They Cling to the Hull (Horror Lurks Beneath Book 2)

by Ben Farthing

  Riley closed her eyes. What she’d seen outside couldn’t be real. It was an ocean from a foreign dimension—that was getting harder to deny. But the way those fleshy rock towers had lifted out of the water, and the deep floor of the ocean and risen up to meet them like a whale swallowing kelp…

  It wasn’t real. She couldn’t accept that anything could be that massive. The water had moved, light had shifted, it had been an optical illusion.

  And Chris had a point. If she just barely wound the watch, the overlap would be short.

  Before doubt could overtake her, Riley twisted the bottom of the watch. She felt tiny vibrations as it ticked back to its neutral setting.

  The port hallway of Deck Two shifted to let another hallway occupy the same space.

  Riley’s nose was assaulted with a stronger smell of rot. The dragging sound returned, along with the hundreds of tiny footsteps. The foreign corridor stretched in the same directions as the familiar one it overlapped, but that was where the similarities ended.

  Orange fog hung thick around their knees. Riley couldn’t see the floor, but it felt stiff and brittle under her feet. Shifting her weight brought creaking and cracking noises.

  The walls were bare, without decoration or light fixtures. They were made of an uneven chalky substance that broke free in small puffs and drifted downward.

  The outer walls were skeletal. Great gaping holes revealed the meeting rooms, or what had been the meeting rooms. Now they were mazes of naked beams and studs. Riley looked through the nearest to look straight out into the wild orange ocean. She saw the fleshy rock pillars.

  This alternate Aria rose and fell with rough seas. Riley had to work to maintain her balance.

  The inner wall of the corridor—the wall the starfish had pushed Marjorie’s corpse through—was solid except for an opening as wide as three typical doors.

  Through the wide doorway, Riley saw Marjorie’s dead hands dragged out of sight. The fog near the floor didn’t extend into the central room, furthering her theory that it was dust from the corridor walls. Inside the room, the floor was gray marble with swirl patterns that looked like language.

  Riley inched closer for a better look inside.

  A gasp and a cry from behind her.

  She whirled around.

  Chris grabbed her around the shoulders before she could even see what he was keeping her from.

  People—or their silhouettes at least—crept up out of the shadows in the meeting room, pawing their surroundings blindly. They whispered disbelief to each other. Riley counted six dark figures.

  She suddenly remembered walking onto the Aria yesterday morning and seeing a dark, smeared face through a window. That was one of these. “What are they?” She asked Chris quietly.

  Chris hushed her, but it was too late.

  All six shadows turned to look directly at her.

  32

  Chris felt his heart pounding from his toes to his fingertips.

  This eager girl had caught the attention of the shadowy people lurking on the other side of reality.

  Where his little finger used to be, he felt a phantom pain. He’d lost that finger when a recent victim had reached out for help.

  That’s what Chris had to assume these ghostly figures were. People dragged over to the Deviser’s dimension.

  But the victims he’d seen in the Richmond building, they were fresh. Members of Micah Rayner’s search party. They screamed and begged for rescue, something that Chris had no idea how to give.

  He thought of Leon, the happy building hacker turned inspector hired by Micah, who’d disappeared in the basement, then showed up again crawling through an orange fog, fleeing something Chris never saw.

  Chris pulled Riley away from the staring silhouettes. He didn’t know why they were shadows instead of the dirty, injured people he’d seen last year. But his gut said they were also victims from our world, dragged over.

  “What are they?” Riley asked. “I saw one yesterday. Through a window when we arrived at the ship.”

  “Don’t let them near you.” He risked a glance backwards at their destination: an opening through the interior wall. He expected the shadow people to lunge forward, begging for help, damning him and Riley to their same fate.

  But they watched cautiously. One in the front turned its head to another, who nodded. As a group, they all stepped backwards.

  They weren’t in torment. Maybe Chris’s assumption was wrong. Maybe they were something else entirely. Not working for the Deviser, or they’d have grabbed Chris and Riley. Maybe they were victims dragged over who’d escaped whatever Leon had been fleeing—living in the fringes to avoid detection.

  That might mean…

  “Do you know Leon?” Chris asked. “Or Dr. Terry? They were taken.”

  “What the hell?” Riley hissed.

  The silhouette in front went still. Hard to tell without facial expressions to go on, but the body language said Chris had struck a nerve.

  “I tried to help Leon.” He waved his hand. “He took my finger.”

  The lead silhouette stepped forward, leaning forward to get a better look at Chris. Chris impulsively backed away. Another shadow person pulled the first back, a gentle, compassionate gesture.

  Asking had been pointless, Chris realized. He felt guilt about failing to rescue anyone but himself and Eddie. He wanted to hear that they were still alive. That they had a chance, at least. But assuaging his guilt wouldn’t sink the Aria. Gotta maintain priorities.

  The alternate corridor flickered.

  Chris tugged Riley’s hand. “Through the door, before the watch unwinds.”

  The lead silhouette stomped hard on the floor to get their attention. Chris turned around to look.

  It pointed at an angle up to the ceiling. No, beyond the ceiling. It gestured with two hands like it was impressed by something gargantuan in the sky. Then it pointed back down at its feet.

  Something gigantic is coming here.

  It put a finger over its lips. The silhouettes backed back into the shadows.

  They were hiding. They wanted Chris and Riley to hide, too.

  “Something’s approaching,” Riley said. “I felt it upstairs. It’s closer now. Can’t you feel it?”

  Of course he did. He didn’t want to admit it, but the certainty inside him that a threat was on its way pushed him towards madness. In Richmond, when he’d looked out from the top of the skyscraper and seen an endless, flat plane, his sanity felt like it was loosening. An hour ago, when they’d seen the other side, he’d felt some Leviathan move the ship. And he’d sensed something worse trudging through the bottomless ocean, its sights set on the Aria.

  His human mind couldn’t stand it. He wanted to close his eyes and forget reality.

  So he couldn’t discuss it with Riley. He could only keep racing towards the next step, which was to get through this opening before it closed back up.

  Chris pulled Riley through the doorway.

  Chris caught only a glimpse of an active warehouse floor, giant stone buckets pouring thick sludge into each other, down a chain that ended with molds of anchors shaped like hieroglyphs. And then the watch went still.

  They were back in the normal Aria, as normal as it was. A solid wall behind them. Darkness before them.

  The soft rise and fall of the ship beneath their feet.

  In the quiet dark, the sound of hundreds of tiny footsteps and two corpses being dragged.

  “It’s in here,” Riley said. “Do you hear it?”

  He did, and it wasn’t enough to drown out the certainty of approaching doom.

  Chris couldn’t let his mind stray down that path.

  “We have to see where it’s going.” He clicked on a flashlight.

  33

  Riley used her phone’s flashlight to supplement Chris’s pocket Maglite.

  Where in the alternate Aria, Riley had seen some sort of factory floor, this was clearly meant to be a large meeting room. Space for rows of fold
ing chairs. Thick dividers pushed into the walls. The space could fit several hundred people.

  But it had been added to.

  Riley inspected the center of the room from afar, trying to figure out what she was seeing.

  Her first thought was: pizza dough.

  There was a pile of something that reached to the ceiling that had the consistency of cookie dough.

  But none of her amateur baking had ever included corpses.

  Facedown on the floor, a ring of corpses lay with their heads buried in the pile of dough. Glowing, silvery strings reached out from the hands and feet to stretch across the floor all the way to the walls.

  It was a glowing silver web with corpses stuck into the dough at its center.

  Riley looked down. She and Chris were standing on the cords. She picked up her feet to make sure she hadn’t been stuck to a spider’s web. She hadn’t.

  “Look,” Chris whispered, barely loud enough to hear.

  The starfish was on the far side of the dough pile. Riley watched it rear back and then push Marjorie’s head into the substance. It did the same with the other corpse.

  “Let’s get away from the door,” Riley said. “It’ll head back this way to keep hunting.”

  Chris nodded in agreement. As quiet as they could, they walked over the glowing cords to huddle in the room’s opposite corner. The tendrils squished under Riley’s feet. Silver liquid squeezed out.

  They switched off their flashlights. After a moment, they heard the starfish go back through the wall.

  “Someone else is going to die,” Riley said. “We have to warn Captain Silva.”

  “You can do exactly that,” Chris said. “After we get a closer look.”

  Without waiting for her response, he walked to the center of the room.

  Riley followed, despite her gut warning her to flee. They left little silver puddles for every tendril they stepped on.

  As they approached the doughy pile in the center of the room, the stench of death tickled the back of Riley’s throat. The corpses with their heads stuck into the strange substance weren’t being kept alive or even preserved—they were rotting at a normal rate.

  Chris walked behind the little hill.

  Riley stood still, staring at the bodies at her feet. They wore the sundresses and Hawaiian shirts of the Aria’s guests. Their skin was wrinkled, although that might have been exacerbated by death.

  Riley had only seen a dead body once before, on a tour of an emergency room with a church youth group twelve years ago. A doctor had walked out of a patient’s room, cursing. Riley had peeked inside to see a man younger than her father dead on a bed. A nurse said something about a heart attack. Her church leaders had politely ignored the death to continue listening to their tour guide.

  The bodies on Deck Two of the Aria were different. This wasn’t a man dead before his time after a doctor fought his best to save him. These were thirty or more murdered retirees.

  She considered whether “murder” was the right word. The starfish was an animal, not capable of understanding right and wrong.

  But Nathaniel had helped this all come to be. Even if he wasn’t directly helping… whatever this was… he’d still been involved with the cruise line sending this imposter Aria out to sea.

  She decided “murder” was a perfectly fine word for the situation.

  What she didn’t know how to explain was what was happening to the corpses’ hands and feet. Their fingers had disappeared, replaced by six or seven silver, organic cords that splayed out in all directions, stringing overtop other corpses to run out into the room and create a glowing web.

  The same thick tendrils had burst from the corpses’ feet, through their shoes, and into the room.

  Riley picked a tendril to follow with her eyes. She hadn’t seen the end of one yet. She wanted to know where they went.

  Against her better judgment, Riley inspected the doughy substance that made up the hill. It was nine feet high, just short of the ceiling. It had a diameter of at least fifteen feet. It looked like pizza dough rising in the fridge, except it pulsated. A baseball-sized chunk fell onto a corpse with a splat. Whether the sound was the dough or the body giving way, Riley didn’t know.

  The pile of dough pulsated more violently. Where the chunk had fallen, more mass pressed out from the inside to take its place.

  Just like the rock pillars in the foreign orange ocean.

  But if those things had been the teeth of some leviathan, this was a cancerous growth.

  She realized it had been at least a minute since she’d seen Chris.

  She called his name. He didn’t reply.

  34

  As Riley stared at the corpses on the floor, Chris had felt a pull from the other side of the blob.

  That’s what it looked like to him: a beige version of the blob from the 80s horror remake. Except this one wasn’t mobile.

  At least, he hoped it wasn’t.

  Either way, Chris wasn’t going to touch it.

  He high stepped over the thick bundles of silver tubes. He needed to see on the other side of the blob.

  It was obvious, to one part of his mind, that this urge wasn’t real. It was being implanted in his mind, and that made it dangerous.

  But just like learning about pheromones doesn’t dampen your sexual urges, knowing that this urge to explore was implanted didn’t dampen his need to see.

  Chris circled the blob.

  The room on the opposite side was more of the same. Organic silver tubes reaching out from the corpses and across the floor. They climbed the walls like vines, hiding any other entrances to the room.

  The impulse to explore died down. Here he was, in the Aria’s belly, no doubt standing next to the reason he was here, and he’d just cut himself off from the one person who wanted to help.

  He should hurry back around before Riley got worried.

  As he turned around, he couldn’t help but look at the shuddering surface of the blob.

  Shapes rose and fell in its flesh. They raised the surface without breaking through.

  The movement was hypnotic.

  Chris lifted his hand to catch the next shape that rose.

  A triangle cracked in two pressed outward against the blob’s skin. Chris grabbed it between thumb and forefinger.

  Beneath the blob, the rigid shape crumbled.

  A spark jolted Chris’s fingers, made his wrist spasm, and shot up his arm.

  The room shifted.

  He once again saw the other side of reality. The blob still sat in the middle of the room, but now instead of an empty space with silver tubes covering the floor, it was a factory floor in a desiccated ship.

  Cement vats the size of dumpsters hung from pulleys. Thick silver liquid splashed out of them.

  Decay had struck the floors and walls. The joists and studs were mostly whole, but gaps revealed an orange mist beneath them and the orange ocean outside. Pillars of rock blocked his view of the horizon.

  Again, the sense of something approaching struck him like a shockwave. But now he realized it wasn’t some gigantic creature taking mammoth steps through the ocean—it was extending its form, growing to reach farther.

  The farthest rock pillar he could see disappeared, enveloped by the approaching insanity. Chris couldn’t understand what he was seeing. It wasn’t fog, but it wasn’t solid either. Colors shifted like an oily rainbow, but there was also something mechanical about the structure, like a chain of spinning gears.

  This wasn’t the Deviser. But maybe it was what the Deviser’s slaves were building.

  Chris shook his head, trying to shake off the hypnosis from watching the shapes beneath the blob’s surface. He was too calm about this.

  Riley had panicked about something approaching, and now he was staring at it. No, he was staring at the furthest tip of its reach. And it was inching its way towards the ship.

  Again, that wasn’t quite right. It was approaching the decaying ship on the other side of reality.
But when it got here, what then?

  A cement vat overturned with a creaking groan. Viscous silver liquid splashed down a culvert in the floor towards the beige blob, which pulsed as it soaked up the liquid, like a great throat expanding and contracting with each gulp.

  Clarity snapped back into Chris’s mind. It threatened to morph into panic. He’d suddenly understood the purpose of this blob, the reason for the Aria.

  He hopped over a gap in the floor, circling the beige blob, knowing that he was still on the wrong side of reality.

  Riley would be standing right here if Chris could find his way back out of the Deviser’s dimension.

  His only idea was to try to get out the way he came in.

  He closed his eyes and thrust his open palm against the blob’s skin.

  An electrical charge stiffened his arm.

  The room shifted.

  He was back in the enclosed central room of Deck Two on the Aria.

  The only light came from the silvery tubes covering the floor and Riley’s flashlight beam around the blob. She must have gone looking for him.

  His relief at escaping the other side didn’t calm him. He hurried around the blob to tell Riley the new threat he’d discovered.

  35

  Riley breathed a sigh of relief as Chris came around the circle of dead cruise guests, completing his own inspection.

  “You sure took a while,” she whispered, not sure what she was hiding from. The monster starfish was out on another hunting trip.

  Riley stopped as she got a better look at Chris. His eyes were wide. He scratched at his nose like an addict. He was out of breath.

  “I know what it is.” The words burst from his mouth. “You felt that thing on its way. When we were upstairs, and you wound the watch, you felt the mammoth thing coming. Not the giant sea monster under the old ship on the other side. That’s its own thing. You felt the giant, foreign threat barreling towards us.”

  “Slow down.”

  He was talking like a tweaking auctioneer.