And maybe the voice itself wasn’t so evil, but its intent was unmistakable. Cook dropped the radio and fell backward onto the deck. Crycek was saying something, but he could not hear him. Could not hear anything but the static now and maybe the fog whispering and that clotted sea sluicing and that voice echoing in his head.
“Christ, Cook … what’s wrong?” Crycek was saying, sounding desperate now.
Cook poured some steel into his rubbery limbs, pulled himself up, just shaking his head. “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.” And he knew that sounded foolish, ridiculous, but it was the truth. Because he hadn’t really heard a woman’s voice out there, some malefic female ghost inviting him to doom and madness. Just imagination. He was tired and scared and confused and his imagination had spun all that into the worst thing it could imagine.
His breathing slowed now and he felt foolish. Utterly foolish. He reached over to turn the radio off and, yes, it was still blaring static, but mixed in with it were those buzzing pulses he’d heard earlier. Something his mind had tagged as Morse Code for wasps.
He shut the radio off.
“Better conserve batteries,” he said, feeling, really
feeling
that fog out there now. Certain it was reaching out for him, wanting to drag him into a murky, enclosing shroud of itself.
“What did you hear?” Crycek wanted to know.
“Thought … well, I thought I heard a voice. Just my mind playing tricks on me. I need some sleep.”
Crycek nodded. “There’s funny things in the fog. Funny, weird things. I know all about that. Maybe some of it’s imagination, but not all of it … no sir.”
Cook just sat there, not saying a thing. Crycek was ready to talk now. He wanted to say things and none of it was going to be good.
“I was out there, Cook. I was one of the ones that went to look for Stokes, the guy who jumped overboard. Gosling, the First, he picked me. Picked me because he must have known I was scared of the fog,” Crycek said, his voice low and even and somehow unpleasant. “We went out in the boats to look. Out into that goddamn fog. And I’m not too proud to admit I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment that boat touched water. Terrified. Because that fog wasn’t right then and it’s not right now. Yeah, I knew there were things out in that fog … crawling, pallid things … abominations … things that would drive you mad just to look upon them. Yes, I knew that.”
Cook swallowed. “C’mon, Crycek. Just take it easy.”
“Take it easy?” He uttered a short, sharp laugh that was more like the bark of a dog. It was flat and empty-sounding. Cook was glad, really glad he could not see Crycek’s face then, because he knew it would have been bad, a shroud chewed by lunacy. “Sure, I’ll take it easy. Out in that fog … we were hearing things. Things like voices calling us … awful, clotted voices spoken through mouths full of seaweed … and once, just the once, I heard laughter. A cackling laughter that almost finished me. And then, oh yes, then I saw something. I saw it and it saw me.”
Cook’s arms were full of gooseflesh. He could barely find his voice. “What? What did you see?”
But Crycek could only shake his head back and forth, make a weird whimpering sound low in his throat. “It … it was staring at me out of the fog. Something slimy and stinking with a long neck like a light post. It had a head, something like a head, but all curled-up like a snail shell. Jelly was dripping from it and there was some kind of growth hanging from it, like weeds or dangling roots, only they were crawling and twisting. And its eyes … oh dear God, those eyes, huge and yellow and wicked, staring at me,
staring right into me like they meant to eat my soul raw …”
Crycek’s voice faded out and maybe he with it. He was shaking and making sobbing sounds, his fist shoved up against his mouth so maybe he wouldn’t scream his mind away.
Hupp began to moan and thrash.
“Easy,” Crycek said. “Easy … I won’t let it get you, I swear to God I won’t … when it comes for us, I’ll cheat it. Yes, I’ll cheat it.”
He started giggling then.
Cook had all he could do not to join him.
And then there was a sound.
Something was coming out of the fog.
It was Fabrini who saw the flare.
The flare Crycek fired off. And that’s how they found the lifeboat in the fog.
“Paddle, you goat fuck,” Saks snapped at Menhaus. “It’s a goddamn boat!”
“I’m doing my best,” Menhaus said under his breath.
“So do better.”
But it wasn’t easy. Not for any of them. Fabrini had sighted the boat just as Saks was asking him if his parents had any children that lived. They’d swung right into action, but it was tough going. It wasn’t easy to hang onto the wet, slimy crate and paddle your feet at the same time. And the crate wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate or steer.
“Let’s just abandon it,” Menhaus panted, “and swim for it,”
“No way,” Fabrini said.
“He’s right, Menhaus. If we don’t make the boat and we ditch the crate, we won’t have anything. Keep going.”
Saks was getting damn tired of the both of them. Why, if this had to happen at all, couldn’t he have found himself adrift with say George Ryan or Cushing? Two smart guys there. They kept their wits about them. Not a couple of idiots like Menhaus and that dumb-fuck Fabrini. Fabrini was like some kind of poster child for incompetence and in-breeding. And Menhaus … Christ, what a piece of work. God must’ve been laughing when he brought those two into being. Some kind of heavenly practical joke. Fabrini’s old lady should’ve kept her legs closed … or dropped him into the toilet with the rest of the turds when the time came. One little flush and the world would have been spared so much.
“It’s one of the lifeboats,” Menhaus gasped. “From the ship.”
And it was. They could see someone — Saks thought it was Cook — waving and waving to them. There was someone else in there waving, too.
Why don’t the stupid fucks row over to us?
Saks wondered.
He didn’t know why but he had a pretty good feeling he was going to have to knock a few melons together when he reached the boat. Goddamn lazy sonsofbitches. But it was just like Cook. A guy like that didn’t do squat until you told him so. When he took a shit, you had to show him which end to use.
“We’re going to make it,” Fabrini said.
“Yeah,” Saks said. “Your prayers worked, camel dung. What else did you wish for? A bunch of horny pirates to pick you up and gangrape you?”
“Your turn’s coming, Saks, just you wait.”
“Yeah, if you can get your tongue out of Menhaus’ bum long enough.”
They kept swimming, gripping the crate, and paddling with their feet. It was slow going and exhausting work, swimming through that turgid, oily slop but no one was complaining. They would’ve swam through a septic tank to get to that boat. It was the light at the end of the tunnel … or at least a glimmer of it.
“Okay,” Saks said, “swim for it! We don’t need the crate!”
They all pushed away and made a beeline for the boat which was mere yards away now. It seemed like the longest distance any of them had ever traversed.
“I can’t,” Menhaus panted, coming to a rest, feeling that water around him, warm and thick and oddly comforting. “I can’t … do … it.”
“Come on,” Fabrini said, grabbing him by the lifejacket and towing him along. “You can do it, goddammit. You can.”
“Oh, leave him,” Saks said. “Let the fishies play with him.”
They paddled and fought their way to the boat. Through that marshy, miasmic sea, fingers clawing through islands of decomposing seaweed. A yellow, rank mist rose from the water. When they reached the boat, each man was too exhausted to climb aboard. They just hung off the gunwale and sucked in sharp, salty breaths, feeling heavy like they’d been dipped in liquid cement.
“I’m glad you guys made it,” Cook said, unsmiling.
“You too,” Fabrini said.
“Thank God,” Menhaus rasped.
Saks rolled his eyes. “All right, girls. You can make love later. Into the boat before something takes a bite outta you.”
Cook helped pull each man into the boat. Saks was last. Cook pulled him aboard, but didn’t like the idea. You could see that. The look in his eyes said it all. And Saks knew right then who was going to be trouble. Who was going to need his ass straightened out.
“Nice to see you, too, dumbass,” he told Cook.
George could see nothing but the fog.
It was white and yellow and steaming, great congested patches of it blowing around the raft by a wind that he could not feel. Maybe it moved because it wanted to move. Maybe it was alive. Maybe it was intelligent and in that godawful place, the idea of something like that didn’t seem quite so preposterous as it would have in the real world. Because this was not the real world. Not Earth. Not the Earth George had known. Maybe it was Altair-4 or Rigel-3 or one of those other quaint science fiction sort of places, but it surely was not Earth. Earth did not have fog like this. It did not have scuttling crab/spider things with too many eyes that could run across the water. It did not have big things with glowing green eyes the size of hubcaps. It did not have weird, trilling things in the fog that sounded like giant insects. And, no, it did not have a sea that was like pink gelatin clogged with rotting seaweed and it surely did not have this fog.
Fog that swirled and swallowed and fumed, was lit with that phantasmal, dirty radiance. The fog hid things, George knew, things that might drive you mad if you saw them. So that was good. But it also hid
you.
Wrapped you in its dusky winding sheet and tucked you into secret crevices and shadowy spider-holes you would never find your way out of.
“Does it seem brighter?” George said. “Not day-bright, but certainly brighter”
Gosling nodded. “Maybe this fog will burn away yet. Maybe.”
“Still looks pretty damn thick, though,” George said.
But it was lighter out. It had happened incrementally, so subtly that neither man had even noticed. Now it was not like twilight really, but maybe a gloomy, overcast morning. Well, maybe not that bright, but better. Much better. Even the fog itself didn’t look so murky, so … polluted like seething fumes of toxic waste. You could actually see the ocean, that marshy run of steaming rot.
The surface actually seemed to quiver.
George dipped an oar into it, discovered there was actually sort of a sticky, scummy membrane over the surface … like the film over a pail of spoiled milk. That’s how the scuttler — George had christened the creature on the oar that now — had dashed over it. No magic there, just adaptive engineering.
He figured that the day … or night or whatever it was … was brightening a bit and that was something.
Not that it really improved their situation much.
They were still, without a doubt, the proverbial needle in a haystack. Except the haystack in this case seemed to go on to infinity. And where that haystack was located … well, that was something else again.
Gosling was busy with the VHF radio, seemed impervious to just about everything else.
“You suppose we might get out of this?” George asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your sailor’s intuition tell you?”
“Tells me we’re fucked,” he said.
Gosling and his damn pragmatism. He didn’t care diddly about keeping morale up; that wasn’t his concern. He looked at everything realistically. And the reality of the situation with him was that either they’d live or die. He leaned in neither direction. What happened was what would happen.
“You know, that’s what I love about you, Gosling, your optimism. It keeps my spirits high.”
“I’m not your therapist. It ain’t my job to keep you happy.”
“Yeah, but I was on board
your
ship. Your boys steered us into this fucking netherworld. It seems to me it’s your responsibility to get my ass out in one piece.”
“Well, we get back, you file a complaint with the Coast Guard,” he said. “Until then, quit yer goddamn complaining.”
He kept fiddling with the radio, seemed more intent with it all of a sudden. He kept saying,
hmmm,
under his breath like a dentist deciding which tooth to yank. Regardless, it was driving George up the wall.
“You getting anything out there?”
Gosling shook his head slowly. “No … and yes. I thought before … thought I caught the end of a distress call, but it was swallowed in the static. I can’t be sure. I’m thinking this fog might have some sort of electrical field to it, might be interfering with our signals.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning it’s distorting the shit out of the airwaves,” he said, pulling the earplug out. “Could have been another broadcast, could have been ours coming back at us … hard to tell. That static swallows everything, vomits it back up.”
George loved all that technical detail, but it didn’t tell him shit. He knew radios. You turned them on to get the weather. Turned them off when Neil Sedaka or the Four Seasons came on. Other than that, he knew squat.
He got over closer to Gosling, listened to that static with him.
It was an empty, dead sound, rising and falling. Now and again there was a distant beep or ping. But you couldn’t be sure. George kept listening to it, feeling like some astronomer with his radio telescope listening to the music of the spheres, the noise of deep space searching for an intelligent signal. Yeah, that’s what it sounded like. Dead, distant voids and the echoing blackness between the stars.
He found it unnerving.
It was the sound a TV makes when a channel goes off the air and you’re staring into that field of fuzz and snow. And if you stare too long, you start seeing shapes flitting about, the millions of dots and specs becoming patterns that pull you in … spirals and marching diamonds. But it’s not there, none of it. Just the human mind offended by all that confused, random nothingness and deciding to fill in the blanks. Same way it did in deserts or snowstorms, creating mirages, images it needed to see.
George kept listening, certain he was hearing something … just not sure what.
Out there, in that storm of white noise, a man could get lost. He could sink away into blackness and lunacy. It would suck his mind clean until there was nothing but polished skull left behind. George decided that the static sounded like blowing dust and hissing gas, hollows and low places. A haunted, almost diabolic sound not of emptiness, but of
occupancy.
Like something sentient was out there, not necessarily alive nor dead, but waiting, just waiting, listening and reaching out for minds to touch. It reminded him of recordings made by ghost hunters in tombs and desolate houses … static suffused with distant echoes, suggestions of awareness. Shades, shadows, ghosts.