I dearly wish it were only Worley that has been so plagued by dementia. But the remaining crew and passengers are like demented to varying degrees. The fog that enshrouds us is no common fog. Something about it gets inside men’s minds and turns their thoughts black, turns their brains to rot. Yes, I have felt it, too, and do not dispute the terrible influence it wields.
The morale of the ship is positively decayed. I have not abandoned hope, yet I fear it has abandoned me.
The next few entries were blotted out with mildew. Fabrini wanted to stop right there, but Cook wouldn’t have it. He wanted Fabrini to know the rest. To know what he now knew. So, swearing under his breath, Fabrini skipped to the next legible entry that Cook had his finger on:
20 March 1918 (position unknown)
I have not slept in days now. I dare not. Reading through my entries of the past two days, it seems that I have been near-hysterical. They read like the ravings of a madman. But who can claim not to be mad in this hellish place? I will not go into the things that crawl up the sides of the ship or the loss of the lifeboat and crew to that repellent octopoid monstrosity in plain view of us on the main deck. The less said of such nightmares, the better. Just let me put down here that events have taken a decidedly dark turn. There has been a rash of suicides amongst the crew and passengers. Men have vanished on watch and others right out of their staterooms. Worley is gone now, too. We discovered a hole in the bulkhead of his cabin as if something had chewed its way through steel to get at him. Insane or not, Worley was right about one thing: there is something intelligent in the fog. Some haunter of the dark, some creeping bogey that has slithered up from the pits of primal fear all men carry within their souls. I have felt its influence. It is a cold and deranged intellect, a lunatic shadow out of space and time that watches from the fog and picks clean the minds of men as of a vulture with carrion. Yes, it is driving everyone mad and I with them. The men claim it calls to them out of the fog in the voices of dead loved ones, that it shows them things that are destroying their minds. I will not speak of what it has shown me. God help us all. For each night it gets closer and plucks more men into that noisome mist…
21 March 1918 (position unknown)
Trapped in the weed we are and trapped in the weed we shall remain. Out of frustration more than anything else, I ordered a motorized whaleboat be dropped. The beasts in the weed have been quiet of late, but not that other thing out there. That ghost or whatever it might be called. I ordered the whaleboat lowered, so that I and a select crew including the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Asper, might reconnoiter our position in hopes of finding some possibility of salvation. The mental strain on the crew and passengers is such now, that command has nearly broken down and they have formed into little groups or enclaves which violently oppose one another. There have been several instances now of barbarity. I fear that, given time, the crew and passengers remaining will descend into savagery. Something has to be done. For the sake of our lives and souls, we must take action.
(later)
We rowed through the weeds and once clear, motored our way through the clear channels of the sea. Although “clear” is a bit subjective, considering where we are. The water is pinkish and heavy, scummed with a trembling slime that reminds me of gelatin. Clumps of weeds and rotting debris of all sorts drift through it. Dr. Asper commented that this unknown sea is akin to an organic soup.
An hour out, we sighted a steamship languishing in another mass of weeds. We decided to board her and I wish to God we had not. We used a grappling ladder to climb over the bulwarks. According to the trailboard on the bridge, she is… or was… the Korsund out of Copenhagen. Though slimed with a weird fungus and great growing patches of moss, she was a fine-looking steamer. Straight up-and-down bow and graceful stern. The superstructure was a maze of derricks and booms, spiderwebbed by a profusion of cables and overhead supports. She had tall twin stacks and high ventilators, a fine long deckhouse. Yes, she was a proud and hardy-looking vessel.
But she was derelict… though not, we discovered, empty.
We found great blackened sections on the main deck. Some of the bulkheads crumbled at our touch. I would guess that some intense, mysterious heat had been directed selectively against her. Inside the deckhouse, we found dozens of dead men. Many had killed themselves with razors or by hanging themselves. It was a ghoulish, awful sight. The ship itself had the atmosphere of a morgue, one of violated tombs and dissection rooms. We all felt it. We discovered men in their berths that had been burned to a crisp, oxidized into flaking mummies by a consuming, directed heat that did not so much as char the bedsheets or bolsters! Some of the men immediately began whispering of witchcraft and the like, though Dr. Asper and I do not believe any of this has such a pat, though disturbing explanation.
We found the captain in his cabin. In his chair, he had slit his wrists with a straight razor and was still gripping it. But his face. .. a mask of utter horror, those eyes staring at something we could not see. I got the mad impression that he killed himself before whatever it was he saw got to him.
In the wheelhouse, there were more cadavers. But these were not burnt or in any other way molested, save for numerous contusions. Dr. Asper examined them, telling me that they looked to have died of some horrendous seizures, that their bones were broken, limbs dislocated, abdominal muscles strained and ruptured. Most had bitten through their own tongues. They all bore the same looks of contorted horror as the captain – lips shriveled back from teeth, mouths locked in screams, faces pulled into psychotic masks, eyes bulging. And their eyes, dear Christ, I have never seen such a thing. They were completely white, though not glazed as from putrefaction, but as if the color had been leeched from them or what they had looked upon had been so harrowing and frightful that it had bleached the pigment free.
Later, Dr. Asper attempted a crude autopsy on one of these cadavers in the Korsund’s meager surgery. He told me that its nervous tissue in general was actually reduced to a sort of pulp. That its brain was nothing more than a sort of runny slime as if said brain was boiled to a soup in its own skull. And what, we wondered, could cause such awful seizures and violent contractions? Could literally melt a man’s brain in his own skull and bleach his eyeballs white?
Examination of several others showed the same degree of damage. Also, Dr. Asper discovered that their internal organs had been dissolved down to a sort of white jelly that burned his hands when he touched it. We found similar globs of this burning jelly in various parts of the ship. It has an unusual sort of shine to it. Even Dr. Asper, with his scientific leanings, cannot explain this jelly.
After some three hours aboard the Korsund, that malign and shadowy death ship, we departed. Some of the men were nearly hysterical with the horrors they saw and those they sensed, but could not see. What appalling tragedy has befallen her? And when, I wonder, will it come for the Cyclops?
24 March 1918
Several days now since last entry. I have no good news, nothing which will save those that look to me for answers which are far beyond my grasp. Dr. Asper fears that the crew I put aboard the Danish ship has been contaminated with some nameless pestilence. They bear terrible burns on the exposed flesh of their hands and arms as if they came into contact with some intense heat. Dr. Asper says the burns are quite similar to radium burns. The men are plagued by fatigue and melancholy, terrible weakness and severe vomiting. Asper is doing his best, but the men grow steadily worse. Dr. Asper, too, I fear is contaminated, but will not admit as such.
Though I exhibit no outward signs of the unknown malady, I find myself increasingly nauseous and listless, unable to eat. My mind is given to dream and I do not trust my own judgement.
Whatever terrifying specter circles us out in the fog, it grows nearer by the day and several times now I have been certain I saw something huge and unspeakable slipping through the mists. Perhaps it is only my fevered imagination, but I do not think so. It has placed a curse over this undead sea and the Cyclops in particular. I cannot say what this haunter is or even guess at its nature, but that it is an evil, hungering taint I have no doubt. It has cocooned the ship up now with invisible threads and slowly, patiently, it is sucking our blood dry drop by terrible drop.
I pray for death.
29? March 1918
There is death now, a grim and covetous death that haunts the ship. Day by day by night more men disappear. Some have escaped into the mist by taking lifeboats. I wish them godspeed. Others have been liberated as well, but not of their own free will. This morning, I believe it was this morning, we discovered the cadavers of three men who vanished several days ago. How can I describe their remains to you? They were leathery, empty husks, their faces like crumbling Autumn leaves, webbed up in some wiry silk that is so sharp it slips through fingers if you merely brush or touch it. The cadavers were wound in this like flies in a spider’s web and hung from the aft
