by Tim Curran
It was no less spookier than the ghost bit, but it made sense.
Because George could remember, right before it happened, thinking he saw something moving out there and his mind had been filled with images of ghost ships and spooks rising from their watery graves. Just imagination… but something out there, maybe his hypothetical Fog-Devil, had read his mind and gave him that which would scare him the most.
It was an aberrant line of thinking… yet he almost believed it.
The dead sea… for that’s how he thought of this place, as in Dead Sea, proper noun… was filled with horrible things. But most of them were merely biology run wild, but this other, this Fog-Devil. .. the presence he sensed out in that static… maybe it was the original boogeyman, a thing that knew what scared you, pulled it raw and dripping from your mind and set it loose. Maybe it got off doing that. Maybe it was the very thing that had haunted not only this sea but dozens of others, the very thing that terrified sailors since men first took to the water. The thing that created ghost ships and sea demons and crawling, nameless things that scared sailors to death or became the stuff of legend.
Fantasy? Maybe, but it would explain some things, wouldn’t it? George did not think it created monster eels or schools of weird luminous fish or odd little leggy critters that sat on oars-things like that were nature’s creations, a seriously fucked-up and alien nature, but nature all the same. No, whatever this thing was, it was not so crude in its creativity, it was not so general. When it scared someone, it made things personal, intimate.
Just as it had with George.
George started getting the creeps looking into the fog and thinking these things, so he joined the others up front. The VHF was operating and Gosling was sending out signals. The static was rising and falling with an almost morphic sound that made you want to sleep. And dream.
“What is that?” Soltz was saying. “What am I hearing there? That pinging, shrilling sound in there…”
George had heard it before. A high-pitched pinging like that of a tuning fork, but barely discernable in the static. It came and went. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, a code, something. You’d hear that pinging, then there would be a strange buzzing pulse that rose up and died. But each time George heard it, he was certain there was a pattern to it. That it was not random and certainly not natural in origin.
“Just noise,” Gosling said. “Atmospheric noise.”
That sounded good and maybe Cushing and Soltz were buying it, but George certainly wasn’t. For there was direction behind those sounds, there was intelligence. Something was making them and he honestly didn’t want to know what it was.
“I guess,” Cushing began, “I guess it’s just some weird interference… that’s what it must be.”
“Sure,” Gosling said, but his voice sounded awfully hollow.
If it indeed was static, what they heard next certainly could not be. It happened about three or four minutes later, just about the time Gosling was going to shut the unit off, that static beginning to bother all of them in ways they could scarcely fathom. It started out as a low, distorted whining like a shortwave radio trying to lock on a channel and then it grew high and echoing, became something like a broken up voice full of panic that was saying, “… help us… oh God help us… it’s getting close now… it’s getting close.. . oh dear God…” It faded away and then came back clearer, so clear you could hear the man on the other end breathing and something in the background, a huge and booming sound getting louder and louder. It almost sounded like a great, hollow heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom. “. .. anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog.. . it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and… it’s knocking at the door… at the door…”
It then it faded back into the static.
They listened for another minute or two and then Gosling wisely shut the unit off. His fingers were trembling.
33
“Untie me, you fucking idiots,” Saks was crying out at the others. “Don’t leave me… don’t leave me tied up like this…”
But they had other problems.
They were now in some sort of wide channel cut between two banks of weed and the fish, the boneheads were hammering against the hull of the boat, filled with frenzy and appetite.
But it wasn’t them that really scared the men in the lifeboat.
It was their big brother.
He was back.
The huge, ugly twenty-footer with the armored snout and the dead eyes. For something of its sheer bulk, it moved with incredible speed. With eel-like gyrations of its tail, it launched itself at the boat. The impact was hard and fast. It threw the men to the deck and nearly flipped the boat over.
Then it rocketed in and hit them from the other side, then from the stern, propelling the lifeboat forward like it had an outboard hooked up to it. Most of the smaller ones had scattered, but that big ugly mother was standing his ground.
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini said, “it’s gonna get us, it’s gonna flip the boat…”
“Damn right it is,” Saks said, enjoying their terror. “It’s going to get one of you in the water and swallow you whole.”
I don’t wanna see that, Fabrini kept telling himself. I don’t wanna see a man get bitten in half by a giant fish. I don’t care what else happens out here, but, by Jesus, I don’t wanna see that…
The fish came alongside the boat, so close they could not only see it, but smell it. It stank of brine and blood and bad meat, like something that had been chewing on waterlogged corpses. And that probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Cook!” Menhaus said. “Do something! We got to do something!”
The fish hit them again, knocking everybody to the deck again and almost pitching Menhaus into the drink. He let out a high, girlish scream and sank back down to the deck, gripping the uprights of his seat.
The fish came again, riding right on the surface, spiny ventral fins spread out like Chinese fans and sharp enough to cut timber. Cook was right on the gunwale watching it, watching it bump the boat with its iron snout and pass by. Those thick, bony plates that ran from the tip of its nose to its thorax were actually jointed he saw and it gave the fish incredible flexibility.
Cook took out the gun.
He didn’t want to shoot, but he didn’t see where he had much of a choice.
It nudged up against the lifeboat, those hinged jaws spread wide. .. wide enough to literally bite a man in half… and those dermal tooth bones that were like long, jagged shards of glass grated against the fiberglass hull. It could not bite through the hull and mainly because it could not get a grip on it. Had it been wood and not a single piece of formed fiberglass, it would have been able to butt its head through the hull planking.
Cook kept studying it.
He didn’t think there was any way in hell that a 9mm round could punch through that armored flesh, just no way. Back around mid-thorax, those bony plates ended and the fish had smooth skin like that of a shark or ray.
It vanished from view for a few moments.
The lifeboat was still moving forward with momentum from the hilt to the stern, cutting through those weedy, congested waters and going God knew where.
“It’s coming back,” Fabrini said in a defeated voice. “I can see it…”
And it was.
It was coming straight on, jaws wide and spraying foam, launching itself at the boat like a torpedo. The impact threw Cushing, Menhaus, and Fabrini into each other. The lifeboat swung in a lazy arc, riding on its gunwale a moment before righting itself. Saks screamed and roared like a wild animal.
It swam alongside the boat and Cook brought up the Browning and put three rounds in it at close range. It didn’t seem to have any effect… and then without warning, the fish rose up out of the water like a hooked salmon and they could see that it was probably closer to twenty-five feet than twenty. It rose up straight as a peg and for one horrifying moment they thought it was going to come back right
down on the boat like a fallen tree. But it missed by scant inches, making the boat rock wildly.
Its huge tail splashed in the water and then it was gone.
Ten, tense, expectant minutes later, it still had not returned.
“I think we made it,” Cook said.
But nobody commented on that.
The boat was still moving forward, slicing through the weeds and those coiling tendrils of steam that came off them. The fog blew over and around them in great glistening patches and they were suddenly locked in a fog bank. They couldn’t see two feet in any direction. Just hear the bow moving through the weeds that were getting as thick as briars now.
And then the fog receded a bit.
“Holy Christ in Heaven,” Fabrini said. “Do you see it? Do you fucking see it?”
They did.
Coming out of the mist was a freighter.
PART THREE
THE DERELICT AND THE DEAD SEA
1
So the raft drifted, borne by whatever currents there were in that miasmic, clotted sea. It was carried further into those banks of pale green weed that were thick and rotting and pissing a mephitic condensation into the damp air. The mist never lessened, though sometimes it was thin and vaporous and transparent to a degree. And at other times, thick and cloisterous and oddly agitated as if someone had stirred it with a wire whisk.
In his more poetic moments, Gosling saw that sea as being an ocean of blood. It was more pink than red and sometimes a dirty yellow, but it was never clear like water back on… well, back where he’d come from. This was an alien sea. A reeking, slimy discharge of watery protoplasm, something drained from a poisoned tumor or squeezed from a diseased placenta. He likened that sea to a petri dish, warm and wet and clogged with organic profusion, a metabolic medium, a fluidic slush of life and death and potential.
Cushing, who was something of an armchair naturalist, told him that wasn’t too far off the mark. That this sea – wherever it might be – was a living stew, a nutrient bath where life would be plentiful in amazing varieties and forms. He likened it to the primordial oceans of earth, so very rich in life it was practically a living thing itself.
“And it’s perfect, isn’t?” he said. “When you think about it? Steaming and moist and warm, an equatorial pond. The temperature of the water is probably unvarying, never too cold or too warm, always just right for things to breed and multiply.”
He said he thought the fog was created by the chill air hitting that warm soup of water. Earth’s prehistoric oceans and lakes would have been like that – rank and seething and misty, the very cradle of life.
“But none of that tells us where we are,” Soltz pointed out.
And that was true.
Cushing said, “Soltz has developed a few theories of his own based on watching Bermuda Triangle shows.”
“Oh? And you have a better explanation?” Soltz said. “Because I think at this point we’re all waiting to hear it.”
“Take it easy,” Cushing told him.
Gosling looked over at George. He was sleeping up near the bow. “What is your theory, Soltz? And please tell me it has nothing to do with flying saucers.”
Soltz looked offended at the idea of that. As if he wanted to say, well, the Bermuda Triangle is one thing, but flying saucers? What do you think I am? A kook? He looked over at Cushing, then at Gosling. “My theory involves vortices, time/space displacement. I think we were sucked into a vortex of sorts. That would explain why when we first entered that fog we could not breathe.”
“What would that have to do with it?” Gosling asked.
“It’s pretty apparent, isn’t it? That vortex grabbed us and when we could not breathe it was because we were momentarily caught between our world and this one, in some sort of dead zone, the hopping off point between our dimension, say, and where we are now.”
Gosling had been thinking pretty much along the same lines, but he did not admit it. “We only lost air for… what? Less than a minute? Thirty seconds? Not even probably. Are you telling me this vortex shot us into another dimension like an arrow and did it that quick?”
“Why not? We can’t apply our ideas of time and travel to such things.”
Gosling waited for Cushing with his scientific turn of mind to sweep Soltz and his theories under the carpet, but he did not. And Gosling himself wasn’t in any position to debate any of it either. As a sailor, he’d long been familiar with magnetic deviations and atmospheric abnormalities in the Sargasso Sea and Bermuda Triangle regions. There was no science fiction there. Funny things did happen in these places. It was well-documented and research into their causes continued, he knew, to this very day. But unusual navigational and atmospheric conditions were a long way from space/time distortions. A lot of bad writers had been throwing around the idea of those for a long time and Gosling had spent most of his life shaking his head at such pseudo-science.
And now?
Now he didn’t know what to think. Soltz went on in some detail and he listened patiently. It all made a certain amount of mad sense. Ships and planes disappearing from radar because they had been sucked or funneled into this place, most never to return. Yet, there had been a few that had returned, hadn’t there? If you wanted to believe the stories in some of those books – stories about planes or ships that had passed through some misty dead zone where their navigational and electronic instruments went haywire and then magically started working again when they passed back through the veil again. And, of course, being a sailor, Gosling had heard his share of tales about ships missing for years suddenly reappearing with no one on board.
Where had they gone?
Was it here? Was this place the answer to the age-old mystery of the ship’s graveyard? Was this the place the early mariners had seen when they told their horror stories of the Sargasso Sea? Had they breezed through here, witnessed nightmares, and then breezed out again?
Fantastic. The very same shit Gosling had always laughed at. Most sailors laughed at these things. But he knew, as they probably did, that at the back of every sailor’s mind there was a thin doubt that held on, despite what science and reason told them. A disorderly little fear that there might be a shred of truth in those old stories.
Vortices. Time/space distortion. Dimensional holes. Magnetic whirlpools that could funnel ships and planes into some alien sphere of existence. Christ, it sounded like the late show. But the fact remained, they were somewhere and it didn’t look much like the Atlantic or the Pacific or the pea green sea for that matter.
“You buy any of that?” Cushing said.
Gosling shrugged. “Maybe. Where we’re standing, one explanation is as good as the next. Something happened, didn’t it? And like Dorothy said, we ain’t exactly in fucking Kansas.”
Cushing smiled. “Did she say that?”
“Way I heard it.” Gosling sighed. “If we got in here, who knows, same thing that sucked us in might shoot us back out.”
“Do you really believe that?” Soltz said, despondent as ever. “Some cages have no keys.”
Gosling ignored that. He touched upon some of the things he had read or heard over the years, see what the others thought. “There must be some connection between this place and ours. Has to be. I’m just hoping it’s still open or it might open back up again and soon.”
He told them that he had read about a plane that vanished once. It was flying into Nassau or one of them places, supposed to touch down on some little strip there. People on the ground could hear the plane flying over, but they couldn’t see it. They were in contact with the pilot on the radio who said he could see nothing but mist above and below. That was the last anybody heard of that plane.
“So, maybe these two worlds are closer than we think,” Gosling said.
He said he’d also heard stories about shortwave radio operators picking up transmissions from ships or planes days after they’d disappeared. In some of the wilder tales, it was years later. Then there was the famous case of t
he five Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared in 1945 off of Fort Lauderdale. A ham radio operator claimed to have picked up their distress call many hours after they would have run out of fuel and been forced to ditch.
“I’m thinking that might tie in with that distress call we heard earlier,” Gosling told them, knowing everyone had been scared shitless after hearing that. Himself included. “That might have been something sent twenty years ago or fifty… who can say? Maybe in this place, radio transmissions keep bouncing around and now and again, they just slip out and somebody hears them.”
There was a mixture of total belief and total disbelief in the eyes of both Soltz and Cushing. But mostly just confusion set with terror. Because they were all remembering that transmission, hearing it echoing in their heads as it probably always would.
“… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog… it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and
… it’s knocking at the door… at the door… ”
And what they all wanted to know then as they did now was what exactly was coming out of the fog? What was on the decks and knocking at the door? And what in God’s name was that eerie booming sound in the background that sounded like a hollow, metal heart beating?
Gosling, however, was not about to comment on that.
Soltz had no such compunction. “What do you think it was? What got that ship? And don’t look at me like that because we all know that something got it. You heard the sound of that voice… I’ve never heard such terror before. That person was scared out of their wits.”
Gosling said, “Don’t jump to conclusions here. It could have been just about anything. It doesn’t have to be something supernatural.”
Soltz barked an almost pained sounding little laugh. “Who said anything about the supernatural? That wasn’t what I was thinking at all.”