All of it, whether memory or psychic invasion, blasted through Cook’s brain in a searing wave that left him gasping, a choked whimpering in his throat. His head spun and he fell into Fabrini who held him up, scared now, wanting to know what in the hell was happening. But Cook could not tell him. Could not tell him anything. Because he had seen it, he had seen and felt and physically witnessed the merest fraction of Forbes’ final moments and it left him wriggling with a fear that was so big, so total, it blotted out everything for a moment… even his own mind. He stood there, hanging onto Fabrini and for a few, lunatic moments his mind had been washed clean like a blackboard and he did not know who he was or where he was. And then it all came surging back, leaving him breathless, his temples throbbing.
But what had it been?
Bones were just bones and they could not have sent those images into his head. Cook could not accept such things. Could not let himself go there. Pitted, yellow bones holding, after all these years, a distant and feral memory, a reflection, an echo of a horror beyond human experience… was it possible? Or was the answer far worse? Was it just a telepathic linkup to that thing’s mind, its consciousness, letting him know but a sliver of the fate that was in store for him? For all of them?
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini was saying. “Are you all right?”
And Cook was nodding his head. “I think the air in here is bad or something. I got all woozy or something. I’m… I’m okay now.”
Maybe Fabrini believed that and maybe he didn’t.
Regardless, he led Cook up and out of those subterranean passages and onto the deck where the air was somewhat cleaner, fresher. Even the mist didn’t look so bad after what was below.
After a time, Fabrini said, “Should we go back to the boat?”
“If you want.”
But Fabrini shook his head. “Let’s look around some more.”
Apparently, whatever had gotten into Cook’s head, it had not touched Fabrini. His zeal for exploring the ship had not lessened. Maybe it was being cooped-up in that lifeboat for so long. Maybe that’s what it was. Even exploring a death ship and not knowing what new horror might show itself next did not make him want to leave.
But Cook thought: Of course not. Fabrini has a mission now. Exploration. And anything, even this damned ship, is better than waiting helpless in that lifeboat.
They went into a deckhouse aft and took the companionway below. There was much less fungus here, very little of it in fact. And the air was surely better, although the darkness was equally as claustrophobic. Eventually, they came to the engine room. It was a gigantic, vaulted place like an amphitheater set with mammoth steam turbines and attendant arteries of hoses and vents and pipes. There were a few inches of black, dirty water on the floor.
“I’d say she won’t run,” Fabrini said.
“I’m thinking you’re right.”
They chuckled over their little joke, moving around the turbines and pistons, Fabrini telling Cook how he wished to God he’d followed his first instinct and told Saks to stick the job up his ass. Because, honestly, he’d felt something was wrong with the entire thing, only he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it.
They moved by lantern light into what might have been some kind of storeroom and right away they saw more death.
“Shit,” Fabrini said.
Shit was right. There were maybe a dozen skeletons tangled up in a central, bony mass like something scooped from a mass grave. But it wasn’t all those skulls and ribcages and jutting femurs that made them stop dead, it was what was on them.
Crawling, fluttering, purring things.
At first, Cook thought he was looking at living brains, brains with attached spinal cords creeping amongst the bones and rot and oily water. Just like in that old ‘50s B-movie with Marshal Thompson. But that’s not what he was seeing at all. Whatever they were, they had heads about the size of tea saucers, flattened out and connected to long, bifurcated tails set with fluttering cilia. They were fleshy and pale, making a thrumming noise that sounded very much like purring kittens.
They paid the intruders no mind.
Cook wasn’t sure whether they were insect or crustacean or a little of both. They were eyeless and grotesque, moving with an inching motion like slugs. They inspired a bone-deep atavistic loathing.
“Disgusting,” he said under his voice.
“Sea lice,” Fabrini said. “Those are fucking sea lice. Salmon get ‘em. Other fish, too. I saw ‘em on TV… but only under a microscope. Not this big… these things are a hundred times the size of sea lice…”
The things moved through the bones and into the water beneath, staying there. Revolting as they were, Cook figured Fabrini was probably right. Just sea lice grown to vast proportions in this netherworld. Mutants in the real world, but just harmless critters here in this place.
“Let’s go,” Fabrini said. “Let’s check out the cabins above.”
“All right. Then we better get back. I don’t like leaving Menhaus in charge too long.”
And up to the cabins they went.
7
They unzipped the canopy on the raft, deciding to take their chances because of what they had heard: a foghorn.
The others had been awake, lost in their own little worlds. Soltz had been asleep… and suddenly he sat right up, looking shocked and frightened, eyes glassier than the spectacles covering them. “I heard it,” he said. “I heard it.”
“What?” George said, thinking maybe he had heard something, too.
“Go back to sleep,” Gosling said. “You were just dreaming.”
But they all heard it then. That low moaning sound coming through the mist and it could be nothing but the throaty bellow of a foghorn. It sounded again about five minutes later and this time it was even closer. George, who had been thinking maybe it was the mournful call of some sea serpent like in that Ray Bradbury story, suddenly changed his mind.
It was a goddamn foghorn, all right.
So they unzipped the canopy and sat under the inflated arches, listening and looking and waiting. For they were all thinking the same thing: a foghorn? Well, that could only mean one of two things. Either there was a ship out there or there was a lighthouse. And the idea of one seemed just as ludicrous as the other, but they dismissed neither. God only knew what that fog had pulled into this place through the centuries.
“It can’t be gone, not already,” Soltz said.
Gosling told him to be quiet. He wanted everyone listening. If there was a boat out there blowing its horn, then he wanted to know where it was.