A ghost ship.
“There, there it is,” Menhaus said, his voice raw and grating like he’d been gargling with crushed glass.
Everyone nodded or maybe they didn’t, but mostly what they were doing was
feeling
it, that great ship which reeked of death and insanity and blackness. But that was what they were smelling in their heads. What their noses found was a repellent, odious stink of damp moldered earth and slimy bones rotting in ditches. The sort of smell that made your mouth go dry, made something pull up in your belly.
George was feeling that. Like maybe he’d just swallowed something rancid and his stomach was recoiling from it. It was like that, the fear that old ship inspired. It filled your belly in sickening waves, made you want to vomit just looking at it.
He could see it on all their faces — the dread resignation, that acceptance of ultimate doom. That look you saw in old photographs of faces pressed up against the fences of Mauthausen or Birkenau … an intimate knowledge of horror and an acceptance of it.
Cushing said, “Makes you … makes you want to row away from her fast as you can, don’t it?”
And, sure, that’s what they were all thinking as the terror threaded through them.
George had been afraid many, many times since entering Dimension X, as they now all called it. There had been times when he thought his mind would boil down to a sap and piss out his ears. It had been that bad. And more than once. He wasn’t sure if the cadaver of the
Lancet
was the worse thing yet, but it surely was in the running. Because the terror on him was almost palpable, getting under his skin like an infection and turning his nerve endings to jelly. And as he sat there, thrumming with it, he decided that
real
terror as opposed to book-terror or movie-terror was much like hallucinating. Like tripping your brains right out on some sweet microdot … reality, as such, was suddenly made of cellophane and there was a great, gaping tear in it. That’s what it was like. Exactly what it was like. It overwelmed you and sank you into a numb stupor.
“Okay, it’s just another dead ship,” Cushing said. “Let’s go see what we came to see.”
Hesitantly then, he and Elizabeth took to the oars and pushed the lifeboat through the weed and up close to that hulk. When they were so close that its shadow fell over them chill and black, Menhaus took the anchor and tossed it up and over the taffrail where it caught fast, striking the deck with a great hollow booming like an urn falling to a crypt floor in the dead of night. Menhaus pulled them in close until the moldering smell of that waterlogged casket was rubbed in their faces.
Up close, the
Lancet’s
bulwarks were veiled in sediment and marine organisms … things like tiny sponges and barnacles and, of course, a dense matting of seaweed that seemed not to just grow over the ship, but into it.
“Let me see if I can get up there,” Menhaus told them.
And George looked upon him with renewed respect. The guy was just as scared as the rest of them, but he was doing what had to be done and that was the true mark of a man, the true mark of a human being.
Menhaus tugged on the anchor line, made sure it held fast.
It did.
Which was surprising in of itself. The ship looked so rotten, so decayed, George thought that when Menhaus pulled on the line, the entire rail up there would come down on top of him.
Standing on the lip of the lifeboat, he reached up, took hold of the anchor line and pulled himself up it like a kid climbing a rope in gym class. And he did it pretty good, too. There was an unsuspected agility about him that made George think that old Jolly Olly had been an athlete back in the good old days. His feet skidded against the hull, scraping off shells and mildewed things. He shimmied up the rope maybe four or five feet, got hold of the railing and pulled himself up. Up and over.
Then he looked down at them. “I’m too old for this shit,” he said. He looked around up there, staring and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ … you gotta … you gotta see this …”
And they supposed they didn’t really have a choice.
Elizabeth went up next. She was in good shape and she made it look easy. Cushing followed her with no problem. George figured he’d grab that rope, lose his grip and fall into the weed. But he didn’t. It took some straining, but he got up there, all right. A lifetime spent using his back and muscles paid off.
He flipped himself over the railing, hands pulling on him and then he was up, too.
The teak decks were filthy with dried mud and sediment, the husks of dead crabs and bony fishes protruding obscenely. The masts were bowed and swaying like ancient oaks, their wood discolored from seawater and advanced age. The sails hung in ragged flaps, stained gray with mildew, great lurching holes eaten in them. They looked to be made of graying, threadbare cheesecloth. From the mizzenmast aft to the foremast, all the sails drooped like moldered shrouds, ripped and dangling in ribbons. Most of the stays had rotted away, the jibs gone entirely. Drooping clots of seaweed and webs of fungi were tangled in what remained of the rigging, knotted around mastheads and yards, festooned like cobwebs over the mainsail boom. From forepeak to stern, the
Lancet
was a dead and decaying thing exhumed from a muddy grave, dripping with slime and netted with fungi and assorted unpleasant growths.
Everything just stank of brine and age and moist corruption.
As George and the others moved, those bleached, filthy decks creaked beneath them and the masts groaned overhead like they might fall at any moment. The main cabin was covered in a growth of something like yellow moss. There were huge tarnished kettles in the bows and behind the foremast was a large, imposing naval gun that was green with age. A rope of tangled fungi drooped from the barrel like it had vomited out its insides.
But these were things they expected, what they didn’t expect they found at the quarterdeck.
Something like wagon wheels were set upright and nailed to the bulkheads with rusty flatnails. And on them, spreadeagled, were scarecrows shackled down. Except they weren’t scarecrows, but the mummies of men … husks covered in leathery hides that had erupted open in innumerable places to reveal staffs and baskets of bone. Their faces were skulls set with membranes of skin, jaws sprung open. Tendrils of fungi knotted them up, hanging off their ribcages and ulnas and mandibles in threads and narrow intersecting ropes.
“Jesus,” Menhaus said. “What … what is all this?”
“You tell me,” George said.
Because it wasn’t just at the quarterdeck, but everywhere … the
Lancet
was a mausoleum. There were bones scattered everywhere, some attached and other just flung about like the scraps from an ogre’s meal. Skeletons were hung in cages suspended from the yards and in makeshift gibbets that you had to duck under. There were others lashed into the rusting sail hoops on the mainmast, leering down with grinning faces and empty eye sockets. What might have been either the remains of their clothing or rags of flesh dangled obscenely from them. Yes, everywhere, morbid shadows and grisly deathmasks peering out, riven agonized faces boiled down to bone and embalmed stick figures that looked much like cobwebbed death angels from a churchyard.
Menhaus tried to back away from it, but the dead were at every turn. He stumbled over a mortuary heap of yellowed, jawless skulls and let out a high little scream.
And it was too much. Just all too much.
There were grated hatchways set along the decks and under them, cramped little cells that couldn’t have been more than three-feet high. And in them … bones. Dozens and dozens of skeletons crowded and piled and tangled together. Had to be hundreds of them that looked to be mancled with shackles and leg irons. Ossuary pits. But it was more than that, for as Cushing shined his flashlight down into one of those death pits, he could clearly see something …
incredible.
The skeletons were not just crowded and intermeshed down there, but horribly charred as if they’d been burned. And they looked …
melted.
Yes, dissolved and fused together as if dunked in some sort of acid.
What kind of heat could possibly melt bones together?
“This is fucking insane,” George said. “A prison ship or something.”
But Cushing didn’t seem convinced. “I think it’s worse than that.”
There was a sudden creaking just beyond the aftermast and a voice said, “A slaver. This was a slave ship.”
George almost fell out of his skin.
A bent-over, emaciated man with long white hair and matching beard stepped out. His face was dirty, lined like old sandstone.
“Dr. Greenberg, I presume,” Cushing said.
“It was, of course, what the ONR had us doing with Project Neptune,” Greenberg told them. “We were studying electromagnetic gravitation. Trying to duplicate, under laboratory conditions, aberrant electromagnetic storms. Creating magnetic, cyclonic storms which would in turn, we thought, open a magnetic vortex that was self-augmenting for the purposes of interdimensionl transition. Do you see? That’s what the Navy had us doing. Creating a sort of electromagnetic tornado which is about as close to a black hole as you can get under controlled conditions.”
Greenberg had been talking non-stop.
God knew how long it had been since he talked to anyone and he was certainly making up for it now. The first thing he told them about was the
Lancet,
which was an illegal slave ship bound from the Gold Coast of Africa to Virginia … except somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, fate intervened and the ship ended up here in Dimension X. Its captain, a brutal fellow by the name of Preen, used his slaves as sacrifices to the entity, the Fog-Devil.
“But eventually, much as on the
Cyclops
and the
Korsund,
this creature, this Fog-Devil as you call it, began taking lives and minds of its own accord despite Preen’s offerings. Its radioactive aftermath must have killed everyone eventually, even Preen.”
He said that all he knew was pieced together from Preen’s log and pure speculation. There was no way to acurately know the level of desperation, horror, and madness that had taken this ship and its attendant souls.
Greenberg seemed uncomfortable with the subject of the Fog-Devil, preferred physics.
He said the ONR had been fooling around with high-intensity magnetic fields for years, trying to create the sort of pulsating or vortexual field that occurred randomly and naturally in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area … with varying results. Sometimes comical and sometimes disastrous.
“What we were doing with Project Neptune and, yes, later privately with the Procyon Project of ours was pretty much based on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory which, as you may know, was the great man’s attempts to explain the underlying unity between electromagnetic, gravitational, and subatomic forces. Einstein never finished it, but many, many others of us have been working to that very end for years. Trying to garner practical, applied results from theoretical ends.”
Basically, he said, the idea he and the others in Procyon were fooling with was that the attraction between molecules could be altered by an ionized field, a force field in TV jargon. This field, essentially, would create a tear in the fabric of time/space and allow the introduction or extraction of matter from another dimension. Essentially, the transference of matter from one spatial universe to another.
“And you did?” Cushing said.
“Yes, we did,” Greenberg said, but did not seem happy about it. “We engineered a generator that did not actually
create
said vortex or field, but one that, if you knew the location where these sporadic vortices occurred, could more or less force them to open.”
“And it worked and you ended up here?”
“Yes. The generator worked … but the amount of juice it had to cycle to create the field, well, it blew the thing into about a hundred pieces. It went up like the Fourth of July. By the time myself and the others on the
Ptolemy
got that fire under control, we had been introduced into this place. If you read my letter as you say, you understand that what happens is that the vortex shuttles you into the fourth dimension, then out again into this place which I firmly believe is sort of a fractal.”
“The passage through the fourth,” George said. “It goes pretty quick.”
Greenberg nodded, snapped his fingers. “Mere seconds. Although you pass through a limitless amount of actual space, you do it essentially in hyperspace.”
Elizabeth listened, but was not moved by anything Greenberg said. She did not like the man and made no attempt to hide the fact. He recognized her, of course, and she offered him only the coolest of acknowledgments. And what it came down to with her was that she thought Greenberg was a fool. A fool that had cost her uncle his life and would, no doubt, cost the others their lives as well.
So she kept silent.
Menhaus just listened.
Once Greenberg had espoused his theories of time/space anomalies, whether natural or artificially-induced, and had thoroughly exhausted them, Cushing brought the alien machine aboard. Greenberg was ecstatic. He had to hear the story again and again. For here was an example of alien technology concieved by intellects light years beyond man’s. The machine, the teleporter, was the very thing the members of the Procyon Project had dreamed of. But unlike their version — which took up all available deck space on the
Ptolemy,
weighed in at over a ton, took three generators working in tandem to produce the energy it needed, and blew apart after five minutes of operation — this was a miracle of engineering. Like comparing a horse-driven carriage to a supersonic fighter, he said.
He lifted it off the deck, set it back down. “Amazing … it doesn’t even weigh five pounds. I’ll bet … yes, I’ll bet that disk is some sort of cold fusion generator. You could probably power a dozen factories with it, maybe a city.”
But the excitement was too much for him.
He sat on the deck, breathing hard and trembling, finally coughing out some blood.