“Oh? And what
were
you thinking?” Cushing asked him.
But Soltz would not say. He just sat there, staring into the mist, characteristically morose.
“Listen now, all I’m saying is that there could be lots of reasons for what we were hearing,” Gosling said.
“Don’t treat us like children, please,” Soltz said to him. “Whatever happened … whatever that ship was calling out about … it was not normal. Something came out of the fog. Something
horrible.
And whatever it was, it left an empty ship behind.”
The derelict.
It came out of the fog, huge and dead and forbidding, something you didn’t dare look upon and something else you didn’t dare look away from. To turn your back on it, would have been like turning your back on a razor coming at you in the darkness. The men in the lifeboat saw it and to them, it was like looking at some graveyard described by thin moonlight. It inspired the same sense of mystery and horror, an almost instinctive phobia. For this ship was like something abominable yanked from a burial ground, a relic dragged from a cursed tomb. Something diseased, sepulchral, and ancient. A tombstone emoting gray silence, a mausoleum echoing with dead whispers, blackness and lunacy. Nothing good could come of it.
Cook saw it, rising out of the mist, and it pulled his guts up the back of his throat in cold, coiling loops. Looking upon it, he could barely breathe.
It was a dire and morbid haunted house made of iron and rust and decay, thrust up from that forest of tangled, spreading weed. And though it was dead and rotting, you got the horrendous feeling that it was not dead
enough.
That somehow, it was unspeakably alive and aware and … hungry.
“Like a skull,” Crycek said in a wounded, despairing voice. “It looks like a skull stripped of meat.”
Fabrini said,” Knock it off.” But his voice was almost a whisper, as if he was afraid something on the ship might hear him.
“It’s just an old ship,” Cook said to them. “God knows how long it’s been here.”
“Sure, that’s all it is,” Menhaus put in. “Just an old ship.”
“You boys keep telling yourself that and you might even believe it,” Saks said.
Crycek was shaking his head. “It’s full of death … can’t you
feel
it?”
And they all could, a low and unpleasant thrumming in their heads, the sound of some dark machine idling … waiting to cycle to full rev.
Saks chuckled low in his throat. “Scares you girls, eh?” But it had gotten to him, too, and you could see that. Tough-guy Saks. Whatever was in that ship was scratching blackly in his belly just as it was with the others.
Cook was overwhelmed with a mindless horror at the sight of it. He tried to speak, but his throat was thick like it was stuffed with wool and rags. It took him a minute or two. “Let’s not get superstitious here. It’s just a derelict. It can’t hurt you. Might be something we can use on it.”
Fabrini looked at him. “You’re not … I mean, you’re not suggesting that we
board
it, are you?”
But Cook’s answer to that was to get the oars out.
The ship was caught fast in a bank of weeds. They had crawled right up her hull in glistening green mats like the ship was slowly being devoured by some colony of parasitic plants.
Fabrini and Cook rowed in closer until they hit the weeds which were so thick and congested, they had to use the oars as poles to push the lifeboat through them. Up close, the mist receding, the ship had to be four- or five-hundred feet in length with long decks and high, twin stacks rising up into the gloom. Cook had never seen a ship quite like her before. What he assumed was the bridge or the wheelhouse was suspended over the foredeck on steel stilts. And from just behind it, running aft to the stacks themselves were a skeletal framework of booms and gantries and derricks rising up like fleshless ribs. It made the entire ship look like the skeleton of some gigantic sea monster trapped in the weed.
As they poled down its length, Cook felt a sickly uneasiness in the pit of his belly. The sight of her up close — huge and lifeless and stark — left his skin cold, made his teeth want to chatter. Dead, certainly, but not untenanted.
The lifeboat slid through the weeds pretty easily, actually riding atop of them and sliding over them for the most part. Yet, it was hard work, poling along like that. But the exertion and the sweat felt good.
After what seemed about an hour, they swung around aft and got up behind her. As they passed through her shadow, the weeds suddenly seemed almost black. Not gray as a shadow might make them, but jet black and oily. When Cook looked again, it was gone.
It was like going into a cemetery at midnight, it occurred to him. You weren’t really afraid of ghosts and the dead were just dead, but … you just didn’t want to do it. You didn’t know why, but you didn’t want to. You just didn’t belong there.
As they came along the starboard side, pushing through those weaving mists, Saks said, “Looks like we’re expected.”
They all saw it: the boarding ladder was down. Cook and Fabrini urged the lifeboat nearer the ship where the weeds were so thick and snarled it was like pushing through mud. Finally, they reached the ladder.
“What’s that shit all over it?” Fabrini asked.
“Some kind of goo,” Menhaus said.
Cook was wondering that, too. The steps and handrail of the boarding ladder were festooned with something like cobwebs. On closer inspection, he saw it was a gray-white fungus, a fusty-smelling excrescence that looked like it had grown up out of the weeds and was slimed up the hull of the boat in oily-looking clots and clumps. He prodded some of it with the blade of his oar and a black sap ran from it.
“You ever seen fungus like that?” he asked Crycek, hoping the man’s knowledge of marine life had not abandoned him.
But Crycek just shook his head.
Saks said, “Looks like it’s eating right into the metal.”
And it did.
Cook said, “Menhaus? You feel up to standing guard over Saks here? Can you do that?”
What he was really saying, of course, was
can we trust you not to feel sorry for that so-nofabitch and untie him?
Menhaus nodded, his eyes stern. “What about Crycek?”
“I’ll stay right here,” he said. He seemed to have his wits about him finally. “I’d rather do that than go on that old hulk.”
“Me and you both,” Menhaus said.
“Jesus Christ,” Saks said. “Untie me already. I’m okay now. I just lost my head was all. I’m fine now.”
Cook lashed the lifeboat to the boarding ladder, avoiding the fungus and wincing as the nylon rope cut into that shivering mass, making it bleed black again. “Just the same, Saks, you’ll stay tied until we decide different.”
“Which is probably forever,” Fabrini told him.
Cook took the gun and stuck a chemical lightstick inside his shirt. Fabrini took the knife and then they started up. The boarding ladder trembled as Cook put his weight on it. It groaned and moved, but did not collapse. He could feel the steps giving slightly under his boots, but he decided they would probably hold him.
Fabrini wasn’t crazy about boarding the derelict, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t about to chicken out. Particularly in front of Saks. Regardless of the situation, the macho games between them persisted.
About half way up, as the mist seeping from the water and weeds began to make the lifeboat below look hazy, Fabrini said, “Look at that, Cook. You see that?”
Cook did. It looked like a series of long, jagged furrows in the hull like something had scratched the ship lengthwise. Cook figured he didn’t want to know what caused them.
“Looks like she scraped up against something,” he said.
“Or something scraped up against
her
.”
When they reached the main deck, they just stood there, feeling the ship and certain it was feeling them, too. Much of the decks were obscured in fog and what they could see was a maze of hunched shapes and shadows, the bridge rising up above them. They walked along, Cook in the lead, past the upraised horns of stokeholds and ventilators, the blocklike deckhouses and high, circular gun turrets.
“Must have been a warship,” Cook said, “with guns like that.”
“At least they had some firepower when they ended up here.”
The decks creaked beneath them like doors in rotting houses. To Cook, the entire ship was like some huge casket thrust up from a grave, a nitrous and moldering thing full of dank secrets and viscid, crawling shadows. The atmosphere was blighted and noxious, filled with a gnawing sort of spiritual pestilence that he could feel right down into the marrow of his bones. There was an almost palpable odor of putrescence and age. Everything was rusty and leaning and going to rot. There were great, gaping holes eaten through the decks and bulkheads as if acid had been liberally sprinkled about. All in all, it was grim and haunted and forbidding, the sort of place that made something inside you pull up and hide.
They moved aft, carefully checking the strength of the decks as they went, for it looked as if the entire ship wanted to collapse beneath them. When they got beneath the skeletal, reaching arms of those booms and derricks, they saw that they were enshrouded in ropes of fungus.
“Like wax,” Fabrini said. “Dripping and running everywhere.”
Cook said it was enough and they made their way forward back to the bridge or wheel-house. Snaking fingers of fog and sinister, clutching shadows oozed from riven bulkheads and askew hatches. The stink of the ship was moldy and vaporous, thick and aged and repulsive. If anything indeed lived on that ship, it could be nothing good, nothing remotely wholesome … whatever could breed under such conditions, they didn’t want to look it in the face. From time to time, Cook felt a slight rumble below decks as if some morbid weight were shifting down there, waking up and sucking in that pestiferous air.
When the bridge was above them, they paused, both breathing fast and not from exertion.
“Should we … should we maybe go back?” Fabrini asked, so very hopeful it was almost hard to tell him no.
But Cook did tell him no. “We should go up and check out the bridge, see if we can find anything. You want,” Cook said, taking hold of the ladder that led up there, “you can wait down here.”
Fabrini looked around through the shadows and tendrils of searching mist. “Yeah, fuck you, too. Let’s go.”
It was almost humorous to Cook seeing Fabrini act this way. Oh, he understood the fear, all right, for it was on him, too, just as tight as sweat … but to see Fabrini scared shitless, well it was almost comical. A guy like that with all those muscles.
Cook climbed the ladder with Fabrini coming up beneath him. Neither man looked down until they were safely on the catwalk outside the boxish, rectangular wheelhouse. Up there, they had a view of the ghostly fog closing around the ship, the endless expanse of weeds and the mist rising from them like smoke. Looking out there into that haunted world, it was not hard to believe in sea monsters, ghost ships … and worse things.
“Quite a view,” Cook said.
“Yeah, enough to make you wanna slit your wrists.”
Unlike most ship’s wheelhouses which seemed to have a preponderance of circular portholes, the wheelhouse here had large square ports. All of them were black and filthy and Fabrini couldn’t even scrape them clean with his knife.
Cook found the door and it was unlocked. But it was laden with rust and they had to hammer it with their shoulders to get it open even two feet. It made a groaning sound like nails pulled from old boards and then seized-up completely. They could neither open it or close it after that.
Inside it was black as a mineshaft.
Cook stood there, feeling that darkness and asking himself if he really wanted to go in there.
“Well?” Fabrini said.
Cook snapped the lightstick against his knee and led the way in. The air was dry and stale, motes of dust the size of snowflakes drifting in the glare of the lightstick. They moved around carefully, afraid they’d fall through a hole or gore themselves on a jagged shelf of metal. And maybe, just maybe, they were afraid that something with long white fingers and eyes like red ice would take hold of them.
“Christ, it smells like a tomb in here,” Fabrini said.
And that was close, Cook decided. A sarcophagus that had been brought up from abyssal depths. It smelled of brine and mildew, rust and antiquity. There was another odor, too, something just plain dirty that he did not like.
“Look,” Fabrini said. “A lantern.”
He pulled it off a hook and let Cook see it. Cook took it, saw the shadow of kerosene sloshing around inside. He pulled a pack of waterproof matches from his pocket that he’d taken from the survival equipment. He struck one off the riveted bulkhead and wild, jumping shadows paraded around them. The wick was bone dry and it caught almost immediately.
“Let there be light,” he said, turning up the valve until the bridge was flickering with orange-yellow illumination.
That’s when they got their first good look at the room they were in. It was long and rectangular with life rings on the bulkheads, everything covered in a thick, furry layer of dust. They uncovered an old-fashioned shortwave radio set that was tarnished green. The ship’s compass was thick with sediment. The bridge telegraphs for the port and starboard engines were both locked tight with rust and completely immovable. There was so much grime on the bridge rail that Cook didn’t realize it was brass until he brushed against it and revealed the gleaming metal below. And the ship’s wheel itself was threaded with cobwebs and clotted with dust.
None of what they saw had been touched in decades.
“Christ,” Fabrini said, examining a brass tripod telescope. “How long has this ship been derelict? A hundred years or what?”
Cook just shook his head, led them off into another room. This one had a large, flat table and things like rolled-up posters in slots along the far wall.
“Chart room, I’d guess,” Cook said, setting the lantern into an inch of collected dust on the table.
There were copper chart tubes and navigational books set in low shelves. A nickel-plated aneroid barometer hung above them. Beneath that down of dust, the table was crowded with old navigational instruments — dividers and parallel rulers, three-armed protractors and quadrants. Cook found a sextant in a wooden case with mirrors and shades. In another case, there was a ship’s chronometer.