They were on the oars again, pushing through that congested sea, through the heavy, grim fog which was a fuming mass of vapors and veils and contaminated brume. It drifted over the raft and lifeboat in snaking tendrils that looked like they wanted to strangle you, wanted to crawl down your throat and nest.
“What’s that, George?” Gosling said, working the oars behind him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud, I guess.”
George felt the oar in his hand, liked the feel. It was something to hold on to, an extension of your own muscles and sweat and drive. It was a good thing meeting the Dead Sea as they were, meeting it and fighting it and maybe besting it with nothing but human compulsion, will, and hard work. And when your muscles were taxed, were aching and throbbing and flexed tight as bailing wire, well, it tapped your strength and that was a good thing. Because then your mind did not have all that extra energy to feed itself with, to create fantasies and nightmares that made your flesh crawl.
That’s what George liked about rowing.
That’s why he liked the feel of that oar in his hand and just wished he had two of them.
Because lately, well, his mind was turning a little too quickly and the old bullshit machine called imagination was spinning tales with the best of ‘em. Things George shouldn’t be thinking about. If he thought about them too much he was afraid they would become obsessions and that was only a few feet away from a full-blown psychosis in his way of thinking.
No time for that. Not here. I’ve got to keep on my toes, George thought, and not just for myself, but for the others. They need me and, dear Christ, I cannot let them down. Not in this horrible place.
And what of this horrible place? George’s mind put to him. What about it? Have you ever really, really thought about where you are? And not in the context of whether this is an alien world or some dead-end dimension stuck between two universes, nothing like that. Because, George, you know that point is mute. It doesn’t matter where this place is. Just a black corridor of cosmic insanity with earth at one end and something unknowable and unthinkable at the other end. There. That’s it. But have you ever thought about what this place is and who might be behind it?
And, honestly, George had not.
Had not and did not want to. Sure, he’d given some thought to his little theory of the Fog-Devil, the Nemesis of this place. But he had never, for one solitary moment, let himself believe that this Fog-Devil was calling the shots. For Earth, they said, had its own devil, but he was not in charge of things. The creator, they said, had brought light and breath and life into the world; the Devil just corrupted it when he or she or it got the chance. And George had applied this old world thinking to this new, awful place. This was not Hell, this was just a back alley of creation where terrible things crawled and slithered in the evolutionary soup. That’s all it was. A dimensional sewer of the sort science fiction writers and even some scientists themselves had confessed might exist. That’s all. Nothing more and this purely figurative, hypothetical Fog-Devil was just another of its natural/unnatural occupants.
But what if he was wrong?
Not about the Fog-Devil or any of that business, but about the very nature of this place? What if it was all the playground of some demented and arcane intelligence? Something that watched and learned, but showed itself no more than the watcher of a TV showed himself to the actors being taped? What if this was all some grand amusement for something alien and omnipotent, so far above man it could rightly be called a god? It was crazy thinking, but George thought it regardless. If any of that were true, though, then maybe all of this was in his head, maybe it was all images projected into his mind by something with the power to do so. It reminded him of an old Outer Limits episode where the crew of a downed bomber were trapped in a weird sea
… only to discover it was a drop of water beneath some immense alien microscope.
“George,” Gosling said. “Why’d you stop rowing?”
“I’ve just been thinking some bad shit,” he said.
To which Gosling simply said, “Well, stop it for chrissake. Grab that oar and fucking pull on it.”
You couldn’t beat stripped down logic like that.
George started rowing.
2
“Jesus,” Gosling said, “lookit this damn fog now.”
Marx was standing up in the lifeboat, the mist so heavy he looked ghostly. “Shitting bad,” he said. “It’s like the peas without the soup.”
The fog had come in now, really come in. Before it had only hinted at its arrival, but now it had come. It was easily as bad as it had been on the Mara Corday when they’d first entered its sucking, execrable depths. It was not a casual envelopment. The fog fell over them in winding sheets and moldering rugs, an immense and billowing fleece, encompassing them in its viscous, woolen gulfs which were moist and decayed-smelling like coffin linings. It was steaming and hazing and brewing like a dirty, greasy mantle of steam rising from a black and bubbling cauldron. It carried a briny, gray stench to it and it literally descended on the raft and lifeboat like a blizzard, like a sandstorm… blinding and dense and coveting.
George saw it come.
Saw it come rolling over the weeds and dank waters like a storm of ectoplasm, felt it find him and cover him. Find and cover them all, bury them in its fetid, leaden depths. Within seconds, he could barely see the men in the lifeboat just to his left. They were wrapped up in the stuff, frosted in it. Just grainy silhouettes working their oars and, at times, completely invisible through that hungry mist.
“Should we lay-to?” Marx said.
Gosling considered it. “What in the hell for? We’re just in a pocket of this shit, we might as well row ourselves out.”
Everyone was happy for his decision. The idea of waiting in fog that thick was unpleasant, unsettling somehow.
“These weeds are getting thicker than ever,” Cushing said, scraping a glistening green tangle of them off his oar.
And they were. Maybe, in this heavier fog, they had lost their channel and maybe the channel was just simply gone in the profusion of the weeds. They floated in great, leafy masses, wet and rank, oozing tendrils of vapor. It looked like you could walk across them.
“Start pulling,” Gosling said.
They did. The bow of the lifeboat slit through the weeds easily and the raft seemed to slide right over the top of them. But you could hear bushy thickets of seaweed brushing along the bottoms like scraping fingers. In some places, that weed was so thick it brushed along the sides, too.
Before it had been getting dark, those lurid moons coming out.. . and now? No, it was like day had returned again. The fog and everything else was lit with that glimmering, dirty illumination. Maybe it was the fog itself and maybe there was truly no day or night there.
“What the hell was that?” Cushing said.
Something had passed beneath the lifeboat, bumping its entire length. Marx told him, whatever it was, it wasn’t trying to eat him so keep fucking rowing. They pressed on, making good time, George was thinking, moving along at a pretty good clip despite the weed. From time to time, things bumped into the raft and boat, but they never saw what they were. But they were big things, some of them.
“Hold up,” Marx suddenly said. “Look here what we got.”
Just before the bow of the lifeboat there was what looked like an old plank, waterlogged and knitted with mildew. There were other scraps of wood in the weeds. Off the starboard side of the raft, George was seeing something long and green and fleshy.
Gosling prodded it with his oar. “It’s… it’s a log, part of a fallen tree. Something like a palm, I’d guess.”
“Maybe we’re near land,” Chesbro said.
“Maybe.”
The log was from no tree George had ever seen. It was pea-green and scaly, something very primordial-
