by Tim Curran
Silence. Brooding and secret and infinite.
That and the sound of Menhaus snoring.
Finally, Crycek said, “Do you feel it, Saks? Do you feel it out there waiting for us?”
“Quit with the mind games, Crycek, it’s getting boring,” Saks told him.
But Crycek just smiled. “It’s getting stronger. I can feel it and so can you… closer all the time. We’re drifting closer to its black heart all the time.”
“We’re stuck in the weeds, you silly fuck, we ain’t drifting anywhere.”
“Still, we’re drawn closer. Closer to those teeth and eyes and that cold, ravenous mind. Can you feel its mind, Saks? Feel it trying to find a way in? Because it is, you know, all the time.” He looked out into the fog, then back at Saks. “Sometimes… sometimes it’s so close I can almost touch it. But it’s always scratching at the back of my mind, trying to find a way in”
Menhaus blissfully slept through the exchange.
Saks laughed without mirth. “It gets in your mind, it’s gonna find one big vacancy.”
“Is it already inside you, Saks? The thing? Is it inside you even now?”
“Shut the hell up,” Saks told him.
What he wanted badly right now was to get his hands free, because when that happened, Crycek was gonna be in a world of hurt. Saks hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to wrap those hands around his throat or just thumb the bastard’s eyes right out of their sockets. But something was going to happen. And Crycek wasn’t going to like it much.
Crycek suddenly gripped his head in his hands and out in that cloying mist, that weird droning rose up, faded away just as quick. “Jesus… it’s thinking about us, Saks. I can feel it… feel it in my head. It knows what we’re feeling and seeing… it can read our minds…”
Saks felt something cold under his skin now like a killing frost. “Read my mind?” he said. “Let it read my fucking mind. Hey! You out there! Read my mind right now! Go ahead… you ain’t gonna like what I’m thinking!”
But it was sheer bravado, a thin veneer and nothing more. For inside, Saks was cold and squirming and he badly wanted to scream. He had decided that Crycek was full of bullshit with this devil of his. .. yet, yet, he could almost feel something in his mind, a whisper of motion like the fluttering wings of a moth.
Two minutes later, he was certain he had imagined it all.
“Gone… it’s gone now, Saks,” Crycek said, chewing on the knuckles of his right hand. “But it’ll be back… maybe… maybe it already got Fabrini and Cook. Maybe that’s what happened.”
“They’ll be back,” Saks said, without much conviction. “Sure they will. When… when Cook gets tired of bouncing his balls off Fabrini’s chin, they’ll be back.”
But Crycek shook his head. “Maybe not. Maybe we’re already alone. .. just you and me, Saks. And Menhaus.”
“Be my fucking luck.”
Crycek laughed now, but it was a demented sort of laugh like a knife scraped over glass. “If they don’t come back… I wonder, I just wonder which of us that thing will take. Me or you? Maybe it’ll just want one of us.” Crycek’s eyes were blazing now. “Yeah… maybe it just wants a sacrifice, Saks, a human sacrifice. If that’s what it wants, maybe I’ll just have to give it one. I just happen to know a guy who’s already tied up…”
5
When Gosling relieved Soltz on watch, Soltz was looking funny.. . dreamy. There was an odd haze in his eyes, a faraway look like maybe he was not there at all, just lost in distant places and unseen horizons that Gosling himself could never reach.
“You okay, Soltz?”
Soltz seemed to realize for the first time that he was not alone. He looked at Gosling, blinked, and focused his eyes behind those heavy glasses. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Just fine.”
“What were you looking at out there?”
But he just shook his head. “You see funny things in the fog, don’t you?”
“What sort of funny things?”
Soltz thought it over. Something pulsed at his throat and his eyes went shiny and distant again. “Things that aren’t there. Those things I saw… they couldn’t really be there, could they?”
“What did you see?”
Soltz shook his head again. He opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked off into the fog and Gosling did, too. It did not look any different. Swirling and thick, sparkling and yellow-white like a drive-in movie screen.
“I saw a ship out there,” Soltz said. “I know I didn’t really see it, maybe just with my mind… but it was so real.”
“Tell me about it.”
Soltz narrowed his eyes, seeing it again now. “Well… it was an odd ship, a big ship. But not a modern ship at all. One of those old ones like maybe a barque, a pirate ship… yes, that’s what it was, a pirate ship. It had high masts… except they were ragged and full of holes, gray and sagging. I heard it out in the fog, creaking and groaning, wind whistling through the torn canvas… then it came out and I saw it. It had a funny glow to it, you know? There were men along the railing and they were ragged, too. Dead men. .. ghosts… skeletons. They looked like skeletons… isn’t that odd? Like skeletons.”
Gosling sighed, did not like it. “A ghost ship? Is that what you saw?”
“Yes… I think so. It just went past us and faded into the mist.” He squinted his eyes and cocked his head. “It went past us and there was a woman aboard… a woman. She waved to me. And you know what, Gosling?”
“What?”
“She didn’t have any eyes.”
Gosling felt a chill lay over his skin now. The idea of what Soltz had seen was scaring him, yet Soltz seemed fine with the idea. And that was probably the worst part. Like maybe his mind was going now, was coming apart to the point that he did not recognize fear and danger.
“Go lay down, Soltz, you need a rest.”
Soltz nodded. “What… no, it’s my imagination again. I thought I heard it out there, creaking and groaning, the sound of feet on its decks, pacing and pacing.”
“Go lay down,” Gosling told him.
“I didn’t really see it, did I?”
Gosling told him that he hadn’t, but deep down he honestly had to wonder. Wonder what might next come drifting out of the mist and if it was a ghost ship, would it keep ghosting by… or would it decide to stop?
6
Fabrini seemed better after he admitted his fears openly.
Cook was sure he would want to get off the ship right away, but he seemed to be in no hurry. In fact, when they’d climbed back down to the decks below, he just stood there.
“You know something, Cook? You know what I been thinking?” he said, looking not afraid now, but just angry. “I’m thinking that I’m just plain tired of wandering around with my fucking tail between my legs. I’ve had it. I’m not the sort of guy who gets like this, ready to piss himself over ghost stories. I figure that whatever got the crew here, it wants me, let it take its best shot. Because I sure as hell won’t make it easy.”
“That’s good thinking,” Cook told him. “Reading that log made me start thinking some things myself.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well… maybe I’m wrong, but what if Crycek is right: what if this thing needs our fear, feeds off it? What if it gets stronger on paranoia and anxiety and things like that? What if? Then, I don’t know, maybe if we don’t let it see that we’re scared, maybe it’ll get weaker.”
“Makes sense to me. Let’s show that fucker what we’re made of. Let’s do some exploring.”
That really came as a shock to Cook, but he took it as he took all things with neither a smile nor a frown. They found a hatch and went below decks, down into the damp darkness. And down there, in the shadows and stink, it wasn’t quite so easy to puff out your chest. For if the atmosphere had been forbidding above, it was positively rancid below.
Using the lantern, they began exploring the mazelike passages below decks. Cook figured it was going to be bad down t
here and he was right. There was an awful, gagging stink in the air that was worse than even the smell of the sea and weeds. This was a foul, suffocating odor of rank decomposition and noxious dissolution. Like something wet and moldy locked in a hot closet, boiling away in its own juices. A weird combination of organic decay and rusting machinery, stagnant water and mildewed woodwork… a half dozen other things neither man could identify or wanted to.
“I feel like a worm,” Fabrini said. “A worm sliding through the carcass of something dead.”
It was right on target, but created such an absurd visual that Cook actually laughed… at least until he heard his laughter echoing back at him. No, none of it was funny. Not in the least. There were greasy, gray toadstools and furry green moss growing through rents in the bulkheads and more of that bloated fungus that was just as white and fatty as the flesh of a corpse pulled from a river. A hot, yeasty odor came off it.
Cook stepped on something soft and pulpy about the size of a cantaloupe and it went to juice under his boot. He jumped back with a cry, realizing what he’d stepped on was something like a puffball, a cloud of yellow spores spread out in the lantern light.
“You ever seen anything like this?” Fabrini asked,
Cook just shook his head.
The ship was dead, obviously, yet there was such a profusion of growth and morbid germination, it almost seemed like maybe it was moving from the inorganic to the organic. That given time, the Cyclops would be a seething diseased mushroom that only looked like a ship.
They moved on, ducking beneath ribbons of fungi, bringing light where there had only been moist darkness and bacterial action for decades. The air was saturated with a brackish sewer smell. Shadows pooled and bled like black blood. The bulkheads were thick with a slick yellow moss. Clots of fungus dropped from the ceiling overhead and hit the decks like rotten plums. Everything was creaking and groaning, dripping and oozing and stinking.
It was bad. God yes, it was bad.
But something in them, in both of them, pushed them on. Maybe it was some inexplicable, suicidal desire to see the very worst that floating mortuary could show them. Maybe they could be satisfied with nothing less. And maybe, after reading the ship’s log and having their minds touched by those of the crew, they had to know what became of them.
Doors were either welded shut with rust or had bulging tongues of fungi seeping around their edges as if the cabins behind them were bursting with fungal growth. The fungus was on the decks, too, and they were walking right through it, their boots making gluey, sticky sounds as they lifted them with each step. Cook had brushed some of it on a bulkhead with the back of his hand and it had been warm and oily like the skin of a dying man.
They found another corridor and the fungi had not abated.
But one stretch of wall was free of it, was blackened and pitted as if a great fire had swept through there. Cook and Fabrini paused before a doorway. It was burnt black. When Cook prodded it with the barrel of the Browning it shattered like candy glass. It was entirely crystallized.
“Just like the log said,” Fabrini pointed out. “That ship, the Korsund, remember? Forbes said it looked burned, that the walls fell apart when they touched them.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
Fabrini tapped the door with his knife and it fell apart like ice in a spring thaw. “What could cause something like this?” he wondered out loud.
Cook shook his head. “I’m not sure… it’s like it was burned and then frozen immediately afterwards, you know? Like it was hit with a raging heat that weakened it and then dunked in a tank of liquid oxygen, frozen solid in a split-second. What else could weaken steel, make it like this?”
Now that the door was reduced to shards at their feet, Cook held the lantern in there. There was dust everywhere. And where there wasn’t dust, there was more of that fungi. The floor was thick with it. It climbed up onto a bunk, was in the process of swallowing a desk-
“Jesus,” Fabrini said, “look at that…”
Cook was looking. Seated at the desk was a skeleton dressed in dirty, dingy rags that might have been a uniform at one time judging from the tarnished buttons on the breast. The skull was thrown back, jaws sprung as if in a scream. The fungus had absorbed the yellowed skeleton right up to the ribcage, fingers of it snaking up to the jawline. To Cook, with all that fungi on it, it looked like the skeleton was white wax that had melted down over the desk and pooled onto the floor. Because that’s how it looked… like a Halloween candle.
The fungi seemed almost aware of the light on it, began to bleed droplets of diseased sap.
“You think…” Fabrini began. “You think that might be-”
“Forbes,” Cook said. “I’ll bet it is.”
He didn’t comment on what they were seeing anymore than that. The sickly yellow light of the lantern created wavering shadows, made the skeleton look like it was leaning forward, then back, made the skull grin like it was laughing at them.
And maybe it was.
Because it knew things they did not. It knew plenty of things that they would not know until it was too goddamn late to do anything about them. It sat there, laughing in its sea of fungus and ancient rot, flashing a toothy mortuary grin. Filled to bursting with a grim, macabre mirth. You could almost hear it saying: Well, well, fucking well… look what the cat dragged in… or will soon drag out. Almost ninety years I’ve been waiting for someone and now here you are looking in on me, isn’t that sweet? And you want to know what it was like when I was clothed in flesh, when good dutiful Lieutenant Forbes was a man and not a fungal wraith? Yes, you want to know what it was like for him, sitting in here, waiting and waiting, hearing voices and lost souls whispering in the corridor, things scratching and clawing and hissing his name. How it was for him, his mind gone to a soft quivering rot because he knew he was alone and that thing was coming to claim him. You want to know what it was like, him sick with radiation poisoning… because that’s what it was and you know it. The breath of that thing is radiation, a wasting frozen atomic fission born in black godless cosmic voids… the sort of radiation that melts holes through the fabric of time and space and is a cold fire burning in your guts until you vomit out your insides in glistening, greasy loops. Yes, that’s what it was like for Forbes. His guts coming up his throat and then that doorway suddenly radiant with a flickering, supercharged energy that was so very bright it was actually the purest form of darkness, the absolute darkness of black holes and dead stars. Then it came through the door, passing straight through the metal because solid matter is like a mist to it and that’s when Forbes saw it, something immense, something sinister and intensely alien. Something that perverted three-dimensional space with its very arcane, impossible existence. An obscenity ancient and undying born in a tenebrous antimatter firmament of sentient slime where physics and geometry are screaming, cabalistic cancers. This, my friends, is what our good Lieutenant Forbes saw. What he feasted upon and what feasted upon him. Something lunatic and profane in appearance, a violation of known space that squeezed his brain dry like a sponge just seeing it. A crawling and slithering accumulation of arcing colors and flesh that was not flesh but smoke… colors with texture and sound and smell… writhing, hideous waxen colors that looked into him with green crystal eyes that bleached his own eyes white and boiled his brain to soup just looking upon them, turned his gray matter to a white radioactive jelly that ran from his ears and eyes and mouth…
All of it, whether memory or psychic invasion, blasted through Cook’s brain in a searing wave that left him gasping, a choked whimpering in his throat. His head spun and he fell into Fabrini who held him up, scared now, wanting to know what in the hell was happening. But Cook could not tell him. Could not tell him anything. Because he had seen it, he had seen and felt and physically witnessed the merest fraction of Forbes’ final moments and it left him wriggling with a fear that was so big, so total, it blotted out everything for a moment… even his own mind. He stood there, hanging onto
Fabrini and for a few, lunatic moments his mind had been washed clean like a blackboard and he did not know who he was or where he was. And then it all came surging back, leaving him breathless, his temples throbbing.
But what had it been?
Bones were just bones and they could not have sent those images into his head. Cook could not accept such things. Could not let himself go there. Pitted, yellow bones holding, after all these years, a distant and feral memory, a reflection, an echo of a horror beyond human experience… was it possible? Or was the answer far worse? Was it just a telepathic linkup to that thing’s mind, its consciousness, letting him know but a sliver of the fate that was in store for him? For all of them?
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini was saying. “Are you all right?”
And Cook was nodding his head. “I think the air in here is bad or something. I got all woozy or something. I’m… I’m okay now.”
Maybe Fabrini believed that and maybe he didn’t.
Regardless, he led Cook up and out of those subterranean passages and onto the deck where the air was somewhat cleaner, fresher. Even the mist didn’t look so bad after what was below.
After a time, Fabrini said, “Should we go back to the boat?”
“If you want.”
But Fabrini shook his head. “Let’s look around some more.”
Apparently, whatever had gotten into Cook’s head, it had not touched Fabrini. His zeal for exploring the ship had not lessened. Maybe it was being cooped-up in that lifeboat for so long. Maybe that’s what it was. Even exploring a death ship and not knowing what new horror might show itself next did not make him want to leave.