dirty and vile and polluted-looking and you hate it. Deep-down you just hate that filthy stuff, like smog just hanging there like a fucking blanket. But other times… those sounds, dammit, you’re almost glad it’s there. It hides you, you can hide in it and those things out there, you can’t see them and they can’t see you. Me and Mike… we were hearing those goddamn awful sounds out there. Things screaming and growling, making slobbering sounds like mud sucked through a hose. We didn’t want to know what those things were, we were afraid of what those things would look like
… what they would do to us…”
George understood perfectly. “There’s bad things out there.”
Pollard gripped his arm. “You know? You know what I was thinking while we waited out there? I was thinking… Jesus, it’s crazy.. . but I was just thinking that those things, them eating us wouldn’t be so bad, because there were probably worse things they could do.” Pollard cradled his head in his hands. “But Mike… what got him, it didn’t come out of the fog, it came up out of the water. Out of that slimy, stinking water. They came up quick and I thought, I thought they were people… they looked kind of like people, people covered in seaweed. Green tangles of seaweed. Those faces came out of the water, except they weren’t faces, but weeds, weeds that were alive and crawling like worms. One of them had an eye and that eye looked at me, right at me and it was a human eye, but… but crazy and psychotic, not human any more at all. They wrapped their weedy arms around Mike and Mike fucking screamed and I think I did, too, and those arms… all them weeds coiling and squirming like snakes.. . they pulled Mike down and he never came up. And I waited… yeah, I waited for hours and hours and maybe it was days, I just waited for those hands to take hold of me, those cold and worming hands…”
Sure, there was guilt and there was horror. There was a lot of horror, George figured. Pollard seeing those weed-people… for lack of a better name… taking Mike like that, taking him down into those black, oozing depths. And then Pollard alone, just waiting and waiting for those hands to take hold of him. Well, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped completely.
“It’s over and I know it’s over,” Pollard said, somehow defeated and wasted now. “But… I keep thinking I see Mike out there. I think sometimes I hear him calling to me…”
George said, “We all hear things out there. But none of it’s real. Maybe it’s in our heads and maybe it’s something toying with us, but it can’t be real unless we make it real. We believe. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Just take it easy,” George told him. “If you see anything or hear anything at all, just call me over, okay? I’ve seen things, too. We all have.”
George went and spelled Cushing at the oars and Pollard did the same for Chesbro. He was feeling pretty good, feeling like maybe he had some sort of sympathetic gift here. He could pull guys out of their shells and maybe, just maybe, he could even talk monster jellyfish out of eating people in rafts.
“Well?” Gosling said.
“He went through some bad shit,” George told him. “I think he’ll be okay. But you might want to tell Marx to go easy on him.”
“Already did,” Gosling said. “Thanks, George.”
George just smiled, thinking, well that’s my place in all this, I suppose. Marx is the engineer and Gosling is in charge, Chesbro’s the minister and Cushing is the scientist. Me? I’m the therapist.
Christ, of all things.
23
Menhaus had been watching the candle burn down. Watching the wax run down the stem and pool at the base. He kept thinking that all he really wanted to do was to keep that candle burning. Somewhere during the process, he must have dozed off even though he had pretty much given up on sleep now as an impossibility. Yet, it had happened.
It must have happened.
For the next thing he knew his eyes were opening and he was seeing not the candle, but Makowski standing there, head cocked like a dog listening for its master. He seemed to be swaying on his feet to some unheard music.
Or was it unheard?
Menhaus was hearing something, he thought. But something distant, a sound, a melody… but coming from far away and resonating only in the back of his head.
“Slim,” he found himself saying. “Slim… what the hell are you doing?”
But Makowski did not answer.
He was staring at the door, hearing something that seemed to be intended only for him. His mental shortwave had locked onto some channel and that was obvious. He was receiving and the rest of the world had ceased to exist for him.
Menhaus turned and looked over at Saks.
“Yeah, I’m awake,” Saks said. “The only one sleeping here is Slim Loony, I think.”
And it did look like he was sleeping. Drugged or hypnotized, the way sleepwalkers often looked, that morphic gleam to their eyes. Makowski looked much like that. His eyes were fixed and staring, he was rubbing his hands against his legs. His conscious mind was locked-up in a box somewhere and his subconscious was at the wheel now.
Menhaus knew they always said you weren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but it was probably just one of those old wife’s tales, a whaddyacallit, urban legend.
No, he thought, I won’t wake him… unless he makes for that door.
“What do you think?” he whispered to Saks.
Saks just shrugged. He didn’t give a shit one way or another.
Makowski just stood there, listening.
Menhaus thought he was hearing that sound again… or was he? A weird, uncanny humming or was it a whistling? He could just hear it, but not clearly enough to decipher its nuances, its rhythm and flow, not enough so that he could say without a doubt that, yes, he was hearing it.
He looked over at Saks and Saks had his knife out, like he was expecting trouble. His eyes were narrowed, his teeth set.
“What’s going on here?” Menhaus said, because he knew something was. The atmosphere of the cabin had never been exactly cheerful and sunny, but right then it had gone positively bleak, crawling with something. A something you could sense, could feel like poison in your blood.
Saks waited, drew out that silence, said, “There’s someone out in the corridor.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“There is,” Saks said with complete certainty. His eyes were filled with a dim, brooding light. Maybe it was just candlelight reflected and maybe it was something more. “There’s someone out there waiting for Makowski. He can hear it, whoever it is… he can hear it just fine.”
Menhaus swallowed, had trouble doing so.
Sure, he was picking up on it now, too. He wanted badly to tell Saks how wrong he was, but it just wasn’t in him. Because he was hearing something… a creaking or groaning out in the corridor and that sound, subtle as it was, set him on edge. Made his nerve endings tingle and the muscles of his abdomen pull up tight. More than just an old ship settling, more than just a creaking or groaning… this was the sound of occupancy, of someone waiting in the dankness out there. A secretive sound, one that was calculating and deceitful… and disturbing because of it.
Like someone sneaking into your house in the dead of night to steal your children or slit your throat, Menhaus thought.
He did not like it at all.
Makowski went to the door and stopped. Just stood there dumbly like a zombie in a canefield awaiting his orders. Menhaus sat up now, careful to make no sound whatsoever. And he thought: C’mon, Slim, don’t open that
