A shadow up there… it was Makowski’s shadow thrown against a bulkhead by the ghostly, shimmering illumination of the fog. Cook could not see him, but he could see that shadow. It looked stiff and artificial, its owner more mannequin than man. An effigy and nothing more. The singing was louder now, the tapping, the creeping of too many legs.
Cook made to climb the ladder up to the boat deck… then he paused.
He was smelling that acrid, ozone-like stink again. It was sharp and nauseating, filled his mind with a sickly plastic warmth that was consuming, that shut him down on some primary level.
Cook teetered.
The voice was loud, very loud. Sweet and profane and somehow soothing.
He shook it off, put a foot on the ladder… and got no further.
She was coming.
Cook could not see her, not really, and he was grateful for it. What he saw silhouetted against that bulkhead above was her shadow approaching that of Makowski’s. His was an inert form, something cut from black paper and immovable. Hers was hunched and contorted and bulbous, a chimeric thing that was not really a woman, but maybe two women slinking along in a gunny sack, trying to look natural. But whatever she was, whatever the lunatic memory of Lydia Stoddard had mutated into, subsisting on blackness and stark remembrance, it was not natural. She skittered along, hunched-over and lurching. She moved with the sound of crackling static electricity, with the sound of a thousand fingernails drawn over a thousand blackboards… squeaking and scraping and tapping and rustling.
Cook felt something die inside of him.
Felt it gasp its last breath and fall to moldering bones. Just the see-sawing shadow of Lydia Stoddard was enough to fill your mind with venom, enough to leech the light from your soul… but to look upon it, to actually see it in the flesh, moving and writhing and staring at you with a cold, remorseless appetite… that would have stripped your mind barren.
Cook knew he had to run.
Knew he had to get away before he saw something that would haunt his nightmares far worse than what he’d already seen, but he had to look. His thinking brain demanded proof that this could possibly be.
And it got it.
Got it as a scream filled Cook up, needing to be vented and coming out in a pitiful, airless gasp.
When the woman’s shadow got within a few feet of Makowski’s… she opened up, she bloomed like a spider orchid, erupted into a hideous collection of waving, clicking appendages that reached out like a hand, reached out and grasped Makowski.
And then Makowski screamed… screamed his soul out. Screamed like his guts were being pulled out with cold metal hooks. And maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth. Cook turned away, the shadows above combined into one busy, clicking, chittering profusion of things moving and things rending, things spinning and things vibrating like the needles of sewing machines.
As Cook made it back through the hatch, he heard a wet and meaty snapping from up there and then sucking sounds.
He ran.
He ran down the steps, not going on his ass, nearly floating down them. He found the corridor, his mind shut down, but his belly demanding that he stop and vomit it all out. But he knew that if he did, that if he let his knees find that slimy fungus-covered deck and let his mouth purge it all, it would not stop with what was in his stomach. He would keep retching until everything he was, was voided, until he was an empty shell lying on the floor, shaking and gasping and utterly mad.
There was no stopping. No hesitation. No nothing.
He made it to the cabins and pounded on the doors, the bulkheads, anything his fists could find.
And when those faces appeared, Cook said, “Pack it up… pack it all up. We’re getting the fuck off this goddamn morgue and we’re getting off right now…”
25
They moved fast.
Nobody asked questions, they just did what Cook told them, knowing there was a good goddamn reason for him wanting them off the Cyclops. They worked as a team and it was good for them, it was reviving and necessary. Crycek pitched in wholeheartedly, just glad to be leaving that ghost ship and its attendant nightmares behind. They packed up blankets and survival gear, filled three lanterns with kerosene and took the candles.
Then they made the corridor and Saks told them to stop.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen… ”
And they all heard it, heard her coming for them. Heard that creeping, skittering sound of her moving along the corridor and maybe not on the deck, but over the walls or ceilings, but definitely coming now. She was singing that unearthly dirge and maybe singing their names and counting their bones and drooling for their blood.
“Go the other way,” Cook told them.
He kept the flashlight pointed down the corridor as Saks led the others off to the other companionway. Cook did not see her. He ran after the others just as she would have rounded the bend. He ran along, slopping through the fungi and he was the last one up the companionway ladder that echoed with frantic footsteps. His mind reached out for that door, for freedom, long before he physically found it and he was certain, dead certain, that at the last moment she would drag him back into the darkness, take hold of him and suck him dry of juices.
“C’mon, Cook!” Fabrini cried.
He got a hand hooked around the hatch frame and she was right behind him, hissing and breathing and clawing, coming on with a mind-numbing stench of mucus-licked cobwebs and dried carapaces. And then, just then, something looped around his ankle, then his knee, the bend of his left arm. Silk. A living, coiling, snaking silk roping over him and her breath was on him smelling of violated caskets as she tried to web him, pull him down.
Somebody screamed.
Cook brought the Browning back and squeezed-off three shots.
And broke free.
He did not really see what he hit. Just a chitinous-fleshed blur that was oily and leggy and what might have been a chewing black mouth dripping brown sap.
And then he was out, pitched face-first on the deck.
From the mouth of the companionway came a screeching, squealing roar.
“Close that fucking door!” he heard himself shout.
And then Fabrini and Saks threw everything they had into it and Cook heard it slam into something, something pulpy and moist like rotting fruit and then the door was shut, the latch secured.
And on the other side, she was scratching and grinding and rasping with all those needle-tipped legs.
They ran.
They made it to the boarding ladder and went down one by one while Cook stood there with the gun in his fist. When it was his turn, he looked one last time and saw a flurry of limbs come bursting out of the mouth of a ventilator shaft. He did not wait to see what they were connected to.
When he made the lifeboat, Saks didn’t bother untying the nylon rope, he sawed through it with his knife and planted a foot against the derelict and kicked off with everything he had. The lifeboat drifted out into the weeds. By then there were oars in hands and everyone was paddling madly, pushing the boat out towards the channel through that clotted weed.
“Row!” Saks was crying out. “For the love of God, row!”
And then the bow of the lifeboat cut through the weeds and into the channel and they were well out of her range. But they’d looked back, looked back just once as they pulled away from the ship. And she was waiting there, up at the top of the boarding ladder. Her face was a white blur like an out-of-focus photograph. But you could see her eyes and they were like yellow dying stars sinking into black godless nebula. Those eyes hated. They raged. But mostly, they hungered.
