Cook saw her and so did the others.
But what he was really looking at were her hands above, hooked over the railing. They were not hands. They were discolored thorny claws.
Then the mist took her.
Took the Cyclops and buried it in a shroud of coveting fog.
“What… Jesus Christ… what was that?” Menhaus said.
But Cook would not say. Would never say. “Row,” he said. “Just keep rowing and don’t stop.”
26
The fog was getting thicker and the men were getting tired.
Their arms were beginning to feel like rubber from all the oaring they’d been doing. But it was a good sort of tired. A physical exhaustion that none of them had felt in days and days and it sat on them just right, that weariness. They’d been mentally wrung-out for too long now and it felt good that their bodies were catching up.
They were deeper into the weed all the time and as yet, they had not seen a single thing worth noting except some debris out there. Bits of wood and what might have been part of a seat cushion once. Maybe these were things from the Mara Corday and maybe things from another ship.
The fog was a constant, of course.
Once again, it was growing thick as cotton fluff.
Opaque, expanding and blooming, rising up in dirty-yellow sheets and sparkling white tarps like oozing swamp gas. Boiling and surging and brewing with a boggy, filmy haze. Just a crazyquilt fusion of dirty sackcloth and moldering canvas with absolutely no boundaries. You could sit there, like George, and watch it happen. Watch the fog move and breathe and convolute, full of whirlpools and eddies and secret gloom, something fermented and distilled feeding off its own corroding, steaming marrow. Smell its sewer-stink of stagnant leechfields and leaf- clotted cisterns.
It was an odious thing, a misting desert that could swallow you alive, turn you around, smother you gradually in its own smoldering weave.
And as it grew thicker, the world went darker. That’s how they knew night was coming on, what passed for night in this place. It had been brighter out for some time now, the fog and sea suffused with that dirty illumination that was and would never be a sunny day back home, but more of a rainy and gray overcast afternoon. But even that was coming to an end now. A darkness was being born out in the fog, a creeping murk and the light was fading.
But for how long?
That was really the question. How long was night here and how long was day? There had to be some rhythm to it, some pattern. According to what Gosling had told George, the only way he could accurately calculate how long they’d been out there was by his system of rationing food and water. And according to that, what they’d used so far, they were four days into the mist now.
Four days.
Jesus.
The first day, George knew, had been dark, the only real light was that coming from the fog itself. That must have been night. Though it was never nearly as dark as a dark night back home. That first day was night then and they’d had something like three days of daylight since. Did that mean it would be shadowy for a few more days?
Christ, the idea of it was almost too much.
And George was thinking: I’m trapped in a fucking Roger Corman movie.
Or maybe a Skinner box. Rats running the maze, enough food and water to keep them alive and a piece of cheese dangled before them to keep their minds from going completely to slush. And that piece of cheese, of course, was the possibility they’d find land or another ship trapped out there. Anything would have been welcome. Just to put their feet on something solid, something big enough that you could walk around on and pretend you weren’t trapped in that Dead Sea.
When things got really desperate, it didn’t take much to satisfy the human mind.
But nobody has really gone mad yet, George thought. Not stark raving slit-your-own-throat mad. Not just yet. Sure, Pollard’s disturbed, but that’s not quite the same thing, now is it?
And it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. But it was coming and he could see it in everyone’s eyes the way they could see it in his. Madness was out there, just up ahead maybe. Waiting. They couldn’t drift in this murk forever. Because if they did, lack of food and water would be the least of their worries. The human mind could only take so much and that fog was suffocating them slowly and surely.
George looked out at the sea which was slimy and scummed in a membrane of algae and rotting organic matter. To all sides were those huge and heaving islands of decomposing weed. Yes, mentally it would kill them eventually and maybe physically, too. God only knew what sort of poisons they were breathing in minute by minute.
George sat there, feeling sleep heavy on him.
He was staring at the back of his hand when he realized there was light shining on it. A dim, dirty sort of light and it wasn’t from the fog. He didn’t know how long he’d been seeing it.
He looked up and saw where the light was coming from.
Everyone else was seeing it, too, staring up blankly at what was above them, above the mist.
“Well, I’ll be a cocksucker,” Marx said.
For above the mist, hazy and obscured, but still quite visible, the moon had come out. In fact, two moons had come out. The first, which seemed to be directly above them, was much larger than the full moon back home. This one was the size of a dinner plate and the color of fresh blood. The other, farther off behind them, was small and a dirty yellow-brown like an old penny pulled from a sidewalk crack.
Cushing just said, “Shit.”
Gosling and Chesbro just stared up at those moons in rapt fascination, savages considering the face… or faces… of their god. Pollard refused to look, did not want to see them.
George stared dumbfounded, thinking for one moment that they were not moons at all, but eyes set in some gigantic misty face. But they were moons, all right. Alien and somehow spooky, but moons all the same. Satellites caught in the orbit of whatever this place was called.
“Well that settles it,” Marx said. “This ain’t the Gulf of fucking Mexico after all.”
And that made George laugh.
Bad thing was, he couldn’t seem to stop.
PART FOUR
1
S O THEY DRIFTED THROUGH the weed for what might have been hours upon hours, or possibly days and weeks and maybe a year. Time was compressed in that place, flattened, drawn-out… it was plastic and shifting and refused to hold shape. It moved painfully slow or ran so quickly it left you dizzy. And maybe, just maybe, time did not move at all. Maybe it was stagnant here. Dead and rotted like everything else.
“And maybe it’s all our imagination,” George said.
