by Tim Curran
Cook was waiting for the typical response from Saks, some homosexual innuendo, but he got none. Nothing about his mother entertaining football teams or his father fucking barnyard swine. None of the usual. Saks just stood there silently, a funny look in his eyes.
“You find anything?” Cook asked him.
“Not much. That fungus is everywhere. Found some skeletons below, but whoever owned ‘em died a long time ago.”
Saks said he found the galley, too. The cutlery was all tarnished, but usable. The food was long ago rotted away. Sacks of flour and sugar were full of fungus. Same went for casks of water and bread. But he did find several sealed containers of salt pork.
“You think it’s all right?” Cook asked him.
“Looks like it might be,” Saks said. “But I don’t know if I’d want to put any of it in my mouth.”
“Anything else?”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Saks nodded. “I didn’t see them… but I could hear them in the bulkheads. They were scratching.”
After that, Saks went back to his cabin, that funny look still in his eyes and Cook knew something was up. Either he had seen something or did something or was thinking about doing something. Regardless, Cook didn’t really care.
When Saks was gone, he locked the cabin door and curled up on his bunk on a mattress he’d found that wasn’t too mildewed. He covered himself with a waterproof blanket from the lifeboat and fell asleep almost instantly, thinking of scratching in the walls and rats. He dreamed of ghosts.
11
Thirty minues after Soltz went down, nobody on the raft had spoken. Maybe it was that they couldn’t speak in the aftermath of what they had seen and maybe it was that they were afraid of what they might say. Who they would say it to. Who they would blame. So maybe silence was best.
The jellyfish had disappeared with Soltz, but now it was back.
It wasn’t as close to the raft now, but just up ahead drifting with them. Its bell was nearly submerged, but now and again it would come up, then sink back down again. But even at that distance – maybe a hundred feet, right about where the fog swallowed everything – its tentacles were everywhere in the water. A fluttering skein of them that reached out, circling the boat and winding beneath it, trailing in the stillborn current like a mane. So, essentially, they were trapped.
And the idea of that was almost as painful as watching Soltz die in the caress of some sea monster.
Almost.
“So what now?” George heard himself say aloud, realizing he’d only meant to think that as he’d been thinking it for days now.
Gosling looked over towards the jelly, squinted his eyes. It looked pretty much like a gigantic plastic garbage bag, deflated and wrinkly up there, not smooth and taut as before. George’s voice had no effect on either it or its tentacles.
“Yeah,” Cushing said. “What now?”
“We wait,” Gosling told them.
“I’m sick of goddamn waiting, Gosling, I can’t take much more of it,” George said, knowing that finally, ultimately the Dead Sea was pushing him over the edge. He could feel his mind unwinding in his head like string from a spool. “I mean, I can’t take much more of this. Why don’t you put a flare into that motherfucker? See if it can feel some pain.”
“Piss it off?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? You didn’t see what that sonofabitch did to Soltz when he pissed it off? You want I should burn a hole in it, get it nice and mad? Okay, I’m game. Just tell me what we’re going to do when it comes at us, attacks the raft? Just tell me that, bright boy.”
George felt his cheeks redden. “So you want to sit here like fucking cowards and wait for that prick to choose the moment we die?”
“Shut up, you goddamn idiot,” Gosling snapped at him.
“Listen, you two,” Cushing said. “This won’t accomplish anything.”
“Shut the hell up,” George told him. “Our master and fucking commander over here wants us to sit and wait until that goddamn sea monster gets hungry again. Well, I’m not about to wait. If we got to die, then let’s die like men already. Let’s give that bastard a taste.”
Gosling just shook his head. “C’mon, George, don’t be so damn stupid. No sense riling it up. I mean look at it out there, it looks dead for chrissake. Maybe Soltz wounded it.”
“Yeah, and maybe it’s just biding its time, waiting for the right moment to spring on us.”
“Don’t give it that much credit, George. It’s a fucking jellyfish. You act like it’s the town bully. It’s just an animal, a creature, it doesn’t think or plot. It’s a lower form of life… it reacts, right, Cushing?”
Cushing nodded. “That’s it. It just reacts to stimuli. I can’t imagine it being intelligent, even as smart as a mouse.”
George knew he was being ridiculous, had suddenly transformed into the weak link in the chain, but he wasn’t backing down. Not now. “How the hell would you know, Cushing? I mean, really, how could you possibly know? This isn’t the sort of jellyfish from back home. Its evolution was probably completely different. Maybe it does think. Maybe it can plot. What then?”
“Then we’re probably fucked, George,” Gosling said. “Any more questions?”
“Let’s just take it easy now.” Cushing was looking from one to the other. “Relax here. Giving a jelly intelligence is a real leap, George. I suppose it’s possible, but not likely. For all we know, it may be damaged as Gosling says. It may not have any fight left in it. .. or life for that matter. Although, jellyfish are certainly not organized the way we are and damage to them and damage to us are two different things.”
George sighed. They were right. Of course they were right. “Dammit
… it’s just that this waiting, it’s getting under my skin.”
“There’s not much else we can do,” Gosling said. “For all we know, it may just swim off.”
But Cushing said, “I don’t think so.”
And pointed.
By then, they were all watching. Seeing that noxious jellyfish suddenly pump itself into life like a leaky beach ball filling with air. It rose up, that bell breaking the surface, wearing a crown of weeds. The floats and bladders it wore like some kind of pulsating necklace were coming up, too. A few fleshy and convoluting tentacles emerged, skimming over patches of weed.
If it was dead… it looked damn healthy.
The bell was round and tight and bloated-looking. From a distance, slicked in a scum of that filthy water, it looked like wet vinyl. Right away, as if it could hear them speaking, the bell lit with colors. First it went purple, like some especially moist and succulent plum, immediately fading to a sort of blushed violet and then magenta. But it didn’t stop there. It went the deep, blood-red of port wine, then coral and the blinding neon yellow of wet chrome.
George watched those colors, amazed by them. Under any other circumstances, the jellyfish would have been a real marvel of nature. Something he might have paid to see at an aquarium. But now it was just deadly and deceptive and he wished some giant foot would come down and smash it the way things like that deserved to be smashed.
But those colors… George was certainly no invertebrate zoologist or physiologist and what he knew about the behavioral mechanics of lower species you could’ve kept in a thimble, yet he was certain that there was more to these colors than simple chemical reactions. He just couldn’t get past the idea that this thing was somehow trying to communicate with them in its own utterly alien way.
Could color variation be considered a language? It was ludicrous, of course, at least in the human frame of reference where languages had to be spoken, written, or even broken into mathematical symbols or telemetry… but what if? Was the idea really that absurd? Wasn’t language essentially an organized, systematic grouping of sounds or letters or even images as in pictographic alphabets? The jelly was able to reproduce all the primary colors and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of variations in-be
tween. Couldn’t each separate color be considered a representation of thought much like separate configurations drawn on paper were?
George looked at it, really looked at the thing out there.
Although he had no idea what it was he was doing, he opened himself up to it. Let those colors come into him, let them fill him and, subconsciously almost, he began to equate different colors with different thoughts. The language of color. It was alien and insane.. . but why not? He watched those colors and felt like they were watching him, too. And as he received, he sent, he transcribed his own thoughts into brilliant swaths of radiant color: Just go away, you have to go away. Maybe you honestly mean no harm and maybe you were only defending yourself against Soltz… but you’re dangerous to us, to our kind. So just… please… go… away…
“It’s going under,” Cushing said.
It sank beneath the sea taking its tentacles and floats with it. They could see it, just beneath the surface, a shifting and oily mass expanding and spreading out, pulsing. Then it began to move at the raft. Began to move fast.
“Shit,” Gosling said.
They got into the center of the raft and that big, loathsome jelly came speeding through that turgid water, creating a slow and heaving wake in its path. But it never hit the raft. At the last moment, it ducked beneath and dove into the murk out of sight. The raft bobbed in the swell it left and then settled down.
Nobody moved for a time.
Maybe they were expecting it to attack from below, filling the raft with stinging tentacles, but it didn’t. Five minutes, ten. It did not come back. The raft drifted along, butting its way through little islands of weed, skimming over the surface of that protoplasmic sea.
“I hope that sonofabitch stays gone,” Cushing said.
To which Gosling replied. “Well, let’s not sit here and wait for it to come back, let’s do some rowing. It’ll be good for us.”
Cushing and Gosling took to the oars and the raft began to move deeper through the dark channels that snaked through the weed banks.
And George?
He just wondered if the jellyfish’s departure was pure coincidence or the result of something much more impressive.
12
“No, we’re all going,” Cook told them. “All of us. We’re going to explore this ship and we’re going to do it together.”
They were all standing in the corridor outside their cabins, smelling the stink of the ship and feeling its ominous weight settling down on them. Cook called them all out there and told them he wasn’t crazy about any of them wondering around alone on the ship.
“All I’m saying is that this is an old hulk. A lot of the decks are rotten and one of you could fall through and the rest of us would never know about it,” he explained to them, though rotting decks weren’t what he was really concerned about. “So, if you’ve got to stretch your legs, just take someone with you.”
Fabrini didn’t have a problem with that and neither did Menhaus. Crycek just shrugged. But Saks, of course, smirked at the idea.
“You wanna be big boss man, Cook, it’s okay with me,” he said. “But you’re not going to order me around.”
“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Just do what you’re told.”
“Who dropped a quarter into you, Fagbrini? I was talking to Cook, the big boss man. So kindly fuck off.” He turned back to Cook. “I’ll do what you say, if that’s the way you want it. But if you think I’m some kind of prisoner, guess again.”
Menhaus shook his head. “You starting again, Saks? We trusted you and untied you and you’re starting again?”
“Zip it, fat boy,” Saks told him. “I plan to do what I want. That’s all there’s to it. Besides, when I’m not around that gives you and Fabrini more time to suck tongue.”
“Cocksucker,” Fabrini said, coming at him now.
But he didn’t get too close, because Saks stepped back and pulled out a knife. It had a seven-inch blade on it, looked sharp like he’d been working it on a stone. “Don’t make me do something stupid, Fabrini, because I really don’t want to.”
Fabrini had his knife out then and the two of them faced each other, eyes filled with acid.
Menhaus looked pale.
Crycek just smiled, figuring it was inevitable.
Cook, figuring he was the only cool head, stepped between them. He had the Browning stuck in his belt, but he did not pull it. “Okay, you two, that’s enough. Put those fucking blades away.” He looked from Fabrini to Saks, his fingers drumming the butt of his gun. I mean it.
They saw that he did.
They backed off and the knives disappeared.
Cook said, “You know, we’ve got enough problems here, Saks, without your shit. You want to wander this goddamn wreck and kill yourself? Well, you go right ahead. No loss, I figure. But if you ever pull that knife on someone again, I swear to God I’ll just put you down like a sick dog. And if you think I’m kidding, you think I’m bluffing, then you try pulling it on me right goddamn now.”
Saks licked his lips and it was easy to see that he wanted to pull that knife. Wanted to show these pukes what he was made of, but he backed down. And backing down did not come easy to a guy like Saks. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he did and it filled him with poison. Poison that he secreted somewhere for later, when he had a chance to use it. But right then? No, not a good idea. Cook would kill him. He knew it. Cook was not bluffing.
“Okay,” Saks said, “now that we know who’s in charge, let’s take a walk and see what there is to see.”
Crycek was still smiling. “Yeah, nothing I love better than a ghost ship.” He just shook his head. “What is it you expect to find?”
Menhaus said, “I don’t know. People or something. Maybe.”
Crycek laughed. “People? People? There’s none left. Hasn’t been for years and years. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…”
“That’ll do,” Cook said.
Good old Crycek. He could make the Good Humor Man slit his fucking wrists. Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them… Yeah, that was exactly what everyone needed to be hearing. Jesus.
“Let’s get going,” Fabrini said.
Saks had located a drum of kerosene, so they charged up a couple lanterns and went for a walk.
They found pretty much what they knew they’d find: lots of fungus and rust, some bones and debris. That was all they found thirty minutes into it, unless you wanted to count shadows or the distant sounds of scratching.
They let Saks lead them on, since he seemed to know his way around ships pretty well. But, as he reminded them again and again, he’d been in the Navy. He liked to remind them of all the places he’d been and all the things he’d done there. Cook didn’t hate him as much as before. Sure, Saks still reminded him – frighteningly so – of his father, just another inveterate asshole, but he didn’t want to kill him anymore. He almost felt sorry for the man. For all men like him who felt the need to hide their insecurities and fears behind a wall of machismo. And the realization of that came as something of a surprise to Cook. Somewhere along the way, he had changed. Hatred had become an odd species of pity. Now wasn’t that something?
One of the first places they visited was the surgery.
It was dirty and cobwebbed, debris everywhere, fungus oozing down the walls like streamers at a kid’s birthday party. The furniture and desk were pretty much rotten as was most of the woodwork in there. Cabinets held jars and bottles of drugs and chemicals, the liquids which had dried now to black goo and the powders solidified like cement. The labels on them were faded and unreadable. There were shelves of moldering books and a few yellowed medical degrees in dusty glass frames.
All in all, there was nothing but age here.
“You can almost feel the awful things that happened here,” Crycek said.
“Ah, knock it off with that,” Menhaus told him.
&n
bsp; But he was right. As the others looted through cupboards of instruments and file cabinets of crumbling papers, Cook could actually feel it. Smell it. More than an odor of age and dissolution, but an odd trace memory of pain and blackness and lunacy. Things had happened here, he was certain, terrible things that you didn’t want to think about. It was here, he knew, that the men who’d been infected aboard the Korsund would have been taken. You could almost feel their slow, lingering deaths, the horror they felt as the Cyclops was locked tighter in the grip of something unknown and malevolent. They would have laid on those tables, vomiting their guts out, never knowing in their innocent minds what radiation poisoning truly was.
Yes, the pain was real here. You could feel it.
“Check this out,” Fabrini said, hoisting a large wooden chest up onto a tabletop, pushing aside a dusty rack of test tubes and a box of slides. He knocked over a tall, antique brass microscope that was tarnished green. Motes of dust filled the lantern light.
Cook brushed sediment off it, waving dust away.
It was a surgeon’s kit, he saw. Maybe the others didn’t recognize what it was, but Cook had seen them before. When he wasn’t pushing earth with a grader, he was something of a Civil War buff. He haunted reenactments and particularly the makeshift battlefield hospitals there. Most of the surgeon reenactors were medical men in real life and their equipment was contemporary to the 1860s.
“A doctor’s kit,” Cook told them. “A surgery kit.”
Ebony-handled scalpels were pressed into felt compartments along with sutures, needles, probing hooks, tourniquets, and a particularly fearsome-looking post mortem knife. Cook lifted the tray of instruments out, revealing another beneath which held bone saws, artery clamps, bone snips, a large and rusty amputation saw. There were other implements he was not familiar with.
“Shit,” Fabrini said, “makes my stomach weak just looking at that stuff.”
There was a brass presentation plaque on the inside lid. It read: “Chas. W. Kolbe.”
“That must have been the doctor,” Menhaus said.