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…”
24
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.
25
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.
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.
