Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “He’s gone,” Saks said.

  And he was… yet he wasn’t. You could still hear him from time to time screaming out there for help. That voice would get so loud it would pull your guts out, then so quiet it was like a cry for help coming from a house several streets away in the dead of night.

  And George thought: It’s like they’re dragging a river for a corpse.

  And that’s exactly what they were doing.

  Cushing stayed in the flow with Menhaus and they took turns. Kept at it for maybe ten minutes until they caught a hold of something. They looked at each other with jerky motions in the flow. Whatever they had, they were reeling it in. They stepped from the flow and George helped them land it.

  “Maybe… maybe you guys better not do that,” Saks said.

  And he was probably right.

  But they kept pulling until they dragged something through the field and out of the flow, something like a pile of dusty, filthy rags.

  “Jesus,” Menhaus said, turning away.

  It was Fabrini.

  Or what was left of Fabrini.

  Something shriveled and desiccated, dusty and shrunken like a mummy pulled from an Egyptian tomb. That’s what they were seeing. It was a man, but petrified like prehistoric wood. His flesh had gone to a wrinkled, parched leather, seamed and fissured and ancient. Two spidery hands were held out before the face in brown skeletal claws as if to ward off a blow. And the face… distorted, grotesque, almost clownish in its gruesome exaggeration. It no longer had eyes, just blackened hollows that were wide and shocked. The mouth was open as if frozen in a contorted scream… the left side of it pulled up nearly to the corner of the left eye like maybe that cadaverous face had been soft putty that was molded into a fright mask to scare the kiddies with.

  Truth was, it scared everyone that looked at it.

  But they kept looking and kept seeing it and kept feeling the absolute, almost cosmic horror of Fabrini’s degeneration. That grinning mouth of peg-teeth… gray, crumbling teeth like old headstones; the body that was more rags and bones and worm-holed oak than man; those eyes which were just hollow, mocking pits like maybe Fabrini had clawed his own eyes out rather than look at what and who was around him. Yeah, they kept looking and the reality, the truth of this particular nightmare covered them, drowned them, invaded secret places and defiled their very souls. For what they saw and what they knew, it had… weight. The sort of weight that would crush them, squeeze the pulp right out of them.

  About then, they turned away.

  Cushing was trying hard not to cry, not to rage, not to turn on one of them… maybe Saks, probably Saks… and take it out on them. George was feeling the same thing: like a dozen uncontainable emotions had suddenly burst in him like a shower of black sparks, and he was burning, just burning up inside, the heat turning his mind to sauce.

  And they all had to wonder what awful set of circumstances could have mummified Fabrini like that and what… dear God… what had he looked upon to wrench and warp and buckle his face like that? To turn that handsome, swarthy face of his to something like a twisted tribal fetish mask carved from deadwood?

  “No, no, no,” Menhaus was saying. “That ain’t Fabrini. No fucking way that’s Fabrini… this, this thing it’s been dead longer than Christ…”

  “It’s him, all right,” Saks said.

  And there really was no doubt of that.

  Because they could see the tarnished chain around its neck that had once been gold and knew that this collection of rags and threadbare hides was Fabrini. But to look at him, at that scarecrow body and grisly deathmask, you could not get past the fact that he looked like he had been physically dead thousands of years like that Neolithic iceman pulled out of the Swiss Alps.

  Physically dead… yet his voice raged on beyond the ionized field. Discorporeal, insane, and bleak, yet pathetically aware and alive. A disembodied voice screaming its sanity away in a buzzing, silent blizzard of nothingness: “Help me… help me… help me. .. oh dear God somebody please help me help me-”

  Saks went over to the alien machine and kicked it. It made a popping, crackling sound and the flow instantly cut out. The generator fading to a low hum and then nothing at all.

  And George was trying to pull his mind together, trying to hold it tight in his fist before it flew apart into fragments. He was not a physicist, but he understood enough of Greenberg’s theories now to formulate one of his own. Fabrini had jumped into some dimension where time was not what it was here. In that terrible place, time was subverted, bent, blown all out of sane proportions. Fabrini had died over there. Starved to death or suffocated, an insane and gibbering thing thousands of years before. Yet his mind had not died. His consciousness did not particulate and dissolve. It was eternal and aware. While minutes passed here, thousands of years passed there in a place where time had no true meaning. Imagine that, George thought, alone in that void for countless millennia with nothing but crawling alien geometries for company, things that could not probably even see you or know you were there. Alone, alone, alone… alone with the barren geography of your own mind for ten thousand years or a million. Jesus.

  And Fabrini would always be alive in that black, godless dimension.

  A stream of atoms forever drifting and dissipating, but alive and aware and insane beyond any insanity ever known or conceived of. A tormented consciousness fading into eternity, alone, always alone, undying.

  Nobody said anything for a time.

  Nobody could say anything.

  At least Saks had had the sense to turn that awful machine off so they didn’t have to listen to Fabrini, to the blasphemy of his endless, bodiless agony. A tactile creature in a world of shadows and anti-matter and non-existence.

  He was flaking away, just crumbling now like a vampire in the rays of the sun. Flecks of dust lit off him, bits of him went to powder and rained gradually to the deck like grains of sand. One of his arms fell off, hit the floor and shattered into dirt and debris like it had been sculpted from dry clay. Very dry clay. It was probably the sudden immersion in this atmosphere, after countless centuries in that other.

  As they stood there, Fabrini kept breaking apart until he looked like a heap of debris dumped from a vacuum cleaner bag.

  Menhaus looked positively slack like his bones had gone to poured rubber. He could barely support his own weight. He just slouched there, drained and beaten and broken, his eyes livid and hurtful.

  “So much for Fabrini,” Saks said.

  That warmed up Menhaus. He stood up straight, his eyes blazing with an almost animal ferocity. It was too much. First Cook, then Pollard, and now Fabrini. He went right at Saks. Went right up to him and punched him square in the face. Saks almost went down, a trail of blood coming out of his mouth.

  “You!” Menhaus bellered. “You knew something like this would happen and you wanted it to happen!”

  Saks nodded, a vile and bleeding thing.

  Then he and Menhaus went at other with claws and teeth, hitting and kicking and scratching and it took both George and Cushing to pull them apart. George had to hit Saks three times until he fell away and Cushing had to toss Menhaus to the floor.

  “Dead man,” Saks told him, spitting out blood. “You’re a dead man, you fucking faggot! I’ll kill you! Swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

  And whether that was directed at George or Menhaus or both of them, it was really hard to tell. Elizabeth stood there, shaking her head, not surprised at the ways of men, but generally disappointed as she was now.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

  And that sounded good.

  Except Menhaus wasn’t done. He came up now with George’s. 45 in his hand. It had been on the floor where George dropped it and now Menhaus had it. He leveled it and George and Cushing got out of the way.

  “What’re you gonna do with that, you pussy?” Saks said.

  So Menhaus showed him.

  He pulled the trigger and put a slug in hi
s guts.

  Saks gasped, a flower of blood blossoming at his belly. Drops of it oozed between his clasped fingers. He staggered back, looked like he’d fall, and staggered over to the doorway. They heard him stumbling up the companionway, swearing and gasping.

  George slapped Menhaus across the face and he dropped the gun.

  “He had it coming,” was all Menhaus would say. “That bastard’s been asking for it.”

  And George, numb from toes to eyebrows, thought, yes, he did at that.

  22

  They couldn’t find Saks.

  They looked and looked for over an hour, canvassing that ship and although their thoughts were still dark and their moods just as gray as stormy skies, getting away from that room and the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and that alien husk had been good for them. Searching for Saks, having something to do, it was even better.

  Finally, they gave up.

  Elizabeth said a few words over the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and they all bowed their heads, remembering things that made them smile and other things that made them cry. But mostly just bowing their heads because gravity seemed to be pulling them down and they had all they could do not to give in and go to their knees.

  “All right,” George finally said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They poled their way back to the Mystic through the weave of dense fog, past the carcasses of dead ships caught in the weed. They took their turns on the poles and said very little and wondered a great deal.

  Taking a break and lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers, George told Cushing what he thought had happened to Fabrini. About him being alone for maybe thousands of years in that other place, his mind never dying, just suspended, preserved like something floating in a corked jar of alcohol.

  “Yeah,” Cushing said. “About what I was thinking. Time… well it wasn’t the same on the other side.”

  “Where was he?”

  Cushing just shook his head. “The Fifth Dimension? Sixth? Tenth? Shit, who knows, but a place so alien I don’t want to think about it.”

  George was staring at the alien machine at Cushing’s feet. He had brought it along despite Elizabeth’s protests. Even now, she was glaring at it and him like it was Pandora’s proverbial box and she was afraid the lid was going to blow off it.

  George dragged off his cigarette, blew smoke out his nostrils. “That alien… that Martian… whatever the fuck it was-”

  “I doubt it was a Martian,” Cushing said, trying to laugh, but it just wouldn’t come.

  “You know what I mean, smartass. That… being. You suppose it could have helped us? I mean really helped us if we could have talked sense to it?”

  Cushing nodded. “Without a doubt. You have any idea of the sort of hyper-intellect it must have possessed? The secrets a race like that must know? Yeah, George, it wanted to, it could have calibrated this magic box and shot us straight to Disneyland if it wanted to.” He sighed. “But let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly the friendly type. You saw how it looked at us. You felt it look into you. I saw it doing that, that’s why I hit it with the axe. So much for my hands.”

  “I owe you,” George said and meant it.

  “What was that like? It looking into you like that?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I felt like my mind was emptied, that I felt very small and helpess. Other that, I don’t remember anything.”

  “Well, doesn’t matter. That thing was-”

  “Evil,” Elizabeth said and dared anyone to contradict her. “You know it and I know it. Maybe it was an advanced life form, as you called it, but it was cold and diabolic. It looked at us like scientists look at mice in a cage… something to be toyed with.”

  “You’re right,” Cushing told her. “As usual, you’re absolutely right.”

  And George knew she was, too.

  There was evil as in human evil and then there was the other kind. Cosmic evil. An evil so malign and ravening that it was practically supernatural to the human mind. The alien had been like that. Evil to the fourth power. Evil fucking squared. And thinking such thoughts, feeling embarrassed and, yes, liberated by thinking them, George found himself doing something he had not done since childhood: praying. Yes, in his head he was praying to anything that would listen to him. Hoping, begging for some sort of divine guidance and protection. He’d never had much use for religion, but now? Oh yes, he needed it. He needed to feel a guiding hand on him that would deliver them from this hell. And he thought that if there was no god, no superior consciousness out there, then the human race and all the other struggling dumbassed races in the universe were seriously screwed. Because things like that alien would crush them and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. If there was no creator, no divine protector… then, shit, that meant that the human race was just a bunch of upright, intelligent apes scratching in the dirt for meaning, for revelation. Trying to make sense out of something that was innately senseless.

  The idea of that was terrifying.

  They kept poling along and then, gradually, the Mystic began to come out of the mist at them, taking form and solidity as the fog abandoned it. George sat there looking at it, getting a funny vibe off of it that he could not classify. For some unknown reason, he was equating that ship with a tomb.

  Menhaus paused on his pole, squinted into the mist. “It’s changed,” he said.

  Elizabeth had stopped poling, too. The scow slid into the weeds and came to a stop. She was staring up at the Mystic and looking tense, looking concerned.

  “Looks the same,” Cushing said, as if maybe he didn’t believe it for one moment.

  George was suddenly aware that he felt very rigid. All his muscles were contracted and tight. His eyes were wide and his breathing shallow. His ears were open and his mind was totally clear of anything but the ship. He was feeling it, too. The ship had changed. But how? He could not put words to it, but something about it, about its aura maybe had been violated. It just felt wrong. He wasn’t about to put any of what he was feeling down to some latent psychic gift brewing in the basement of his being, yet it was surely something like that. Something tenuous, but there all the same. Some ancient network of fear powering up and telling him to get ready for the shit, because it was definitely coming.

  Menhaus, very calmly, said, “Something happened after we left. Something… something was here after we left.”

  Cushing seemed to be feeling it now, too. He swallowed and then swallowed again. “Let’s go see what it was.”

  23

  On board, that sense of danger became positively electric in George. It was here, something was here, something had passed in the fog and left… he wasn’t sure what it had left. But the atmosphere of the boat was certainly different. That sense of desecration was there, was very palpable. And George knew it the way you knew when something intimate to you was handled roughly, touched by hands that had no business touching it. Like the objects in your room had been touched, put back an inch or two out of place. Not so anyone would notice except for you.

  They stood on the deck, fingers of fog drifting around their legs like hungry cats. The mist was luminous and pulsing behind them. If there could be a soundtrack to all this, George knew, it would be someone plucking the strings of a violin. Strings off-key an octave or two.

  First thing they saw was that the aft bulkhead of the main cabin was blackened. When Menhaus prodded it with his axe, it flaked away like it had crystallized in a firestorm.

  “Like what Fabrini said of the Cyclops,” George said. “That Swedish ship him and Cook read about in the log.”

  “Danish. The Korsund, he called it. It was out of Copenhagen.”

  Several sections of the deck had been charred black and there was a snotty tangle of something like fungus hanging from the main mast. It was glowing with a shimmering, internal light.

  They all noticed that, too.

  They went below.

  The companionway walls were smeared with clots
of some phosphorescent matter as if something huge had forced itself down the stairwell, bits of it breaking off above, below, and to either side.

  “Don’t touch that shit,” Cushing warned them.

  They made it into the saloon cabin. Everything was burnt. The carpet was ashes beneath their footsteps. Elizabeth was taking it all in. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her right hand locked tight on the hilt of her machete. Her lips were pulled into a tight line.

  They found Aunt Else first.

  There would be no more legal motions by her. There would be no more of anything. She was in her bunk, a twisted and incinerated thing. The stench of cremated flesh was unbearable.

  Elizabeth made a choking sound and turned away.

  George was sickened by it, yet he looked long enough to see that the sheets below her were not charred in any way. As if, Aunt Else had been tossed into a blast furnace, fished out, and dumped back here. By they all knew by that point what had happened and it was not from heat. Not as they understood heat.

  They found Crycek next.

  He was not dead, yet very close. He was badly burned, but his face was more or less unmolested. His hair had gone white and his eyes had gone white with them. He was laying in his bunk, gasping and drooling and coughing out tangles of slime that were suffused with a shine like the fungus on deck. A terrible transformation had overtaken him. And it was more than those eyes like mirrors whitened by steam or that glowing mucus running from his mouth. It was much more than that. For Crycek looked like he had aged a hundred years, had been taken high into unthinkable heights and at such momentum that he had been burned raw, worn to a nub.

  Although he could not see them, he knew they were there. “Oh yes, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it came while you were out… it came with colors and fire and eyes and ice… it came and kept coming. ..”