it probably always would.
“… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog… it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and
… it’s knocking at the door… at the door… ”
And what they all wanted to know then as they did now was what exactly was coming out of the fog? What was on the decks and knocking at the door? And what in God’s name was that eerie booming sound in the background that sounded like a hollow, metal heart beating?
Gosling, however, was not about to comment on that.
Soltz had no such compunction. “What do you think it was? What got that ship? And don’t look at me like that because we all know that something got it. You heard the sound of that voice… I’ve never heard such terror before. That person was scared out of their wits.”
Gosling said, “Don’t jump to conclusions here. It could have been just about anything. It doesn’t have to be something supernatural.”
Soltz barked an almost pained sounding little laugh. “Who said anything about the supernatural? That wasn’t what I was thinking at all.”
“Oh? And what were you thinking?” Cushing asked him.
But Soltz would not say. He just sat there, staring into the mist, characteristically morose.
“Listen now, all I’m saying is that there could be lots of reasons for what we were hearing,” Gosling said.
“Don’t treat us like children, please,” Soltz said to him. “Whatever happened… whatever that ship was calling out about.. . it was not normal. Something came out of the fog. Something horrible. And whatever it was, it left an empty ship behind.”
2
The derelict.
It came out of the fog, huge and dead and forbidding, something you didn’t dare look upon and something else you didn’t dare look away from. To turn your back on it, would have been like turning your back on a razor coming at you in the darkness. The men in the lifeboat saw it and to them, it was like looking at some graveyard described by thin moonlight. It inspired the same sense of mystery and horror, an almost instinctive phobia. For this ship was like something abominable yanked from a burial ground, a relic dragged from a cursed tomb. Something diseased, sepulchral, and ancient. A tombstone emoting gray silence, a mausoleum echoing with dead whispers, blackness and lunacy. Nothing good could come of it.
Cook saw it, rising out of the mist, and it pulled his guts up the back of his throat in cold, coiling loops. Looking upon it, he could barely breathe.
It was a dire and morbid haunted house made of iron and rust and decay, thrust up from that forest of tangled, spreading weed. And though it was dead and rotting, you got the horrendous feeling that it was not dead enough. That somehow, it was unspeakably alive and aware and… hungry.
“Like a skull,” Crycek said in a wounded, despairing voice. “It looks like a skull stripped of meat.”
Fabrini said,” Knock it off.” But his voice was almost a whisper, as if he was afraid something on the ship might hear him.
“It’s just an old ship,” Cook said to them. “God knows how long it’s been here.”
“Sure, that’s all it is,” Menhaus put in. “Just an old ship.”
“You boys keep telling yourself that and you might even believe it,” Saks said.
Crycek was shaking his head. “It’s full of death… can’t you feel it?”
And they all could, a low and unpleasant thrumming in their heads, the sound of some dark machine idling… waiting to cycle to full rev.
Saks chuckled low in his throat. “Scares you girls, eh?” But it had gotten to him, too, and you could see that. Tough-guy Saks. Whatever was in that ship was scratching blackly in his belly just as it was with the others.
Cook was overwhelmed with a mindless horror at the sight of it. He tried to speak, but his throat was thick like it was stuffed with wool and rags. It took him a minute or two. “Let’s not get superstitious here. It’s just a derelict. It can’t hurt you. Might be something we can use on it.”
Fabrini looked at him. “You’re not… I mean, you’re not suggesting that we board it, are you?”
But Cook’s answer to that was to get the oars out.
The ship was caught fast in a bank of weeds. They had crawled right up her hull in glistening green mats like the ship was slowly being devoured by some colony of parasitic plants.
Fabrini and Cook rowed in closer until they hit the weeds which were so thick and congested, they had to use the oars as poles to push the lifeboat through them. Up close, the mist receding, the ship had to be four- or five- hundred feet in length with long decks and high, twin stacks rising up into the gloom. Cook had never seen a ship quite like her before. What he assumed was the bridge or the wheelhouse was suspended over the foredeck on steel stilts. And from just behind it, running aft to the stacks themselves were a skeletal framework of booms and gantries and derricks rising up like fleshless ribs. It made the entire ship look like the skeleton of some gigantic sea monster trapped in the weed.
As they poled down its length, Cook felt a sickly uneasiness in the pit of his belly. The sight of her up close – huge and lifeless and stark – left his skin cold, made his teeth want to chatter. Dead, certainly, but not untenanted.
The lifeboat slid through the weeds pretty easily, actually riding atop of them and sliding over them for the most part. Yet, it was hard work, poling along like that. But the exertion and the sweat felt good.
After what seemed about an hour, they swung around aft and got up behind her. As they passed through her shadow, the weeds suddenly seemed almost black. Not gray as a shadow might make them, but jet black and oily. When Cook looked again, it was gone.
It was like going into a cemetery at midnight, it occurred to him. You weren’t really afraid of ghosts and the dead were just dead, but. .. you just didn’t want to do it. You didn’t know why, but you didn’t want to. You just didn’t belong there.
As they came along the starboard side, pushing through those weaving mists, Saks said, “Looks like we’re expected.”
They all saw it: the boarding ladder was down. Cook and Fabrini urged the lifeboat nearer the ship where the weeds were so thick and snarled it was like pushing through mud. Finally, they reached the ladder.
“What’s that shit all over it?” Fabrini asked.
“Some kind of goo,” Menhaus said.
Cook was wondering that, too. The steps and handrail of the boarding ladder were festooned with something like cobwebs. On closer inspection, he saw it was a gray-white fungus, a fusty-smelling excrescence that looked like it had grown up out of the weeds and was slimed up the hull of the boat in oily-looking clots and clumps. He prodded some of it with the blade of his oar and a black sap ran from it.
“You ever seen fungus like that?” he asked Crycek, hoping the man’s knowledge of marine life had not abandoned him.
But Crycek just shook his head.
Saks said, “Looks like it’s eating right into the metal.”
And it did.
Cook said, “Menhaus? You feel up to standing guard over Saks here? Can you do that?”
What he was really saying, of course, was can we trust you not to feel sorry for that so-nofabitch and untie him?
Menhaus nodded, his eyes stern. “What about Crycek?”
“I’ll stay right here,” he said. He seemed to have his wits about him finally. “I’d rather do that than go on that old hulk.”
“Me and you both,” Menhaus said.
“Jesus Christ,” Saks said. “Untie me already. I’m okay now. I just lost my head was all. I’m fine now.”
