Hampton and Suzie were in chairs across from the bar, staring at the two men with glazed eyes while Michael Corona paced.
“Where are the others?” Finn demanded. “Okay, so Anita is on her high-horse and off somewhere, but where are Brigitte and Suzie?”
“We don’t know,” Hampton said dully.
“You idiots were all pissed off and running around like two-year-olds,” Matt Barringer said. “How the hell would anyone know?”
“Fine. Where’s the crew?” Finn demanded of Barringer. Barringer slammed the tequila down. “Don’t you get it yet? I don’t know. They’re gone; just gone. Like the damned waiters … maids, stewards, whatever the hell you call them. Don’t you get it? This is real. Do you see my sound guy anywhere? Somehow he’s gone, too. Do you see me filming anything?”
“Barringer, there could be cameras anywhere,” Finn said.
“There could be. But if there are, I don’t know a damned thing about it—and I would!” Barringer snapped.
“We’re being eaten,” Hampton said.
Finn went and hunkered down before him. “Hampton, come on, now. We have to get it together and find out what is going on.”
“But he’s right,” Granger said. “I mean, scientifically, that would explain it.”
Devon let out a strangled little sob.
“So what’s your plan?” Finn demanded of Barringer. “We’re going to just sit out in the ocean and drift? Have you called for help—do you know how to use the radio?”
Granger seemed to brighten up. “The radio—I could figure out the radio.”
“Go do it,” Barringer said. “Go, quickly!”
“What?” Granger demanded. “Oh, no! I’m not going off anywhere alone.”
“Fine. Take your muscle-man with you,” Barringer said.
Barringer meant
him
, Finn realized.
He walked to the bar and took the bottle of tequila from Barringer’s hands and stared at the man. “We all go. We all go together. We stay together so that no one pulls out more cameras and no one else disappears.”
“Hell, no—there’s nothing in here so far,” Barringer said. “And I … I have an international cell phone. I called the head office. They’ve already got someone coming for us.”
Frankly, Finn had more faith in his sister than in any help Barringer’s “company” might send for them.
“No. We need help now,” Finn said. “Help from a ship
in the area
. If Granger can work the radio, we need to get on it. So, move. Or,” he said, glancing at the cameraman, “we all go—and leave you here alone.”
“Fine!” Barringer snapped.
Devon stayed close to Finn. The others followed. They trekked down toward the elevators again. The shop windows seemed eerier than ever.
As they reached the elevators, they saw that there was now much more black goop in the floor there. They stood gathered together just staring at the foreign substance as they waited for the elevator.
Behind him he heard Barringer demand, “What the hell?”
“Yuck! Shit!” The cameraman said. “What the hell is this crap I’m stepping in?”
Finn knelt down to study the stuff again. He smelled the unpleasant odor and it struck him—he knew why it was a familiar odor. For a moment, a wall of black seemed to loom before him—hell, he was ready to pass out himself!
Because that was it—exactly it. The black goop was—shit.
The crew was gone, the kitchen staff was gone, and the stewards were gone. Anita, Marnie, and Suzie were gone.
And they might be stepping on any of them.
“Forget the radio,” Finn said.
It was impossible. There was nothing that could be on the ship and eating people and leaving this … shit everywhere.
It wasn’t possible.
But neither, really, was the ship’s existence in its almost pristine shape …
“We have to get off the ship—now. We have to get to the lifeboats.”
“What?” Barringer demanded. “Off the ship? We’re in the middle of the North Atlantic!”
It wasn’t possible—and yet it seemed that it was so. In fact, it never should have taken him so long. He had studied anthropology, humans, sub-humans, and if there was one thing he should know …
It was shit.
“All right, Mr. Barringer, you do what you want. I’m getting off the ship. Anyone who wants to join me, I’m heading out to the deck.”
“We don’t know how to lower the lifeboats,” Granger said.
“We’re scientists—we’ll figure it out!” Finn said.
“I’m with you!” Michael Corona told him.
Granger, Hampton, and Devon nodded enthusiastically.
“You didn’t tell us what the shit is,” the cameraman said.
“You don’t want to know,” Finn told him.
“Fine—I’m with you. Let’s get off this sucker!” the cameraman said.
Finn turned and started walking; Devon was at his heels. He hurried along the hallway until he reached the doors that led out to the deck. Moving quickly, he opened the door and paused as he felt the sharp cold of the night sear into him.
Screw the cold.
His intellectual mind—the part of him that made it through his doctorate at Yale—screamed that he was foolish. That there was no known creature that could consume living creatures such as
human beings
and break them down so completely that there was nothing left but
black goop shit
.
But another voice inside him was screaming. It came from deep in the pit of his being, deep in his soul. It was primal fear and, perhaps, the human desperation for survival.
As he reached the door, he heard a strangled scream. A frantic, piercing, desperate scream.
He turned back. The cameraman had been bringing up the rear as they left the hall that stretched before the row of cabin doors. As Finn looked, he saw the
thing
rising behind him.
It was huge and gelatinous. It had eyes that seemed to be haphazardly thrown over the black and green and disgusting mass of the bloblike body.
Shoggoth. Except that such a thing did not exist.
As the cameraman screamed, the
thing
formed over him, consuming him as if it digested him bit by bit, inch by inch, even as it formed over him, as if its digestive fluids were part of the mass, as if …
They had all frozen, horrified, disbelieving—watching.
Then Devon gasped and shoved him. “Out! Get us out—get us off of this boat!”
“Ship!” Granger croaked.
“Get us the hell off it!” Hampton roared.
Finn went on out into the cold, no longer aware of it. He raced down the deck to where he found a lifeboat. He stared up at the mechanism keeping it in place. There were ropes and winches and he thanked God that it was an old ship and he could probably move the thing manually. His fingers were frozen as he went to work on the sailor’s knots holding the rope in place. It somehow sunk in that the thing would fall and torpedo in the water if someone didn’t take the other side.
He looked back. Granger was across from him, working on the other end of the ropes and levers.
“Get Devon into it!” he cried. “Hampton … get in. Michael, Barringer—”
But he heard another horrified gasp. He turned back.
The door was open; Barringer had been caught trying to run out—he’d been the one now bringing up the rear.
Finn saw his face. Saw the horror, the absolute disbelief in his eyes. And he heard the scream, deep and primal and terrible, that ripped from his body, so loudly that it seemed to tear apart the heavens and the dark night sky. His eyes … they were so huge, so filled with horror—and then they weren’t because the black and green gelatinous mass of the
thing
was sliding over his forehead and then he was blinded, and his scream was choked off because the oozing thing filled his mouth …
And Barringer was no more.
Frantically he worked at the ropes. He found the winch, and he began to lower the boat. Devon was in it; Hampton tried to crawl in it with her. Michael Corona ran over and pushed Hampton.
“Stop, stop!” Devon pleaded. “Slowly, balance—!”
Her words of warning were too late. Michael Corona’s mad shove to get on the lifeboat sent both him and Hampton screaming and plunging off the lifeboat together, cascading in an elongated howl of terror as they both crashed down into the inky darkness of the sea.
“We’ll find them!” Finn lied as he saw Devon’s face. The boat was lowering; it was now far down and he turned to Granger. “Hop—hop now!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll get her another twenty feet … and take a dive. You’ll get me.”
Bull—what the hell was he doing, what was he saying? He was too far; he was going to die. He was no kind of a hero. He was a geek, a nerd—a scientist. And he was surely suffering some kind of a neuro-break because this couldn’t be happening.
There was a sudden sound; a fierce banging sound. He turned. The
thing
was coming. It had thrown open the doors to the deck with a fury and a hunger.
Finn stared. There it was, eyes all over … like a giant bowl of extremely ugly and miscolored Jello. It was hideously black and green and yet …
Somehow see-thru.
And thus he could see Barringer. See the man in his half-digested state.
Eyes, soft tissue, all dissolved within while the acids in the thing’s stomach continued to work and gnaw away at bone, at the skeleton of the man, at the skull that still looked frozen in a scream …
He dropped the winch. He heard the plop as the lifeboat hit the water. He looked back.
It had a thousand eyes, so it seemed now, but it was looking at him. And Finn knew that he’d rather freeze to death. He hiked himself up to the rail and tried to judge the distance in the night. He saw only the blackness of the water, but he made his best attempt at a high dive …
He plunged deep. So deep into the water that he didn’t think he’d make it up again. His lungs burned. That might have been because he could no longer hold his breath … it might have been because of the fierce, icy cold that enveloped him, almost as if the freezing waters were alive themselves, eating him as the thing had intended to do.
With his last strength, his last will, his last, desperate human longing to survive, he kicked hard against the water.
And he shot to the surface, gasping, tasting salt, barely cognizant.
“Finn!”
He heard Devon’s voice. He was almost by the lifeboat. He couldn’t feel his muscles, couldn’t feel his body at all. Something in the human involuntary system designed to help with life kicked in. He was moving; he was at the boat. And Devon and Granger were reaching for him, drawing him into the lifeboat. He fell inside it; Devon had found the blankets and one came around him and still he shivered, still, his body remained numb.
He heard a splash. Granger was rowing. They were moving away from the horrid ship
Guinevere.
In the night, he heard the sound of
its
anger. The
thing
. The heinous, despicable
thing
.
The—
dare he say it, dare he think it?—
shoggoth.
“Shoggoth!”
Granger said it aloud.
It screeched; it screamed. Its fury was complete—they still existed, and the thing wanted them. But it didn’t plunge into the sea. Somehow, Finn made his muscles work and he grabbed a set of oars, and he didn’t know how long or how furiously they moved, but the lifeboat moved far from the
Guinevere.
Finally, when the sound of the thing’s fury faded into the night and all they could hear was the lap of the oars, he fell back, exhausted.
Warmth invaded him. It was Devon, crawling over him, trying to share her body warmth with him. She’d gotten the tarp from the stowage compartment and more blankets, and she had him and Granger covered and warm and …
She didn’t scream and she didn’t fail. She looked at him with her beautiful eyes. There was strength in her voice. “We’re going to make it,” she told him. “You got us this far; we will make it.”
* * *
Somehow, somewhere in the nightmare darkness, he must have dozed. Because he woke and there was sunlight all around him.
Devon was still curled against him. Granger was awake, drinking from an emergency thermos, staring up at the sky.
“Listen!” Granger said. Finn listened. He heard a whirr.
“It’s a helicopter,” Devon said.
They all stared. Yes, it was a helicopter.
Granger stood up. “Hey, hey!” He jumped up and down, rocking the rowboat precariously.
“Granger, stop!” Finn warned.
The boat teetered.
“Granger!” he cried.
He reached for the man, but Granger went toppling over. Finn swore, crawling to the edge of the hull, trying to find Granger and get the lifeboat back to stability at the same time.
Granger had disappeared into the inky depths of the sea.
He half rose to crawl over the hull and get into the water. He had to save the man, but he couldn’t capsize the lifeboat with Devon still in it.
“Finn, no!” she cried with horror. “I have the flare—they’ll come, rescue will come!”
To prove her point, she fired the flare gun. The helicopter would see them; rescue would come.
“I have to—have to try to save Granger!” he told her.
Their eyes met. It was the story he would have loved for his life; it was the beautiful woman staring at him. It was him—a most unlikely hero.
He fell into the water.
It was still freezing, even more bitterly cold by day. But he looked. He dove and he rose and he dove and he rose until he could no more.
Then he was back at the lifeboat, not so much of a hero, but Devon was there, helping him, desperately tugging at his weight to get him back on.
And the helicopter was nearly there. Seated, freezing, huddled on their knees in the middle of the lifeboat, he and Devon waved.
Then it happened.
The sea seemed to explode about two hundred yards from them. Water spewed everywhere, as if a geyser had erupted from the ocean bed. Something began to rise …
It was massive. It stood, Finn knew, on two legs, because the tips of its thighs were visible just at the water’s surface. It had two arms … weblike fingers. There were tiny wing structures folded at its back. It was horrible, black and green, nearly opalescent …