids. Bent over with a shotgun in their hands, there was no mistaking who it was.

“Saks,” George said and that single word was like a knife in his belly.

Saks. Yeah, he was plenty to contend with just about any time, but now, well, he was just a little worse. He stood there, his face pale and blotchy, one eye narrowed to a slit and the other wide and glistening like a peeled grape. The front of his shirt was brown and crusty with dried blood. He was grinning and that grin was all teeth like something from a storybook that ate children.

“Having a little party, eh?” Saks said. “A little going away party? Fireworks and everything? Well, don’t that beat all? Don’t it… just… fucking… beat… all?”

George swallowed, but there was no spit in his mouth. “Saks… Jesus, you’re still alive.”

Maybe that was the wrong thing to say, but there was probably no right thing to say. Not now. Saks was insane and there was no getting around that. He was sick and wounded and insane. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he had a shotgun in his hands. The barrel was rusty, but it looked like it wasn’t that rusty.

A gun? Saks had a gun? Of course he had a gun, George knew. Guns find people like Saks and people like Saks always find guns. Same way rich men always find money and poor ones never get a break. Saks probably found it on the ship somewhere. The really crazy thing was that Saks was still alive. Gutshot like that, he should have been dead or dying at the very least, curled up somewhere like a road-struck dog. But that blood on his shirt was old. He didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore.

How could that be?

He took it right in the belly, George thought. I saw it. He took it right in the fucking belly.

Cushing and Elizabeth were standing there now.

It was hard to say what was on their faces. They didn’t seem really surprised, just unhappy. Both of them were probably beyond the point where anything in this damn place could really surprise them.

“Why did you run off?” Cushing asked him. “Why did you hide from us when we looked for you? We were just trying to help you, Saks.”

Saks laughed or wheezed… he did something, made some sort of rattling, choking sound that might have been mirth. Might have been, but wasn’t. His right eye, the wide one, was simply blank and scary looking. “Is that what you wanted to do, Cushing? Is that it? You sure you just didn’t want to finish what Menhaus started?”

“C’mon, Saks, you know me better than that.”

George was staring without meaning to, way you might stare at a mad dog knowing it was certainly the wrong thing to do. But… but Saks’s neck was covered in something. Where those weird sores had been the other day, the ones Saks was always scratching, there was some kind of spreading, tumorous growth. It looked pink and furry like moss might look on Mars. Something made of tiny, wiry hairs.

Cilia, George thought, like on an ameba.

And there was something under his shirt, something bulging and obscene-looking. Something that did not belong. Whatever it was, it was moving.

“Where’s Menhaus?” Saks said in a low, grating voice. “I wanna see the fucker who killed me.”

And that’s what he said. Like maybe he had died, but came back just to fuck up this little party they were planning. George didn’t know what had happened to him, but it didn’t take a real jump of logic to connect Fabrini’s story of Saks eating that discolored salt pork from the Cyclops and the sudden outbreak of sores on his body and what was happening now. It was an easy path to follow.

“So what do you dipfucks got in mind here?” Saks wanted to know. “Are you planning on sacrificing the old man to your Fog-Devil, George? Is that it?”

“No, we-”

“Nice work there, George, nice-looking bomb you’ve got there. You would’ve made one hell of a terrorist. Let’s see here… if I pull that cord you got rigged up, in about… what? Sixty seconds, maybe, we all go up? Something like that?”

George felt a trickle of sweat slide down the back of his neck. “Saks,” he said. “We… we rigged that to kill the thing…”

“Menhaus!” Saks cried out. “You don’t show your ass in the next ten seconds, I’m gonna have to start killing people! You hear me?” He leveled the shotgun at Cushing. “I’ll start with Cushing… you hear me? You hear me, you slimy little fuck?”

“No,” Elizabeth said, stepping in-between the shotgun and Cushing. “No, that’s enough. No more killing. I can’t bear any more killing.”

Saks chuckled. “Does blood offend you, honey?”

“Yes.”

George didn’t believe that, but it sounded good. Sounded real good and looking into those sad green eyes of hers you could almost believe it. But it wasn’t true. Elizabeth wasn’t a cold-blooded killer or anything, but she was a survivor. That was for sure. Part of her was very callous and when necessary, she had a mean streak a mile wide.

“Okay, here’s how it works,” Saks said. “Menhaus don’t show… and I don’t think he’s gonna show… I kill your snatch, Cushing, then I kill you. What do you think, George? You got a problem with that?”

Greenberg just sat there on the deck, looking old and used up, maybe not liking any of this but too far gone himself to do much about it.

“Menhaus! You think I’m fucking around, you think this is-”

And that’s about as far as he got. For something hit him in the back of the head and he pitched forward, dropping the shotgun. Cushing moved fast and kicked the gun away from Saks’s clutching fingers. There was a wrench laying on the deck. A pipe wrench. Saks was barely conscious.

Menhaus waltzed purposely out from around the aft cabin.

“Good shot,” George told him.

“Fucking guy’s like a tick,” Menhaus said. “Stepping on him ain’t enough, you got to burn him out.”

Saks moaned and George saw what he was going to do seconds before he did it. Saks was feigning here, pretending to be nearly unconscious. But he wasn’t. He was inching himself over toward the pull rope for the satchel fuses. He made it maybe an inch closer and George kicked him in the head. Punted him hard enough to make the game-winning field goal.

This time, Saks was out cold.

Menhaus, with no emotion, simply picked-up the wrench and went over to Saks and swung it with everything he had. There was a sickly wet and hollow popping sound. Menhaus hit him again with everything he had and then stood up, studying the gore and clotted hair on the end of the wrench. He tossed it aside with a shudder like he couldn’t believe what he’d just done.

Nobody said anything about it.

And Menhaus himself had absolutely no comment.

“You had better go,” Greenberg told them, clutching the Geiger Counter to him.

George put the end of the pull rope on his lap. “You know what to do,” he said. “But I’ll ask you one more time if you don’t want to come with us.”

Greenberg appreciated that they all seemed to care about him, that they did not make this decision to leave him easily. It was tough on them. So much inhumanity and death had been forced on them in this awful place, the idea of willingly sacrificing one of their number was unthinkable. Yet, they had to do it. Greenberg knew it and so did they.

But it didn’t make the parting any easier.

Even Elizabeth said, “Please, Mr. Greenberg, think about it.”

But he just shook his head. “You better go. There’s not much time. It’ll be dark in just over an hour, I’m guessing. Please, get moving.”

George looked at him one last time, mumbled a goodbye and Menhaus did the same. They did not look back.

“Mr. Greenberg, I-”

“On your way, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Your uncle and I were friends, you know. What I’m doing, I’m doing for you and for him and for all the others that thing has killed. And, yes, out of curiosity.”

Cushing led her away towards the boarding ladder.

And that was it.

That was the last anyone saw of Greenberg.

30

In the cigarette boat, the ship’s graveyard and its attendant weed were easy to transverse. There were a few scary moments in the fog when Menhaus slammed into an overturned hull and nearly pitched everyone overboard or when he nearly steered them into the side of a tanker, but other than that it went pretty smoothly.

In thirty minutes, they were free of the weed, moving at a good clip through one of the channels, cutting through the fog and keeping their fingers crossed. They had everything they needed and if they couldn’t find the vortex, then it would all end out in the Sea of Mists. Maybe through the offices of the local wildlife or maybe when Greenberg pulled the cord and let loose his anti-matter bomb, as he called it.

As they pushed further away from the ship’s graveyard, George was thinking that just about anything would be preferable to having your mind vacuumed clean by the Fog-Devil. Just about anything.

The channel began to twist and turn and Menhaus lowered their speed a bit, not wanting to, but knowing that they couldn’t afford a catastrophe. Not even a little one. Darkness was coming. They could all see that. The fog was getting verse dense and heavy like rainclouds fallen to earth.

George had the compass out. “If Greenberg’s right, we should make the general area of the vortex in twenty, thirty minutes after we get out into that sea.”

“Especially with this baby,” Menhaus said, loving his new toy.

“That is,” Cushing cautioned. “If we don’t get turned in circles in this goddamn fog.” But George didn’t think they would.

Elizabeth was doing the navigating now and that was a good thing. She seemed to know her way through the channels pretty well. And George wondered how many trips she had made like this through the weed with her uncle, searching out that elusive trapdoor, that escape route from the misting world of the Dead Sea. She told Menhaus which channel to take, when he had gone too far, her eyes on the fog like maybe she could see through it.

Then finally, ultimately, all those acres of green and rotting weed to either side finally opened up, fell away, and there was open water before them, little islands of seaweed drifting about, but nothing like what they had just left.

“Hold onto your hats,” Menhaus said and edged the throttle back, picking up speed and parting those gelid waters.

“Not too fast,” Elizabeth told him. “There’s derelicts out here, too. Lots of things in the water.”

The mist started gathering around them in blankets and sheaths, just impenetrable and boiling and viscid. It was so damp it left a wet sheen on their faces. And George could remember all too well the days spent drifting and rowing through its murky depths. Jesus, he got to thinking, how had they even made it this far?

Night was coming and there was danger in that.

George remembered that the last time night had fallen on them, they had been on the C-130. Then the squid had attacked and then… well, he wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t going to think about any of the badness because there was only the here and now and that was enough. He could feel something building in him, same way he’d felt it when they were nearing the ship’s graveyard… a sense of excitement, of anticipation. They were getting near to something. He could really feel it.

And as he felt it, he knew that there was a motion to their little group now, a building psychic energy, a physical momentum and it was carrying them forward to something.

He looked down at the compass.

The needle was still dead, but soon, soon there would be movement. He felt it right down in his belly. He turned away from the wind the boat was creating and lit a cigarette in cupped hands. Looking at Cushing, he smiled and Cushing smiled back and then something happened.

It happened very quickly.

So fast, George could only watch it happen. Speechless, helpless, he saw it, but could do nothing about it. Something dropped down out of the mist, something shiny like fishing line and looped around Cushing’s throat. Like a noose it swung down and took him, yanked him up out of the boat and into the mist. Whether it was the speed of the boat or the strength of whatever sinister puppet master that worked that line, Cushing was gone fast.

In the blink of an eye.

Elizabeth made one wild dive at him, but she was far too late and she went over the side and vanished in the fog.

They heard her scream.

George shouted.

Menhaus brought the boat around, wanting to know what in the hell had happened. But George had no answers. Nothing tangible to even tell him. The running lights on the bow of the cigarette boat illuminated the fog, cut only ten or twelve feet into it.

“Elizabeth!” George called out. “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”

His voice echoed out through the fog and he thought for one terrifying minute that something out there was mocking his words, but it was just Elizabeth. Menhaus pushed the cigarette boat in the direction of her voice.

There.

They could see her.

Bobbing in that gelatinous, stinking water, looking positively frantic.

And with good reason, George soon saw.

There was something poised above her in the fog, maybe fifteen feet up. Something huge and amorphous and shadowy. Something wriggling and creeping and riding the mists like a moth. But it was no moth, it was no bird, it was something else. He could see a network of those shiny looking threads descending onto Elizabeth and those threads or webs or whatever they were looked alive, looked like they were coiling and looping with a flowing serpentine motion.

Elizabeth screamed one more time as those threads snared her up.

George brought up the flare gun, was going to punch a burning hole through that nightmare, but at the last moment, he hesitated. Hesitated because a form dropped out of the mist, something that looked to be made of drooping gray rags and motheaten shrouds. Something dangling on one of those wires, like a marionette that was dropped down accidentally.

But it was no marionette.

It was Cushing. Only he had been reduced to a skeleton or something quite near one. George saw what he thought was vertebrae, maybe a gleaming knob of rib or femur. A sort of fleshless face. But that was all. Whatever nightmare mockery of a man it had been, it was quickly yanked back up into the mist by that puppet master, that thing floating up there.

Elizabeth was pulled up out of the water, wrapped in those living threads and both George and Menhaus caught a momentary glimpse of something immense and leggy wth gleaming blue-black skin. And that was all they saw, just a suggestion of form and intent, a hint of some immense insect puppeteer. And eyes. George thought maybe he saw a cluster of wet, pink eyes that looked like a dozen slimy tennis balls stuffed in a nylon.

Then Elizabeth was gone.

Maybe it was reflexive action, but George jerked the trigger on the flare gun and it went off with a dull popping. It cut a red path up into the fog overhead like the trail of a tracer bullet. And then it exploded up there with a shower of orange and yellow sparks. Something made a shrieking, squealing sound and George saw that thing scuttling away up into the mist, looking oddly like some bloated and fleshy parachute with two jumpers trailing behind it, Cushing and Elizabeth.

And that was horrible.

But what was maybe a little worse was that in the glow of the descending flare, in its flickering red glare, he could see that there were others up there. Humped things with maybe twenty or thirty legs creeping along some network of webs up in the mist, dancing away from the light.

Cushing’s gone and so is Elizabeth, a voice was telling George, a wild and hysterical voice, just like you’re going to be if you don’t get your ass in gear!

“Bring it around,” George told Menhaus.

Menhaus just stared at him dumbly. “What?”

“Bring this fucker around!”

Menhaus did, gunning the throttle and bringing them around in an arc, creating a surging wake and then pushing them forward into the mist again. George was hoping, praying that they had not gotten turned around. He slid another flare into the gun and waited.

Waited for what came next.

Not letting himself think about what he had just seen or what kind of spiderish monstrosity could spin a floating web up in the mist and make Cushing look like he’d been dunked in a bath of acid in under a minute.

They kept going, pushing on and on.

And then George looked at the compass.

The needle was moving.

31

The needle on the Geiger Counter was moving, too.

It shuddered, fell back, began to move steadily upwards with a lazy sort of roll and Greenberg just watched it, feeling tense but exhilerated. This was it then. No more toying about with mathematical equations on paper, no more speculating on the vagaries of interdimensional physics, no more hiding in lead-lined vaults and coughing up blood and vomiting and watching his hair fall out from radiation poisoning.

This was it.

This was really it.

The thing was coming. Coming for him and there wasn’t a single force born of man, nature, or God that could stop it. Stop this breathing, hissing abomination that could chew through time and space like a maggot through dead meat.

Don’t get emotional and imaginative, Greenberg warned himself. You are an observer, a scientist. Keep that in mind. Do not look at this thing and tremble. Do not let it see your fear.

But it was too late for that and Greenberg damn well knew it. For the Fog-Devil had been smelling his fear for some time know. It had been licking at his brain for weeks, gnawing on his thoughts and sucking the salt from his subconscious with a growing, impossible hunger. Yes, carefully working him and savoring him, unwrapping the candied layers of his psyche and now it had found the creamy, rich nougat at the center… fear. Mindless, mad, human fear and such a thing was a luxury to this Devil of Fogs and anti-space. It had marked Greenberg with its wasting breath, sweetening him up, letting him ripen like a succulent grape on a vine, and now it would claim him.

Now it would eat his mind raw.

Easy, easy, he cautioned himself.

But it was not easy. Not at all, because the Geiger Counter was clicking away now, the analog meter jumping and falling rapidly, showing a high-end reading of three hundred counts per second. Well beyond the safety level of Roentgens. Greenberg watched the needle.. . yes, five hundred, seven hundred, up and up, not falling at all now. The clickings were so fast now they sounded like the static from an old radio. The analog needle was pegged now and Greenberg knew he was being inundated by a crackling swarm of charged subatomic particles that were burning right through him.

Dear God, dear God.

He was suddenly gripped with an almost hysterical, superstitious terror that was building inside him like plumes of poison gas. And the fog… dear Christ the fog, look at the fog…

It was being consumed by a sort of thrumming luminosity that was filling it with light and motion and flickering shapes. Yes, now it was exploding with a gushing, polychromatic brilliance that was running like wet paint, seeming to drip and ooze and puddle, diffusing now like ink dropped in water. Yes, it was colors and prisms and a spreading dark vortex-adumbration of depthless black matter that was bright and blinding… deranged geometrical shapes and living polyhedrons and, yes, more, more all the time. The fog was fog and yet was not fog. It was liquid and solid, then gas, then a roiling putrescence expanding like a balloon blown with filth.

Greenberg could feel it, yes, feel it down deep, chewing into his mind, filling his rioting brain with things unknown, unseen, and blasphemous.

His hand tightened on the pull cord of the dirty bomb.

Hesitated.

Not yet, not yet, not just yet. I must see it, I must see it, God help me but I must… see… this… nightmare…

But some gods were not meant to be looked upon by mortal eyes and Greenberg’s eyes were unclean, impure, and he could feel a wave of heat reaching out to burn his eyes out of their sockets. Waves of agony shot through his brain and blood ran from his nose and ears, but he would see, he would see this thing, God yes, he would look upon it and know it.

The fog was not fog now, it was flesh, blubbery radiant flesh that was pink and yellow veined by squirming purple arteries that pulsed and undulated like tentacles. It was a huge mass of radioactive smog that was flesh that was smog that was misting, dripping flesh that was alive, alive, alive, filling the sky and swallowing the world with a mouth that was a black, seeking nebula. Yes, the Dead Sea was an incubator and the fog was a placenta that was sheering now with a ripping sound, with an eruption of slime that was not slime but colors, vibrant and violent auras of colors that filled Greenberg’s mind with a rumbling white noise. For he was seeing colors that he had never seen before, smelling them and tasting them, feeling them ignite him with a freezing/burning wind that was blowing from the malignant irradiated wastes and radioactive bone heaps beyond the edges of the known universe.

He screamed then.

Screamed his mind to quivering jelly and vomited out his guts in white-hot coils.

The Fog-Devil was birthed in a nuclear fallout of blistering ice and radioactive fire and frost and acid, an effusion of strontium-90 and radium and unstable cellular anti-matter. Greenberg saw it, was allowed to see it coming at him in a boiling flux of nerve gas and chlorine mist, methane and supercharged split atoms of hydrogen… a slithering, worming multi-dimensional obscenity. Yes, a breath of living cosmic darkness, a translucent and larval incandescence, a primal chaos of decaying cadaveric gulfs. It became a bile of screaming fungal pigments and an immense, electric wraith skeletoned by a neural network of synapses flapping with fleshy rags infused by an incinerating moonlight. Maybe it was a million writhing and eyeless alien graveworms pissing jets of color and dissolving into a noxious atomic steam. And maybe it was a cauldron of smoldering entrails and maybe it was a sentient plexus of mewling plasma, a creeping and hissing thermonuclear afterbirth born in some searing anti-world of radionuclides and plutonium.

Yes, maybe it was all these things and none of them.

A living furnace of shadow-matter that had come to devour the world, the universe, something that was pulling gravity inside-out and collapsing time-space in its wake.

Greenberg saw what his mind told him was a vast, living, breathing honeycomb descending on him, fluttering and blurring, unable to hold its shape or form. It was blown with noxious clouds of searing, scalding vapors and incremating heat. And his last true sensory impression was of… eyes.

What his disintegrating brain told him were eyes… colossal, luminous-red globular orbs leering from nests of wiry tentacles like whips or eyelashes. Eyes that were steaming like melting reactor cores, burning holes through the dimensional fabric and turning Greenberg’s brain to hot, bubbling mud.

Eyes, eyes, eyes… a million eyes, a billion eyes staring out from a slime of protoplasmic mist.

Eyes that destroy, eyes that devour, eyes that violate and consume and burn, burn, burn, oh dear Christ the burning burning burning static breath…

Eyes that were black holes and quasars and the ravening charnel wastes of dead-end space. Depthless crystalline eyes that burned with a green smoke, chromatic graveyards and diseased moons that washed him down in cosmic rays and gamma rays and phosphorescent streams of cremating atoms that found his mind and gnawed the meat from it and sucked its blood and vacuumed-free its marrow and gnawed its charred bones.

Yes, it found Greenberg and Greenberg pleased it, filled it, satisfied its relentless and voracious appetite. He was burnt offerings beneath the fission of its nuclear winter breath.

Greenberg’s flesh became bubbling wax.

His bones liquified like melted candlesticks.

His skull became a boiling, steaming pot of cold, white radioactive jelly.

And even as his mind was stripped to bone and his muscles and nerve endings and anatomy became running tallow, he felt his hand jerk the cord.

Heard from some distant room, the noose drop over the Fog-Devil, that extradimen-sional abomination, that distortion out of space, out of time.

32

“Okay,” George was saying, “veer to the left, to the left…”

Menhaus jerked the wheel and they went too far, the needle of the compass swinging far to the right and almost stopping George’s heart with it. But without being told, he brought the boat back until the needle was pointing straight up, attracted by an unknown magnetic influence.

“Hold it there now,” George said. “We’re moving straight at whatever it is…”

Behind them, far, far behind them there was a rumbling sound like thunder. A deafening hollow boom. The fog behind them was lit with a flickering green light.

They knew what it was.

The anti-matter bomb. The collision of dimensions, the big bang.

Seconds now, mere seconds before that shockwave found them, atomized them into mist.

Oh, it was a breathless time. A frenzied time. An insane time. A time when all and everything were balanced on the head of some celestial pin and George could feel the world trembling, waiting to fall, readying itself for that great, godless fall to the pavement far below. He could almost feel that pavement rushing up at him, feel himself impacting with a splatter of blood and bones and memory.

The compass needle began to spin.

George’s heart leaped.

Menhaus muttered, “I think, I think…”

George held the teleporter in his hands. They were shaking badly and he almost dropped it. He held it steady, placed one hand on the scope and the boat began to vibrate, static electricity snapped and crackled all around him making his hair stand on end. The generator hummed, the scope shot out a blue pencil of light that was refracted, boosted, amplified, turned back upon itself and a stream of blue pulsing, ionzed particles shot out into the fog… made the fog glow and seem to momentarily freeze like frost on a window pane.

And then, then…

And then there it was, the fog within a fog, a breath of interdimensional lunacy surging out at them. A vortex, a hole, a tear

…and they were plowing right into it, Menhaus jerking the throttle down out of sheer exhileration. There was a blinding flash of light that knocked them right out of their seats and a sickening sense of falling, of drifting, of tumbling through white space and cosmic noise… and, yes, a sensation of speed and distance and time and particulated matter.

And then blackness.

It lasted for less than a minute, but when they opened their eyes and found their bodies, they were gasping for breath. Coughing, gagging, delirious and disoriented. George made it to his knees and crashed back down onto the deck of the cigarette boat.

Panic, just panic… that weird, inexplicable sense of pressure and lack of it, of fullness and emptiness and countless leagues of nothing. Then even that was gone and they were breathing air, good clean air that filled their lungs and revitalized them.

Panting, George sat up.

It was black, blacker than black.

The boat was rocking as small, choppy waves bumped it to and fro. And overhead, overhead George could see-

Stars.