a little girl be doing out in the mist in the first place?
George looked back toward Gosling, wanted to say something, wanted to rouse him, but his throat was simply too dry. It had constricted down to a pinhole now and he could barely draw a breath.
You need me, you wake me, hear?
But George could not. He was barely breathing. Locked tight, motionless, his heart just a shallow pattering in his chest.
The girl was waving to him now.
And George could do nothing, not a goddamn thing. He didn’t have the strength to wave back. And the idea of waving, of drawing attention to himself… it was unthinkable. For in that little girl was the embodiment of every fear he’d ever known, every adult anxiety and childhood terror alive and breathing and rustling.
The girl was moving now.
George could see it happening and was telling himself madly that he had to push these awful images from his mind, because it was all hallucination, just some dark fiction vomited up from the depths and if he let it root in his mind, if it got too strong of a hold there. ..
But he didn’t think he was hallucinating.
He was seeing some little girl in what appeared to be 19 ^th century period dress moving in his direction, getting closer and closer and he was absolutely helpless to do anything but watch it happen.
He told himself: You are not seeing a little girl out there. I don’t know what in Christ that is, but it cannot be a little girl. It’s something else. Either a fiction your mind created and fleshed out… or something worse. Something that wants you to think it’s a little girl.
And that made perfect sense to him.
Yes, something vile and degenerate, the sort of thing that haunts black submarine valleys and lives in the rotting hollows of sunken ships. Something that picks through the bones of drowned men and howls through high masts and calls ships down into abyssal plains. Yes, that’s what it was. The living, phobic personification of all the men, women, and children lost at sea and drawn into murky graveyards of swaying kelp and gutted coffin-ship and barnacle-encrusted bone that no light would ever touch.
George thought maybe she was standing on an island of weed, but that wasn’t so. She was moving, yes, but standing perfectly still, drifting in his direction very slowly, just above the water. She was wrapped in tendrils of fog, but he could see that she wore a royal blue silk taffeta dress trimmed in white ribbon and braid. A party dress. There was a gold Celtic cross around her neck.
A ghost, his mind told him, a ghost of some little girl sucked down into the dead sea, a shade that haunts the mist…
As she got closer, he saw her hair was done in golden ringlets and her face was smooth and white like porcelain. A Victorian doll. She looked exactly like a Victorian doll.
No, not at all.
That face was corpse-white, bleached by seawater, the eyes just huge black pits punched into it and filled with a misty yellow glow like full moons sinking into a cloudbank. Hazy and misty and ghastly. She was only ten or fifteen feet away now and he could see that she was fouled with strands of weed that draped over her shoulders and were tangled in her hair. Her dress was a dingy rag spotted with mildew. Fog was steaming from her, boiling inside her and blowing out through innumerable holes torn through her like she was burning up inside. She came on with a wake of churning, smoky mist, tendrils of fog seeping from her outstretched fingertips.
George felt something shatter inside his head like glass in a faraway room.
Closer and closer yet. He could see the fog bank through the fissures eaten through her, could see the green marine worms burrowing at her throat. Her eyes were wide and glistening and yellow, a rope of drool hanging from her lips.
There was something building in George, something raging and sharp and violent: a scream scraping up the back of his throat.
Your soul… she’s come to suck away your soul.
Those puckered white fingers reached for him and her mouth opened like a black, seething blowhole.
And George screamed.
Screamed until she was gone, dissipated like vapor, and he could hear his voice echoing through the fog, becoming something else and coming back at him like a dozen taunting voices. None of which sounded like his own.
Then there was a hand on his shoulder shaking him and Gosling was yelling something.
“What?” George said. “What?”
“Was is it?” Gosling demanded, his hands on George strong and sure. “What in the fuck is it?”
Both Cushing and Soltz were staring at him with barely-concealed horror.
But George couldn’t tell what he saw, because he just wasn’t sure. So, instead, he let go with the first lie his mind produced: “I… I must have fallen asleep, had a nightmare…”
But they didn’t look like they believed him anymore than he believed himself.
He only hoped they couldn’t hear what he was hearing. A high, mocking childish giggling from somewhere deep in the fog.
29
“Either you’re with me or against me,” Saks said, aiming the Browning in the general direction of Fabrini and Cook and Crycek. “You’re either with me, Menhaus, or you’re with them. What’s it going to be?”
“Saks,” Menhaus said breathlessly, “come on now.”
He was directly in-between the opposing sides now. Saks was in the stern and the others were up near the bow and he himself was seated roughly amidships. This is where things got complicated and dangerous. If he went to Saks, the others would never trust him again. And if he stayed with them, Saks would think everything he’d said was bullshit.
“What I would like, everyone, what I would really like is for all this to stop,” Menhaus told them, trying desperately to sound calm and reasonable, but probably only succeeding in sounding like a scared little boy. Which was pretty much how he felt. “This can’t go on. It just can’t.”
Saks’s reply to this was to aim the gun directly at Menhaus. There was a deadly gleam in his eye. He looked very much like a man who wanted very badly to hurt someone.
He’s going to kill me, Menhaus thought.
“Get your ass over here now,” Saks said, “or get over there with them. If you’re with me, you’ll live to tell the tale. With them… you get the picture, don’t you?”
Menhaus looked around uncertainly. He was almost wishing those horrible fish would come back, even the big one. Or maybe that something even worse would come sliding out of the mist. At least then, they’d have a common enemy.
But he supposed they already did: each other.
“Don’t do it,” Fabrini said. “Don’t go over there. You get involved with that gutless shit, you’re going to be an accomplice to murder. Mine or one of the others. And you don’t want that, do you?”
No, Menhaus certainly did not want that.
“Don’t listen to that goatfuck,” Saks said. “He don’t know shit, Menhaus. Besides… look around you. All of you, look right fucking around you. You think we’re adrift in the Gulf of goddamn Mexico here? Well, we ain’t. Where we are there are no laws. It’s survival of the fittest. You come with me, Menhaus, I’ll keep you alive and I just might get your ass out of here. But you stick with them…”
“He’s talking nonsense,” Cook said. “We can only survive together.”
But he didn’t understand. Neither did Fabrini. It was the only way. The only possible way to pacify Saks.
Swallowing, Menhaus went and sat in the seat directly in front of Saks.
“You cheap fuck,” Fabrini spat.
Cook said nothing.
Crycek smiled, then pointed upward… as if that made a lick of sense. Then he nodded, thinking he’d made his
