PART THREE
THE DERELICT AND THE DEAD SEA
1
So the raft drifted, borne by whatever currents there were in that miasmic, clotted sea. It was carried further into those banks of pale green weed that were thick and rotting and pissing a mephitic condensation into the damp air. The mist never lessened, though sometimes it was thin and vaporous and transparent to a degree. And at other times, thick and cloisterous and oddly agitated as if someone had stirred it with a wire whisk.
In his more poetic moments, Gosling saw that sea as being an ocean of blood. It was more pink than red and sometimes a dirty yellow, but it was never clear like water back on… well, back where he’d come from. This was an alien sea. A reeking, slimy discharge of watery protoplasm, something drained from a poisoned tumor or squeezed from a diseased placenta. He likened that sea to a petri dish, warm and wet and clogged with organic profusion, a metabolic medium, a fluidic slush of life and death and potential.
Cushing, who was something of an armchair naturalist, told him that wasn’t too far off the mark. That this sea – wherever it might be – was a living stew, a nutrient bath where life would be plentiful in amazing varieties and forms. He likened it to the primordial oceans of earth, so very rich in life it was practically a living thing itself.
“And it’s perfect, isn’t?” he said. “When you think about it? Steaming and moist and warm, an equatorial pond. The temperature of the water is probably unvarying, never too cold or too warm, always just right for things to breed and multiply.”
He said he thought the fog was created by the chill air hitting that warm soup of water. Earth’s prehistoric oceans and lakes would have been like that – rank and seething and misty, the very cradle of life.
“But none of that tells us where we are,” Soltz pointed out.
And that was true.
Cushing said, “Soltz has developed a few theories of his own based on watching Bermuda Triangle shows.”
“Oh? And you have a better explanation?” Soltz said. “Because I think at this point we’re all waiting to hear it.”
“Take it easy,” Cushing told him.
Gosling looked over at George. He was sleeping up near the bow. “What is your theory, Soltz? And please tell me it has nothing to do with flying saucers.”
Soltz looked offended at the idea of that. As if he wanted to say, well, the Bermuda Triangle is one thing, but flying saucers? What do you think I am? A kook? He looked over at Cushing, then at Gosling. “My theory involves vortices, time/space displacement. I think we were sucked into a vortex of sorts. That would explain why when we first entered that fog we could not breathe.”
“What would that have to do with it?” Gosling asked.
“It’s pretty apparent, isn’t it? That vortex grabbed us and when we could not breathe it was because we were momentarily caught between our world and this one, in some sort of dead zone, the hopping off point between our dimension, say, and where we are now.”
Gosling had been thinking pretty much along the same lines, but he did not admit it. “We only lost air for… what? Less than a minute? Thirty seconds? Not even probably. Are you telling me this vortex shot us into another dimension like an arrow and did it that quick?”
“Why not? We can’t apply our ideas of time and travel to such things.”
Gosling waited for Cushing with his scientific turn of mind to sweep Soltz and his theories under the carpet, but he did not. And Gosling himself wasn’t in any position to debate any of it either. As a sailor, he’d long been familiar with magnetic deviations and atmospheric abnormalities in the Sargasso Sea and Bermuda Triangle regions. There was no science fiction there. Funny things did happen in these places. It was well-documented and research into their causes continued, he knew, to this very day. But unusual navigational and atmospheric conditions were a long way from space/time distortions. A lot of bad writers had been throwing around the idea of those for a long time and Gosling had spent most of his life shaking his head at such pseudo-science.
And now?
Now he didn’t know what to think. Soltz went on in some detail and he listened patiently. It all made a certain amount of mad sense. Ships and planes disappearing from radar because they had been sucked or funneled into this place, most never to return. Yet, there had been a few that had returned, hadn’t there? If you wanted to believe the stories in some of those books – stories about planes or ships that had passed through some misty dead zone where their navigational and electronic instruments went haywire and then magically started working again when they passed back through the veil again. And, of course, being a sailor, Gosling had heard his share of tales about ships missing for years suddenly reappearing with no one on board.
Where had they gone?
Was it here? Was this place the answer to the age-old mystery of the ship’s graveyard? Was this the place the early mariners had seen when they told their horror stories of the Sargasso Sea? Had they breezed through here, witnessed nightmares, and then breezed out again?
Fantastic. The very same shit Gosling had always laughed at. Most sailors laughed at these things. But he knew, as they probably did, that at the back of every sailor’s mind there was a thin doubt that held on, despite what science and reason told them. A disorderly little fear that there might be a shred of truth in those old stories.
Vortices. Time/space distortion. Dimensional holes. Magnetic whirlpools that could funnel ships and planes into some alien sphere of existence. Christ, it sounded like the late show. But the fact remained, they were somewhere and it didn’t look much like the Atlantic or the Pacific or the pea green sea for that matter.
“You buy any of that?” Cushing said.
Gosling shrugged. “Maybe. Where we’re standing, one explanation is as good as the next. Something happened, didn’t it? And like Dorothy said, we ain’t exactly in fucking Kansas.”
Cushing smiled. “Did she say that?”
“Way I heard it.” Gosling sighed. “If we got in here, who knows, same thing that sucked us in might shoot us back out.”
“Do you really believe that?” Soltz said, despondent as ever. “Some cages have no keys.”
Gosling ignored that. He touched upon some of the things he had read or heard over the years, see what the others thought. “There must be some connection between this place and ours. Has to be. I’m just hoping it’s still open or it might open back up again and soon.”
He told them that he had read about a plane that vanished once. It was flying into Nassau or one of them places, supposed to touch down on some little strip there. People on the ground could hear the plane flying over, but they couldn’t see it. They were in contact with the pilot on the radio who said he could see nothing but mist above and below. That was the last anybody heard of that plane.
“So, maybe these two worlds are closer than we think,” Gosling said.
He said he’d also heard stories about shortwave radio operators picking up transmissions from ships or planes days after they’d disappeared. In some of the wilder tales, it was years later. Then there was the famous case of the five Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared in 1945 off of Fort Lauderdale. A ham radio operator claimed to have picked up their distress call many hours after they would have run out of fuel and been forced to ditch.
“I’m thinking that might tie in with that distress call we heard earlier,” Gosling told them, knowing everyone had been scared shitless after hearing that. Himself included. “That might have been something sent twenty years ago or fifty… who can say? Maybe in this place, radio transmissions keep bouncing around and now and again, they just slip out and somebody hears them.”
There was a mixture of total belief and total disbelief in the eyes of both Soltz and Cushing. But mostly just confusion set with terror. Because they were all remembering that transmission, hearing it echoing in their heads as
