Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

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

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

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

  “I’m thinking you’re right.”

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

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

  “Shit,” Fabrini said.

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

  Crawling, fluttering, purring things.

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

  They paid the intruders no mind.

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

  “Disgusting,” he said under his voice.

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

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

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

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

  And up to the cabins they went.

  7

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

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

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

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

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

  It was a goddamn foghorn, all right.

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

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

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

  Five minutes later, the horn sounded again.

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

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

  But they could see nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  After that, there was silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well, don’t worry about it.”

  “It looks alive.”

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

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

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

  And then it came back up. Fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And, yes, long enough to make Soltz scream.

  And what a scream it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And compared to Soltz, he surely was.

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