Gosling considered it. George knew very well what he was thinking, how he didn’t like the idea of listening to that static. It got to a man and particularly when you had that odious sense that it was not just static, but something alive and aware.
“That’s what we should do,” Soltz said.
Gosling looked to George and he just shrugged. What else could he do?
Gosling went up to the bow where all the survival equipment was stowed in waterproof, zippered compartments. He took out the VHF and began to set it up.
George stayed by the doorway, watching.
The others went with Gosling and George just sat there, thinking, thinking about what he’d seen coming out of the fog earlier. Even now, it left him with a dread sense of horror. Something like that, it got under your skin and stayed there like mites. The image of that horrible little girl… he couldn’t shake it nor the idea of what she might have done to him.
He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. She had been there, all right. But where did that leave him… believing in ghosts?
No, absolutely not, he told himself, I do not believe in ghosts and spooks. I didn’t believe in them before I was lost in this terrible place and I don’t believe in them now.
But if she hadn’t been a ghost, then what?
This is what George had been threading through the reels of his brain ever since it happened. She had been dressed in what he thought was 19 ^th century clothing. He figured he wasn’t too far off there. He rather doubted that if it was all a hallucination, that his mind would have conjured up such convincing antique fashions. And it had been convincing… her hair, her dress, everything. He’d been around and around on this and he kept coming back to the same thing: the little girl was not a ghost, not really, it was just something else pretending to be the ghost of a little girl.
It was no less spookier than the ghost bit, but it made sense.
Because George could remember, right before it happened, thinking he saw something moving out there and his mind had been filled with images of ghost ships and spooks rising from their watery graves. Just imagination… but something out there, maybe his hypothetical Fog-Devil, had read his mind and gave him that which would scare him the most.
It was an aberrant line of thinking… yet he almost believed it.
The dead sea… for that’s how he thought of this place, as in Dead Sea, proper noun… was filled with horrible things. But most of them were merely biology run wild, but this other, this Fog-Devil… the presence he sensed out in that static… maybe it was the original boogeyman, a thing that knew what scared you, pulled it raw and dripping from your mind and set it loose. Maybe it got off doing that. Maybe it was the very thing that had haunted not only this sea but dozens of others, the very thing that terrified sailors since men first took to the water. The thing that created ghost ships and sea demons and crawling, nameless things that scared sailors to death or became the stuff of legend.
Fantasy? Maybe, but it would explain some things, wouldn’t it? George did not think it created monster eels or schools of weird luminous fish or odd little leggy critters that sat on oars-things like that were nature’s creations, a seriously fucked-up and alien nature, but nature all the same. No, whatever this thing was, it was not so crude in its creativity, it was not so general. When it scared someone, it made things personal, intimate.
Just as it had with George.
George started getting the creeps looking into the fog and thinking these things, so he joined the others up front. The VHF was operating and Gosling was sending out signals. The static was rising and falling with an almost morphic sound that made you want to sleep. And dream.
“What is that?” Soltz was saying. “What am I hearing there? That pinging, shrilling sound in there…”
George had heard it before. A high-pitched pinging like that of a tuning fork, but barely discernable in the static. It came and went. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, a code, something. You’d hear that pinging, then there would be a strange buzzing pulse that rose up and died. But each time George heard it, he was certain there was a pattern to it. That it was not random and certainly not natural in origin.
“Just noise,” Gosling said. “Atmospheric noise.”
That sounded good and maybe Cushing and Soltz were buying it, but George certainly wasn’t. For there was direction behind those sounds, there was intelligence. Something was making them and he honestly didn’t want to know what it was.
“I guess,” Cushing began, “I guess it’s just some weird interference… that’s what it must be.”
“Sure,” Gosling said, but his voice sounded awfully hollow.
If it indeed was static, what they heard next certainly could not be. It happened about three or four minutes later, just about the time Gosling was going to shut the unit off, that static beginning to bother all of them in ways they could scarcely fathom. It started out as a low, distorted whining like a shortwave radio trying to lock on a channel and then it grew high and echoing, became something like a broken up voice full of panic that was saying, “… help us… oh God help us… it’s getting close now… it’s getting close.. . oh dear God…” It faded away and then came back clearer, so clear you could hear the man on the other end breathing and something in the background, a huge and booming sound getting louder and louder. It almost sounded like a great, hollow heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom. “… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog.. . it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and… it’s knocking at the door… at the door…”
It then it faded back into the static.
They listened for another minute or two and then Gosling wisely shut the unit off. His fingers were trembling.
33
“Untie me, you fucking idiots,” Saks was crying out at the others. “Don’t leave me… don’t leave me tied up like this…”
But they had other problems.
They were now in some sort of wide channel cut between two banks of weed and the fish, the boneheads were hammering against the hull of the boat, filled with frenzy and appetite.
But it wasn’t them that really scared the men in the lifeboat.
It was their big brother.
He was back.
The huge, ugly twenty-footer with the armored snout and the dead eyes. For something of its sheer bulk, it moved with incredible speed. With eel-like gyrations of its tail, it launched itself at the boat. The impact was hard and fast. It threw the men to the deck and nearly flipped the boat over.
Then it rocketed in and hit them from the other side, then from the stern, propelling the lifeboat forward like it had an outboard hooked up to it. Most of the smaller ones had scattered, but that big ugly mother was standing his ground.
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini said, “it’s gonna get us, it’s gonna flip the boat…”
“Damn right it is,” Saks said, enjoying their terror. “It’s going to get one of you in the water and swallow you whole.”
I don’t wanna see that, Fabrini kept telling himself. I don’t wanna see a man get bitten in half by a giant fish. I don’t care what else happens out here, but, by Jesus, I don’t wanna see that…
The fish came alongside the boat, so close they could not only see it, but smell it. It stank of brine and blood and bad meat, like something that had been chewing on waterlogged corpses. And that probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Cook!” Menhaus said. “Do something! We got to do something!”
The fish hit them again, knocking everybody to the deck again and almost pitching Menhaus into the drink. He let out a high, girlish scream and sank back down to the deck, gripping the uprights of his seat.
The fish came again, riding right on the surface, spiny ventral fins spread out like Chinese fans and sharp enough to cut timber. Cook was right on the gunwale watching it, watching it bump the boat with its iron snout and pass by. Those thick, bony plates that ran from the tip of its nose to its thorax were actually jointed he saw and it gave the fish incredible flexibility.