vibration caused by sound.
Cushing moved and a half dozen tentacles jerked as if in surprise.
“Sit fucking still,” Gosling said in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, just not exactly where…”
Soltz began to stir. He shifted and shook, the waterproof blanket sliding down to his knees. He was up in what passed for the bow and the thing’s tentacles were mere inches away from him over the lip of the raft.
His motion made those tentacles flutter. They changed from the color of wheat to a bright, neon-yellow. Most of them just lay motionless in the water, but a dozen or so above the waterline began to coil in lazy rolls like pythons. It wasn’t just the tentacles that changed color, but the bell, too. It looked oddly synthetic, George had thought upon first seeing it, like something poured from a Jello mold. A perfectly circular mass of transparent jelly that looked deep enough to drown in, skinned with a rubbery membrane like cellophane wetted down with cooking spray. And now it was changing color, too. From that rich purple to hot pink and then scarlet and orange and indigo… it looked like gasoline on water.
“Why the hell is it doing that?” George said under his breath.
“Chromatophores,” Cushing said just as quietly. “Pigmentation cells… it can either control its pigment or it’s reacting to mood swings like a squid…”
But George wasn’t sure if he was buying that.
What he was thinking was insane… but what if it was responding to their voices? The subtle vibrations they caused? Only when they spoke did the bell effuse color. What if it was… Jesus
… intelligent and it was trying to communicate?
That was scarier than just about anything he could imagine. The idea of some revolting dumb predator was infinitely preferable to one that could reason. For if it could reason, then it was only a matter of time before it figured out how to get them out of the raft.
This was bad. George had thought it had all been bad up to this point… the giant eel attacking the raft, that crazy devil-ray bat
… but none of that had been like this. It was one thing to be able to fight back, regardless of how disgusting your adversary was, but to just sit here and wait and wonder helplessly while your mind turned upon itself like a top, showing you all the unpleasant details of your death… yeah, now that was really bad. The sort of bad that reached down inside you and yanked your guts out through your mouth until there wasn’t a goddamn thing left in you but an echoing void like the hollow of an empty drum.
Somebody better do something, George thought, or I’m gonna crack, see if I don’t.
And maybe he was close, maybe they were all close, but he held it in check best he could. He felt gutless and sick and scared. Very scared. For how could you not be? Waiting there like that in the foggy silence, feeling like a condemned man waiting for execution, everything inside you tense and bunched, ready to explode. And in the back of your mind there was that primitive urge to fight, to do battle, even though the idea was ludicrous. There was no chance of victory against something of this immensity… yet, that primal man inside said it was better to die that way, fighting and slashing and cutting with blood in your mouth, than to take it like this. Just sitting there, letting it happen. And George figured that made real good sense, for maybe the jellyfish would kill them quicker that way. Maybe the very defiance of them hacking at its tentacles would piss it off. And a quick death would be better than waiting, better than feeling your mind going to a cold slop as those tentacles embraced you like living ropes.
George didn’t honestly think he could handle being touched by it. That was just unthinkable. Repellent. Like being webbed up by a spider and feeling it lick you… your mind would go to sauce.
The tentacles continued to unwind, slithering over and around each other like a tangle of nesting snakes slowly waking.
The minutes ticked by.
George could hear those tentacles now brushing up against the sides of the raft with a squeaking sound. Many of them, questing and scraping and investigating. One of them rose up, hovered directly over Soltz’s head and everyone on the raft held their breath… it passed within two, three inches of his face, found the gunwale of the raft and tapped against it, withdrew.
But that was hardly the end of it.
Those tentacles were real busy all of a sudden. It seemed as if maybe the jelly was intelligent to a certain degree, for it kept touching the raft, trying to figure it out. One of the tentacles slid up the side of the raft and wormed its way inside, just touching things… the blanket that covered Soltz’s legs, an oar, the zippered compartments that contained the survival equipment. It found a lightstick and darted back as if it did not like the feel of it. Then it slid back over the side. Four or five others began tapping their way along the gunnel as if looking for something.
One of them got real close to George.
It was the pale, waxy yellow of a gourd. An undulant and rubbery thing like a great blind worm rooting through mulch. Not aggressive, merely explorative. It brushed over the tip of George’s boot, paid it no mind.
And George, feeling hot and loose inside, thought, what the hell does it want? What is it looking for?
Other tentacles passed very close to Gosling and Cushing. Cushing had to move his arm out of their way.
There were things about this creature that Cushing wanted to tell them about. He knew jellies, had done a great deal of reading about them, and this was not exactly a jelly. A jellyfish, he wanted to tell them, was a hydrozoan, a colonial animal, a colony of specialized cells. Jellies did not act like this. They were not capable of reaching around and grasping things with their tentacles. He also wanted to tell them that if this was indeed a jellyfish, then those tentacles would be lined with stinging cells.
The only good thing, everyone noticed, was that the sort of tentacles that were doing the exploring were not terribly numerous. From what they could see in the water, the thing had no more than a few dozen of them. Which seemed like a lot until you realized that the jelly had hundreds of tentacles. But most were thin, reedy projections that fluttered in the water like long wisps of yellow hair.
It might have went on that way for hours or even days or at least until that medusan grew bored or dried out and had to dive back down to rehydrate itself. That was, if it hadn’t been for Soltz. Soltz awakening in a kind of delirium, sitting up and moaning, licking his lips and breathing hard. His one good eye looking around, but dreamy and unfocused, confused. He tossed the blanket aside and right away those big tentacles started moving around, coiling and corkscrewing.
“What?” he said, barely able to catch his breath. “What is this? What… what… what?”
The sound of his voice triggered chemical changes in the bell of the jellyfish. It went from that livid purple to a soft yellow, then the bright orange and fiery red of a sunset.
“Soltz…” Gosling whispered, but it was no good.
Two of the tentacles came up the side of the raft like snakes. Soltz did not see them. He tossed his blanket aside and it struck them, making them twist like earthworms in direct sunlight.
“Colors,” Soltz said, “look at those awful colors…”
So maybe he did see the jelly. For even the tentacles were suffused with oranges and reds now. The floats and bladders around the bell were inflating and deflating rapidly, the bell was quivering. Three or four more tentacles boarded the raft, looping and creeping. Soltz grabbed an oar and swung at them. They would never have been strong enough to drag a man overboard, for as the oar hit one that was rising up like a rattlesnake in a defensive posture, it went to pulp. It literally shattered in a spray of jelly. The bell went bright red and a dozen tentacles went after Soltz. He hit some with the oar and they exploded, but he wasn’t fast enough.
Two or three others noosed around him and he instantly dropped the oar, screaming and thrashing as the nematocysts of the tentacles, the stinging cells, injected their toxins into him. He stood right up straight as a post and a dozen more ringed him, and he fell thrashing into the water, right into the squirming forest of the thing.
Cushing cried out and Gosling held him back.
There was no helping Soltz.
Not now.
“Do something for chrissake!” George cried out. “We can’t just let him-”
“We don’t have a fucking choice,” Gosling said, just sick with it all. “Nothing to be done… just, just don’t look.”
But George was looking. There was no way he could not. Like seeing a man fall beneath a subway train, you simply had to look. Because maybe, just maybe, what you saw wouldn’t be as bad as what your mind would show
