by Tim Curran
“Oh, but there is.”
Cushing had come out of the galley and there was a tone in his voice that told them he was not kidding around. “It’s out there, Saks. And it’s not some half-ass Christian oogy-boogey man with a pitchfork and horns, it’s the real thing and it has plans for us. You can believe that.” He sighed, looked around. “But enough of that. Let’s eat, then we’ll get down to business.”
18
Business, then.
They were all sitting there and the whiskey was gone and now there was just coffee and bloodshot eyes. Some of the men were smoking. George and Saks and Pollard were studying the chart of the ship’s graveyard and environs beyond that Greenberg had drawn. Crycek was looking over the letter Greenberg had written. Cushing had the floor and he was pacing back and forth saying, “So, like I said, this Greenberg… the guy Elizabeth knew as the Hermit… he was one of a group of scientists that got sucked in here because they wanted to. They believed all along that those planes and ships and people in the Devil’s Triangle and Sargasso Sea were getting funneled somewhere. They just weren’t sure where.
So, somehow… who knows… they got themselves pulled in here same way we did.”
Saks looked up from the chart. “So these eggheads, they worked for the Navy at one time? Part of something called Project Neptune?” He shook his head. “You expect me to believe that the Navy wastes time on shit like this?”
“They wasted time on the Philadelphia Experiment, didn’t they?” Pollard said. “Who knows what kind of crazy shit our government is up to?”
“Philadelphia Experiment? What the hell is that?” Saks waved it away like he didn’t honestly care. “You telling me our government knows about this shit and don’t do nothing about it? I can’t buy that. You buy this shit, George?”
But George didn’t say; he just studied the chart.
Fabrini laughed. “You’re naive, Saks. You know that? You think those politicians ever tell the truth? All they do is lie and cover-up shit.”
Menhaus said, “You won’t get Saks to believe that, Fabrini. He believes whatever those lying shits tell him. Blind faith.”
Saks slammed his hand down on the table. “Menhaus, you’re a fucking idiot and we all know it. I don’t believe anything those lying fuckwigs in Washington say. I was in Vietnam, dipshit, I know all about lies and cover-ups. Don’t you be telling me what I believe, because you don’t have a clue.”
“All right, already,” George said. “We’re not talking politics here. We’re listening to Cushing. Maybe if you all shut up long enough he can say what he’s got to say.”
There was no argument about that.
“Point is,” Cushing said, “that these scientists got themselves trapped in here same as us. They know something about this place and how it can exist. Greenberg called it Dimension X and that’s good enough. We’re stuck on some rotting, misty world on the dirty backside of Dimension X…”
He went on to cover pretty much what was in the letter and Greenberg’s theories about wormholes and interdimensional passage. It was heavy, heady stuff, but Cushing tried to explain it as simply as he could. Even he, with his scientific leanings, was pretty confused about it all, he admitted. But it all made sense in the long run, he told them. Greenberg explained how they got here and maybe, just maybe, how they could get back out.
“Sure,” Fabrini said. “But if what Elizabeth here says about her uncle is true, well, what chance have we got? He looked for that vortex to open and it never did. So where does that leave us?”
“You’re missing something, though,” Crycek said, pointing at Fabrini with the letter. “In here, Greenberg says that he’s going back to that ship, that Lancet, says that it’s the key. That it’s the key to deliverance from this place.”
“That’s right,” Cushing said. “The Lancet. What Greenberg referred to as a cursed ship. I don’t know what he means by that, but obviously this ship is important. He doesn’t say anything about us waiting around down in the Sea of Mists hoping that vortex’ll open. He seemed to think that the only way out was through something on the Lancet or through maybe the Lancet itself.”
“He also said that if we go back through, we might end up in some other time,” Saks said. “Maybe that’s just some voodoo crazy bullshit, maybe not. If it isn’t… Christ, who knows where we’d end up?”
“Who gives a shit?” Menhaus said. “I mean, does it really matter? Maybe the time-thing would reverse itself like he said and if it doesn’t? Fuck it. The tenth or fifteenth century beats the shit out of this place, way I’m looking at it.”
George looked up from the chart when he said that, smiled. That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? Good old Earth in the good old third dimension beat the shit out of this place any day of the week. For there you had sunshine and blue skies and people and, yes, hope. When you were home, there was always hope. That’s how George was seeing it. He wanted his time back, wanted it back in the worst way because he had a wife and a kid, but he’d take earth any way he could get it.
“Okay, Cushing,” Saks said. “Since you’ve appointed yourself as the half-ass expert on this science-fiction bullshit, let me ask you something. That egghead… he’s talking about time bending or curving or whatever… so what happens if we come back two hours before we sailed? We go up to ourselves and say, hey, knothead, don’t get on that fucking tub?”
“If we have to.”
Cushing explained that all the time curvature business was highly theoretical. He told them about something he’d read once, the “Grandfather Paradox”, wherein you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather before he married your grandmother. Hence, your parents would never have been born and neither would you… so how could you possibly have traveled back in time? One theory said, he told them, was that time was self-perpetuating, that it would maintain its own integrity. So that at the moment you killed your grandfather, you would cease to exist… as would everything that had anything to do with you, your parents, etc. Bam, it was all gone, never happened. It was all pretty much fringe-thinking and open to endless debate. He said that everyone knew the Ray Bradbury story where a guy goes back in time to the Jurassic, steps on a butterfly, comes back to the present and the world has been completely changed by that one insignificant butterfly’s death which set up a chain-reaction that totally subverted the future.
“But that’s all speculation,” Cushing finished by saying. “And we don’t have the time to worry about crap like that. What we need to decide is how we’re going to go about getting out of here.”
“Maybe we can’t,” Saks said. “Maybe Crycek’s boogeyman, maybe he won’t let us out.”
Maybe it was Saks’s attempt at some cruel joke, but nobody thought it was funny. On the subject of that mysterious other, they had absolutely no sense of humor.
“The Fog-Devil,” George said.
“Good name as any,” Cushing said.
“Oh, Christ,” Saks said. “Here we go.”
But nobody was paying him any attention on that subject anymore. They had all pretty much written off his skepticism as fear. He could not accept such a thing, could not live with the idea of such a thing, hence it did not exist. Simple. George figured it was the same sort of self-denial you had back in the world concerning UFOs or aliens… the very idea of such things existing was too much for the human mind, so it denied and ridiculed. Sort of a psychological self-preservation so you could sleep at night and not lose your mind wondering when the little green men might come for you.
Crycek said, “Greenberg talks about that, too, in his letter. How that Lancet might be the focal point of this thing.”
Which, Cushing said to them, had to make you wonder about that ship and what it was exactly. According to Greenberg it was a cursed vessel, but a place of revelations, too. The keys to deliverance and also maybe the hopping off point of something incalculably dangerous.
“Was it it, though?” Menhaus asked. “What is this thing?”
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But nobody was even going to hazard a guess on that one. They had ideas in their heads, but they wouldn’t speak of them. Not just yet. Maybe it was some sort of alien ghost and maybe it was the very thing that had inspired the idea of Satan on earth… and a thousand other worlds.
“Listen now,” George said to them. “Right now, it doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve felt it and so have all of you. It’s out there and that’s enough. I don’t know how many times out there in that goddamn fog I felt like I was being watched, felt like something was getting close. I saw things, too. Things that couldn’t be. I think the Fog-Devil is responsible for a lot of that.”
“I think I’ll take a walk until story-time is over,” Saks said, getting up. “You run out of ideas, there’s the one about the guy with the hook-hand out in lover’s lane.”
“Sit down, Saks,” George said.
“What?”
“Sit… down.”
“Fuck you think you are, bossing me around?”
George was up on his feet now and so was Fabrini. “I think I’m the guy that’s gonna put you on your ass and make you listen whether you fucking like it or not.”
“Think you’re up to the job?”
“Maybe not. But I’ll bet Fabrini is.”
Saks sat down. “All right, all right, go ahead. Tell me your fucking spook stories. Hey, Elizabeth? You got any popcorn?”
But if he thought it was some big joke, the cocky grin on his face didn’t last too long. Not when George brought out the VHF radio from the lifeboat and set it on the table in front of him. His grin faded and his eyes widened. The blood drained from his ruddy, unshaven face drop by drop.
“This is bullshit,” he managed with little conviction. “Fucking parlor games.”
“Let’s see,” George said. “Let’s see what’s out there…”
Elizabeth helped Aunt Else up. Aunt Else had dozed off now and Elizabeth woke her and helped her to the doorway leading to the cabins. But in the doorway, Elizabeth paused. “You… all of you. .. you better think about what it is you’re doing, what you might be invoking out there…”
Then she left on that ominous note.
George started up the VHF and the air in the cabin was heavy, leaden, so thick you could barely pull it into your lungs. The VHF whined for a moment or two, then there was static, rising and falling as before. A snowstorm of static that reminded George of distant, windy places, stormy and blowing places where there was no escape, but only waiting, solemn and grim waiting. Like maybe outposts on hostile worlds or lonely bases coveted by Antarctic maelstroms. Just that static rising and falling like it was breathing. But the bad thing was, he was almost certain that it was louder than it had been before
… more palpable, cognizant.
“Sounds…” Menhaus began, his voice full of dryness. “… sounds like wind blowing through an empty house…”
George was thinking that, too. A lonely, loathsome sound of dead places. An eerie sound of wind blown through hollow gourds and catacombs. You kept listening, though, listening to that rushing, angry field of static, you started hearing other things, sensing other things.
“Makes my fucking skin crawl,” Menhaus admitted.
George was with him on that. For his skin was crawling. The static was the sound of voids and distance, black fathomless zones and dead moons. The noise a haunted house would make when no one was there to listen to it. Just that thrumming, listening static that was not entirely lifeless, but not living either. Sterile, unborn, thinking about birth. It got right inside your head and made something in you flinch and curl-up. George knew if he was stuck in a room by himself listening to it for any length of time, he would have put a gun in his mouth.
“Okay,” Cushing finally said, almost startled by the sound of his own voice. “Broadcast, George. Put your voice out there…”
But George hesitated. The idea of his voice being sucked into that storm of skeletal, dead air was almost too much for him. Like maybe, whatever was out there making that noise, would reach out through the receiver and pull him in.
The static suddenly changed in pitch or something out there did. There came a muted beeping like a Morse Code key being frantically tapped. At first he thought he was imagining it and then he was certain he was: because there was a voice out there speaking, but lost in that field of static. Gradually, it became clearer and it was a man’s voice, garbled and lost, but you could hear it, all right. A high-pitched, almost whimpering sort of voice. “… out there, out there… out there, out there…” Then it faded, echoing in the static, coming right back again like it had bounced off something. “out there… please, please, please… don’t come after us.. . don’t follow us… dear God don’t follow us…” And then it dropped back down into the static again and everybody in the cabin found their lungs and started to breathe again. And this time another broadcast came up, but just for a second or two. A woman’s voice now, desperate and insane-sounding, whispering over the mic: “… help us… help us… help us… help us…” Yes, just a whisper like she was afraid someone or something might be listening to her.
“Turn it off,” Saks said, breathing hard. “Turn that shit off.”
But George didn’t. He clicked on the mic, said, “This is an SOS. .. this is an SOS… this is an SOS…”
Then he clicked it back off and the effect was immediate. The static got louder, became something akin to the buzz of hornets and there was that weird, echoing ping buried in it, coming and going and sounding very much like the pinging of a sonar unit, only oddly hollow and alien-sounding.
Cushing nodded and George shut it off, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“Now,” Cushing said. “What you’re hearing out there… that noise… it’s not of natural origin and we all know it. The only time that buzzing or pinging rises up is when you put your voice out there. Something, something out there reacts to it.”
Pollard was shaking. “Those people… those poor, lost people. ..”
“Those people are long dead,” Cushing told him. “Those are just echoes of old broadcasts I’m willing to bet, but in this place, somehow they keep repeating.”
He let everybody relax a moment before he went on and by then Elizabeth was back. She sat over on the settee by Crycek and Pollard. She didn’t say a word. She looked disturbed by what they were talking about, but wouldn’t say so.
“All right,” Cushing said. “Greenberg knew this thing existed, he felt it the same way we’ve all been feeling it out there. Though he doesn’t say so, I think we can read between the lines and say that this thing… the Fog-Devil… it got his friends when they were at the Lancet. Greenberg said he thought the Fog-Devil was cyclic, meaning that it went through periods of dormancy and gradually cycled itself back up from time to time. And I’m guessing that we just happened to drop into this place about the time it’s ready to wake back up.”
Fabrini stood up. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right. I mean, think about it… why aren’t there more people here? Christ, should be lots of people here. We survived and they should have, too. Where are they? What happened to them?”
“They were purged,” George said, jumping in.
Everyone was looking at him now.
“I don’t have a better word for it, people. Whenever that Fog-Devil wakes up, goes kinetic like Greenberg said, then it goes hunting minds, human minds. And the next time it comes, none of us’ll be left.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said.
Fabrini was scared. You could see that. But he wanted to say something and he did: “When we were on the Cyclops, Cook and I found the ship’s log and…”
He told them what he remembered about it, breaking off again and again and saying how he wished Cook was alive, because Cook could tell it better than he could. But he got most of it right. The crew from the Cyclops visiting a Danish ship called the Korsund and what they found there… the burned men, their eyes cremated from their skulls, their brains boiled to jelly.
All the horrors of that dead ship. And how what happened there, happened then to the Cyclops… one man at a time until there was no one left but the first mate who had gone mad, waiting for the Fog-Devil to come for him. When Fabrini had finished, he was breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and a tic in the corner of his lips.
“I never saw that fucking book,” Saks said. He looked to Menhaus and Crycek and they both shook their heads. “Where was it?”
“Cook,” Fabrini said. “He tossed it overboard. Did something with it. He didn’t want you guys reading it, getting freaked out.”
Saks made some derogatory comment under his breath.
Menhaus just said, “Cook… he was a good one. A real good one.”
“So that gives us an idea of what this thing does,” Cushing said to them. “It might be radioactive in nature. Regardless, it’s extremely dangerous. If we don’t want to be part of the next purge-”
“Then it’s time to shit or get off the pot,” George said.
“Meaning what?” Saks asked him.
George looked at him, at all of them in turn. “It means, Saks, that we can either head our asses back into the Sea of Mists and hope like hell that vortex opens for us again or we can go up to the Lancet.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s our only chance,” Cushing said. “We go up there and find Greenberg if he’s still alive or we find out the secret of that ship, find out why Greenberg thought it was the key. Deliverance, maybe.”
“And?” Menhaus said.
“Maybe death.”
“Well, you girls have fun,” Saks said. “Drop me a line from hell.”
“He’s right, Saks,” Menhaus said. “It’s our only chance and we got to take it.”
They voted on it right then and there and everyone but Saks was in favor of making the trip and taking the chance. Elizabeth voted to go along, too, but she figured it was more to protect Cushing than anything.