“Go lay down, Soltz, you need a rest.”
Soltz nodded. “What … no, it’s my imagination again. I thought I heard it out there, creaking and groaning, the sound of feet on its decks, pacing and pacing.”
“Go lay down,” Gosling told him.
“I didn’t really see it, did I?”
Gosling told him that he hadn’t, but deep down he honestly had to wonder. Wonder what might next come drifting out of the mist and if it was a ghost ship, would it keep ghosting by … or would it decide to stop?
Fabrini seemed better after he admitted his fears openly.
Cook was sure he would want to get off the ship right away, but he seemed to be in no hurry. In fact, when they’d climbed back down to the decks below, he just stood there.
“You know something, Cook? You know what I been thinking?” he said, looking not afraid now, but just angry. “I’m thinking that I’m just plain tired of wandering around with my fucking tail between my legs. I’ve had it. I’m not the sort of guy who gets like this, ready to piss himself over ghost stories. I figure that whatever got the crew here, it wants me, let it take its best shot. Because I sure as hell won’t make it easy.”
“That’s good thinking,” Cook told him. “Reading that log made me start thinking some things myself.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well … maybe I’m wrong, but what if Crycek is right: what if this thing
needs
our fear, feeds off it? What if it gets stronger on paranoia and anxiety and things like that? What if? Then, I don’t know, maybe if we don’t let it see that we’re scared, maybe it’ll get weaker.”
“Makes sense to me. Let’s show that fucker what we’re made of. Let’s do some exploring.”
That really came as a shock to Cook, but he took it as he took all things with neither a smile nor a frown. They found a hatch and went below decks, down into the damp darkness. And down there, in the shadows and stink, it wasn’t quite so easy to puff out your chest. For if the atmosphere had been forbidding above, it was positively rancid below.
Using the lantern, they began exploring the mazelike passages below decks. Cook figured it was going to be bad down there and he was right. There was an awful, gagging stink in the air that was worse than even the smell of the sea and weeds. This was a foul, suffocating odor of rank decomposition and noxious dissolution. Like something wet and moldy locked in a hot closet, boiling away in its own juices. A weird combination of organic decay and rusting machinery, stagnant water and mildewed woodwork … a half dozen other things neither man could identify or wanted to.
“I feel like a worm,” Fabrini said. “A worm sliding through the carcass of something dead.”
It was right on target, but created such an absurd visual that Cook actually laughed … at least until he heard his laughter echoing back at him. No, none of it was funny. Not in the least. There were greasy, gray toadstools and furry green moss growing through rents in the bulkheads and more of that bloated fungus that was just as white and fatty as the flesh of a corpse pulled from a river. A hot, yeasty odor came off it.
Cook stepped on something soft and pulpy about the size of a cantaloupe and it went to juice under his boot. He jumped back with a cry, realizing what he’d stepped on was something like a puffball, a cloud of yellow spores spread out in the lantern light.
“You ever seen anything like this?” Fabrini asked,
Cook just shook his head.
The ship was dead, obviously, yet there was such a profusion of growth and morbid germination, it almost seemed like maybe it was moving from the inorganic to the organic. That given time, the
Cyclops
would be a seething diseased mushroom that only looked like a ship.
They moved on, ducking beneath ribbons of fungi, bringing light where there had only been moist darkness and bacterial action for decades. The air was saturated with a brackish sewer smell. Shadows pooled and bled like black blood. The bulkheads were thick with a slick yellow moss. Clots of fungus dropped from the ceiling overhead and hit the decks like rotten plums. Everything was creaking and groaning, dripping and oozing and stinking.
It was bad. God yes, it was bad.
But something in them, in both of them, pushed them on. Maybe it was some inexplicable, suicidal desire to see the very worst that floating mortuary could show them. Maybe they could be satisfied with nothing less. And maybe, after reading the ship’s log and having their minds touched by those of the crew, they had to know what became of them.
Doors were either welded shut with rust or had bulging tongues of fungi seeping around their edges as if the cabins behind them were bursting with fungal growth. The fungus was on the decks, too, and they were walking right through it, their boots making gluey, sticky sounds as they lifted them with each step. Cook had brushed some of it on a bulkhead with the back of his hand and it had been warm and oily like the skin of a dying man.
They found another corridor and the fungi had not abated.
But one stretch of wall was free of it, was blackened and pitted as if a great fire had swept through there. Cook and Fabrini paused before a doorway. It was burnt black. When Cook prodded it with the barrel of the Browning it shattered like candy glass. It was entirely crystallized.
“Just like the log said,” Fabrini pointed out. “That ship, the
Korsund,
remember? Forbes said it looked burned, that the walls fell apart when they touched them.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
Fabrini tapped the door with his knife and it fell apart like ice in a spring thaw. “What could cause something like this?” he wondered out loud.
Cook shook his head. “I’m not sure … it’s like it was burned and then frozen immediately afterwards, you know? Like it was hit with a raging heat that weakened it and then dunked in a tank of liquid oxygen, frozen solid in a split-second. What else could weaken steel, make it like this?”
Now that the door was reduced to shards at their feet, Cook held the lantern in there. There was dust everywhere. And where there wasn’t dust, there was more of that fungi. The floor was thick with it. It climbed up onto a bunk, was in the process of swallowing a desk-
“Jesus,” Fabrini said, “look at that …”
Cook was looking. Seated at the desk was a skeleton dressed in dirty, dingy rags that might have been a uniform at one time judging from the tarnished buttons on the breast. The skull was thrown back, jaws sprung as if in a scream. The fungus had absorbed the yellowed skeleton right up to the ribcage, fingers of it snaking up to the jawline. To Cook, with all that fungi on it, it looked like the skeleton was white wax that had melted down over the desk and pooled onto the floor. Because that’s how it looked … like a Halloween candle.
The fungi seemed almost aware of the light on it, began to bleed droplets of diseased sap.
“You think …” Fabrini began. “You think that might be-”
“Forbes,” Cook said. “I’ll bet it is.”
He didn’t comment on what they were seeing anymore than that. The sickly yellow light of the lantern created wavering shadows, made the skeleton look like it was leaning forward, then back, made the skull grin like it was laughing at them.
And maybe it was.
Because it knew things they did not. It knew plenty of things that they would not know until it was too goddamn late to do anything about them. It sat there, laughing in its sea of fungus and ancient rot, flashing a toothy mortuary grin. Filled to bursting with a grim, macabre mirth. You could almost hear it saying:
Well, well, fucking well … look what the cat dragged in … or will soon drag out. Almost ninety years I’ve been waiting for someone and now here you are looking in on me, isn’t that sweet? And you want to know what it was like when I was clothed in flesh, when good dutiful Lieutenant Forbes was a man and not a fungal wraith? Yes, you want to know what it was like for him, sitting in here, waiting and waiting, hearing voices and lost souls whispering in the corridor, things scratching and clawing and hissing his name. How it was for him, his mind gone to a soft quivering rot because he knew he was alone and that thing was coming to claim him. You want to know what it was like, him sick with radiation poisoning … because that’s what it was and you know it. The breath of that thing is radiation, a wasting frozen atomic fission born in black godless cosmic voids … the sort of radiation that melts holes through the fabric of time and space and is a cold fire burning in your guts until you vomit out your insides in glistening, greasy loops. Yes, that’s what it was like for Forbes. His guts coming up his throat and then that doorway suddenly radiant with a flickering, supercharged energy that was so very bright it was actually the purest form of darkness, the absolute darkness of black holes and dead stars. Then it came through the door, passing straight through the metal because solid matter is like a mist to it and that’s when Forbes saw it, something immense, something sinister and intensely alien. Something that perverted three-dimensional space with its very arcane, impossible existence. An obscenity ancient and undying born in a tenebrous antimatter firmament of sentient slime where physics and geometry are screaming, cabalistic cancers. This, my friends, is what our good Lieutenant Forbes saw. What he feasted upon and what feasted upon him. Something lunatic and profane in appearance, a violation of known space that squeezed his brain dry like a sponge just seeing it. A crawling and slithering accumulation of arcing colors and flesh that was not flesh but smoke … colors with texture and sound and smell … writhing, hideous waxen colors that looked into him with green crystal eyes that bleached his own eyes white and boiled his brain to soup just looking upon them, turned his gray matter to a white radioactive jelly that ran from his ears and eyes and mouth …
All of it, whether memory or psychic invasion, blasted through Cook’s brain in a searing wave that left him gasping, a choked whimpering in his throat. His head spun and he fell into Fabrini who held him up, scared now, wanting to know what in the hell was happening. But Cook could not tell him. Could not tell him anything. Because he had seen it, he had seen and felt and physically witnessed the merest fraction of Forbes’ final moments and it left him wriggling with a fear that was so big, so total, it blotted out everything for a moment … even his own mind. He stood there, hanging onto Fabrini and for a few, lunatic moments his mind had been washed clean like a blackboard and he did not know who he was or where he was. And then it all came surging back, leaving him breathless, his temples throbbing.
But what had it been?
Bones were just bones and they could not have sent those images into his head. Cook could not accept such things. Could not let himself go there. Pitted, yellow bones holding, after all these years, a distant and feral memory, a reflection, an echo of a horror beyond human experience … was it possible? Or was the answer far worse? Was it just a telepathic linkup to that thing’s mind, its consciousness, letting him know but a sliver of the fate that was in store for him? For all of them?
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini was saying. “Are you all right?”
And Cook was nodding his head. “I think the air in here is bad or something. I got all woozy or something. I’m … I’m okay now.”
Maybe Fabrini believed that and maybe he didn’t.
Regardless, he led Cook up and out of those subterranean passages and onto the deck where the air was somewhat cleaner, fresher. Even the mist didn’t look so bad after what was below.
After a time, Fabrini said, “Should we go back to the boat?”
“If you want.”
But Fabrini shook his head. “Let’s look around some more.”
Apparently, whatever had gotten into Cook’s head, it had not touched Fabrini. His zeal for exploring the ship had not lessened. Maybe it was being cooped-up in that lifeboat for so long. Maybe that’s what it was. Even exploring a death ship and not knowing what new horror might show itself next did not make him want to leave.
But Cook thought: Of course not. Fabrini has a mission now. Exploration. And anything, even this damned ship, is better than waiting helpless in that lifeboat.
They went into a deckhouse aft and took the companionway below. There was much less fungus here, very little of it in fact. And the air was surely better, although the darkness was equally as claustrophobic. Eventually, they came to the engine room. It was a gigantic, vaulted place like an amphitheater set with mammoth steam turbines and attendant arteries of hoses and vents and pipes. There were a few inches of black, dirty water on the floor.
“I’d say she won’t run,” Fabrini said.
“I’m thinking you’re right.”
They chuckled over their little joke, moving around the turbines and pistons, Fabrini telling Cook how he wished to God he’d followed his first instinct and told Saks to stick the job up his ass. Because, honestly, he’d felt something was wrong with the entire thing, only he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it.
They moved by lantern light into what might have been some kind of storeroom and right away they saw more death.
“Shit,” Fabrini said.
Shit was right. There were maybe a dozen skeletons tangled up in a central, bony mass like something scooped from a mass grave. But it wasn’t all those skulls and ribcages and jutting femurs that made them stop dead, it was
what was on them.
Crawling, fluttering, purring things.
At first, Cook thought he was looking at living brains, brains with attached spinal cords creeping amongst the bones and rot and oily water. Just like in that old ‘50s B-movie with Marshal Thompson. But that’s not what he was seeing at all. Whatever they were, they had heads about the size of tea saucers, flattened out and connected to long, bifurcated tails set with fluttering cilia. They were fleshy and pale, making a thrumming noise that sounded very much like purring kittens.
They paid the intruders no mind.
Cook wasn’t sure whether they were insect or crustacean or a little of both. They were eyeless and grotesque, moving with an inching motion like slugs. They inspired a bone-deep atavistic loathing.