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.
19
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.”
20
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
