“Crycek thinks there’s a boogeyman out in the fog,” Saks said.
“Knock it off,” Fabrini told him.
Crycek wouldn’t even look at any of them. He sat there with Pollard, looking almost queasy that any of it had been brought up in the first place. He buried his face in his hands like he wanted to cry.
“See?” Saks said. “He’s having one of his headaches. You know what that means? That means that the
thing
out there is getting at him again. Right, Crycek? It’s trying to eat your mind again?”
George reached over and yanked the whiskey bottle from Saks’s hands. “I think you’ve had enough of that on an empty stomach.”
Saks rose in his seat an inch or two, his face red as a ripe tomato. “You do that again, Captain George, and I’ll break that bottle right over your fucking skull.”
Fabrini was ready. “Why don’t you try it, Saks? Because whatever part of you George don’t stomp, I will.”
“I think you’re all forgetting why you’re here,” Aunt Else said. “This is a court of law and you should all behave in accordance. Let’s try and act civilized here. We know who the guilty man is. Let us come together on that.”
George kept watching Saks, trial or no trial. “What makes you think there
isn’t
something out there, Saks? C’mon, regale us with your wisdom.”
But Saks wasn’t biting. “Because Crycek is crazy. He’s a nutjob and that’s all there is to it. You got to be crazy to believe shit like that, Captain.”
“Then you haven’t felt
it?”
George put to him.
Everyone was watching them now. Everyone but Aunt Else. They were all watching and listening, wanting, maybe, to have this subject broached. Something they had all thought of, but didn’t dare speak of.
“I haven’t felt shit.”
George just nodded his head. “Well, I have. And I’ve felt it more than once. Go ahead, Saks, smile like an idiot. But you’ve felt it just like we have, only you don’t have the guts to admit it. But that’s okay … because I don’t know what’s out there, but something is. And that something? That devil or boogeyman, it believes in
you,
Saks. You better believe it does.”
“Crazy goddamn shit,” was all Saks would say. “Kiddie stories.”
“You really think so?” George looked over at the others, one by one. “How about the rest of you? Any of you agree with Saks? You think there’s nothing out there in that mist but weeds and bones and crawly things? Any of you honestly believe that? No? I figured as much. Guess that makes you the odd man out, Saks.”
Saks stood up. “Pussies,” he said. “You’re all a bunch of fucking pussies that are afraid of your own goddamn shadows. I don’t believe in any devil. Not here, not back home. There ain’t no such thing as a devil.”
“Oh, but there is.”
Cushing had come out of the galley and there was a tone in his voice that told them he was not kidding around. “It’s out there, Saks. And it’s not some half-ass Christian oogy-boogey man with a pitchfork and horns, it’s the real thing and it has plans for us. You can believe that.” He sighed, looked around. “But enough of that. Let’s eat, then we’ll get down to business.”
Business, then.
They were all sitting there and the whiskey was gone and now there was just coffee and bloodshot eyes. Some of the men were smoking. George and Saks and Pollard were studying the chart of the ship’s graveyard and environs beyond that Greenberg had drawn. Crycek was looking over the letter Greenberg had written. Cushing had the floor and he was pacing back and forth saying, “So, like I said, this Greenberg … the guy Elizabeth knew as the Hermit … he was one of a group of scientists that got sucked in here because they wanted to. They believed all along that those planes and ships and people in the Devil’s Triangle and Sargasso Sea were getting funneled
somewhere.
They just weren’t sure where.
So, somehow … who knows … they got themselves pulled in here same way we did.”
Saks looked up from the chart. “So these eggheads, they worked for the Navy at one time? Part of something called Project Neptune?” He shook his head. “You expect me to believe that the Navy wastes time on shit like this?”
“They wasted time on the Philadelphia Experiment, didn’t they?” Pollard said. “Who knows what kind of crazy shit our government is up to?”
“Philadelphia Experiment? What the hell is that?” Saks waved it away like he didn’t honestly care. “You telling me our government knows about this shit and don’t do nothing about it? I can’t buy that. You buy this shit, George?”
But George didn’t say; he just studied the chart.
Fabrini laughed. “You’re naïve, Saks. You know that? You think those politicians ever tell the truth? All they do is lie and cover-up shit.”
Menhaus said, “You won’t get Saks to believe that, Fabrini. He believes whatever those lying shits tell him. Blind faith.”
Saks slammed his hand down on the table. “Menhaus, you’re a fucking idiot and we all know it. I don’t believe anything those lying fuckwigs in Washington say. I was in Vietnam, dipshit, I know all about lies and cover-ups. Don’t you be telling me what I believe, because you don’t have a clue.”
“All right, already,” George said. “We’re not talking politics here. We’re listening to Cushing. Maybe if you all shut up long enough he can say what he’s got to say.”
There was no argument about that.
“Point is,” Cushing said, “that these scientists got themselves trapped in here same as us. They know something about this place and how it can exist. Greenberg called it Dimension X and that’s good enough. We’re stuck on some rotting, misty world on the dirty backside of Dimension X …”
He went on to cover pretty much what was in the letter and Greenberg’s theories about wormholes and interdimensional passage. It was heavy, heady stuff, but Cushing tried to explain it as simply as he could. Even he, with his scientific leanings, was pretty confused about it all, he admitted. But it all made sense in the long run, he told them. Greenberg explained how they got here and maybe, just maybe, how they could get back out.
“Sure,” Fabrini said. “But if what Elizabeth here says about her uncle is true, well, what chance have we got? He looked for that vortex to open and it never did. So where does that leave us?”
“You’re missing something, though,” Crycek said, pointing at Fabrini with the letter. “In here, Greenberg says that he’s going back to that ship, that
Lancet,
says that it’s the key. That it’s the key to deliverance from this place.”
“That’s right,” Cushing said. “The
Lancet.
What Greenberg referred to as a cursed ship. I don’t know what he means by that, but obviously this ship is important. He doesn’t say anything about us waiting around down in the Sea of Mists hoping that vortex’ll open. He seemed to think that the only way out was through something on the
Lancet
or through maybe the
Lancet
itself.”
“He also said that if we go back through, we might end up in some other time,” Saks said. “Maybe that’s just some voodoo crazy bullshit, maybe not. If it isn’t … Christ, who knows where we’d end up?”
“Who gives a shit?” Menhaus said. “I mean, does it really matter? Maybe the time-thing would reverse itself like he said and if it doesn’t? Fuck it. The tenth or fifteenth century beats the shit out of this place, way I’m looking at it.”
George looked up from the chart when he said that, smiled. That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? Good old Earth in the good old third dimension beat the shit out of this place any day of the week. For there you had sunshine and blue skies and people and, yes, hope. When you were home, there was always hope. That’s how George was seeing it. He wanted his time back, wanted it back in the worst way because he had a wife and a kid, but he’d take earth any way he could get it.
“Okay, Cushing,” Saks said. “Since you’ve appointed yourself as the half-ass expert on this science-fiction bullshit, let me ask you something. That egghead … he’s talking about time bending or curving or whatever … so what happens if we come back two hours before we sailed? We go up to ourselves and say, hey, knothead, don’t get on that fucking tub?”
“If we have to.”
Cushing explained that all the time curvature business was highly theoretical. He told them about something he’d read once, the “Grandfather Paradox”, wherein you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather before he married your grandmother. Hence, your parents would never have been born and neither would you … so how could you possibly have traveled back in time? One theory said, he told them, was that time was self-perpetuating, that it would maintain its own integrity. So that at the moment you killed your grandfather, you would cease to exist … as would everything that had anything to do with you, your parents, etc. Bam, it was all gone, never happened. It was all pretty much fringe-thinking and open to endless debate. He said that everyone knew the Ray Bradbury story where a guy goes back in time to the Jurassic, steps on a butterfly, comes back to the present and the world has been completely changed by that one insignificant butterfly’s death which set up a chain-reaction that totally subverted the future.
“But that’s all speculation,” Cushing finished by saying. “And we don’t have the time to worry about crap like that. What we need to decide is how we’re going to go about getting out of here.”
“Maybe we can’t,” Saks said. “Maybe Crycek’s boogeyman, maybe he won’t let us out.”
Maybe it was Saks’s attempt at some cruel joke, but nobody thought it was funny. On the subject of that mysterious
other,
they had absolutely no sense of humor.
“The Fog-Devil,” George said.
“Good name as any,” Cushing said.
“Oh, Christ,” Saks said. “Here we go.”
But nobody was paying him any attention on that subject anymore. They had all pretty much written off his skepticism as fear. He could not accept such a thing, could not live with the idea of such a thing, hence it did not exist. Simple. George figured it was the same sort of self-denial you had back in the world concerning UFOs or aliens … the very idea of such things existing was too much for the human mind, so it denied and ridiculed. Sort of a psychological self-preservation so you could sleep at night and not lose your mind wondering when the little green men might come for you.
Crycek said, “Greenberg talks about that, too, in his letter. How that
Lancet
might be the focal point of this thing.”
Which, Cushing said to them, had to make you wonder about that ship and what it was exactly. According to Greenberg it was a cursed vessel, but a place of revelations, too. The keys to deliverance and also maybe the hopping off point of something incalculably dangerous.
“Was it it, though?” Menhaus asked. “What is this
thing?”
But nobody was even going to hazard a guess on that one. They had ideas in their heads, but they wouldn’t speak of them. Not just yet. Maybe it was some sort of alien ghost and maybe it was the very thing that had inspired the idea of Satan on earth … and a thousand other worlds.
“Listen now,” George said to them. “Right now, it doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve felt it and so have all of you. It’s out there and that’s enough. I don’t know how many times out there in that goddamn fog I felt like I was being watched, felt like something was getting close. I saw things, too. Things that couldn’t be. I think the Fog-Devil is responsible for a lot of that.”
“I think I’ll take a walk until story-time is over,” Saks said, getting up. “You run out of ideas, there’s the one about the guy with the hook-hand out in lover’s lane.”
“Sit down, Saks,” George said.
“What?”
“Sit … down.”
“Fuck you think you are, bossing me around?”
George was up on his feet now and so was Fabrini. “I think I’m the guy that’s gonna put you on your ass and make you listen whether you fucking like it or not.”
“Think you’re up to the job?”
“Maybe not. But I’ll bet Fabrini is.”
Saks sat down. “All right, all right, go ahead. Tell me your fucking spook stories. Hey, Elizabeth? You got any popcorn?”
But if he thought it was some big joke, the cocky grin on his face didn’t last too long. Not when George brought out the VHF radio from the lifeboat and set it on the table in front of him. His grin faded and his eyes widened. The blood drained from his ruddy, unshaven face drop by drop.
“This is bullshit,” he managed with little conviction. “Fucking parlor games.”
“Let’s see,” George said. “Let’s see what’s out there …”
Elizabeth helped Aunt Else up. Aunt Else had dozed off now and Elizabeth woke her and helped her to the doorway leading to the cabins. But in the doorway, Elizabeth paused. “You … all of you … you better think about what it is you’re doing, what you might be invoking out there …”
Then she left on that ominous note.
George started up the VHF and the air in the cabin was heavy, leaden, so thick you could barely pull it into your lungs. The VHF whined for a moment or two, then there was static, rising and falling as before. A snowstorm of static that reminded George of distant, windy places, stormy and blowing places where there was no escape, but only waiting, solemn and grim waiting. Like maybe outposts on hostile worlds or lonely bases coveted by Antarctic maelstroms. Just that static rising and falling like it was breathing. But the bad thing was, he was almost certain that it was louder than it had been before … more palpable, cognizant.
“Sounds …” Menhaus began, his voice full of dryness. “… sounds like wind blowing through an empty house …”
George was thinking that, too. A lonely, loathsome sound of dead places. An eerie sound of wind blown through hollow gourds and catacombs. You kept listening, though, listening to that rushing, angry field of static, you started hearing other things, sensing other things.
“Makes my fucking skin crawl,” Menhaus admitted.
George was with him on that. For his skin
was
crawling. The static was the sound of voids and distance, black fathomless zones and dead moons. The noise a haunted house would make when no one was there to listen to it. Just that thrumming, listening static that was not entirely lifeless, but not living either. Sterile, unborn, thinking about birth. It got right inside your head and made something in you flinch and curl-up. George knew if he was stuck in a room by himself listening to it for any length of time, he would have put a gun in his mouth.