tendrils of hair, matted and knotted and sweeping and moving. It was a flowing thing and a braided thing, a diaphanous spider clustered in hairballs and filigree. A snaking expanse of living cobwebs that were in constant, creeping motion. That hump they’d first seen rode atop the mass like a head, but it had no face, no anything… just a net of that webby hair hiding something black and glistening beyond. And it had two limbs or maybe three… boneless things that were not tentacles or the appendages of a crab, but just long and scaly sticks that shuddered and dripped ooze.
In a high, panicked voice, Saks said: “What… what are you going to do about it, Big Chief?”
Good question.
Cook looked upon it and it was hideous, an abomination, something that could not possibly be alive… but was. Very much alive. A creeping, evil mesh of fibers and hairs and dirty gray lace. Strands and plaits of those growths were extended out in a random pattern like limbs, but they were not limbs. Just free-flowing and wavering hairs, others bunched into great masses and knotted strands, all interconnected by long fleshy cords.
Cook started shooting.
He emptied the gun into it and then it took him. That is to say those long and scaly limbs knocked him into its central mass. But it had no mouth as such, nothing to rend him with. He fell against it and they all heard him scream, scream with the guttural and blank and inhuman sound of an animal being tortured to death.
Menhaus was pounding on his seat, screeching and shouting and crying, his mind flying apart in his head.
And Fabrini, he was just in shock.
Cook… Jesus. All those hairs and cilia were blanketing him, webbing and caressing and sliding over him, knotting him up and he was thrashing, tearing at those growths, coming out with handfuls of them that sounded like bunches of grass pulled from muddy soil. All those webs inherited him, coveted him, flowing up his nostrils and down his throat and in through his eyes, crawling and undulating things like the dendrites and synapses of nerve cells. They were growing into him like roots, into him and out of him.
They all saw it.
About the time his screaming stopped because his throat was filled with a bail of those slithering cobwebs, tiny hairs began to sprout from his face and throat and hands and arms. They burst forth like rootlets on time-lapse photographs, wiry and fibrous, just millions of them erupting from Cook until there was no longer any Cook… just a hairy, twitching thing with the general shape of a man that was being absorbed into the thing’s rustling mass.
The others sat there because there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. Fabrini stood up once, brandishing an oar and took maybe one step before Saks told him to sit the hell down, he knew what was good for him.
It happened very fast.
One moment Cook was there and the next… he was part of the thing.
Menhaus was whimpering and Fabrini was making a strangled gagging sound in his throat and Crycek refused to look upon it. And Saks? He was scared shitless and wanted to put a gun in his mouth and blow his brains out through the top of his head. But as terrible and offensive as this all was, that scheming mind of his took it all for what it really was: opportunity.
So, he reached down inside himself, found his voice quivering in darkness, and pulled it up his throat and past his lips. “Okay,” he said in a squeaking voice. “Okay… just sit still and do not fucking move.”
It was an easy order to follow; nobody had a problem with it.
The thing was still there, a huge and breathing network of webbing and tissue and floss, all those fibroid and ropy sinews shuddering and wriggling like long stringy worms. It looked almost pregnant with the mounded form of Cook tangled in it. Its limbs, those branching scaly sticks, were busy there, pulling nets of hair over him, tucking him away, a cocooned fly. And the really horrible thing was, Cook was still moving. Shuddering and jerking in there, trying to die and having a hard time of it apparently.
The men in the lifeboat knew what was happening to him.
They knew he was not being eaten exactly or drained of blood or de-boned… although, essentially, all these things were happening, just not in the way they understood them. For Cook was being absorbed and digested by those hairs, dissolved and assimilated into the general mass of that nightmare. The creature was the sort of thing you whacked with a broom and swept into a dustbin, except in this place, it did the whacking.
It was moving now, lilting slowly from side to side like it was drunk. Saks saw this and figured it probably wasn’t a good thing. For if the beast was full, it would have just sank back into the sea.
It brought those limbs forward, resting them on the gunnels of the lifeboat and all those wiry gossamer tendrils began to twist and curl and spread out like when it had first seen… or sensed… Cook. A surging, rustling growth of them flowed from the thing and covered the bow, filling the boat now, seeking new flesh to subvert.
And Saks found himself thinking that those hairs were not just a body covering, but possibly general appendages and sensory instruments to boot… muscle fibers and nerve fibers, organs of taste and smell and digestion.
Menhaus tried to climb overboard and Saks clapped him on the ear. “Give me one of those kerosene lamps and a flare,” he said very quietly as those hairs crept steadily forward, just a moving mat of them creeping in their direction, covering the bow seat and progressing, progressing, a tidal wave of surging, living hairs.
Fabrini put one of the lamps in Saks’s hands and Saks shattered it against one of the amidships seats, scant feet from those tendrils, and splashed kerosene over the advancing horde. He capped the flare and a bright red tongue of flame lit up the boat and reflected off the fog like neon. The creature did not know fire. It could not see as such, but Saks was willing to bet it had nerve endings. He tossed the flare at those kerosene-drenched fibers and they exploded with a gush of flames, catching like tinder, spreading up toward the thing’s body.
It began to thrash wildly, cheated out of easy pickings, and it had a mouth or something like one, for it began making a high, strident e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound like a dying insect, the sort of sound you expected a spider to make as you crushed it to pulp under your shoe. It withdrew, flaming and smoking, filling the air with a nauseating, acrid stench.
It sank back into the sea, sizzling and steaming.
But it did not go away. Its hump was still visible just above the waterline.
“What now?” Menhaus said. “Oh, Jesus, what now?”
“Put that fire out,” Saks said.
Fabrini and Crycek splashed water on the dying flames in the boat and Menhaus grabbed the flare which was burning a trench in the hull of the lifeboat.
The hump began to move, vibrating and shaking, rising up now maybe three or four inches out of the water. It began to elongate and then there were suddenly two humps and they began to pull apart with a tearing, moist sound.
“Oh, what the fuck is it doing?” Fabrini said.
Crycek licked his lips. “I think… I think it’s dividing.”
And it was. Binary fission, asexual reproduction. Like a protozoan, it was splitting itself into two parts. The humps continued to move apart, both vibrating madly, strands of pink and yellow tissue connecting the halves as genetic material was shared and the cellular plasma membrane was sheared and reformed. Coils of white fluid like semen filled the sea around it. And then division was complete and there were two humps out there. Neither were moving.
Menhaus vomited over the side of the boat.
Crycek said, “It might be dormant now… we better get out of here while we can.”
Saks thought it was a good idea. He passed out the oars. “Now row, you sonsofbitches,” he told them. “Row like motherfuckers…”
6
It had been threatening for hours and now darkness came.
It was born in the stark depths and the black silent bellies of the derelict ships. It came rushing out in a plexus of shadows, shifting and pooling and spreading, connecting finally in a blanketing ebon sheet that fell over
