you if you didn’t look.
Soltz was pretty much out of his head when he attacked those tentacles. To him it was a dream and he’d been reacting with dreamlike logic. When the tentacles touched him, he felt an instant searing agony spread over his bare arms and face. It was like being stuck with glowing red needles. A stinging, burning sensation that brought tears to his eyes and a scream to his mouth.
And then he was in the water, thrashing in a sea with something like kelp and crawling weed, only that weed was on fire and him with it. He was flailing in that mass of tentacles, covered with them. They were draped over his face and tangled around his arms. Many of them had come apart and hung over him in rags and glistening membranes. The bell was a livid, boiling red, pulsing and shuddering, and Soltz was screaming through a mouthful of jellied polyp as those stinging nettles shot barbs of neurotoxin into him.
Somebody was calling out to him, but the voice seemed to be coming from some distant gulf. It was muffled and unreal. He tried to thrash away, but it was no good. He was knotted in jellyfish. Huge, tortuous waves of convulsive pain tore through his legs, his belly, and now his hands and arms as he clawed and fought, trying to free himself.
“Ah, ahhhh!” he gasped as water filled his mouth. “Help me! Help meeeee!”
He tore at floats and bladders, scratching rents in the bell itself.
He kicked and splashed and ripped at the trailing toxic whips and became further ensnared, his entire body lacerated with blinding agony that made his head buzz with white noise.
He could hear voices shouting, yelling, screaming.
But it was hard to understand above his own shrieks that seemed to be fading now, echoing from an empty room. The pain was unreal and encompassing. It blotted out everything. It was like some impossible Oh-my-God wall of torture rising up around him and he seemed to be sinking down further, embraced by tentacles, his mouth filled with a stinging pulp that bloated his tongue in his mouth.
Then he was sinking, sucking in water and slowly, very slowly, everything was going gray. He could see nothing but tentacles and jelly, ruptured bits of the thing drifting everywhere in the cascading bubbles. And then everything was quiet. Still. No sound. No motion. Just that peaceful womblike grayness swallowing up all and everything
He felt himself sinking deeper.
Felt himself break the surface once again and then submerge for good.
Then nothing.
The men in the raft saw it all, watched it with stunned abject horror. George saw Soltz break the surface that last time, the bandage gone from his bad eye that was red and shining and filled with blood. That eye seemed to see him in the raft, it locked onto him and then sank beneath the foaming, dirty sea like a dying sun.
And that was the last they saw of Soltz.
10
When Saks came back, Fabrini was sleeping in his bunk. But Cook was awake. Wide awake, just sitting there and maybe trying to sort it all out in his mind which was no easy thing. Saks came through the door, his piggish face streaked with grime like he’d been crawling around down in a mechanic’s bay.
“Crycek back?” Cook asked.
Saks shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.
Menhaus went looking for him.”
“I suppose he’ll find him.”
Cook was waiting for the typical response from Saks, some homosexual innuendo, but he got none. Nothing about his mother entertaining football teams or his father fucking barnyard swine. None of the usual. Saks just stood there silently, a funny look in his eyes.
“You find anything?” Cook asked him.
“Not much. That fungus is everywhere. Found some skeletons below, but whoever owned ‘em died a long time ago.”
Saks said he found the galley, too. The cutlery was all tarnished, but usable. The food was long ago rotted away. Sacks of flour and sugar were full of fungus. Same went for casks of water and bread. But he did find several sealed containers of salt pork.
“You think it’s all right?” Cook asked him.
“Looks like it might be,” Saks said. “But I don’t know if I’d want to put any of it in my mouth.”
“Anything else?”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Saks nodded. “I didn’t see them… but I could hear them in the bulkheads. They were scratching.”
After that, Saks went back to his cabin, that funny look still in his eyes and Cook knew something was up. Either he had seen something or did something or was thinking about doing something. Regardless, Cook didn’t really care.
When Saks was gone, he locked the cabin door and curled up on his bunk on a mattress he’d found that wasn’t too mildewed. He covered himself with a waterproof blanket from the lifeboat and fell asleep almost instantly, thinking of scratching in the walls and rats. He dreamed of ghosts.
11
Thirty minues after Soltz went down, nobody on the raft had spoken. Maybe it was that they couldn’t speak in the aftermath of what they had seen and maybe it was that they were afraid of what they might say. Who they would say it to. Who they would blame. So maybe silence was best.
The jellyfish had disappeared with Soltz, but now it was back.
It wasn’t as close to the raft now, but just up ahead drifting with them. Its bell was nearly submerged, but now and again it would come up, then sink back down again. But even at that distance – maybe a hundred feet, right about where the fog swallowed everything – its tentacles were everywhere in the water. A fluttering skein of them that reached out, circling the boat and winding beneath it, trailing in the stillborn current like a mane. So, essentially, they were trapped.
And the idea of that was almost as painful as watching Soltz die in the caress of some sea monster.
Almost.
“So what now?” George heard himself say aloud, realizing he’d only meant to think that as he’d been thinking it for days now.
Gosling looked over towards the jelly, squinted his eyes. It looked pretty much like a gigantic plastic garbage bag, deflated and wrinkly up there, not smooth and taut as before. George’s voice had no effect on either it or its tentacles.
“Yeah,” Cushing said. “What now?”
“We wait,” Gosling told them.
“I’m sick of goddamn waiting, Gosling, I can’t take much more of it,” George said, knowing that finally, ultimately the Dead Sea was pushing him over the edge. He could feel his mind unwinding in his head like string from a spool. “I mean, I can’t take much more of this. Why don’t you put a flare into that motherfucker? See if it can feel some pain.”
“Piss it off?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? You didn’t see what that sonofabitch did to Soltz when he pissed it off? You want I should burn a hole in it, get it nice and mad? Okay, I’m game. Just tell me what we’re going to do when it comes at us, attacks the raft? Just tell me that, bright boy.”
