by Tim Curran
“Sure,” Crycek said. “Why don’t you touch that stuff, Fabrini? That would be interesting. What do you suppose would happen if you touched that stuff?”
But Fabrini wasn’t having it. The smile on his face was like a paper cut, just a slit. You could see it in his eyes, how he was getting damn tired of Crycek, too. Was maybe thinking that after he punched Saks’s fucking ticket he was going to do the same with Crycek, just keep it up, keep it up.
Menhaus said, “I just wish we’d drift free of this shit already.”
“You hear that, Fabrini? Menhaus wants us to drift free of this shit already,” Saks said. “What do you suppose the chances of that are?”
“About the same as you getting a personality,” Fabrini said.
Which got Saks laughing. “You’re great, Fagbrini, you’re really great. Why didn’t your old man shoot his load into the sink and save us all this grief?”
That almost did it. Fabrini’s eyes went dark and simmering, like hot tar bubbling up from a crevice. He looked about as close to murder as anyone Cook had ever seen. But then that look melted from his eyes and that smile came back, only it was sharp enough now to slit a throat. “Keep it up, Saks. Just keep it up,” was all he said.
“I always do. Just ask your mother.”
Crycek was still grinning. He couldn’t seem to lose that grin any more than a clown could lose one painted on his face. “Childish. You’re both so goddamn childish. You sit and argue and call each other fucking names while we drift farther into the mouth of Hell. Because that’s where we’re all going, each and everyone of us, right into Hell. And you know what, Menhaus? We’re never getting out. Never, ever.” He started giggling with a high, jittery sound that seemed to have the same tonal quality as fingernails scraping a blackboard. “Just like… heh, heh… just like Alice in Wonderland, eh? We went through the looking glass and now there’s no way out, no way at all.”
“Shut up,” Saks told him. “Goddamn freak.”
“No, no,” Fabrini said. “Let him speak. Let him get it off his chest. Maybe it’s about high time somebody around here speaks what’s really on their minds, really tells the truth.” Cook said, “Everyone’s overwrought.”
“Shut up, moron,” Saks told him. “Okay, Crycek. Spill it. You’ve been chewing on a bone ever since we came aboard, so out with it. What kind of crazy shit have you got for us?”
Crycek didn’t like that. Didn’t like being called crazy any more than a prostitute likes being called a whore. Because sometimes the truth not only hurts, it wounds, it scars. “What bone have I been chewing on? Same one you’ve all been chewing on, except not a one of you has the balls to come out and admit it. You’re all scared, you’re scared fucking white and I know it. I can see it in your eyes. Shit, I can smell it on you. You’re all ready to piss your pants! Big tough construction workers scared like little old ladies of the dark! I love it! I just fucking love it! Look how I love it!”
Cook said, “C’mon, Crycek… take it easy for chrissake. We’re your friends here.”
That got Saks laughing. “Friend? I ain’t his friend, Cook, anymore than I’m yours. And I also ain’t his mommy and ain’t about to baby this goddamn pussy.”
“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Give the guy a break.”
“Kiss my ass, you dumb wop. And that goes for the rest of you fucking sissies. Jesus H. Christ. Not a man among you.” He looked over at Crycek, looked at him like the very idea of his existence disgusted him. “Go ahead, Crycek. Vent yourself. Have your little nervous breakdown. When you decide you’ve got the balls to slit your wrists, I’ll give you the knife. Hell, I’ll hold it for you.”
Cook was beginning to feel tense and uncomfortable now, too. It was like reality and sanity were sewn together and some crazy bastard was pulling the seams open. He felt alone and paranoid and vulnerable.
Maybe they all felt that.
For if there had ever been any camaraderie here, it had just gone black to its core. Saks was a big part of that, of course. He was the proverbial rotten apple, the seed of malice. Sure, he was everything that was wrong with the race, all the intolerance and selfishness and cheap hatred rolled into a big fucking mess that called itself a man. Survival situations, like war, brought out the best and worst in people. And there was no doubt where Saks fit in. He was vile and crude and callous, the sort of guy that would slit your throat for a crust of bread.
And wasn’t it just damn funny, Cook got to thinking, how trash like him always survived? Always lived another day to poison a few more minds?
But if any of Saks’s cruelty was intended to make Crycek fold up like a flower in a frost, it just didn’t work. “That’s what I like about you Saks… you’ve got the biggest mouth of the bunch. Thrusting your chest out and running the others down, big boss man, big tough guy… and you know what’s really funny about that? What’s killing me is that you’re the most scared of all. You hide behind that macho shit because inside you’re a scared little boy… we weren’t here to show off for, you’d be crying and sucking your thumb.”
Saks was pissed. And everyone thought he was going to read Crycek the riot act, go up one side and down the other and not miss much real estate in-between… but he didn’t. He just stared at him, stared with such intensity he could’ve burned holes through him.
Menhaus said, “Okay, Crycek, enough. Both of you, enough.”
Fabrini just looked puzzled by it all. “What’s this ‘through the looking glass’ shit… what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Crycek, still grinning, said: “We aren’t in the Atlantic anymore. We’ve passed beyond, to another place. A bad place and you all know that. Just like Alice, right through the fucking looking glass… only this Wonderland, things aren’t so brightly lit, are they? You can call it the Devil’s Triangle or the Sargasso Sea or the Graveyard of Lost Ships… what does it matter? That fog grabbed us, vomited us out here… wherever in Christ here is. Another dimension, another planet, I don’t know, but I do know one thing and that’s that not a one of us is getting out. We’re here to stay.”
“Bullshit,” Menhaus said, looking angry for the first time. “I don’t buy that shit. Goddamn sailor’s stories, that’s all they are and you won’t get me to believe it, no sir. How about you, Saks? You don’t believe that, do you?”
Saks just looked at him. “All I’m going to say here is that wherever we are, whatever clusterfuck Crycek and his butthole sailors got us into, if we got here then we can get out again.”
There was a simple child’s logic to that and everyone felt it, understood it. Even Fabrini was nodding.
“There you go,” he said. “What we got to do is stick together, stay alive until we sort this out. That’s what we got to do.”
“Exactly,” Cook said.
But that only made Crycek start tittering. “Alive? Alive?” He looked at them all like they were nuttier than he was and maybe they were. He kept up that awful tittering, his yellow teeth chattering together as he did so. “Do you think what’s out there will let us live? You’ve all seen things and so have I. Monstrous, evil things. Alien things. Out in that fog, out there right now, they’re waiting, they’re listening to us. Nightmares, that’s what they are just as sure as this is Hell. Things with teeth and empty bellies and yellow eyes and-”
Menhaus slapped him across the face. Menhaus. Mellow, mild, goodtime, joke-telling, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Menhaus. And he did it almost involuntarily. His hand just came up and swatted Crycek across the face and it was hard to say who was more shocked: Crycek or Menhaus himself.
“Good one,” Saks said.
Crycek looked like he was ready to leap, ready to start swinging, but Cook held him back. Wouldn’t let it happen. Wouldn’t give Saks the satisfaction of letting the men go at each other like animals.
“All right,” Fabrini said. “We all know there’s crazy shit here, we’re all on the same page. But-”
“But what?” Crycek said, practical
ly raving now. “Don’t you get it? Don’t any of you get it? This fairy tale never-neverland we’re in is like some kind of dumping ground. Things too horrible to exist other places end up here. Maybe things God doesn’t want to look on or admit he created, things he’s ashamed of. This is where they end up, in this fucking sewer. They live and breed and multiply here… in this damnable pit, this cauldron of filth!” He started cackling again, only now no one had the guts to stop him. His eyes were huge and bloodshot, his lips trembling, cords jumping at his throat. “Sure, this is the bad place. This is where the things are, the crawling, squealing things! Unborn things and inhuman things! Things without eyes, without souls! Slinking, slithering, creeping nightmares and they’re out there right now! Can’t you feel them in the fog? Can’t you? Can’t you feel their hunger?”
“That’s enough,” Fabrini finally said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough…”
But it wasn’t enough. They’d goaded Crycek into this, they’d wanted it and now they were getting it. They’d opened the can of madness and now he was shaking its contents all over them, wetting them down with the stinking, abominable, deranged reality of it as he saw it. “Those things… oh, Jesus, I can feel them hungering… they’ll be coming for us. Don’t you doubt that. None of you. Today or tonight they’ll take another and then tomorrow night and the night after and the fucking night after that! They’ll take us one by one and if you’re the last one… God help you if you’re the last one because you’ll slit your own throat rather than look those things in the face, look ‘em in the face alone”
His mind was gone and they all knew it, but the impact of what he said was inescapable. For they’d all seen things now. Heard things. Sensed things and imagined still others. And what Crycek was telling them was exactly what had been echoing through their minds.
“You think I’m nuts? That it? You think I’m nuts?” he put to them, shuddering and quaking, his eyes darting madly. “Sure. Why not? Why shouldn’t I be? You give it a day or two and you’ll be as fucking loopy as I am! Oh, yes, yes, yes!”
Saks hit his seat with his fist and everyone jumped. “That’s it,” he said. He pulled out the knife he’d taken from Hupp: a lockblade with a seven-inch blade. Everybody saw that steel and they saw what was in his eyes, too. “One of you guys… somebody don’t shut this fucking nutjob up, so help me I’ll cut his fucking tongue out!”
Crycek was beyond danger now. He just laughed and then tears rolled from his eyes. He made a whimpering sound that quickly turned into a more ragged, horrid laughter. “You think I’m crazy, Saks? Sure, sure, sure, hee, hee, hee, crazy I am! Fuck it! But I’ll tell you people one thing and I’ll tell you it only once: you’re all in danger. And it isn’t just the wildlife, either. It ain’t just the things in the water, because this world… this zone or dimension or whatever in the Christ it is… it ain’t no different from the one we’re from. Because just like our world, this one… yeah, this one has a Devil, too.”
That even stopped Saks from using his knife which he was actually getting ready to do. And Cook knew that no one was going to stop him, but this stopped him. This stopped everyone. This filled them with something cold and shifting and made them all look out into the churning fog and wonder if something was looking back.
Menhaus was breathing hard. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I just want to get back home. That’s all I want.”
“Ask Cook,” Crycek said, his voice dead and emotionless now. “Go ahead, ask him. Ask him why he’s afraid to listen to the VHF, why he’s afraid to broadcast on it. Ask him.”
They were all looking at Cook now. But he just shook his head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
But in their eyes, all their eyes, he could see that they did not believe him.
Crycek said, “Tell them, Cook. Tell them why you don’t like that static on the radio, how you can feel something out there, something listening. Go ahead, tell them.”
“Shut up,” Cook snapped.
“Cook doesn’t have the guts to say what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling,” Crycek said and his sudden, rational calm was even worse than his earlier hysteria. “Because he knows it’s out there, just like I do. It makes a buzzing sound like… like an insect. And maybe it is an insect. But it’s out there, believe that. Something cold and cruel… out there in the fog, listening, watching us. It wants to eat our souls, it wants to devour our minds…” He held a finger to his lips. “Ssshh. Just. Listen. You can hear it out there, hear it listening, hear it waiting, feel it thinking about us… in here.” He massaged his temples. “It’s in here, in all of us, eating us from the inside with fear.”
And the thing was, they were all listening.
Listening to the fog and hearing distant things and things that were not so distant. Suggestions of movement. Whispers of motion. And underneath it all, a low constant thrumming sound like a generator on stand-by, waiting to power up.
For a long time after that, nobody said a thing.
But they were thinking things.
Things that were not good, especially trapped in that fog.
Things about the horrors in the fog and how they could be positively minor in comparison to an evil that was huge and cosmic and had come to eat their souls.
14
There were things in the fog and there were things in the minds of men and sometimes it was truly hard to say which was the worst. That which you could see and which could kill you… or that which remained unseen that slowly ate away your mind, your resolve, your sanity. And then, according to Crycek’s psychosis, there was that forbidding third grouping: that which you could not only see, but what could see you. Could feel you. And to this devil, if Crycek was correct, flesh and blood were of only marginal interest. What it wanted were minds to fill with gnawing pestilence and souls it could eat raw and squirming.
George Ryan was not in the lifeboat and he didn’t need to be, for he had felt this other and more than once. He could sense it on the VHF, something hidden in that static like a hive of wasps hidden in the trunk of a blasted oak. Something that used the static for camouflage or maybe was the static itself. Both, maybe, and neither.
The easiest thing to do was to tell yourself that you were being paranoid, imagining soul-eating bogies out in that draping fog. For imagining such a thing under such conditions was perfectly natural. For the human mind was like that, wasn’t it?
If it had no answers, it created them.
It filled in the blanks so it didn’t burn out circuits and relays trying to answer that which was ultimately unanswerable. Maybe there was no discarnate intelligence out there, no depraved puppet master working the strings. Maybe it was just nature, raw and ravenous and alien. Such a thing was entirely possible, George decided. But it did not satisfy that very human sort of logic that declared that there always had to be someone in charge, if not God then the Devil and if neither of them, something vile and nameless so above us on the evolutionary scale that it might as well have been a god.
Humans had need of such higher powers.
Maybe it was because our society was empirical, based on social pecking order and always had been. Everything had to have levels and classes, we decided, a food chain of sorts. And every food chain had its apex predator… the big guy, the boss man, the chief.
And in that awful void of fog and nightmares, well, there had to be one, too. It definitely was not man so it had to be something else. For the idea of a place existing, being left under the chaotic charge of old Mother Nature… that was not acceptable.
For every ship had a captain and there had to be one here, too.
Didn’t there?
Well, didn’t there?
Yes, George had been thinking these things, trying to root out superstitious fear with modern weapons like reason and hard-headed logic. He’d come up with a pretty good theory to explain away this theoretical Fog-Devil. But he had to. There really was no choice in the matter. If you didn’t erect some
kind of wall between yourself and the unexplainable, well… you were going to be in trouble. And especially here. George had gone through it for a time after hearing that phobic white noise. It had gotten to him. Gotten to him bad. Gotten to him to the point that he had pulled down inside himself, crouched down in his own cellar, hidden there, trying to be small and silent and safe like a mouse avoiding an owl in some great, misting killing field. And there he had waited, scared and helpless, smelling the rubber of the raft and the dankness of his own soul. But paranoia found him even there, hiding in the shadows, told him that this… this whatever it was, could find him anywhere. That even then it could hear his breathing, smell the fear-sweat on him, sense the hot blood rushing through his veins and the electrical impulses threading the synaptic networks of his brain.
It was out there, thinking about him. Feeling him. Getting stronger and stronger on the sour bile of his fear.
It was then that George put it to bed.
He climbed out of the cellar and filled his lungs with that moist, musty air and pretended real hard that he could not feel something out there. It was easier that way. Through ignorance there was ascension, through self-denial there was purity. Because the only other option was gradual mental deterioration, a rabid and all-encompassing paranoia that would eat his mind right down to cinders and polished bone.
So, without a doubt, George did not need to be on the lifeboat with the others. He did not need Crycek’s madness for he had enough of his own, thank you very much.