God help us, God help any creature with a conscious, reasoning brain when that happens.
I will die, perhaps. But I will die knowing. Not just the nature of that thing (something that boggles the mind), but of the secret of the
Lancet.
For there, I think, are the keys to deliverance from this place.
This, then, is my mission. I leave you this letter, my chart. Help yourself to my gun and supplies. For I no longer will need them. Please, do not come after me.
May God protect you,
John R. Greenberg
That is where the letter ended.
Cushing stood there, amazed and informed, depressed and confused, feeling a great many things. Maybe there was hope now and maybe there was a complete lack of it. There were certainly a lot of questions he needed answered and, unfortunately, this Greenberg … the Hermit … was not there to answer them.
“What do you know about this guy?” Cushing asked Elizabeth.
She just sighed and shook her head. “He was a crazy old man who didn’t like people. My Uncle knew him … visited him sometimes … he was out of his head.”
“Maybe not.”
“We should go,” Elizabeth said.
Cushing found himself staring at her. “You didn’t want me seeing this, did you?”
She shook her head.
“You knew he was gone?”
“Yes.”
“And-”
“And I didn’t want you filling yourself with his crazy ideas. I didn’t want you to get filled with false hope,” she said to him, “because it is false.”
It was confession time. She told him her Uncle Richard had been something of an acquaintance of the Hermit. That he believed implicitly in the Hermit’s science. Uncle Richard spent days on end trying to find that vortex that would carry them out.
“But he didn’t find it?”
She shook her head. “No. He never did … and it broke something in him. Destroyed something in him. Made him give up. That’s what killed him … he had no hope left. None at all.”
“And Greenberg never returned from the Sea of Veils?”
“No one ever does.” She swallowed. “Can we please leave now?”
Cushing had a fair idea that Elizabeth was not telling him all she knew. The letter … it was dated in December. But this December or the last or five past? He knew Elizabeth wouldn’t tell him. At least not yet. But for his money, Greenberg had probably only just set out for the Sea of Veils a few months back. He didn’t know that to be true, yet he was certain it was.
“Please,” Elizabeth said. “We need to go.”
Taking the chart, letter, and gun, they did just that.
Maybe Gosling’s death had shut something down in him and maybe it had opened something else up. George was never able to figure exactly how he felt about any of it. He’d liked Gosling, trusted Gosling, had faith that Gosling would somehow, in the end, get their asses out of there. And now that he was gone? What was left? Sadness? Hopelessness? Maybe even something as crazy and improper as betrayal? Because it was there, all right, that insane sense that by dying, Gosling had abandoned them all. Abandoned them to Cushing’s theories and George’s own indecision, to Pollard’s weird sensitivity and Chesbro’s blind faith. That what they had now, was all they’d ever have … dead ships and crawling weed and stinking mists and
fear.
Yes, fear. Fear that every decision they made was wrong, that every turn they took was the wrong one, every road leading back into itself, a maze, a hopeless fucking maze. Without Gosling there, without his guiding hand and no-nonsense practicality, they were screwed. Literally.
For Gosling had been important.
Gosling had been necessary.
He was the heat and boiling steam and hot wetness in a pan and, without him, they were just the residue clinging to the lid. Yes, Gosling had been their motion and energy and drive. He kept them going. He kept them sane and together and hopeful. Gosling was the can-do guy, the quit-feeling-sorry-for-your-pussy-ass guy. Get your ass in high gear, boy, or swear to God, I’ll kick it there. That was Gosling.
Without him?
Residue.
Just residue clinging to the lid of the pan called the Dead Sea. And who was going to scrape that residue off? Who was going to be the one now to kick this little group of theirs in the ass and get it moving? That was the question and George didn’t seem to have any good ideas. In his mind, he could see them unraveling day by day until none of them gave a shit and they became like Elizabeth Castle … just beaten and squashed and accepting.
And George thought: Is that what you want? Is that what you really want to become?
And it wasn’t.
Gosling was gone, but they had to carry on in his spirit. He would have respected nothing less and nothing less was acceptable. George was thinking about the things Marx and Gosling had been talking about: finding a boat. Something with an engine, something that could plow them out of the weed and back out into the sea itself. Because George had been thinking that very thing himself all along. With a child’s simple logic he knew that if you came in through a door, then you had to go back the same way. And maybe it took quantum theory and Einsteinian physics for a certain Mr. Greenberg to arrive at this deduction, but George knew it intuitively.
The screaming came in the night.
Except, of course, it was not night really. George had been laying in his bunk, napping, and he had come awake to screaming. His cabin was dim and he stumbled out into the corridor, more than a little confused, his head full of fuzz.
Screaming.
Who in the Christ was screaming?
George made it up to deck shortly after Pollard, both dazed and shocked and they didn’t know what. Didn’t know what in the hell they were going to be staring in the face this time, only that it would not be good. Could not possibly be good.
“What the hell’s going on?” George heard himself say.
Pollard mumbled something incomprehensible and George was right behind him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as they scrambled along those salt-whitened decks, trying to locate the screaming.
“There,” Pollard said dumbly. “Oh, there …
there … ”
It was Chesbro.
He was out into the weed about thirty feet maybe from the
Mystic,
in a run of oily, slopping water, stumbling about in the raft as it sank around him, seeming to deflate before their eyes. But it wasn’t deflating, it was … it was coming apart. It was fraying and shredding and collapsing. That dirty water around it was spraying up in gouts and boiling in foam.
“Christ, we gotta do something,” Pollard was saying.
And George knew they had to, too, but what? They had no boat to get to him and what in the fuck was he doing out there anyhow? But George could pretty much put that together. The dumb sonofabitch was trying to escape. He’d been in a weird, introspective mood ever since the squid attacked them on the C-130 and now he had simply lost his mind and was trying to escape.
George could see quite clearly now what was happening and it made something in his belly take a sickening, empty roll. The raft was getting hit by things … luminous things, like the fish he and Gosling had been hit by. Except these were smaller, fist-sized creatures darting and diving about with such speed you could not get a good look at them. Just shining, glowing little things, perhaps hundreds of them going after the raft, hitting it like sharks in a feeding frenzy, teeth tearing and ripping and biting.
He’s a dead man,
George found himself thinking.
And Chesbro surely was at that, but George couldn’t stand there and do nothing. The idea of leaping out there and helping him was suicidal, those little razor-toothed fish could have stripped a Holstein calf to the bones in minutes.
Pollard was shrieking. Slamming his fists against the rail helplessly, just completely frustrated by it.
George saw a life ring and rope hanging from the cabin bulkhead. It was a waste of time and he knew it. But he pulled it off and Pollard seemed to like the idea. In fact, Pollard yanked the ring right out of his hands and gave it a mighty toss out into the mist. It landed with a splatting sound about four feet from the raft.
Chesbro was wailing.
The raft was disintegrating around him. Even all those multiple buoyancy chambers the engineers had designed into the life raft were no good against those little eating, hungry fish. Chesbro was like a man trapped in a burning room, starting first this way and then that, shrieking and moaning and whimpering. It was probably the most piteous thing George had ever witnessed. The entire stern section of the raft had sunk now, filthy water and slimy weeds sluicing up into the forward section.
He’s gonna fall,
George thought,
gonna fall and then and then—
Chesbro slipped and fell, his left leg bicycling in the water just long enough for about twenty of those little fish to find it. His pant leg came apart in fragments that almost looked like blue sawdust spit from a wood chipper. There was a spray of blood — the reddest Technicolor blood George had ever seen — and so many fish converged on his leg that you could no longer see his leg. Just what seemed like a hundred silvery, flapping, chomping bodies, all driven mad by the smell of blood, the taste of blood, the warm saltiness of blood. Chesbro clawed his way back up into the raft and the fish fell away momentarily, except for a few whose tiny, cutting teeth were imbedded simply too deeply. George saw raw meat where those fish had been, punctured and gashed. Then a flash of gleaming white that must have been bone.
“Grab that ring!” Pollard was calling out to him. “Chesbro! Grab that ring! Grab that ring!
Grab that fucking ring you goddamn idiot!”
His face was red and his eyes were bulging, tears streaking down his face. His fists were gripping the life ring rope and had Chesbro been able to just get a hand on it, Pollard would have probably yanked him fifteen feet with the first pull. Because he was half out of his mind, something in him hot and arcing and violent with the need for action. Any action.
But it was too late for anything.
The raft was not a raft anymore, was looking more like a kid’s blow-up pool toy that had deflated. The water was thrashing and those fish were hitting Chesbro from every possible direction, tails flapping and jaws working like the needles of a sewing machine. The water and weeds were red and frothing. Chesbro managed to rise up once, about six of them hanging from his face and they had managed to nearly chew all of his clothes from him. Before he came back down, George noticed with mad hysterical laughter echoing in his head that a pod of them were hanging from his crotch like the remoras on a shark, emasculating him.
There was nothing to do but watch.
That was the really heartbreaking, maddening thing about it all. They could only watch as hundreds of those luminous little fish with their serrated, scissoring jaws reduced Chesbro to a pulped and bitten husk, to a bleeding and stripped thing that looked oddly like a raw and living shank of beef. But you had to hand it to him, you really did. Because Chesbro had a lot of life in him, he was coming apart like the raft … a red and gored thing composed of fleshy flaps and folds and scratching bloody digits … but he did not die easily.
Pollard had lost his anger now. It was replaced by a sort of frightening, paralyzed shock, his mouth contorted in awe and revulsion. “Gah … gah …
gahhh,”
he kept saying. “That blood … all that blood … how can there be so much goddamn blood? Have you ever in your life seen so … much … fucking …
blood?”
And George didn’t think he honestly had.
Chesbro’s face broke above the bloody, boiling water and it had been stripped down to tendons and muscle and they were going fast. He looked up toward the
Mystic,
what remained of his eyes splashed down the basal anatomy of his face in a pink, snotty slime. A mist of seething blood was expelled from his mouth in a cloud and then … then he just sank in that luminous sea of tearing mouths. Like meat in a piranha tank, he was divided and peeled and torn until he was just a red-stained skeleton and then nothing at all.
Pollard looked over at George or maybe right through him. Then he turned back, looked down at the red, greasy slick that marked Chesbro’s passing, and promptly vomited right down the front of his shirt.
And George was thinking,
oh, Chesbro, oh Jesus Christ I’m so sorry I never ever meant to hit you oh my Christ …
And then he felt himself sliding down the railing to the deck, empty. Just completely empty and so numb, so cold and frozen he thought he might shatter if someone touched him.
And then there were three,
he thought.
When Cushing came back, he knew something had happened.
Maybe it was the atmosphere on the
Mystic,
which was positively tense and guarded, worn just as thin as an old blanket. If Cushing, coming down the ladder into the main cabin, had to put a name to it, it would have been
apocalyptic.
Because it was there on everyone’s face: doom and gloom with an extended forecast of dread. Pollard was just sitting there and so was George, both looking pale and despondent.
Cushing knew it was something more than Gosling’s death.
Whatever it was, it was recent. The wound still open and bleeding. It hadn’t even had the chance to scab over yet.
“Okay,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “What now?”
Pollard and George looked at each other, maybe both hoping the other one would put it into words. Pollard finally just looked down.
George cleared his throat, said, “Chesbro … he’s dead.” He paused, swallowed something down. “I think he was trying to escape in the raft … it got torn up and him with it.”
George gave him the quick version and from what he said and what Cushing could see in his eyes — a simmering black horror — he was glad he had not seen it. He’d seen plenty of bad by that point, but this he could do without.
“Well, I guess … I guess it was his own fault.” It was cold and cutting, but Cushing did not retract it. Did not even consider doing so. He pulled something out of the duffel bag hanging at his side: a fifth of Jack Daniels. He tossed it to George. “Looks like you guys need one.”