George was staring at the alien machine at Cushing’s feet. He had brought it along despite Elizabeth’s protests. Even now, she was glaring at it and him like it was Pandora’s proverbial box and she was afraid the lid was going to blow off it.
George dragged off his cigarette, blew smoke out his nostrils. “That alien … that Martian … whatever the fuck it was-”
“I doubt it was a Martian,” Cushing said, trying to laugh, but it just wouldn’t come.
“You know what I mean, smartass. That …
being.
You suppose it could have helped us? I mean really helped us if we could have talked sense to it?”
Cushing nodded. “Without a doubt. You have any idea of the sort of hyper-intellect it must have possessed? The secrets a race like that must know? Yeah, George, it wanted to, it could have calibrated this magic box and shot us straight to Disneyland if it wanted to.” He sighed. “But let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly the friendly type. You saw how it looked at us. You felt it look
into
you. I saw it doing that, that’s why I hit it with the axe. So much for my hands.”
“I owe you,” George said and meant it.
“What was that like? It looking into you like that?”
“I honestly don’t know. I felt like my mind was emptied, that I felt very small and helpess. Other that, I don’t remember anything.”
“Well, doesn’t matter. That thing was-”
“Evil,”
Elizabeth said and dared anyone to contradict her. “You know it and I know it. Maybe it was an advanced life form, as you called it, but it was cold and diabolic. It looked at us like scientists look at mice in a cage … something to be toyed with.”
“You’re right,” Cushing told her. “As usual, you’re absolutely right.”
And George knew she was, too.
There was evil as in human evil and then there was the other kind. Cosmic evil. An evil so malign and ravening that it was practically supernatural to the human mind. The alien had been like that. Evil to the fourth power. Evil fucking squared. And thinking such thoughts, feeling embarrassed and, yes, liberated by thinking them, George found himself doing something he had not done since childhood: praying. Yes, in his head he was praying to anything that would listen to him. Hoping, begging for some sort of divine guidance and protection. He’d never had much use for religion, but now? Oh yes, he needed it. He needed to feel a guiding hand on him that would deliver them from this hell. And he thought that if there was no god, no superior consciousness out there, then the human race and all the other struggling dumbassed races in the universe were seriously screwed. Because things like that alien would crush them and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. If there was no creator, no divine protector … then, shit, that meant that the human race was just a bunch of upright, intelligent apes scratching in the dirt for meaning, for revelation. Trying to make sense out of something that was innately senseless.
The idea of that was terrifying.
They kept poling along and then, gradually, the
Mystic
began to come out of the mist at them, taking form and solidity as the fog abandoned it. George sat there looking at it, getting a funny vibe off of it that he could not classify. For some unknown reason, he was equating that ship with a tomb.
Menhaus paused on his pole, squinted into the mist. “It’s changed,” he said.
Elizabeth had stopped poling, too. The scow slid into the weeds and came to a stop. She was staring up at the
Mystic
and looking tense, looking concerned.
“Looks the same,” Cushing said, as if maybe he didn’t believe it for one moment.
George was suddenly aware that he felt very rigid. All his muscles were contracted and tight. His eyes were wide and his breathing shallow. His ears were open and his mind was totally clear of anything but the ship. He was feeling it, too. The ship
had
changed. But how? He could not put words to it, but something about it, about its aura maybe had been violated. It just felt wrong. He wasn’t about to put any of what he was feeling down to some latent psychic gift brewing in the basement of his being, yet it was surely something like that. Something tenuous, but there all the same. Some ancient network of fear powering up and telling him to get ready for the shit, because it was definitely coming.
Menhaus, very calmly, said, “Something happened after we left. Something … something was here after we left.”
Cushing seemed to be feeling it now, too. He swallowed and then swallowed again. “Let’s go see what it was.”
On board, that sense of danger became positively electric in George. It was here, something was here, something had passed in the fog and left … he wasn’t sure
what
it had left. But the atmosphere of the boat was certainly different. That sense of desecration was there, was very palpable. And George knew it the way you knew when something intimate to you was handled roughly, touched by hands that had no business touching it. Like the objects in your room had been touched, put back an inch or two out of place. Not so anyone would notice except for you.
They stood on the deck, fingers of fog drifting around their legs like hungry cats. The mist was luminous and pulsing behind them. If there could be a soundtrack to all this, George knew, it would be someone plucking the strings of a violin. Strings off-key an octave or two.
First thing they saw was that the aft bulkhead of the main cabin was blackened. When Menhaus prodded it with his axe, it flaked away like it had crystallized in a firestorm.
“Like what Fabrini said of the
Cyclops,”
George said. “That Swedish ship him and Cook read about in the log.”
“Danish. The
Korsund,
he called it. It was out of Copenhagen.”
Several sections of the deck had been charred black and there was a snotty tangle of something like fungus hanging from the main mast. It was glowing with a shimmering, internal light.
They all noticed that, too.
They went below.
The companionway walls were smeared with clots of some phosphorescent matter as if something huge had forced itself down the stairwell, bits of it breaking off above, below, and to either side.
“Don’t touch that shit,” Cushing warned them.
They made it into the saloon cabin. Everything was burnt. The carpet was ashes beneath their footsteps. Elizabeth was taking it all in. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her right hand locked tight on the hilt of her machete. Her lips were pulled into a tight line.
They found Aunt Else first.
There would be no more legal motions by her. There would be no more of anything. She was in her bunk, a twisted and incinerated thing. The stench of cremated flesh was unbearable.
Elizabeth made a choking sound and turned away.
George was sickened by it, yet he looked long enough to see that the sheets below her were not charred in any way. As if, Aunt Else had been tossed into a blast furnace, fished out, and dumped back here. By they all knew by that point what had happened and it was not from heat. Not as they understood heat.
They found Crycek next.
He was not dead, yet very close. He was badly burned, but his face was more or less unmolested. His hair had gone white and his eyes had gone white with them. He was laying in his bunk, gasping and drooling and coughing out tangles of slime that were suffused with a shine like the fungus on deck. A terrible transformation had overtaken him. And it was more than those eyes like mirrors whitened by steam or that glowing mucus running from his mouth. It was much more than that. For Crycek looked like he had aged a hundred years, had been taken high into unthinkable heights and at such momentum that he had been burned raw, worn to a nub.
Although he could not see them, he knew they were there. “Oh yes, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it came while you were out … it came with colors and fire and eyes and ice … it came and kept coming …”
George wanted to block his ears, because he did not want to hear these profanties. Did not want to feel them spearing into his brain, tearing him open in too many places at once. Because in Dimension X there were things that you could fight and others that were ghosts and malignancies and creeping haunted matter and you didn’t stand a chance, you just didn’t stand a fucking chance and how was that for divine guidance?
Crycek was still talking, alternately cackling and moaning and making high, lunatic sounds no sane mind could produce. “You … you ought to see it … oh it’s so cold … so bright and hot and cold and damp and dry … it pulls you into its mind and the blackness … the searing frozen blackness of forever … oh, oh, oh, you’ll see … you’ll feel it and it’ll feel you …”
Then he died.
In mid-babble he just went stiff as a board and stayed that way.
Nobody seemed capable of moving then. They were just as inanimate as Crycek’s corpse. They could only look at each other or not look at each other and just
feel
each other. Feel the settling, iron weight on one another’s souls and feel the indecision re-making them into statues and mannequins and silent, immoveable things.
But Cushing?
No, not Cushing. He knew better as they all knew better, he knew how dangerous it was to stay. How each passing moment was cellular death and chromosomal suicide. Like standing on a hot skillet, waiting to sizzle and sputter like greasy strips of bacon.
“We gotta get out of here,” he said, leading Elizabeth away by the hand. “Don’t touch anything, don’t handle anything … this entire place is radioactive waste now …”
Sullen, wordless, they let him lead them back up into the fog and down into the scow. And when they were in it, he and Menhaus poled them away from the
Mystic
which was now little better than the leaking core of a nuclear power plant. And all Cushing kept saying was: “The fallout … oh Jesus, the fallout, the black rain …”
So there were four of them, then. Not a lot, but something. A collective mind, a collective force, a last flexing muscle of humanity in that godless place, in that Dimension X or Dead Sea, that awful and nightmarish place of rended veils beyond the misting, black looking glass. Yes, they had come in numbers and this place had whittled them down like hickory, scattering shavings and chips in every which direction. And now they were just this last flexing muscle, but they had motion and drive and one last, gasping hope before the darkness took them. And they were going to put that muscle to use, they were going to hammer this place like hot metal, punch a hole through it, make it work for them. Before that other came, before that devil of fogs and anti-dimensions chewed the meat from their souls, they were going to make a stand.
Just one stand.
Because it was all they had, all they would ever have.
So they rowed through the noisome fog, fought through the ship’s graveyard, clawing through the weed that was clotted jungle foilage and slipped around the carcasses of dead vessels until they cut their way into channels indicated on Greenberg’s chart. Then the real work began, filling that last, lone lifeboat with ugency and steel, propelling it through the channels of slopping water and into the haunted wastelands of the Outer Sea.
And somewhere above, getting closer like jaws ready to snap, was the
Lancet
and the fabled Sea of Veils.
Closer and closer still.
One minute there was the fog, enshrouding and thick and gaseous, something steaming and boiling and giving birth to itself in dire, moist rhythms you could not even guess at. Something hot and smoldering born in sulfurous brimstone depths, billowing smoke and fumes and noxious clouds of itself, something burning itself out with its own heat and pressure and wasting radium breath.
And the next … the next your eyes were seeing through that weave of October mist, separating fibers and threads and filaments, looking at something that made a speading fever ignite in your belly until you thought your insides would melt and run out through your pores.
When they saw it, they stopped rowing.
They held their breath and forgot how to speak.
For maybe they had not found the
Lancet
… maybe it had found
them.
George had been resting, smoking a cigarette and feeling for that light at the end of the tunnel. He had not been looking up. Had not been taking too much notice that the clumps of weeds were getting thicker or more numerous, were often welded into shoals and married into great, creeping green and yellow reefs. He had not been paying attention to any of that because that would have meant he would have had to look upon the fog and he just couldn’t do that anymore. After days and days in its claustrophobic shifts, the more he watched it, the more it pressed in on him. Got up his nose and into his eyes, filled his pores and fouled his lungs. Made him feel dizzy, asphyxiated, a fish flopping on a beach.
So he was not looking when the
Lancet
made its appearance like the Flying Dutchman, like a plague ship with a seething, pestilent cargo in its belly. How he knew they had reached it, was that he simply
felt
it. Felt it coming up at them or reaching out with bony digits. He felt as if a thunderstorm were approaching or a Kansas tornado. There was something like an immediate drop in atmospheric pressure, a change in the air, a shivering in the fog. A thickness and a thinning and a roiling taint. A sense of time compressed and imploded. Everything seemed electric and engulfing and heavy as if the world had been drowned in a black wash of vibrant matter.
He looked up and, yes, there she was.
A big and long five-masted schooner, once high and proud and sharp and now just dead. A death ship. A corpse ship. Some wind-splitting leviathan that had strangled here in the ropes and mats of verdant, stinking weed. Yes, it had died here, thrashed and fought and raged, but finally died, an immense marine saurian dying beneath the pall of its own primeval breath. The flesh was picked from its bones. Its hide was riven by worms and gnawed by slimy things, moldered to carrion beneath a shroud of seaweed and alien fungi. And now it lay in state, a great petrified fossil, a labyrinth of fleshless arches and spidery rigging, skeletal masts and withered rungs of bone. A thing of shades and shadows and rolling vapors.