Saks was pissed. And everyone thought he was going to read Crycek the riot act, go up one side and down the other and not miss much real estate in-between… but he didn’t. He just stared at him, stared with such intensity he could’ve burned holes through him.
Menhaus said, “Okay, Crycek, enough. Both of you, enough.”
Fabrini just looked puzzled by it all. “What’s this ‘through the looking glass’ shit… what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Crycek, still grinning, said: “We aren’t in the Atlantic anymore. We’ve passed beyond, to another place. A bad place and you all know that. Just like Alice, right through the fucking looking glass… only this Wonderland, things aren’t so brightly lit, are they? You can call it the Devil’s Triangle or the Sargasso Sea or the Graveyard of Lost Ships… what does it matter? That fog grabbed us, vomited us out here… wherever in Christ here is. Another dimension, another planet, I don’t know, but I do know one thing and that’s that not a one of us is getting out. We’re here to stay.”
“Bullshit,” Menhaus said, looking angry for the first time. “I don’t buy that shit. Goddamn sailor’s stories, that’s all they are and you won’t get me to believe it, no sir. How about you, Saks? You don’t believe that, do you?”
Saks just looked at him. “All I’m going to say here is that wherever we are, whatever clusterfuck Crycek and his butthole sailors got us into, if we got here then we can get out again.”
There was a simple child’s logic to that and everyone felt it, understood it. Even Fabrini was nodding.
“There you go,” he said. “What we got to do is stick together, stay alive until we sort this out. That’s what we got to do.”
“Exactly,” Cook said.
But that only made Crycek start tittering. “Alive? Alive?” He looked at them all like they were nuttier than he was and maybe they were. He kept up that awful tittering, his yellow teeth chattering together as he did so. “Do you think what’s out there will let us live? You’ve all seen things and so have I. Monstrous, evil things. Alien things. Out in that fog, out there right now, they’re waiting, they’re listening to us. Nightmares, that’s what they are just as sure as this is Hell. Things with teeth and empty bellies and yellow eyes and-”
Menhaus slapped him across the face. Menhaus. Mellow, mild, goodtime, joke-telling, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Menhaus. And he did it almost involuntarily. His hand just came up and swatted Crycek across the face and it was hard to say who was more shocked: Crycek or Menhaus himself.
“Good one,” Saks said.
Crycek looked like he was ready to leap, ready to start swinging, but Cook held him back. Wouldn’t let it happen. Wouldn’t give Saks the satisfaction of letting the men go at each other like animals.
“All right,” Fabrini said. “We all know there’s crazy shit here, we’re all on the same page. But-”
“But what?” Crycek said, practically raving now. “Don’t you get it? Don’t any of you get it? This fairy tale never-neverland we’re in is like some kind of dumping ground. Things too horrible to exist other places end up here. Maybe things God doesn’t want to look on or admit he created, things he’s ashamed of. This is where they end up, in this fucking sewer. They live and breed and multiply here… in this damnable pit, this cauldron of filth!” He started cackling again, only now no one had the guts to stop him. His eyes were huge and bloodshot, his lips trembling, cords jumping at his throat. “Sure, this is the bad place. This is where the things are, the crawling, squealing things! Unborn things and inhuman things! Things without eyes, without souls! Slinking, slithering, creeping nightmares and they’re out there right now! Can’t you feel them in the fog? Can’t you? Can’t you feel their hunger?”
“That’s enough,” Fabrini finally said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough…”
But it wasn’t enough. They’d goaded Crycek into this, they’d wanted it and now they were getting it. They’d opened the can of madness and now he was shaking its contents all over them, wetting them down with the stinking, abominable, deranged reality of it as he saw it. “Those things… oh, Jesus, I can feel them hungering… they’ll be coming for us. Don’t you doubt that. None of you. Today or tonight they’ll take another and then tomorrow night and the night after and the fucking night after that! They’ll take us one by one and if you’re the last one… God help you if you’re the last one because you’ll slit your own throat rather than look those things in the face, look ‘em in the face alone”
His mind was gone and they all knew it, but the impact of what he said was inescapable. For they’d all seen things now. Heard things. Sensed things and imagined still others. And what Crycek was telling them was exactly what had been echoing through their minds.
“You think I’m nuts? That it? You think I’m nuts?” he put to them, shuddering and quaking, his eyes darting madly. “Sure. Why not? Why shouldn’t I be? You give it a day or two and you’ll be as fucking loopy as I am! Oh, yes, yes, yes!”
Saks hit his seat with his fist and everyone jumped. “That’s it,” he said. He pulled out the knife he’d taken from Hupp: a lockblade with a seven-inch blade. Everybody saw that steel and they saw what was in his eyes, too. “One of you guys… somebody don’t shut this fucking nutjob up, so help me I’ll cut his fucking tongue out!”
Crycek was beyond danger now. He just laughed and then tears rolled from his eyes. He made a whimpering sound that quickly turned into a more ragged, horrid laughter. “You think I’m crazy, Saks? Sure, sure, sure, hee, hee, hee, crazy I am! Fuck it! But I’ll tell you people one thing and I’ll tell you it only once: you’re all in danger. And it isn’t just the wildlife, either. It ain’t just the things in the water, because this world… this zone or dimension or whatever in the Christ it is… it ain’t no different from the one we’re from. Because just like our world, this one… yeah, this one has a Devil, too.”
That even stopped Saks from using his knife which he was actually getting ready to do. And Cook knew that no one was going to stop him, but this stopped him. This stopped everyone. This filled them with something cold and shifting and made them all look out into the churning fog and wonder if something was looking back.
Menhaus was breathing hard. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I just want to get back home. That’s all I want.”
“Ask Cook,” Crycek said, his voice dead and emotionless now. “Go ahead, ask him. Ask him why he’s afraid to listen to the VHF, why he’s afraid to broadcast on it. Ask him.”
They were all looking at Cook now. But he just shook his head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
But in their eyes, all their eyes, he could see that they did not believe him.
Crycek said, “Tell them, Cook. Tell them why you don’t like that static on the radio, how you can feel something out there, something listening. Go ahead, tell them.”
“Shut up,” Cook snapped.
“Cook doesn’t have the guts to say what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling,” Crycek said and his sudden, rational calm was even worse than his earlier hysteria. “Because he knows it’s out there, just like I do. It makes a buzzing sound like… like an insect. And maybe it is an insect. But it’s out there, believe that. Something cold and cruel… out there in the fog, listening, watching us. It wants to eat our souls, it wants to devour our minds…” He held a finger to his lips. “Ssshh. Just. Listen. You can hear it out there, hear it listening, hear it waiting, feel it thinking about us… in here.” He massaged his temples. “It’s in here, in all of us, eating us from the inside with fear.”
And the thing was, they were all listening.
Listening to the fog and hearing distant things and things that were not so distant. Suggestions of movement. Whispers of motion. And underneath it all, a low constant thrumming sound like a generator on stand-by, waiting to power up.
For a long time after that, nobody said a thing.
But they were thinking things.
Things that were not good, especially trapped in that fog.
Things about the horrors in the fog and how they could be positively minor in comparison to an evil that was huge and cosmic and had come to eat their souls.
14
There were things in the fog and there were things in the minds of men and sometimes it was truly hard to
