by Tim Curran
There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.
“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water… but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”
“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”
Gosling nodded. “Maybe. But even with big diesels or steam turbines, you’d run out of fuel sooner or later, wouldn’t you? And then what?”
“Then you’d drift,” Marx said.
“And be brought right back in here.”
They all thought about the hopelessness of it all, those hundreds of ships trapped here, fossils in some grim collection. They looked out over them. They looked eerie and haunted in the mist, backlit by whatever made the mist glow. Those twin moons had come out again, the huge red one casting a bloody glare over mastheads and yards, stacks and cargo booms.
Pollard was saying nothing. He did not look exactly surprised about any of it. Chesbro, however, looked downright scared.
“I don’t like this place,” he said. “It looks… it looks like a cemetery.”
And it did.
The cemetery of the seas. Only in this unhallowed sea, the cemetery was restless and uneasy, a loathsome necropolis of dead and drowned things, slimy things ribboned with weeds and crepuscular fungi. It vomited back up what it could not hold down in its black charnel belly: waterlogged tombs and mildewed caskets, wormy coffins and crumbling sepulchers, floating crypts and oblong boxes draped in floral tributes of rotting kelp and vaporous green shrouds. They rose from the noxious weed, in whole and in part, clustered with morbid shadows, leaning this way and that like ancient headstones and webby monuments. The ships here were mummies and husks, cadaverous hollow-eyed things made of pipes and bones and ossuary girders. Derelicts welded from yellowed femur and gray ulna, mildewed rungs of rib and stark meatless vertebrae. They were alien exoskeletons and spectral ghost ships, exhumed wraiths resurrected from moldering abyssal mortuaries.
Yes, just skeletons and things that wanted to be skeletons. Things that sought blackness and depths, sluicing vaults cut in muddy sea bottoms, bathypelagic catacombs of drifting sediment and burrowing marine graveworms.
Jesus, George was thinking, it’s like some fucking shrine.
But not a good one. Not one that inspired cherished memory or peace, but one that inspired an almost atavistic horror. A place of malignance and spiritual violation. They were all so alone here. So far from everything decent and warm and caring. All those ships, just dark and hollow and scratching with a secret darkness that was devouring them bone by bone.
George was seeing those ships and feeling them, too, swallowing great black silences and tenebrous echoes, feeling the memory of those ships fill him, drop his dreaming brain into some pit where he could hear voices. Yes, the voices of those lost souls who had perished aboard those ships or simply went mad. But they were all there, all those tormented voices shrieking at him, showing him dark truths that made him want to scream. He was at the bottom of a dripping, brine-stinking well, feeling them feel him, touch him, whisper and laugh and cry. They were many but one, a single withering presence, a monster of deranged mourning with ten thousand hands and fifty-thousand steel fingers. George listened because he had no other choice. Just as Cook had channeled the last sensory impressions of Lieutenant Forbes aboard the Cyclops, George was channeling them. Knowing their thoughts and memories, their pain and sorrow and rage.
He saw all those great ships, all those three- and four-masters ghosting along beneath a pall of moonlight, slicing through high seas and thrashing water. Spars were creaking and blocks whining shrilly. Rain dripped from sail and rope and backstay. The masts and yards rode up high and cutting. Sails snapped and whistled. Hands hoisted and lowered cordage and shrouds. And the sea was a constant, a raging and rolling and pitching thing. Those sharp bows sliced through it and the seas broke before them like wheat before a scythe. He felt the coming of that cemetery fog. The stars blotting out, the breathable air sucking away, ship after ship after ship drawn into a misting tunnel of non-existence.
Ship’s bells ringing.
Voices shouting.
Oh, please, oh, please, get us out of here, oh God above get us out of this awful place, Lord.
Please.
We’re lost.
We’re becalmed.
We’re adrift.
We are dying.
We are losing our minds.
The fog is eating the flesh from our bones.
And the ships drifted on, enshrouded and doomed and despairing. Falling one by one into the weed and into rot, bathed in that slimy tideless sea, pulled into crawling depths and moist graveyards of weed where there were things with unseeing eyes and bloated tentacles and slavering mouths. And maybe, oh yes, something far worse that would come drifting from that misting effluvium, something vile and diseased and burning, smoking and sparking and vomiting ice.
And the voices screamed at the memory of that which walked alone.
The well vibrated and shuddered with their screaming, howling voices blown from contorted mouths fed by terror-wracked minds that were going to pulp and ash. And those ships, they became coffins. Lids snapping tight and weeds ringing them shut while white fingers scraped at satin and silk and-
“Jesus H. Christ, George,” Gosling was saying. “You all right?”
They were all looking at him.
Gosling was shaking him.
And he realized his mouth was wide and his eyes bulging and he was screaming silently. But then it was gone and he was on the raft and there was nothing, nothing but a lot of derelict ships and a handful of men wanting to know what in the hell he was doing.
But he couldn’t tell them. He could just say, “I’m… fine.”
Nobody bought it, of course, and long after the other eyes had abandoned him, Pollard was watching him, knowing things he shouldn’t know, but that was just the way of this place. It was the amplitude or something. For sensitive minds could hear things they had no business hearing and maybe Pollard had heard that scream of his though no one else had.
And maybe they would have all questioned him over his little episode, but there were other and more important things to be considered.
“Look at that,” Marx said. “Did you see it? Just at the edge of the mist there.”
They saw it. Some huge, nebulous shape had passed beneath the weed or maybe through it, a colossal luminous form that dipped beneath the wreck of an old three-masted brig and vanished from site.
“What the hell was that?” Gosling said.
Maybe they wanted Cushing to give them some rational scientific explanation for it, but all he said was, “I don’t know… but I hope to hell it doesn’t come back.”
3
“Hungry,” Menhaus was saying. “I can’t seem to remember what it is not to be hungry.”
Saks thought that was funny. “Yeah, but look at yourself. You’ve already dropped pounds. You’re looking good. Just imagine how good you’re going to look after a month, two months, a year-”
“Okay, Saks,” Cook said. “Once again, quit trying to piss people off.”
“I’m kidding, for chrissake. In case you don’t know what that is, Big Chief, it’s also called a joke or a funny, a laugh. Boy, Cook, ever since you decided you were the big cheese, you’re a real fucking pain in the ass.”
Cook could only sigh.
In command? Oh Christ, of all things.
Command of what exactly? A lifeboat with four men who were ready to tear out each other’s throats at the drop of a hat? Even Fabrini wasn’t weathering any of it real good now. After what they’d seen and experienced on the Cyclops, something in him had shut down. What was l
eft was irritable and angry and looking for something or someone to vent on. Cook had tried to draw him out more than once, but each time he did Saks was there, asking if he wanted to breastfeed Fabrini, too. Maybe wipe his ass and tuck him in to boot. And Cook had to wonder how long it was going to be before Saks and Fabrini really went at it, how long before their knives came out and blood was drawn. At least on the Cyclops, they’d settled down, had enough room to get away from each other.
Sure, Fabrini had been very good about it, when you considered things. Like the fact that Saks had cut off part of his ear with a knife. Most guys, they’d be wanting payback for that, but Fabrini let it go. That was big of him. But now? Well, Fabrini kept touching his bandaged ear and staring at Saks. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what he was thinking.
And Saks knew it, too.
Cook had to watch them all the time.
And he pretty much had to do it alone because Menhaus was pretty much whiny and pouty twenty-four/seven now, withdrawn really, talking from time to time, but more to himself than anyone else.
And Crycek? Well, Crycek had his moments.
So, essentially, Cook was wading these dark waters alone. He had to keep them from each other, offer them hope, squelch Saks, reassure them that they were not going to starve to death or get eaten by horrors out of the mist. Then, if that wasn’t enough, Cook had to keep directing them, giving them something to hold out for and this when he was dying inside, had considered more than once how easy it would have been to slit his own wrists.
“How do you like this fog, Crycek?” Saks said.
Saks had been asking him this question about every half an hour or so, needling him, trying to get under Crycek’s skin… and pretty much trying to get everyone riled up. Because Cook knew that’s what Saks was: a catalyst. That’s how he saw himself. The more disorder he could create, the sooner Menhaus and maybe even Fabrini – God forbid – would want him back in charge.
Crazy thing was, Cook had even considered handing back the reins to Saks. Wondering if maybe that arrogant, selfish piece of shit might have some ideas about what they should do that he would only share once he was firmly back in the driver’s seat. But, ultimately, Cook had weighed it out like a man deciding whether or not to emasculate himself with a paring knife… and decided it wasn’t exactly prudent.
“You hear me, you crazy shit?” Saks said. “How do you like this fog?”
Cook was ready to intercede, but Crycek turned and said, “Compared to what?”
Cook laughed.
Saks smiled, but he was seething beneath. Who was Crycek to smart off to him? To undermine the disorder he was sowing?
“Compared to Fabrini’s hot ass on a cold night, you freak.”
But that didn’t get him anything. And you could almost hear the reels spinning in Saks’s mind, hear him scratching that one off his big list of Things To Do. Hear his pencil scribbling up there: Note to self, Crycek is impervious to gay cracks. Try a new approach. Maybe insult his mother or father, talk about banging his kid sister.
Cook was watching the curtain of fog ringing them in. It was thick as woolpack now and you could barely see three feet to either side. For a while there, it had gotten dim and those mystic, eldritch moons had come out… Crycek nearly coming out of his skin at the sight of them. But then the fog had blown in or seeped in, and things had gotten lighter out again. Though it seemed like it was thinking about getting dark again, it just couldn’t make up its mind. Things were dimmer, yes, but they could still see each other fine and Cook was almost praying for darkness so he wouldn’t have to see their faces for awhile. The disappointment in them. The way they had been ravaged and lined by terror.
The weeds were very thick. Much thicker than earlier which told Cook they were getting closer to the heart of the seaweed sea. From time to time, he had his little crew row, but that never lasted because Menhaus would complain about his back and Saks would call him a pussy and Fabrini would tell them both to shut up and Crycek would start getting gloomy, asking Cook just what their hurry was. What was waiting out there for them was endlessly patient.
Damn. What a bunch.
“Hey, Crycek,” Saks said. “What’s your view on cannibalism?”
“Oh, knock it the hell off, Saks,” Fabrini said. “You’re really getting on my fucking nerves.”
Saks giggled. He looked satisfied. Well, maybe he couldn’t torment Crycek much, but he could still push Fabrini’s buttons just fine. He seemed happy with that.
“No, I’m serious, Fagbrini. I think we should all just sit down and discuss this. We may drift like this for weeks… in another month, we’ll be out of food and water. What then? I mean, we have to be practical, don’t you think? We have to decide who’s going on the spit. And when that times comes… what’re we gonna do? Flip a coin? Draw straws? Or just decide who’s most expendable?”
Fabrini was breathing real hard, veins pulsing at his temples. “I’m telling you, Cook, shut that prick up or I will.”
“Shit, Fabrini, settle down,” Saks chuckled. “You’re scaring the piss out of me over here.”
“Knock it off, Saks,” Cook said. “Or we’ll all throw your ass into the drink.”
“Yeah,” Menhaus piped in. “Quit being such an asshole.”
Saks chuckled again. “Listen, Menhaus, a man has to go with his strengths.” Dammit, it never ended.
Nobody had come off the Cyclops in real great shape. They were all haunted after that. Those monsters in the sea and fog… well, they were terrible things, but you could fight them and they were not intelligent. But that spider-woman on the Cyclops… well, she was an entirely different bag of chips, now wasn’t she? Even now, nearly a day since they’d fled from that mausoleum, Cook was having trouble putting any of it into context. For, really, what in the hell had Lydia Stoddard become? A ghost? A mutant? A crawling and skittering representation of the raw and shivering insanity that had peeled the skin from the Cyclops and everyone on board? Was she a physical manifestation or something supernatural? Jesus, it all boggled the mind and wilted the soul. But the very scary thing about it all… or scariest might have been apt, because it had all been scary and withering… was that whatever that woman had become, it was intelligent. It could plot and scheme and lure men to insanity and death. And as far as Cook was concerned, you could not fight something like that. Something that was equal parts madness, ectoplasm, and nightmare biology driven by a predatory, deranged mind.
No, none of them had been unscathed by the implications of that business. Even Saks, Cook figured, had had his stomach ripped out by it. He might not show it, but if you looked real close, you could see it in his eyes: fear.
“Now listen,” Saks said. “I don’t want to alarm you dipfucks, but food is something we have to be concerned about. Eventually, we’re going to run out… then what? What happens then? What happens if one of us starts getting crazy ideas?”
“You already got that covered,” Crycek said under his breath.
“Yeah, well I wouldn’t talk, psycho.” Saks held his hands out before him to show that there was nothing up his sleeve. “This is something we have to think about. You guys are all hungry and I know it. This goddamn rabbit food Cook has been doling out isn’t keeping our bellies full.”
He had Menhaus’ full attention now. You could see it in his eyes, that caloric lust. Here was a guy intimately familiar with buffets and second helpings. Maybe his belly was shrinking, but his eyes were filled with an unflinching desire to sink his teeth into something.
“All right, Saks, that’s enough,” Cook said, once again the only voice of reason. “We’re all hungry. I’d love a cheeseburger or an order of prime rib, but there aren’t any restaurants out here that I can see. So just shut up about it. And as far as cannibalism goes.. . I’ll shoot anyone who even mentions it again.” He had everyone’s attention then and his eyes were flat and dark and menacing. “And you better believe that I mean it.”
Even Saks wasn’t s
miling then. No, he had a new game now. Which was really old and just plain worn out through repetition. You saw it every day in prison yards and factories, boardrooms and barrooms… the stare. Any place men were gathered, you saw the stare. The intimidation game. My dick is bigger than yours and my muscles are harder than yours, don’t you look at me ‘cause I can kick your ass any goddamn time and you better believe it. You don’t intimidate me, I intimidate you. Yeah, it was childish and self-defeating, the last resort of weak minds. The sort of thing that should have been left in the high school locker room along with your dirty jock. But men never left it there. Cook knew they didn’t. Men were essentially weak, frightened creatures scurrying through life, seeing just about anything and everything as a challenge to what swung between their legs. Great stuff. You could see monkeys and lions practicing it on TV and men practicing it just about everywhere else.
And as Cook knew, the only men who practiced intimidation were those that were intimidated.
“Okay, Saks, you can quit staring me down now,” he said. “The playground is closed and I don’t play the big dick game.”
Fabrini burst out laughing and even Menhaus did.
“You might wanna watch it with that, Cook,” was all Saks could say. He had been cornered now, his infantile macho games dragged out into the open for all to see.
“Yeah, okay, Saks.” Cook smiled. “And Saks?”
Saks looked at him, never seemed to stop.
“Grow the fuck up already.”
Saks was boiling and Fabrini was laughing at him.
Poor old Saks, Cook thought, he never even realized that all his life, people were laughing behind his back.
“What’s that shit on your arm?” Menhaus asked.
Saks looked at him. Gave him the stare, too. “What the hell are you talking about, mama’s boy?”
But Cook was seeing it, too. All over his forearm… things like sores, great spreading red sores that did not look so much like abrasions or scrapes but like ulcers.