happened to Fabrini. About him being alone for maybe thousands of years in that other place, his mind never dying, just suspended, preserved like something floating in a corked jar of alcohol.
“Yeah,” Cushing said. “About what I was thinking. Time… well it wasn’t the same on the other side.”
“Where was he?”
Cushing just shook his head. “The Fifth Dimension? Sixth? Tenth? Shit, who knows, but a place so alien I don’t want to think about it.”
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.”
23
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
