beam?”
Crycek grinned at the idea.
“Any ideas, Fabrini?” Saks said.
Fabrini twisted a bit, but covered himself. “Who knows? So long ago, who could say?” Cook started breathing again. Goddamn Fabrini.. . how did he let the doctor’s name slip?
Menhaus and Crycek were not interested in any of that, but Saks was. He knew he was on to something here. He had sensed some secret shared between Cook and Fabrini and he wasn’t going to let go of it. Like a tongue working a sore tooth, he was going to keep at it. As they walked down the corridors, slopping through those mats of fungi, the lanterns creating wild and sinister shapes around them, he kept suggesting places they could investigate, digging and probing, trying to find out something that Cook and Fabrini did not want him to know about.
“I’d like to take a look at the engine room,” he said, watching Fabrini for a sign of discomfort. “That sound good to you, Fabrini?”
Fabrini looked at Cook, looked away. “Don’t matter to me.”
“We were already down there,” Cook said. “Nothing to see but a lot of rusty machinery.”
“Old steam turbines, I bet,” Saks said. “You wanna check ‘em out, Menhaus?”
“Why not?”
There was no way to get out of it.
So down they went into that cavernous blackness, the lanterns peeling the darkness back layer by layer. They stood before the rusted, seized up turbines which were gigantic.
“Look at that piston,” Menhaus said, in awe, as always, of mechanical things. “Bigger than a pillar… and solid fucking brass. Jesus.”
There were a few inches of slimy gray water on the floor. They checked the machine shops and storerooms, found the pile of bones Cook and Fabrini had found… but the giant sea lice were gone. That was a good thing. Saks was trying to force a rusted hatch. With Menhaus’ help, it came open with a terrible groaning that seemed to shake the ship. There was a companionway beyond it, a set of black iron steps.
“The bilge must be down here,” Saks said. “Let’s take a look.”
There was no arguing with the guy. He felt that he was on to something and nobody could talk him out of it, even if he was light years away from the logbook that so disturbed Cook and Fabrini. Saks in the lead, they went down those creaking steps that were thick with slime and mold.
“Smells bad down here,” Menhaus said. “You smell that?”
They all did. A black, filthy odor of decay and stagnance. A stench of moist, dripping subcellars, closets threaded with wood rot, caskets plucked from muddy graves. Things buried or that should have been buried. It was a stink similar to the rest of the ship, but down here the volume had definitely been turned up. It was actually warm and yeasty, curiously alive with a sweet/sour tang of organic profusion like a hothouse filled with jungle orchids.
Not a good smell at all.
Cook had smelled something like that once before. When he was a boy, beneath his Uncle Bobby’s trailer home. Bobby’s old dog, Bobo, had disappeared the autumn before and come June, when the weather turned warm, they followed the stench under the trailer and found him. Down there amongst the cobwebs and spiders, mouse droppings and rotting cardboard boxes, old Bobo lay. He had sickened and crawled down there to die. Cook was the first to see him. He had literally rotted in half. A black fungus was growing out of his eye sockets and hindquarters, a slimy collection of toadstools sprouting from his belly. What Cook was smelling now reminded him of that – hot, moist germination.
The deck down there was flooded with about two feet of water. The hull was breached in half a dozen locations. Weeds had grown up through the holes and were threaded along the bulkheads. The bilge trough itself was thick with weeds and black, oozing water.
And that was bad.
“Jesus, lookit those holes,” Menhaus said. “This goddamn wreck could sink at any moment.”
But Cook said he didn’t think it would. It was actually marooned in the weeds. They must have been thick beneath the ship beyond belief.
“Watch that trough,” Saks told them, leading them on.
“What the hell do you expect to find down here?” Cook asked him.
But Saks didn’t answer. He stepped lightly, over tangles of weed that were green and thick and thriving. Cook wanted them to turn back. What they were smelling, it was more than the stink of the weed. It was something else. A growing, noxious odor and he did not like it. From time to time he thought he heard a sort of secretive rustling from up ahead.
They passed around an arch of riveted steel and Saks stopped.
He brought his light up so they could all see. See that forest of white, pulsating things that grew up through an immense rent in the hull of the ship. They looked at first like the stems of some weird plant, but as Saks held the light up, they could see that they were wormlike, about as thick as fence posts and hollow. Hundreds of them, slithering and rustling, black mouths set at their ends.
“What the fuck?” Menhaus said.
“Worms,” Cook told them, his skin crawling at the sight of them. “I think they’re tube worms… like the kind you see around smoker vents on the ocean floor.”
It was hard to say whether they were dangerous or not and nobody was getting close enough to find out, but they were certainly hideous. Squirming and horribly alive, standing straight up like saplings, mouths opening and closing like those of fish.
Cook almost felt like screaming at the sight of them.
In his mind, he saw himself lost without a light, stumbling around down here, falling into the bilge and dragging himself back up, all snarled with weeds and then… then falling into that creeping mass of tube worms. Feeling them coil around him, brushing his arms and face with their hot, rubbery corpse-flesh.
But it was only his imagination hurting him here. The worms appeared to be stationary and they couldn’t get to him. But such thoughts, once born are not so easily dismissed. They exist in the dark spaces between rational thoughts, in the shadows of logic.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Saks said.
And then they were moving, trying not stumble over one another or fall into the bilge. Behind them, they could hear those worms moving and sliding against one another and by the time they got up the stairs to the engineroom, they had to stop themselves from running in blind panic.
No more was said about it.
As they made their way out of the engine room, they heard a sound. They all heard it.
Footsteps.
The sound of footsteps.
Someone was coming down the companionway ladder.
13
Everyone froze
Everyone just stood there.
Cook went for his gun, thinking that this had to be the very worst thing you could possibly hear on an old derelict: the sound of footsteps coming in your direction. He thanked God then and there than he was not alone. He wasn’t sure he could have handled this alone.
The footsteps stopped outside the hatch. They could hear someone out there, someone breathing hard as if they’d run a long way. Of course, in everyone’s mind, it was not that at all, it was something far worse. Some dead and dripping thing sheathed with fungus coming to pay them a call.
There was the sound of scraping as the latch was worked from the other side. That harsh breathing. The door opened a few inches and Saks, good old hardass Saks, pulled it open all the way and took hold of whoever-or
