by Tim Curran
“You don’t know what that place is up there,” she said. “You don’t know all the souls that have been eaten up there… you have no idea what it is you’re going up against.”
“Do you?” George asked her.
But all she would do was stare holes through him.
19
Later, when George went up on deck, he found Cushing and Elizabeth up there. His first reaction was to go back below, like maybe he was interrupting something. But he saw he wasn’t. They were both leaning on the rail, looking out into the fog.
“Anything going on?” he said.
Cushing shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
George started watching, too.
The fog was very thick, thicker than it had been earlier. But it was still day and the mist was still backlit by itself, though heavy and roiling like some crazy fusion of smog, steam, and smoke. A gushing gaseous envelope. You could smell the dankness of it, feel its moisture on your skin like jungle damp.
“What is it I’m looking for?” George said, lighting a cigarette,
“Just wait,” Cushing said.
So George waited. Waited and smoked and wondered when the real question would be broached, that of when they were planning on making their pilgrimage up to the Lancet. Way he was looking at it, it was something they had to do and soon and also something that might kill them.
“There,” Cushing said. “You see it?”
George did, all right. A dull blue glow off in the fog that brightened, flickered for a few moments like a loose light bulb and then vanished. About two minutes later it did it again, then not for another five. Irregular, but artificial-looking. Like maybe somebody was turning on and off a light out there or something, something electrical, was shorting out.
“Like neon or something,” George said.
Of course, Cushing was quick to point out that it was more like argon. Electrified neon gas had a reddish glow to it, but electrified argon was blue. And this was definitely blue. “What do you make of it?” George asked him.
But he said he didn’t know. “Could be just about anything… could even be some weird chemical reaction, you know, some sort of gas mixing with the fog.”
But standing there, watching it, George was thinking it was not random. Like maybe it was being directed.
Fabrini came up on deck next. “Well, when are we going to go? I’m in a hurry to get out or die trying.” Then he saw that glow out there pulsing. “What in the hell is that?”
George was thinking that a searchlight seen through coastal fog might look like that.
“You don’t think it’s that… that Fog-Devil, do you?” Fabrini asked.
“No,” Cushing said. “I don’t think so.”
George said, “Elizabeth… have you seen this before?”
“One or twice in the past few days,” she admitted. “But not before, never before.”
George could tell from her tone that something about that light was getting her hackles up. It was disturbing her, putting her on her guard, but she didn’t seem to know why… or want to say why.
“Okay,” Fabrini said. “I’m curious. What are we waiting for?”
Cushing shrugged. “Let’s do it.”
20
The blue glow was coming from a freighter.
When they got up close and it came up out of the mist at them, they all felt it down in their guts like some wasting disease, something pernicious and destructive. The ship was just another old derelict listing in the fog, a container ship with great holes eaten through its sides, rusting and silent with weed growing up its hull. .. yet it was so much more. There was something grimly monolithic about it, unhallowed like a moldering tombstone over a heretic’s grave or an ancient altar where human sacrifice had been practiced. Whatever it was, it felt like doom and insanity. Tendrils of mist wrapped up its superstructure, oozed and drifted like fingers of ectoplasm.
Go away, the ship seemed to be saying, this is none of your damn business. Just go away while you still can.
But they weren’t heeding its warning.
They were all there, save for Crycek who had stayed behind with Aunt Else. In Elizabeth’s boat, they poled closer to the wreck through the weeds, feeling its weight and ominous pull.
George felt like it had reached out and taken hold of him, held him tightly in a cold fist and would not let him go until it had squeezed all the good, decent, human things out of him.
“Christ,” Pollard finally said. “It… it gets under your skin, doesn’t it?”
Everyone agreed wordlessly.
Even old tough-guy Saks was having trouble pretending there wasn’t something, something bad you could feel, smell, and taste.
If ships could go insane, this one had. There was something decidedly wrong about it. Empty maybe, but not untenanted. And how long it had drifted alone and derelict, no one could say. But it might drift for another hundred years or maybe a thousand, a worm-holed, mist-shrouded coffin bobbing in the weed, holding darkness tight in its belly like black earth. A thing of silence and mist and dire memory. If anything called it home, then it could not possibly be sane. Could not possibly be anything you would want to look in the face.
“Boarding ladder’s down,” Saks said.
“Just like the Cyclops,” Fabrini said.
They tied off the scow and went up one after the other. They carried lanterns and flashlights. George carried the. 45 that had been Greenberg’s. The others had axes and gaffs. Menhaus had a pike.
The decks were covered in slime and mildew, were almost spongy in places. The beams of their flashlights bounced off the heavy fog. The lanterns threw weird, crawling shapes over the bulkheads. That blue glow was coming from this ship. They knew that much. They’d seen it strobing as they approached it, but now they had not seen it in ten minutes or more.
Like somebody turned off the light, George thought.
The idea of exploring another old hulk didn’t sit well with anyone, but they had come this far and no one mentioned turning back. The decks were crowded with orange plastic containers stacked one-high that appeared to be bolted down. They stopped before a row of them.
“What do you suppose all this shit is?” Fabrini said.
The plastic containers held yellow metal drums. In the light of the fog, it was easy enough to read what was stamped on the containers themselves:! RADIOAKTIVE MATERIALIEN DER GEFAHR! GEFAHRLICHE VERGEUDUNG! And beneath that, a symbol for radiation.
“German,” Saks said.
Cushing nodded. “Radioactive materials,” he said. “Must be barrels of radioactive waste they were taking to dump or store somewhere.”
“Oh, shit,” Fabrini said.
“Relax, they look sealed,” Saks said.
They did, but no one liked the idea of being on a freighter full of stuff like that. It was not exactly reassuring. Especially with that funny blue glow they’d been seeing. Cushing explained what it meant to Elizabeth.
“We better get our asses out of Dodge,” Menhaus said.
“Maybe not,” Saks said. “Look…”
There it was again, that pulsing pale blue glow. It lit up, flickered, painted one of the aft cabins an electric blue. Then it died out again.
“What do you make of it?” George asked Cushing.
“I know what I make of it,” Fabrini said. “Some of this shit leaked. That’s what we’re seeing and we’re probably all fucking contaminated now.”
“Well, at least your dick’ll glow in the dark, Fagbrini,” Saks said. “Menhaus ought to get a charge out of that.”
But Cushing just shook his head. “Radioactive waste might glow.. . maybe… but not like that.”
“Let’s see what does then,” Saks said.
He led them aft, beneath a framework of winches and derricks, around great chasms eaten through the deck plating, and to the cabin beyond. The hatch to the companionway was open.
“Shall we?” he said.
They started down after him, his
flashlight beam cutting through the murk, revealing motes of dust and grimy bulkheads, iron steps that were warped and buckled. Near the bottom of that ladder, the blue light pulsed again, casting a ghostly, ethereal illumination over them. They saw it was coming from an open doorway.
George smelled something rank that made his eyes water. The air was thin and dry, rarified like gas in a vacuum tube. It was hard to breathe, but then, maybe it was just panic on his part. His throat felt tight, constricted to a pinhole now. He was smelling something like rotting fish. But other odors, too, hot and acrid smells.
They stepped through the doorway, flashlights and lanterns held before them, weapons at the ready. The first thing they saw was some sort of machine on the floor of what might have been a machine shop once. It sat on a crude frame of welded bars that housed a large oval disk of shiny metal. Above that was something like the scope from a hunting rifle, though three feet in length. Connected to the disk by two-foot rods at either end were two large, circular mirrors set upright… at least things that looked like mirrors. The entire contraption was making a low, humming sound. Charged particles of luminous blue danced across those mirrors, then faded.
Looking at it, George could not say what it was. But it appeared as if that scope-device was lined up dead center of those off-set mirrors. And what could the point of that be?
The machine thrummed again and George could feel the deck vibrating beneath him. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. Static electricity crackled in the air and there was a sudden, gagging stench of burnt ozone and fused wiring. Then the machine made a funny whining sound and a transparent pencil-thin beam of light like a laser beam came out of the back end of the scope and struck the rear mirror. The mirror was suddenly suffused with white light, making a sharp sound like rustling cellophane. It glowed and reflected a series of prismatic beams at the front mirror which broke them up into a blue beam of light like a searchlight, directing that blue radiance at the bulkhead. You could see that blue energy crawling, rippling, making the bulkhead beneath seem insubstantial.
Then the scope cut out again.
“What the hell is that?” George said.
And maybe somebody would have answered him, but that’s when they saw that they were not alone with the machine. There was something else in that room and it was not a man. What it was… they couldn’t say at first, it was so utterly alien in appearance. It looked at first like an elongated lizard squatting on its hands and knees, but it was no lizard. It was not anything that anyone had ever seen before. It rose up off the floor, a corded and rawboned thing made of rubbery blue-green flesh. It did not have legs as such, but something like a tripod of stout and boneless limbs ending not in feet but in pads like those of a treefrog.
“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said.
“Keep away from it,” Cushing said, as if that needed saying.
It had the general body shape of a pond hydra – cylindrical and up-curving like a banana, but hunched and contorted, set atop that tripod of legs that looked more like pythons than legs. It moved back a step and those spade-feet made wet, sucking sounds as they were pulled from the metal deckplates. It stood there, tall as a man, a nightmare sculpted from wrinkled, convoluted flesh with a bony head full of hollows and draws like an irregular, knobby cone pressed flat on top. From which, there was a nest of coiling blue-black tendrils, each as thick as a man’s thumb. They could have been some kind of alien hair, but they looked more like bloated worms looking for blood to suck.
“What the fuck is that?” Saks demanded to know.
“I think… I think it’s the thing that made that machine.”
It had three blue-green leathery arms ending in whipping clusters of root-like tentacles that might have been called fingers on some distant world. From throat to legs, there were a series of short, blunt, hollow tubes running down its underside. They looked like sheared-off sections of garden hose… but greasy, horribly-alive, twitching. They could have been organs of speech or reproduction for all anyone could say.
And that was the crazy thing about this horror: you couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t look at it and say, yes, it’s invertebrate. Yes, it’s a worm or a snake or an insect. There was no possible frame of reference for this thing on earth. Its anatomy was completely alien, its evolutionary biology unguessable.
Now George knew where that revolting, dead fish smell was coming from. But closer like this, it wasn’t exactly the smell of dead fish. Like that, but sharper, higher, with an almost gagging chemical smell mixed in.
Everything about the creature inspired revulsion. And the worse part was that it had a face. If you wanted to call it that. A fissured, wizened sort of face with a triangular arrangement of close-set eyes, each pink as strawberry milk, glistening and oozing with mucus… all three of them. And each about the size of a tennis ball. But those eyes, they soon saw, were not pink. Not really. There was only a membrane of pink skin over them. Like drapes opening, the membranes pulled away in tandem, slitting open in the center and revealing eyes that were red as rubies. The membranes did not pull back all the way… just enough so that the eyes looked pink with a luminous and jellied red slit in them.
And those eyes… they sucked the spirit right out of you.
What was to be done?
What really was to be done?
They watched it and it watched them, checkmate.
There was a pair of short, powerful-looking tentacles at its mouth. One to either side like they might have been used in feeding. They were a bright, cobalt blue with pink undersides, tiny razored suckers set into them. The creature stood there, rubbing those tentacles together with a slippery sound like a man stroking his chin, thinking what to do, what to do.
George watched it, noticing now that it was making a sort of shallow, gasping sound and as it did so, those tubes on its underside inflated, then deflated. Sure, it was breathing. That’s what those things were. Aspirators of some type. Probably not anything like human lungs at all, but more like the book lungs of a spider or maybe the gills of a fish. Organs of respiration that separated breathable gases from the toxic ones. And in this place, George knew, that could have been oxygen… but with all the rotting weed out there, it could have been methane, too. Maybe a little of both with some nitrogen mixed in.
Nobody had made any threatening moves on it yet and it had not done a thing to provoke any. But it was coming. If not from the thing itself, then from the people gathered there. You could almost smell it in the air: a hot, seething intolerance for this creature. And you could see it on the faces of those gathered there: an atavistic, marrow-deep race hatred that was involuntary and automatic. This thing did not belong. It was spidery and evil and obscene. It was offensive to the human condition. You wanted to crush it. To kick it. To stomp it. It was an abomination that disgusted you in ways you could not comprehend… so it had to die. It had to be purged. It was simply too different to be allowed to live.
No, none of them were truly aware at a conscious level of what they were truly feeling, but it was there. A race memory, an inherited predisposition that was acid in their bellies and electricity in their veins. That communal need to destroy, to kill, to rend for the good of the tribe. Slay the beast, kill the monster, protect the hive…
And everyone was suddenly very aware of the weapons in their white-knuckled fists, how their muscles bunched and their nerve endings jangled. Those weapons needed to be put to use.
“Let’s kill it,” Saks said and you had to expect it to come from him first. “Ugly cock-sucker, let’s put it down.”
And everyone there seemed more than willing to let that happen. They were like the same animal with the same bones and claws and teeth. The same wide, predatory eyes.
But Cushing said, “Now take it easy. Just take it easy. It… it must be intelligent. To build something like that.”
Menhaus felt his mouth begin to speak: “You… you know what it is, don’t you? Don’t you?”
/> “Yeah,” Saks said, his voice hollow-sounding.
“That flying saucer… that ship in the weeds… that’s where it came from.”
Cushing didn’t even bother inquiring about that one, he just said, “It’s smarter than we are… it might be able to help us, to get us out of here…”
George just stood there, feeling numb and stupid. His body was thick and ungainly like he was stuffed with wet rags or had been shot up with Thorazine. If the thing had moved suddenly, he knew, it would have had him. There was just no way he could have hoped to evade it. Maybe this was from fear and maybe it was the result of that thing looking at him and into him. And he wondered if that wasn’t it… because with those alien eyes burning into his head like arc lights, he had a mad desire to draw a razor over his wrists.
Those eyes were bad.
Nothing on earth had eyes like that.
Glaring and hateful and insectile. And this was only accentuated by its mouth which was little more than an oval, puckered hole set off to the side… like the mouth of an old man without his teeth in. The total effect was that of a wicked, evil alien face.
It stood there, watching them, not directly threatening, but infinitely repulsive. Maybe it was intelligent, but it had no right to be so. Not in the thinking of anyone looking at it. The idea of this slinking nightmare being intelligent was like the idea of an intellectual spider or centipede… appalling.
Fabrini took a step towards that weird machine and the thing tensed. Those tubes running down its belly shuddered. Something like black saliva ran from them and when it struck the deck plating, it sizzled like butter on a hot griddle.
“I don’t recommend pissing it off,” Cushing said.
George had to stay his hand now from bringing up that. 45 and putting a few rounds into it. Maybe more than a few.
Yes, he was thinking, it is intelligent. You can see that. But it’s the wrong kind of intelligence. It’s not our kind, but a profane, blasphemous sort of intelligence. Cold and cruel and arrogant. Looking at it, he was struck by its unflinching superiority, its… arrogance. Because, yes, it was arrogant. You could see that. It hated them. It hated them with the warped, inborn bigotry and aversion that its entire race felt for lower orders of life.