When Gosling relieved Soltz on watch, Soltz was looking funny.. . dreamy. There was an odd haze in his eyes, a faraway look like maybe he was not there at all, just lost in distant places and unseen horizons that Gosling himself could never reach.
“You okay, Soltz?”
Soltz seemed to realize for the first time that he was not alone. He looked at Gosling, blinked, and focused his eyes behind those heavy glasses. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Just fine.”
“What were you looking at out there?”
But he just shook his head. “You see funny things in the fog, don’t you?”
“What sort of funny things?”
Soltz thought it over. Something pulsed at his throat and his eyes went shiny and distant again. “Things that aren’t there. Those things I saw… they couldn’t really be there, could they?”
“What did you see?”
Soltz shook his head again. He opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked off into the fog and Gosling did, too. It did not look any different. Swirling and thick, sparkling and yellow-white like a drive-in movie screen.
“I saw a ship out there,” Soltz said. “I know I didn’t really see it, maybe just with my mind… but it was so real.”
“Tell me about it.”
Soltz narrowed his eyes, seeing it again now. “Well… it was an odd ship, a big ship. But not a modern ship at all. One of those old ones like maybe a barque, a pirate ship… yes, that’s what it was, a pirate ship. It had high masts… except they were ragged and full of holes, gray and sagging. I heard it out in the fog, creaking and groaning, wind whistling through the torn canvas… then it came out and I saw it. It had a funny glow to it, you know? There were men along the railing and they were ragged, too. Dead men. .. ghosts… skeletons. They looked like skeletons… isn’t that odd? Like skeletons.”
Gosling sighed, did not like it. “A ghost ship? Is that what you saw?”
“Yes… I think so. It just went past us and faded into the mist.” He squinted his eyes and cocked his head. “It went past us and there was a woman aboard… a woman. She waved to me. And you know what, Gosling?”
“What?”
“She didn’t have any eyes.”
Gosling felt a chill lay over his skin now. The idea of what Soltz had seen was scaring him, yet Soltz seemed fine with the idea. And that was probably the worst part. Like maybe his mind was going now, was coming apart to the point that he did not recognize fear and danger.
“Go lay down, Soltz, you need a rest.”
Soltz nodded. “What… no, it’s my imagination again. I thought I heard it out there, creaking and groaning, the sound of feet on its decks, pacing and pacing.”
“Go lay down,” Gosling told him.
“I didn’t really see it, did I?”
Gosling told him that he hadn’t, but deep down he honestly had to wonder. Wonder what might next come drifting out of the mist and if it was a ghost ship, would it keep ghosting by… or would it decide to stop?
6
Fabrini seemed better after he admitted his fears openly.
Cook was sure he would want to get off the ship right away, but he seemed to be in no hurry. In fact, when they’d climbed back down to the decks below, he just stood there.
“You know something, Cook? You know what I been thinking?” he said, looking not afraid now, but just angry. “I’m thinking that I’m just plain tired of wandering around with my fucking tail between my legs. I’ve had it. I’m not the sort of guy who gets like this, ready to piss himself over ghost stories. I figure that whatever got the crew here, it wants me, let it take its best shot. Because I sure as hell won’t make it easy.”
“That’s good thinking,” Cook told him. “Reading that log made me start thinking some things myself.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well… maybe I’m wrong, but what if Crycek is right: what if this thing needs our fear, feeds off it? What if it gets stronger on paranoia and anxiety and things like that? What if? Then, I don’t know, maybe if we don’t let it see that we’re scared, maybe it’ll get weaker.”
“Makes sense to me. Let’s show that fucker what we’re made of. Let’s do some exploring.”
That really came as a shock to Cook, but he took it as he took all things with neither a smile nor a frown. They found a hatch and went below decks, down into the damp darkness. And down there, in the shadows and stink, it wasn’t quite so easy to puff out your chest. For if the atmosphere had been forbidding above, it was positively rancid below.
Using the lantern, they began exploring the mazelike passages below decks. Cook figured it was going to be bad down there and he was right. There was an awful, gagging stink in the air that was worse than even the smell of the sea and weeds. This was a foul, suffocating odor of rank decomposition and noxious dissolution. Like something wet and moldy locked in a hot closet, boiling away in its own juices. A weird combination of organic decay and rusting machinery, stagnant water and mildewed woodwork… a half dozen other things neither man could identify or wanted to.
“I feel like a worm,” Fabrini said. “A worm sliding through the carcass of something dead.”
It was right on target, but created such an absurd visual that Cook actually laughed… at least until he heard his laughter echoing back at him. No, none of it was funny. Not in the least. There were greasy, gray toadstools and furry green moss growing through rents in the bulkheads and more of that bloated fungus that was just as white and fatty as the flesh of a corpse pulled from a river. A hot, yeasty odor came off it.
Cook stepped on something soft and pulpy about the size of a cantaloupe and it went to juice under his boot. He jumped back with a cry, realizing what he’d stepped on was something like a puffball, a cloud of yellow spores spread out in the lantern light.
“You ever seen anything like this?” Fabrini asked,
Cook just shook his head.
The ship was dead, obviously, yet there was such a profusion of growth and morbid germination, it almost seemed like maybe it was moving from the inorganic to the organic. That given time, the Cyclops would be a seething diseased mushroom that only looked like a ship.
They moved on, ducking beneath ribbons of fungi, bringing light where there had only been moist darkness and bacterial action for decades. The air was saturated with a brackish sewer smell. Shadows pooled and bled like black blood. The bulkheads were thick with a slick yellow moss. Clots of fungus dropped from the ceiling overhead and hit the decks like rotten plums. Everything was creaking and groaning, dripping and oozing and stinking.
It was bad. God yes, it was bad.
But something in them, in both of them, pushed them on. Maybe it was some inexplicable, suicidal desire to see the very worst that floating mortuary could show them. Maybe they could be satisfied with nothing less. And maybe, after reading the ship’s log and having their minds touched by those of the crew, they had to know what became of them.
Doors were either welded shut with rust or had bulging tongues of fungi seeping around their edges as if the cabins behind them were bursting with fungal growth. The fungus was on the decks, too, and they were walking right through it, their boots making gluey, sticky sounds as they lifted them with each step. Cook had brushed some of it on a bulkhead with the back of his hand and it had been warm and oily like the skin of a dying man.
They found another corridor and the fungi had not abated.
But one stretch of wall was free of it, was blackened and pitted as if a great fire had swept through there. Cook and Fabrini paused before a doorway. It was burnt black. When Cook prodded it with the barrel of the Browning it shattered like candy glass. It was entirely crystallized.
“Just like the log said,” Fabrini pointed out. “That ship, the Korsund, remember? Forbes said it looked burned, that the walls fell apart when they touched them.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
