Dead Sea (47 page)

And, no, there was nothing to see.

Nothing but that yellowed light dappled by reaching shadows, but there was certainly something to hear: the woman. The thing she was or the thing that pretended to be her. It was singing its mourning dirge, loud then soft, pure and then dirty. It bounced around the decks, echoing off the superstructure so that it could have been forward or aft or three feet away.

Footsteps.

A creaking.

Then … oh Jesus, what in the hell was that?

It was a sound of motion, a busy tapping/scratching sort of sound ringing off the rusted metal decks. Like a hundred pencils tapping simultaneously and Cook knew that it was
her.
That she was making that sound, the sound of a thousand spidery legs.

The boat deck.

Yes, Cook saw now.

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 …”

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.

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.”

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.”