“Sure,” Marx said. “People handle it different ways, I suspect. But, way I see it, we got a hell of a plot to hoe, we don’t stick together and toughen up, we might as well drop our pants and jump in that slop, let the first thing that swims by make a sandwich out of our bare asses.”
“Amen to that,” Cushing said.
George wasn’t sure what to make of Marx. He was a tough bastard, to be sure, not exactly sympathetic, but something told him the chief engineer was okay. Down deep, he was a good guy… you got past the salty language.
Marx maybe read his mind, because he looked over at George, smiled, stroked his mustache which was flecked with silver. “Don’t mind me, boys, I just go off sometimes. I’m not so bad as I sound. But we got to toughen our asses up. That’s how I see it. Every man for himself doesn’t wash dirty shorts here. We gotta stay tight and stay hard. Am I right, First?”
“As rain,” Gosling said. “As always.”
Cushing cleared his throat. “But Pollard’s right, you know.”
“How’s that?” Marx asked.
“In saying we should be real careful of that back door. In this place, we should be careful of every door.” He had everyone’s attention now and that was what he’d wanted. “Way I see it, we slipped through some kind of door into this place, some kind of warp, if you will. Vortex. Time/space distortion. Wormhole. Call it what you want. If there’s a doorway into our world there just might be doorways into others. We had best be careful we don’t walk through the wrong one.”
That gave everyone something to chew over in their minds.
“I mean, some of the things we’ve seen here… some of the local wildlife… who can say if it’s even native to this place? It might have been pulled in from other places. Maybe.”
George thought that made sense. Most of it was probably native, but some of it could have been as alien as they were. Possibly. Just a theory, but it held some water when you thought about it. And George had been thinking about such things. “I like it, Cushing,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe all those crazy stories of sea monsters sailors reported, maybe they were things that got vomited out of this place and into ours.”
“Sure,” Marx said, “why in the Christ not? I shipped with a boilermaker out of Baton Rouge when I was first a deckhand. Claimed he saw something off of the Ivory Coast like out of one of them prehistoric movies, long neck and all, Loch Ness monster-type. Said it was pea-green and had teeth like knives. Dove before they could get a good picture of it. Maybe that shitter swam out of here.”
“Sounds like a plesiosaur,” Cushing said.
“Sounds fine to me,” Marx said. “Fucking sea monster, all right. You seem to know your science, son. You a scientist or some shit?”
“No. I just like the stuff, natural history and all that. A hobby, I guess.”
George knew he was being modest. Cushing was a trove of information. And as George well knew most hobbyists knew more about their chosen obssessions than did most experts. When something was your blood and soul, rather than your bread and butter, you lived it. You drank it and breathed it and slept it. He figured Cushing was like that.
“Well, we can sure use your head,” Marx said. “When we find that way out, we’ll let you pick door number one or two or three.”
George thought that you just had to admire Marx’s energy level. He was always up, always ready to tango. To a guy like him, pessimism was unthinkable. Not among his natural rhythms. If you were to ask him, George figured, Marx would have said that pessimists weren’t nothing but sissies with philosophy and good diction.
Gosling said, “Let’s rope the raft to your lifeboat and do some rowing. I have a feeling these channels through the weed here, by accident or purpose, lead somewhere. And I want to know where that is.”
“And there’s a drift here,” Marx said. “And it’s pulling us in that general direction. Sooner or later we’re going there, might as well row our nuts off and get a look at it before it gets a look at us.”
Chesbro looked like he was going to say something, but shut his mouth.
Which George figured was probably a good thing.
Marx explained to them that anyone else that got spit into this place would drift in the same direction, chances were. So that if there were other survivors they would be up ahead. “And who knows? If this is the same place that’s been sucking ships and planes out of the Triangle and the Sargasso since god-knows-when, they’re probably up there, too. Jesus, we could find a good boat… I could get my hands on some engines and fuel… shit, I’d either push us back home or make one hell of a stab at it.”
And that, George realized, was about as close as you were going to come to a reason to live in this place.
It was too much to hope for… but it was better than drifting and brooding. He had a funny feeling they were poised at the edge of revelation. He just hoped it didn’t have big teeth and an empty belly.
18
When Menhaus came awake, he knew instinctively something was wrong.
His eyelids fluttering open, he could not put a name to it. But he could feel it, same way you can feel someone in the darkness with you. You do not need to see them or be told that they are there, you can feel it. An invasive sense of presence… no less palpable than fingernails drawn up your spine.
Saks was snoring lightly.
Menhaus could not see Makowski. It was too dim in the cabin. Shadows nested like snakes, finding each other, combining, mating, breeding a slithering brood of shifting darkness.
Menhaus tried to blink it away, for there was something positively unnatural about that darkness.
He listened. Yes, he could hear it. He could hear the darkness.
Just a subtle whisper of motion, but he’d sensed it, felt it somehow. And now he heard it: a wet, dragging sound. Like a soaked, moth-eaten blanket dragged over the floor. Swallowing, he pulled himself up on his elbows, craning his neck, listening. There. He heard it again. A secretive, moving noise. Menhaus imagined that’s how snakes would sound in the dark… but it wasn’t snakes; he knew that much. Not here. Not in this dead ship in the boundless graveyard sea. No, this was a stealthy, intelligent locomotion. The sound of something trying to be quiet. Something that knew it was being listened to and was trying not to be heard.
He wanted to write it off to imagination, to nerves, but he was beyond all that now.
For not only could he hear it, he could smell it now.
A rank, wet smell. The stink of something from the bottom of a pond.
Carefully, Menhaus found his lighter and flicked it into life.
“Saks?” he whispered softly. “Saks?”
Nothing. Saks was out cold.
Only that rustling, breathing motion.
Menhaus swung his legs over the bunk and hopped off. But quietly, a cat dropping soundlessly to the floor. He snatched one of the candles they’d purloined from the lounge and lit it.
Makowski’s berth was empty.
No, not empty. Not exactly. There was a form there, a shape, a sense of solidity. Makowski was there, all right, but wrapped in a net of shadow.
Except that the shadow wasn’t moving… it was not evaporating as the light hit it.
Yes, as he approached Makowski with the candle the darkness did not retreat. It hung over him like a shroud. Blacker than black, glistening and wet, an oil slick of shadow. It seemed to almost shudder at the intrusion of light like it was not shadow at all, but something pretending to be shadow.
Menhaus felt his heart seize momentarily in his chest.
Makowski was enveloped in the stuff.
He looked like he’d been dipped in tar.
As Menhaus brought the candle closer, closer, the mass began to slide off of Makowski, running like hot wax from his staring face. A thick, serpentine clot of it deserted his open mouth with the sound of viscera yanked from
