Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  There was something poised above her in the fog, maybe fifteen feet up. Something huge and amorphous and shadowy. Something wriggling and creeping and riding the mists like a moth. But it was no moth, it was no bird, it was something else. He could see a network of those shiny looking threads descending onto Elizabeth and those threads or webs or whatever they were looked alive, looked like they were coiling and looping with a flowing serpentine motion.

  Elizabeth screamed one more time as those threads snared her up.

  George brought up the flare gun, was going to punch a burning hole through that nightmare, but at the last moment, he hesitated. Hesitated because a form dropped out of the mist, something that looked to be made of drooping gray rags and motheaten shrouds. Something dangling on one of those wires, like a marionette that was dropped down accidentally.

  But it was no marionette.

  It was Cushing. Only he had been reduced to a skeleton or something quite near one. George saw what he thought was vertebrae, maybe a gleaming knob of rib or femur. A sort of fleshless face. But that was all. Whatever nightmare mockery of a man it had been, it was quickly yanked back up into the mist by that puppet master, that thing floating up there.

  Elizabeth was pulled up out of the water, wrapped in those living threads and both George and Menhaus caught a momentary glimpse of something immense and leggy wth gleaming blue-black skin. And that was all they saw, just a suggestion of form and intent, a hint of some immense insect puppeteer. And eyes. George thought maybe he saw a cluster of wet, pink eyes that looked like a dozen slimy tennis balls stuffed in a nylon.

  Then Elizabeth was gone.

  Maybe it was reflexive action, but George jerked the trigger on the flare gun and it went off with a dull popping. It cut a red path up into the fog overhead like the trail of a tracer bullet. And then it exploded up there with a shower of orange and yellow sparks. Something made a shrieking, squealing sound and George saw that thing scuttling away up into the mist, looking oddly like some bloated and fleshy parachute with two jumpers trailing behind it, Cushing and Elizabeth.

  And that was horrible.

  But what was maybe a little worse was that in the glow of the descending flare, in its flickering red glare, he could see that there were others up there. Humped things with maybe twenty or thirty legs creeping along some network of webs up in the mist, dancing away from the light.

  Cushing’s gone and so is Elizabeth, a voice was telling George, a wild and hysterical voice, just like you’re going to be if you don’t get your ass in gear!

  “Bring it around,” George told Menhaus.

  Menhaus just stared at him dumbly. “What?”

  “Bring this fucker around!”

  Menhaus did, gunning the throttle and bringing them around in an arc, creating a surging wake and then pushing them forward into the mist again. George was hoping, praying that they had not gotten turned around. He slid another flare into the gun and waited.

  Waited for what came next.

  Not letting himself think about what he had just seen or what kind of spiderish monstrosity could spin a floating web up in the mist and make Cushing look like he’d been dunked in a bath of acid in under a minute.

  They kept going, pushing on and on.

  And then George looked at the compass.

  The needle was moving.

  31

  The needle on the Geiger Counter was moving, too.

  It shuddered, fell back, began to move steadily upwards with a lazy sort of roll and Greenberg just watched it, feeling tense but exhilerated. This was it then. No more toying about with mathematical equations on paper, no more speculating on the vagaries of interdimensional physics, no more hiding in lead-lined vaults and coughing up blood and vomiting and watching his hair fall out from radiation poisoning.

  This was it.

  This was really it.

  The thing was coming. Coming for him and there wasn’t a single force born of man, nature, or God that could stop it. Stop this breathing, hissing abomination that could chew through time and space like a maggot through dead meat.

  Don’t get emotional and imaginative, Greenberg warned himself. You are an observer, a scientist. Keep that in mind. Do not look at this thing and tremble. Do not let it see your fear.

  But it was too late for that and Greenberg damn well knew it. For the Fog-Devil had been smelling his fear for some time know. It had been licking at his brain for weeks, gnawing on his thoughts and sucking the salt from his subconscious with a growing, impossible hunger. Yes, carefully working him and savoring him, unwrapping the candied layers of his psyche and now it had found the creamy, rich nougat at the center… fear. Mindless, mad, human fear and such a thing was a luxury to this Devil of Fogs and anti-space. It had marked Greenberg with its wasting breath, sweetening him up, letting him ripen like a succulent grape on a vine, and now it would claim him.

  Now it would eat his mind raw.

  Easy, easy, he cautioned himself.

  But it was not easy. Not at all, because the Geiger Counter was clicking away now, the analog meter jumping and falling rapidly, showing a high-end reading of three hundred counts per second. Well beyond the safety level of Roentgens. Greenberg watched the needle.. . yes, five hundred, seven hundred, up and up, not falling at all now. The clickings were so fast now they sounded like the static from an old radio. The analog needle was pegged now and Greenberg knew he was being inundated by a crackling swarm of charged subatomic particles that were burning right through him.

  Dear God, dear God.

  He was suddenly gripped with an almost hysterical, superstitious terror that was building inside him like plumes of poison gas. And the fog… dear Christ the fog, look at the fog…

  It was being consumed by a sort of thrumming luminosity that was filling it with light and motion and flickering shapes. Yes, now it was exploding with a gushing, polychromatic brilliance that was running like wet paint, seeming to drip and ooze and puddle, diffusing now like ink dropped in water. Yes, it was colors and prisms and a spreading dark vortex-adumbration of depthless black matter that was bright and blinding… deranged geometrical shapes and living polyhedrons and, yes, more, more all the time. The fog was fog and yet was not fog. It was liquid and solid, then gas, then a roiling putrescence expanding like a balloon blown with filth.

  Greenberg could feel it, yes, feel it down deep, chewing into his mind, filling his rioting brain with things unknown, unseen, and blasphemous.

  His hand tightened on the pull cord of the dirty bomb.

  Hesitated.

  Not yet, not yet, not just yet. I must see it, I must see it, God help me but I must… see… this… nightmare…

  But some gods were not meant to be looked upon by mortal eyes and Greenberg’s eyes were unclean, impure, and he could feel a wave of heat reaching out to burn his eyes out of their sockets. Waves of agony shot through his brain and blood ran from his nose and ears, but he would see, he would see this thing, God yes, he would look upon it and know it.

  The fog was not fog now, it was flesh, blubbery radiant flesh that was pink and yellow veined by squirming purple arteries that pulsed and undulated like tentacles. It was a huge mass of radioactive smog that was flesh that was smog that was misting, dripping flesh that was alive, alive, alive, filling the sky and swallowing the world with a mouth that was a black, seeking nebula. Yes, the Dead Sea was an incubator and the fog was a placenta that was sheering now with a ripping sound, with an eruption of slime that was not slime but colors, vibrant and violent auras of colors that filled Greenberg’s mind with a rumbling white noise. For he was seeing colors that he had never seen before, smelling them and tasting them, feeling them ignite him with a freezing/burning wind that was blowing from the malignant irradiated wastes and radioactive bone heaps beyond the edges of the known universe.

  He screamed then.

  Screamed his mind to quivering jelly and vomited out his guts in white-hot coils.

  The Fog-Devil was birt
hed in a nuclear fallout of blistering ice and radioactive fire and frost and acid, an effusion of strontium-90 and radium and unstable cellular anti-matter. Greenberg saw it, was allowed to see it coming at him in a boiling flux of nerve gas and chlorine mist, methane and supercharged split atoms of hydrogen… a slithering, worming multi-dimensional obscenity. Yes, a breath of living cosmic darkness, a translucent and larval incandescence, a primal chaos of decaying cadaveric gulfs. It became a bile of screaming fungal pigments and an immense, electric wraith skeletoned by a neural network of synapses flapping with fleshy rags infused by an incinerating moonlight. Maybe it was a million writhing and eyeless alien graveworms pissing jets of color and dissolving into a noxious atomic steam. And maybe it was a cauldron of smoldering entrails and maybe it was a sentient plexus of mewling plasma, a creeping and hissing thermonuclear afterbirth born in some searing anti-world of radionuclides and plutonium.

  Yes, maybe it was all these things and none of them.

  A living furnace of shadow-matter that had come to devour the world, the universe, something that was pulling gravity inside-out and collapsing time-space in its wake.

  Greenberg saw what his mind told him was a vast, living, breathing honeycomb descending on him, fluttering and blurring, unable to hold its shape or form. It was blown with noxious clouds of searing, scalding vapors and incremating heat. And his last true sensory impression was of… eyes.

  What his disintegrating brain told him were eyes… colossal, luminous-red globular orbs leering from nests of wiry tentacles like whips or eyelashes. Eyes that were steaming like melting reactor cores, burning holes through the dimensional fabric and turning Greenberg’s brain to hot, bubbling mud.

  Eyes, eyes, eyes… a million eyes, a billion eyes staring out from a slime of protoplasmic mist.

  Eyes that destroy, eyes that devour, eyes that violate and consume and burn, burn, burn, oh dear Christ the burning burning burning static breath…

  Eyes that were black holes and quasars and the ravening charnel wastes of dead-end space. Depthless crystalline eyes that burned with a green smoke, chromatic graveyards and diseased moons that washed him down in cosmic rays and gamma rays and phosphorescent streams of cremating atoms that found his mind and gnawed the meat from it and sucked its blood and vacuumed-free its marrow and gnawed its charred bones.

  Yes, it found Greenberg and Greenberg pleased it, filled it, satisfied its relentless and voracious appetite. He was burnt offerings beneath the fission of its nuclear winter breath.

  Greenberg’s flesh became bubbling wax.

  His bones liquified like melted candlesticks.

  His skull became a boiling, steaming pot of cold, white radioactive jelly.

  And even as his mind was stripped to bone and his muscles and nerve endings and anatomy became running tallow, he felt his hand jerk the cord.

  Heard from some distant room, the noose drop over the Fog-Devil, that extradimen-sional abomination, that distortion out of space, out of time.

  32

  “Okay,” George was saying, “veer to the left, to the left…”

  Menhaus jerked the wheel and they went too far, the needle of the compass swinging far to the right and almost stopping George’s heart with it. But without being told, he brought the boat back until the needle was pointing straight up, attracted by an unknown magnetic influence.

  “Hold it there now,” George said. “We’re moving straight at whatever it is…”

  Behind them, far, far behind them there was a rumbling sound like thunder. A deafening hollow boom. The fog behind them was lit with a flickering green light.

  They knew what it was.

  The anti-matter bomb. The collision of dimensions, the big bang.

  Seconds now, mere seconds before that shockwave found them, atomized them into mist.

  Oh, it was a breathless time. A frenzied time. An insane time. A time when all and everything were balanced on the head of some celestial pin and George could feel the world trembling, waiting to fall, readying itself for that great, godless fall to the pavement far below. He could almost feel that pavement rushing up at him, feel himself impacting with a splatter of blood and bones and memory.

  The compass needle began to spin.

  George’s heart leaped.

  Menhaus muttered, “I think, I think…”

  George held the teleporter in his hands. They were shaking badly and he almost dropped it. He held it steady, placed one hand on the scope and the boat began to vibrate, static electricity snapped and crackled all around him making his hair stand on end. The generator hummed, the scope shot out a blue pencil of light that was refracted, boosted, amplified, turned back upon itself and a stream of blue pulsing, ionzed particles shot out into the fog… made the fog glow and seem to momentarily freeze like frost on a window pane.

  And then, then…

  And then there it was, the fog within a fog, a breath of interdimensional lunacy surging out at them. A vortex, a hole, a tear

  … and they were plowing right into it, Menhaus jerking the throttle down out of sheer exhileration. There was a blinding flash of light that knocked them right out of their seats and a sickening sense of falling, of drifting, of tumbling through white space and cosmic noise… and, yes, a sensation of speed and distance and time and particulated matter.

  And then blackness.

  It lasted for less than a minute, but when they opened their eyes and found their bodies, they were gasping for breath. Coughing, gagging, delirious and disoriented. George made it to his knees and crashed back down onto the deck of the cigarette boat.

  Panic, just panic… that weird, inexplicable sense of pressure and lack of it, of fullness and emptiness and countless leagues of nothing. Then even that was gone and they were breathing air, good clean air that filled their lungs and revitalized them.

  Panting, George sat up.

  It was black, blacker than black.

  The boat was rocking as small, choppy waves bumped it to and fro. And overhead, overhead George could see-

  Stars.

  EPILOGUE

  BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  1

  In the end there was irony.

  Irony in that after all those days or weeks spent in that other place, that bad place, they came out in what George figured was the Atlantic and they were just as lost as ever. When they got their bearings and decided they were actually home, really and honestly home, George turned on one of the cockpit lights and looked at the compass. It was pointing to what he figured was magnetic north. No deviation, no nothing.

  And when that happened and the wonder of it all had faded, if only momentarily, George read the compass and pointed his finger. “That way’s east, Olly, that’s where land will be.”

  So Menhaus fired up the cigarette boat and they headed east, the cigarette boat glad to be back in the sea, the real sea, back in water it understood. In reacted in kind, firing off into the night like a rocket, cutting through those black waters and kicking up a gout of spray in its wake.

  George turned on the radio.

  What he was hoping for was a station. Any station. News or music or anything that would tell them, yes, you’re back in the right century. But all they got was static. Maybe it was the radio and maybe atmospheric disturbance and maybe, just maybe, the worse sort of portent.

  “We’re home,” Menhaus kept saying. “I know we’re home.”

  George knew they were, too. The only question was, what year it might be.

  But there would be time for that, wouldn’t there?

  Because right then the air smelled salty and fresh and cool, no fog or stagnance or floating seaweed. No, nothing but the sea and the night and the boat beneath them taking them to a place either they would know or to one where they and their boat would be freaks, out of place and out of time. Regardless, breaking free of the Dead Sea, there was hope. It burned brightly and their souls burned with it. With the lifting of that perpetual fog, even in th
e darkness and starlight, they felt free, absolutely unbound. Around them they could feel the spaces and distance and it was good to be free of the fog and its claustrophobia.

  But, there was irony.

  The next day the sun burned hot and the sea became a mirror and the heat was almost unbearable. George had forgotten just how bright the sun was. By late afternoon, the cigarette boat had exhausted the last of the fuel and there was nothing to do but drift and hope.

  When night came, George fell asleep.

  Maybe for an hour, maybe less. But when he woke up, Menhaus was shaking him roughly.

  “Wake up, Sleeping fucking Beauty! Wake up!”

  When George did he saw what Menhaus was seeing: a plane. Far overhead, its lights blinking on and off. George fumbled out the flare gun and popped a flare into it. Then he took aim on the plane like he wanted to shoot it down.

  The flare lit up the sea and sky.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait and hope.

  2

  It was the next morning when they caught sight of the Coast Guard cutter. She had a high, ice-breaker bow and, thankfully, no sails. She looked modern in every respect. In every possible detail. George even saw a helicopter waiting on the flight deck like a wasp sunning itself. The cutter caught sight of them, circled and dropped two rubber boats into the sea.

  “This is it, George,” Menhaus said. “This is really fucking it.”

  “Yes,” George said, overwhelmed by it all.

  He felt a curious sense of disorientation, like he’d just woken from a dream. And that’s what it had been, right? A dream? All a crazy, insane dream? Sure, it had to be, he got to thinking. For chrissake, George decided he did not believe in magnetic vortices and other dimensions, did not believe in fog-shrouded anti-worlds and sea monsters and aliens and ship’s graveyards and Fog-Devils. No, he did not believe in any of that and he certainly didn’t believe in the Dead Sea and Dimension X.