George knew, things that might drive you mad if you saw them. So that was good. But it also hid you. Wrapped you in its dusky winding sheet and tucked you into secret crevices and shadowy spider-holes you would never find your way out of.
“Does it seem brighter?” George said. “Not day-bright, but certainly brighter”
Gosling nodded. “Maybe this fog will burn away yet. Maybe.”
“Still looks pretty damn thick, though,” George said.
But it was lighter out. It had happened incrementally, so subtly that neither man had even noticed. Now it was not like twilight really, but maybe a gloomy, overcast morning. Well, maybe not that bright, but better. Much better. Even the fog itself didn’t look so murky, so… polluted like seething fumes of toxic waste. You could actually see the ocean, that marshy run of steaming rot.
The surface actually seemed to quiver.
George dipped an oar into it, discovered there was actually sort of a sticky, scummy membrane over the surface… like the film over a pail of spoiled milk. That’s how the scuttler – George had christened the creature on the oar that now – had dashed over it. No magic there, just adaptive engineering.
He figured that the day… or night or whatever it was… was brightening a bit and that was something.
Not that it really improved their situation much.
They were still, without a doubt, the proverbial needle in a haystack. Except the haystack in this case seemed to go on to infinity. And where that haystack was located… well, that was something else again.
Gosling was busy with the VHF radio, seemed impervious to just about everything else.
“You suppose we might get out of this?” George asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your sailor’s intuition tell you?”
“Tells me we’re fucked,” he said.
Gosling and his damn pragmatism. He didn’t care diddly about keeping morale up; that wasn’t his concern. He looked at everything realistically. And the reality of the situation with him was that either they’d live or die. He leaned in neither direction. What happened was what would happen.
“You know, that’s what I love about you, Gosling, your optimism. It keeps my spirits high.”
“I’m not your therapist. It ain’t my job to keep you happy.”
“Yeah, but I was on board your ship. Your boys steered us into this fucking netherworld. It seems to me it’s your responsibility to get my ass out in one piece.”
“Well, we get back, you file a complaint with the Coast Guard,” he said. “Until then, quit yer goddamn complaining.”
He kept fiddling with the radio, seemed more intent with it all of a sudden. He kept saying, hmmm, under his breath like a dentist deciding which tooth to yank. Regardless, it was driving George up the wall.
“You getting anything out there?”
Gosling shook his head slowly. “No… and yes. I thought before
… thought I caught the end of a distress call, but it was swallowed in the static. I can’t be sure. I’m thinking this fog might have some sort of electrical field to it, might be interfering with our signals.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning it’s distorting the shit out of the airwaves,” he said, pulling the earplug out. “Could have been another broadcast, could have been ours coming back at us… hard to tell. That static swallows everything, vomits it back up.”
George loved all that technical detail, but it didn’t tell him shit. He knew radios. You turned them on to get the weather. Turned them off when Neil Sedaka or the Four Seasons came on. Other than that, he knew squat.
He got over closer to Gosling, listened to that static with him.
It was an empty, dead sound, rising and falling. Now and again there was a distant beep or ping. But you couldn’t be sure. George kept listening to it, feeling like some astronomer with his radio telescope listening to the music of the spheres, the noise of deep space searching for an intelligent signal. Yeah, that’s what it sounded like. Dead, distant voids and the echoing blackness between the stars.
He found it unnerving.
It was the sound a TV makes when a channel goes off the air and you’re staring into that field of fuzz and snow. And if you stare too long, you start seeing shapes flitting about, the millions of dots and specs becoming patterns that pull you in… spirals and marching diamonds. But it’s not there, none of it. Just the human mind offended by all that confused, random nothingness and deciding to fill in the blanks. Same way it did in deserts or snowstorms, creating mirages, images it needed to see.
George kept listening, certain he was hearing something… just not sure what.
Out there, in that storm of white noise, a man could get lost. He could sink away into blackness and lunacy. It would suck his mind clean until there was nothing but polished skull left behind. George decided that the static sounded like blowing dust and hissing gas, hollows and low places. A haunted, almost diabolic sound not of emptiness, but of occupancy. Like something sentient was out there, not necessarily alive nor dead, but waiting, just waiting, listening and reaching out for minds to touch. It reminded him of recordings made by ghost hunters in tombs and desolate houses… static suffused with distant echoes, suggestions of awareness. Shades, shadows, ghosts.
“Hearing something?” Gosling asked him.
“I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. Was it imagination or… or did something want him to think that?
“It’s funny static… never heard nothing quite like it before. Those sounds in there, buzzing sounds now and again. You listen to it long enough you get the feeling…”
“That it’s listening back?”
But if Gosling thought that, he would not say and maybe it was his silence that was the very worst thing of all.
He feels it, too, George found himself thinking, he feels something out there, something listening, something cold and predatory
… and maybe amused.
But George knew he had to get off that track. For it was the road to dementia and once you started down it, you’d never come back. It was strictly a one-way street.
Gosling shut the radio off. “Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
George figured if the both of them kept telling themselves that, given time, they might even believe it.
He stared off into the fog like maybe he was waiting for it to show its teeth. “You don’t have much hope for us, do you?”
Gosling shrugged. “I don’t put much in things like hope or faith or luck. I used to hope for things, wish for things for all the good it did. Experience taught me otherwise. You make your own luck, I guess. I’m not saying luck doesn’t exist. I’m sure it does. But not for me and probably not for you. Some people have it, most people don’t.”
George uttered a short laugh. “You can say that again.”
They sat in silence, wishing they had something to smoke or something hard to drink. Anything. Humans loved their chemical dependencies and they never meant so much as they did in survival situations.
“Listen,” Gosling said.
“I don’t hear…” George began and then he did.
It was subtle, but it was there: a sort of tapping sound. And it was coming from under the raft. It wasn’t a big sound like before when the raft had actually been lifted from the sea. This was nothing like that, this was more investigatory, probing, curious. George heard it down there, thinking with a chill that it sounded very much like fingertips scraping over the rubber. It started getting louder, bumping and squeaking, thudding.
“Jesus-”
“Shut up,” Gosling warned him.
It ran up and down the bottom of the raft, creaking and bumping and scratching. Then it just touched now and again.
When it hadn’t happened again for maybe five minutes, George said, “What do you suppose that was?”
But Gosling just shook his head. “I don’t know… I just hope it stays gone.”
