“Okay,” Cushing finally said, almost startled by the sound of his own voice. “Broadcast, George. Put your voice out there …”
But George hesitated. The idea of his voice being sucked into that storm of skeletal, dead air was almost too much for him. Like maybe, whatever was out there making that noise, would reach out through the receiver and pull him in.
The static suddenly changed in pitch or something out there did. There came a muted beeping like a Morse Code key being frantically tapped. At first he thought he was imagining it and then he was certain he was: because there was a voice out there speaking, but lost in that field of static. Gradually, it became clearer and it was a man’s voice, garbled and lost, but you could hear it, all right. A high-pitched, almost whimpering sort of voice.
“ … out there, out there … out there, out there …”
Then it faded, echoing in the static, coming right back again like it had bounced off something.
“out there … please, please, please … don’t come after us … don’t follow us … dear God don’t follow us …”
And then it dropped back down into the static again and everybody in the cabin found their lungs and started to breathe again. And this time another broadcast came up, but just for a second or two. A woman’s voice now, desperate and insane-sounding, whispering over the mic:
“ … help us … help us … help us … help us …”
Yes, just a whisper like she was afraid someone or something might be listening to her.
“Turn it off,” Saks said, breathing hard. “Turn that shit off.”
But George didn’t. He clicked on the mic, said, “This is an SOS … this is an SOS … this is an SOS …”
Then he clicked it back off and the effect was immediate. The static got louder, became something akin to the buzz of hornets and there was that weird, echoing ping buried in it, coming and going and sounding very much like the pinging of a sonar unit, only oddly hollow and alien-sounding.
Cushing nodded and George shut it off, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“Now,” Cushing said. “What you’re hearing out there … that noise … it’s not of natural origin and we all know it. The only time that buzzing or pinging rises up is when you put your voice out there. Something, something out there reacts to it.”
Pollard was shaking. “Those people … those poor, lost people …”
“Those people are long dead,” Cushing told him. “Those are just echoes of old broadcasts I’m willing to bet, but in this place, somehow they keep repeating.”
He let everybody relax a moment before he went on and by then Elizabeth was back. She sat over on the settee by Crycek and Pollard. She didn’t say a word. She looked disturbed by what they were talking about, but wouldn’t say so.
“All right,” Cushing said. “Greenberg knew this thing existed, he felt it the same way we’ve all been feeling it out there. Though he doesn’t say so, I think we can read between the lines and say that this thing … the Fog-Devil … it got his friends when they were at the
Lancet.
Greenberg said he thought the Fog-Devil was cyclic, meaning that it went through periods of dormancy and gradually cycled itself back up from time to time. And I’m guessing that we just happened to drop into this place about the time it’s ready to wake back up.”
Fabrini stood up. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right. I mean, think about it … why aren’t there more people here? Christ, should be lots of people here. We survived and they should have, too. Where are they? What happened to them?”
“They were purged,” George said, jumping in.
Everyone was looking at him now.
“I don’t have a better word for it, people. Whenever that Fog-Devil wakes up, goes kinetic like Greenberg said, then it goes hunting minds, human minds. And the next time it comes, none of us’ll be left.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said.
Fabrini was scared. You could see that. But he wanted to say something and he did: “When we were on the
Cyclops,
Cook and I found the ship’s log and …”
He told them what he remembered about it, breaking off again and again and saying how he wished Cook was alive, because Cook could tell it better than he could. But he got most of it right. The crew from the
Cyclops
visiting a Danish ship called the
Korsund
and what they found there … the burned men, their eyes cremated from their skulls, their brains boiled to jelly. All the horrors of that dead ship. And how what happened there, happened then to the
Cyclops
… one man at a time until there was no one left but the first mate who had gone mad, waiting for the Fog-Devil to come for him. When Fabrini had finished, he was breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and a tic in the corner of his lips.
“I never saw that fucking book,” Saks said. He looked to Menhaus and Crycek and they both shook their heads. “Where was it?”
“Cook,” Fabrini said. “He tossed it overboard. Did something with it. He didn’t want you guys reading it, getting freaked out.”
Saks made some derogatory comment under his breath.
Menhaus just said, “Cook … he was a good one. A real good one.”
“So that gives us an idea of what this thing does,” Cushing said to them. “It might be radioactive in nature. Regardless, it’s extremely dangerous. If we don’t want to be part of the next purge—”
“Then it’s time to shit or get off the pot,” George said.
“Meaning what?” Saks asked him.
George looked at him, at all of them in turn. “It means, Saks, that we can either head our asses back into the Sea of Mists and hope like hell that vortex opens for us again or we can go up to the
Lancet.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s our only chance,” Cushing said. “We go up there and find Greenberg if he’s still alive or we find out the secret of that ship, find out why Greenberg thought it was the key. Deliverance, maybe.”
“And?” Menhaus said.
“Maybe death.”
“Well, you girls have fun,” Saks said. “Drop me a line from hell.”
“He’s right, Saks,” Menhaus said. “It’s our only chance and we got to take it.”
They voted on it right then and there and everyone but Saks was in favor of making the trip and taking the chance. Elizabeth voted to go along, too, but she figured it was more to protect Cushing than anything.
“You don’t know what that place is up there,” she said. “You don’t know all the souls that have been eaten up there … you have no idea what it is you’re going up against.”
“Do you?” George asked her.
But all she would do was stare holes through him.
Later, when George went up on deck, he found Cushing and Elizabeth up there. His first reaction was to go back below, like maybe he was interrupting something. But he saw he wasn’t. They were both leaning on the rail, looking out into the fog.
“Anything going on?” he said.
Cushing shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
George started watching, too.
The fog was very thick, thicker than it had been earlier. But it was still day and the mist was still backlit by itself, though heavy and roiling like some crazy fusion of smog, steam, and smoke. A gushing gaseous envelope. You could smell the dankness of it, feel its moisture on your skin like jungle damp.
“What is it I’m looking for?” George said, lighting a cigarette,
“Just wait,” Cushing said.
So George waited. Waited and smoked and wondered when the real question would be broached, that of when they were planning on making their pilgrimage up to the
Lancet.
Way he was looking at it, it was something they had to do and soon and also something that might kill them.
“There,” Cushing said. “You see it?”
George did, all right. A dull blue glow off in the fog that brightened, flickered for a few moments like a loose light bulb and then vanished. About two minutes later it did it again, then not for another five. Irregular, but artificial-looking. Like maybe somebody was turning on and off a light out there or something, something electrical, was shorting out.
“Like neon or something,” George said.
Of course, Cushing was quick to point out that it was more like argon. Electrified neon gas had a reddish glow to it, but electrified argon was blue. And this was definitely blue. “What do you make of it?” George asked him.
But he said he didn’t know. “Could be just about anything … could even be some weird chemical reaction, you know, some sort of gas mixing with the fog.”
But standing there, watching it, George was thinking it was not random. Like maybe it was being directed.
Fabrini came up on deck next. “Well, when are we going to go? I’m in a hurry to get out or die trying.” Then he saw that glow out there pulsing. “What in the hell is that?”
George was thinking that a searchlight seen through coastal fog might look like that.
“You don’t think it’s that … that Fog-Devil, do you?” Fabrini asked.
“No,” Cushing said. “I don’t think so.”
George said, “Elizabeth … have you seen this before?”
“One or twice in the past few days,” she admitted. “But not before, never before.”
George could tell from her tone that something about that light was getting her hackles up. It was disturbing her, putting her on her guard, but she didn’t seem to know why … or want to say why.
“Okay,” Fabrini said. “I’m curious. What are we waiting for?”
Cushing shrugged. “Let’s do it.”
The blue glow was coming from a freighter.
When they got up close and it came up out of the mist at them, they all felt it down in their guts like some wasting disease, something pernicious and destructive. The ship was just another old derelict listing in the fog, a container ship with great holes eaten through its sides, rusting and silent with weed growing up its hull … yet it was so much more. There was something grimly monolithic about it, unhallowed like a moldering tombstone over a heretic’s grave or an ancient altar where human sacrifice had been practiced. Whatever it was, it felt like doom and insanity. Tendrils of mist wrapped up its superstructure, oozed and drifted like fingers of ectoplasm.
Go away,
the ship seemed to be saying,
this is none of your damn business. Just go away while you still can.
But they weren’t heeding its warning.
They were all there, save for Crycek who had stayed behind with Aunt Else. In Elizabeth’s boat, they poled closer to the wreck through the weeds, feeling its weight and ominous pull.
George felt like it had reached out and taken hold of him, held him tightly in a cold fist and would not let him go until it had squeezed all the good, decent, human things out of him.
“Christ,” Pollard finally said. “It … it gets under your skin, doesn’t it?”
Everyone agreed wordlessly.
Even old tough-guy Saks was having trouble pretending there wasn’t something, something bad you could feel, smell, and taste.
If ships could go insane, this one had. There was something decidedly wrong about it. Empty maybe, but not untenanted. And how long it had drifted alone and derelict, no one could say. But it might drift for another hundred years or maybe a thousand, a worm-holed, mist-shrouded coffin bobbing in the weed, holding darkness tight in its belly like black earth. A thing of silence and mist and dire memory. If anything called it home, then it could not possibly be sane. Could not possibly be anything you would want to look in the face.
“Boarding ladder’s down,” Saks said.
“Just like the
Cyclops,”
Fabrini said.
They tied off the scow and went up one after the other. They carried lanterns and flashlights. George carried the .45 that had been Greenberg’s. The others had axes and gaffs. Menhaus had a pike.
The decks were covered in slime and mildew, were almost spongy in places. The beams of their flashlights bounced off the heavy fog. The lanterns threw weird, crawling shapes over the bulkheads. That blue glow was coming from this ship. They knew that much. They’d seen it strobing as they approached it, but now they had not seen it in ten minutes or more.
Like somebody turned off the light, George thought.
The idea of exploring another old hulk didn’t sit well with anyone, but they had come this far and no one mentioned turning back. The decks were crowded with orange plastic containers stacked one-high that appeared to be bolted down. They stopped before a row of them.
“What do you suppose all this shit is?” Fabrini said.
The plastic containers held yellow metal drums. In the light of the fog, it was easy enough to read what was stamped on the containers themselves: !RADIOAKTIVE MATERIALIEN DER GEFAHR! GEFAHRLICHE VERGEUDUNG! And beneath that, a symbol for radiation.
“German,” Saks said.
Cushing nodded. “Radioactive materials,” he said. “Must be barrels of radioactive waste they were taking to dump or store somewhere.”
“Oh, shit,” Fabrini said.
“Relax, they look sealed,” Saks said.
They did, but no one liked the idea of being on a freighter full of stuff like that. It was not exactly reassuring. Especially with that funny blue glow they’d been seeing. Cushing explained what it meant to Elizabeth.
“We better get our asses out of Dodge,” Menhaus said.
“Maybe not,” Saks said. “Look …”
There it was again, that pulsing pale blue glow. It lit up, flickered, painted one of the aft cabins an electric blue. Then it died out again.
“What do you make of it?” George asked Cushing.
“I know what I make of it,” Fabrini said. “Some of this shit leaked. That’s what we’re seeing and we’re probably all fucking contaminated now.”
“Well, at least your dick’ll glow in the dark, Fagbrini,” Saks said. “Menhaus ought to get a charge out of that.”
But Cushing just shook his head. “Radioactive waste might glow … maybe … but not like that.”
“Let’s see what does then,” Saks said.
He led them aft, beneath a framework of winches and derricks, around great chasms eaten through the deck plating, and to the cabin beyond. The hatch to the companionway was open.
“Shall we?” he said.
They started down after him, his flashlight beam cutting through the murk, revealing motes of dust and grimy bulkheads, iron steps that were warped and buckled. Near the bottom of that ladder, the blue light pulsed again, casting a ghostly, ethereal illumination over them. They saw it was coming from an open doorway.