sort of horror.
“Listen,” Saks said. “Listen… ”
And there it was, coming down the corridor: a high-pitched, mournful whistling/wailing sound, like some eerie dirge piped from a throat stuffed with ashes and dry things. It carried a profane melody to it.
Jesus. Cook felt his heart suddenly just stop dead in his chest like something had gripped it… it stopped, then began to beat so fast he thought he would pass out. Droplets of cold sweat burst out on his forehead. His lips felt as though they’d been tack-welded shut.
Saks was scared.
Scared like Cook had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. All that tough-guy machismo had melted away into a tepid shivering puddle. The gray streaks in his hair looked positively white and those bags under his eyes were like pouches.
Cook could only imagine what he must have looked like.
That whistling came again… only it was not so distant now, it was closer and more shrill. And there was something morbidly seductive about that melody it carried, made you want to stay put until you could see the mouth that sang it.
“She’s coming,” Saks said.
Cook had his gun out.
He took hold of the lantern and walked out into the corridor and it took every bit of strength he had. There was nothing out there. Nothing but clutching shadows that seemed viscidly alive and coiling. Motes of dust spinning in the light. No, there was nothing there, but there soon would be. He was smelling that sharp stink of ozone again because lightning was about to strike. Something was about to strike. .. something creeping and leggy and impossible. Something grinning and insane and lonesome. The sort of grin that haunts your childhood nightmares… just a smiling mouth with long yellow teeth and no face to go with them.
The whistling came again.
Came with a volume that made them curdle inside.
It was so close… it could only be around the next bend in the corridor. And Cook thought… yes… thought he could hear her coming, all those legs scratching along the bulkhead like a thousand scraping nails.
Run for godsake! a voice was shouting in his head. Get the fuck out of here… if you see what comes around that bend, if you see what comes creeping along the wall…
They started running, pounding through that fungus and nearly going on their asses half a dozen times. They went up one companionway, then another until they reached the deck. They could hear that mad, insectile skittering behind them, something like a braying laughter echoing through a black and shuttered attic… and then Saks slammed the hatch on the deckhouse shut, secured the latch.
And almost immediately, on the other side, the sound of many things rasping and clawing against the rusted steel door. Things like knives and hooks and awls.
They ran until they found their cabins.
And did not dare breathe until their doors were shut and locked.
20
They were rowing and making some distance, according to Gosling. It was an ungainly craft they had roped together, the lifeboat on one side and the oblong raft on the other. But with two men on either side pulling with the oars, they were indeed moving.
Marx and Gosling took their break together, as the other four pulled.
“We’re going to come onto something,” Marx said. “I can feel it now.”
Strange thing was, Gosling could feel it, too. They were going somewhere and he could feel it in his bones. A certainty that they were getting close to something.
“Way I’m figuring this whole shitting thing,” Marx was saying, “is that we’re going to be finding some boats. We’ve got to. And maybe people, too, because this drift leads somewhere. A dumping ground, a junkyard… whatever in the Christ you want to call it. Wouldn’t you say, First?”
Gosling nodded. “There’s something out there. I know that much. I guess I keep wondering, thinking that if we survived this, then others must have, too.”
“You… you try your VHF?” Marx asked him.
“Yeah. There’s nothing out there, nothing you want to hear.”
“We tried it for a time… but some of the shit we heard out there, well, it didn’t do my boys much good. Didn’t do me much good either. Just that static out there… never heard static like that before. Now and again…”
“A distress call?”
“You got it. But crazy, spooky shit. Maybe we imagined it.”
“Not unless we imagined it, too.”
Marx looked thoughtful. “You ever see any of them Devil’s Triangle shows on Discovery or one of them?”
“Sure.”
“You probably heard about Flight 19, then?”
Gosling had. Happened in 1945. Five Navy torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale and flew into oblivion. A search plane sent out to look for them vanished, too. No wreckage found, not so much as a slick of oil. Even all these years later, it was one of the great Bermuda Triangle mysteries, a point of great controversy.
“Well,” Marx said, “we kept picking up distress calls. Some fellow saying how they were flying into ‘white water’ and then later, one about being ‘lost in the fog, the bottomless fog.’ It was pretty spooky stuff. I didn’t link it up with Flight 19 until I heard something on the VHF a few hours later. ‘FT, FT, FT, FT’… just repeated on and on like that. You know what ‘FT’ was?”
Gosling shook his head.
“That was part of Flight 19’s call letters.” Marx swallowed. “You’re probably wondering how it is I know that, how I might remember such a thing.”
Gosling, staring out into the fog, was wondering exactly that.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Marx rubbed his eyes, looked very uncomfortable suddenly. “Had me an uncle, named Tommy. My old man’s younger brother. I never met him. He was a radioman on one of those Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared out there all those years ago. Now and again, my old man would get in a funny mood, start talking about the Brooklyn neighborhood he was raised in. Soon enough, he’d be talking about Uncle Tommy and what happened to him. The old man didn’t buy the official U.S. Navy line about them just going down… all those planes, without a spot of wreckage. He didn’t believe any of it. The old man was of the mind that something out there reached out and grabbed Tommy and the rest of them boys. He would never say what he thought it was. But it haunts him to this day.”
Marx went on to say that his old man was in his eighties now. And every December he went down to Florida on the anniversary of Flight 19’s disappearance, out to Ft. Lauderdale and just stood there for a few hours, staring out over the sea, remembering his brother and praying for him.
“Yeah, the old man’s getting on in years, First, but sometimes he still talks about it. Told me he talked with some of the other crew members’ families and none of them believe what the Navy said either. Still don’t.” Marx shrugged. “I’m thinking Flight 19 ended up here. In this goddamned place. Maybe, maybe if I could find some trace of it out there and get my ass out through one of them doors Cushing was talking about… well, I think my old man could die in peace finally knowing. But one way or another, First, I got to get out of here. I don’t want my old man dying thinking that something out there took his son, too.”
Gosling patted his arm, knowing it had been hard for Marx to admit any of that. Like most sailors, he wasn’t given to airing his family secrets in public. Wasn’t given to showing a hint of the softness all men had at their core. What he had shared with Gosling was almost a sacred thing and Gosling knew he had to treat it as such.
“I’ll do anything I can to help,” Gosling told him.
“Hell, I know that, First. I knew you would without me even squeezing my soul out to you. That’s the kind of
