Somebody better do something,
George thought,
or I’m gonna crack, see if I don’t.
And maybe he was close, maybe they were all close, but he held it in check best he could. He felt gutless and sick and scared. Very scared. For how could you not be? Waiting there like that in the foggy silence, feeling like a condemned man waiting for execution, everything inside you tense and bunched, ready to explode. And in the back of your mind there was that primitive urge to fight, to do battle, even though the idea was ludicrous. There was no chance of victory against something of this
immensity
… yet, that primal man inside said it was better to die that way, fighting and slashing and cutting with blood in your mouth, than to take it like this. Just sitting there, letting it happen. And George figured that made real good sense, for maybe the jellyfish would kill them quicker that way. Maybe the very defiance of them hacking at its tentacles would piss it off. And a quick death would be better than waiting, better than feeling your mind going to a cold slop as those tentacles embraced you like living ropes.
George didn’t honestly think he could handle being touched by it. That was just unthinkable. Repellent. Like being webbed up by a spider and feeling it lick you … your mind would go to sauce.
The tentacles continued to unwind, slithering over and around each other like a tangle of nesting snakes slowly waking.
The minutes ticked by.
George could hear those tentacles now brushing up against the sides of the raft with a squeaking sound. Many of them, questing and scraping and investigating. One of them rose up, hovered directly over Soltz’s head and everyone on the raft held their breath … it passed within two, three inches of his face, found the gunwale of the raft and tapped against it, withdrew.
But that was hardly the end of it.
Those tentacles were real busy all of a sudden. It seemed as if maybe the jelly was intelligent to a certain degree, for it kept touching the raft, trying to figure it out. One of the tentacles slid up the side of the raft and wormed its way inside, just touching things … the blanket that covered Soltz’s legs, an oar, the zippered compartments that contained the survival equipment. It found a lightstick and darted back as if it did not like the feel of it. Then it slid back over the side. Four or five others began tapping their way along the gunnel as if looking for something.
One of them got real close to George.
It was the pale, waxy yellow of a gourd. An undulant and rubbery thing like a great blind worm rooting through mulch. Not aggressive, merely explorative. It brushed over the tip of George’s boot, paid it no mind.
And George, feeling hot and loose inside, thought,
what the hell does it want? What is it looking for?
Other tentacles passed very close to Gosling and Cushing. Cushing had to move his arm out of their way.
There were things about this creature that Cushing wanted to tell them about. He knew jellies, had done a great deal of reading about them, and this was not exactly a jelly. A jellyfish, he wanted to tell them, was a hydrozoan, a colonial animal, a colony of specialized cells. Jellies did not act like this. They were not capable of reaching around and grasping things with their tentacles. He also wanted to tell them that if this was indeed a jellyfish, then those tentacles would be lined with stinging cells.
The only good thing, everyone noticed, was that the sort of tentacles that were doing the exploring were not terribly numerous. From what they could see in the water, the thing had no more than a few dozen of them. Which seemed like a lot until you realized that the jelly had hundreds of tentacles. But most were thin, reedy projections that fluttered in the water like long wisps of yellow hair.
It might have went on that way for hours or even days or at least until that medusan grew bored or dried out and had to dive back down to rehydrate itself. That was, if it hadn’t been for Soltz. Soltz awakening in a kind of delirium, sitting up and moaning, licking his lips and breathing hard. His one good eye looking around, but dreamy and unfocused, confused. He tossed the blanket aside and right away those big tentacles started moving around, coiling and corkscrewing.
“What?” he said, barely able to catch his breath. “What is this? What … what … what?”
The sound of his voice triggered chemical changes in the bell of the jellyfish. It went from that livid purple to a soft yellow, then the bright orange and fiery red of a sunset.
“Soltz …” Gosling whispered, but it was no good.
Two of the tentacles came up the side of the raft like snakes. Soltz did not see them. He tossed his blanket aside and it struck them, making them twist like earthworms in direct sunlight.
“Colors,” Soltz said, “look at those awful colors …”
So maybe he did see the jelly. For even the tentacles were suffused with oranges and reds now. The floats and bladders around the bell were inflating and deflating rapidly, the bell was quivering. Three or four more tentacles boarded the raft, looping and creeping. Soltz grabbed an oar and swung at them. They would never have been strong enough to drag a man overboard, for as the oar hit one that was rising up like a rattlesnake in a defensive posture, it went to pulp. It literally shattered in a spray of jelly. The bell went bright red and a dozen tentacles went after Soltz. He hit some with the oar and they exploded, but he wasn’t fast enough.
Two or three others noosed around him and he instantly dropped the oar, screaming and thrashing as the nematocysts of the tentacles, the stinging cells, injected their toxins into him. He stood right up straight as a post and a dozen more ringed him, and he fell thrashing into the water, right into the squirming forest of the thing.
Cushing cried out and Gosling held him back.
There was no helping Soltz.
Not now.
“Do something for chrissake!” George cried out. “We can’t just let him-”
“We don’t have a fucking choice,” Gosling said, just sick with it all. “Nothing to be done … just, just don’t look.”
But George
was
looking. There was no way he could not. Like seeing a man fall beneath a subway train, you simply had to look. Because maybe, just maybe, what you saw wouldn’t be as bad as what your mind would show you if you didn’t look.
Soltz was pretty much out of his head when he attacked those tentacles. To him it was a dream and he’d been reacting with dreamlike logic. When the tentacles touched him, he felt an instant searing agony spread over his bare arms and face. It was like being stuck with glowing red needles. A stinging, burning sensation that brought tears to his eyes and a scream to his mouth.
And then he was in the water, thrashing in a sea with something like kelp and crawling weed, only that weed was on fire and him with it. He was flailing in that mass of tentacles, covered with them. They were draped over his face and tangled around his arms. Many of them had come apart and hung over him in rags and glistening membranes. The bell was a livid, boiling red, pulsing and shuddering, and Soltz was screaming through a mouthful of jellied polyp as those stinging nettles shot barbs of neurotoxin into him.
Somebody was calling out to him, but the voice seemed to be coming from some distant gulf. It was muffled and unreal. He tried to thrash away, but it was no good. He was knotted in jellyfish. Huge, tortuous waves of convulsive pain tore through his legs, his belly, and now his hands and arms as he clawed and fought, trying to free himself.
“Ah, ahhhh!” he gasped as water filled his mouth. “Help me!
Help meeeee!”
He tore at floats and bladders, scratching rents in the bell itself.
He kicked and splashed and ripped at the trailing toxic whips and became further ensnared, his entire body lacerated with blinding agony that made his head buzz with white noise.
He could hear voices shouting, yelling, screaming.
But it was hard to understand above his own shrieks that seemed to be fading now, echoing from an empty room. The pain was unreal and encompassing. It blotted out everything. It was like some impossible Oh-my-God wall of torture rising up around him and he seemed to be sinking down further, embraced by tentacles, his mouth filled with a stinging pulp that bloated his tongue in his mouth.
Then he was sinking, sucking in water and slowly, very slowly, everything was going gray. He could see nothing but tentacles and jelly, ruptured bits of the thing drifting everywhere in the cascading bubbles. And then everything was quiet. Still. No sound. No motion. Just that peaceful womblike grayness swallowing up all and everything
He felt himself sinking deeper.
Felt himself break the surface once again and then submerge for good.
Then nothing.
The men in the raft saw it all, watched it with stunned abject horror. George saw Soltz break the surface that last time, the bandage gone from his bad eye that was red and shining and filled with blood. That eye seemed to see him in the raft, it locked onto him and then sank beneath the foaming, dirty sea like a dying sun.
And that was the last they saw of Soltz.
When Saks came back, Fabrini was sleeping in his bunk. But Cook was awake. Wide awake, just sitting there and maybe trying to sort it all out in his mind which was no easy thing. Saks came through the door, his piggish face streaked with grime like he’d been crawling around down in a mechanic’s bay.
“Crycek back?” Cook asked.
Saks shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.
Menhaus went looking for him.”
“I suppose he’ll find him.”
Cook was waiting for the typical response from Saks, some homosexual innuendo, but he got none. Nothing about his mother entertaining football teams or his father fucking barnyard swine. None of the usual. Saks just stood there silently, a funny look in his eyes.
“You find anything?” Cook asked him.
“Not much. That fungus is everywhere. Found some skeletons below, but whoever owned ‘em died a long time ago.”
Saks said he found the galley, too. The cutlery was all tarnished, but usable. The food was long ago rotted away. Sacks of flour and sugar were full of fungus. Same went for casks of water and bread. But he did find several sealed containers of salt pork.
“You think it’s all right?” Cook asked him.
“Looks like it might be,” Saks said. “But I don’t know if I’d want to put any of it in my mouth.”
“Anything else?”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Saks nodded. “I didn’t see them … but I could hear them in the bulkheads. They were scratching.”
After that, Saks went back to his cabin, that funny look still in his eyes and Cook knew something was up. Either he had seen something or did something or was thinking about doing something. Regardless, Cook didn’t really care.
When Saks was gone, he locked the cabin door and curled up on his bunk on a mattress he’d found that wasn’t too mildewed. He covered himself with a waterproof blanket from the lifeboat and fell asleep almost instantly, thinking of scratching in the walls and rats. He dreamed of ghosts.
Thirty minues after Soltz went down, nobody on the raft had spoken. Maybe it was that they couldn’t speak in the aftermath of what they had seen and maybe it was that they were afraid of what they might say. Who they would say it to. Who they would blame. So maybe silence was best.
The jellyfish had disappeared with Soltz, but now it was back.
It wasn’t as close to the raft now, but just up ahead drifting with them. Its bell was nearly submerged, but now and again it would come up, then sink back down again. But even at that distance — maybe a hundred feet, right about where the fog swallowed everything — its tentacles were everywhere in the water. A fluttering skein of them that reached out, circling the boat and winding beneath it, trailing in the stillborn current like a mane. So, essentially, they were trapped.
And the idea of that was almost as painful as watching Soltz die in the caress of some sea monster.
Almost.
“So what now?” George heard himself say aloud, realizing he’d only meant to think that as he’d been thinking it for days now.
Gosling looked over towards the jelly, squinted his eyes. It looked pretty much like a gigantic plastic garbage bag, deflated and wrinkly up there, not smooth and taut as before. George’s voice had no effect on either it or its tentacles.
“Yeah,” Cushing said. “What now?”
“We wait,” Gosling told them.
“I’m sick of goddamn waiting, Gosling, I can’t take much more of it,” George said, knowing that finally, ultimately the Dead Sea was pushing him over the edge. He could feel his mind unwinding in his head like string from a spool. “I mean, I can’t take much more of this. Why don’t you put a flare into that motherfucker? See if it can feel some pain.”
“Piss it off?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? You didn’t see what that sonofabitch did to Soltz when he pissed it off? You want I should burn a hole in it, get it nice and mad? Okay, I’m game. Just tell me what we’re going to do when it comes at us, attacks the raft? Just tell me that, bright boy.”
George felt his cheeks redden. “So you want to sit here like fucking cowards and wait for that prick to choose the moment we die?”
“Shut up, you goddamn idiot,” Gosling snapped at him.
“Listen, you two,” Cushing said. “This won’t accomplish anything.”
“Shut the hell up,” George told him. “Our master and fucking commander over here wants us to sit and wait until that goddamn sea monster gets hungry again. Well, I’m not about to wait. If we got to die, then let’s die like men already. Let’s give that bastard a taste.”
Gosling just shook his head. “C’mon, George, don’t be so damn stupid. No sense riling it up. I mean look at it out there, it looks dead for chrissake. Maybe Soltz wounded it.”
“Yeah, and maybe it’s just biding its time, waiting for the right moment to spring on us.”
“Don’t give it that much credit, George. It’s a fucking jellyfish. You act like it’s the town bully. It’s just an animal, a creature, it doesn’t think or plot. It’s a lower form of life … it reacts, right, Cushing?”