Five minutes later, the horn sounded again.
And what a beautiful, haunted sound it was. A deep baritone crying out in the mist, calling stray ships to safety like a mother calling in her young, warning of toxic mists and rocky headlands, reefs that liked to set their teeth into unwary hulls. It was so loud it actually made the rubber skin of the raft vibrate when it sounded.
“Christ,” George said, “we gotta be right on top of it. Where the hell is it?”
But they could see nothing.
Maybe it was close and maybe it was far, maybe it was an echo sounding from another world, just a noisy ghost that would tempt them with hope and then shatter it just as quick. Regardless, the men in the raft could not see it for the fog would not allow it, it would not part and there was no prophet’s voice to make it do so. It hung on, thick and thicker, roiling and swirling and encasing, an ethereal roof and four enclosing walls, a ghost-sheath that covered and constricted and tucked tight. The warm sea brewed it and the chill air blew it into life, a miasma of gases and vapors and dank moisture that was semi-luminous via its own otherworldly chemistry.
“Fucking soup,” Gosling said. “If we could only see through it.. .”
Sometime later, the foghorn sucked in a breath and sounded again, but this time it was distant and lonely and lost. Eerie-sounding, like some behemoth roaring as it submerged. And when it came again, it was barely audible.
“Gone,” Soltz said, despair on him thick as ice. “Just… gone. We’ll drift until the flesh falls from our bones.”
“Knock it off,” Gosling said, really not in the mood for a pity-party.
“It doesn’t make any damn sense,” Cushing said. “I mean, yeah, we’re drifting, but we’re not moving that fast. We’re not clipping along at sixty miles an hour here. That foghorn couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away in the mist… yet we passed it like we’re in a racing boat.”
“It’s the physics of this place… they’re fucked up,” was George’s scientific take on it.
After that, there was silence.
Nothing to say and nothing that could be said that would make sense of it or lessen the tremendous let-down they all felt. Nothing to do but sit quietly and stare off into that fog which was huge and billowing and sure of itself. Sure that it had them secreted away where they would never be found.
George was staring into that clotted, stagnant sea, watching patches of weeds float by, feeling the raft skid around weed masses that were thick and verdant. That’s when he saw something just behind the raft, something dark spreading out down there like an oil slick, a few inches beneath the surface.
Looks like an old coat down there, he thought, a tarp or something.
But he knew it wasn’t any of those things, not here, and he wished to God it would just go away. But it wasn’t going away, he saw, it was drifting along with them like a kite tangled in the sea anchor.
George crept back a bit from the stern of the raft. He really wasn’t sure why, but there was something he did not like about that kite. It inspired a weakness in his belly. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he’d been in the Dead Sea long enough now to respect his own apprehensions.
He stared at it… it moved. Fluttered, something.
The air in his lungs felt oddly dry and prickly. There was a tenseness at the back of his neck, a certainty that this was not just something tangled in the anchor line, but something that chose to be there. Not accidental in the least.
“What’re you doing over there, George?” Gosling asked him.
“There’s something caught on the anchor line… I think,” he said. “I’m not really sure.”
“Well, don’t worry about it.”
“It looks alive.”
That got everyone’s attention. Except for Soltz who just sat up front, brooding and unreachable. Cushing came back by George and looked at the shape in that dark water.
“Looks like a skate, kind of,” he said.
And before George could tell him to just leave it be, Cushing grabbed an oar and jabbed it with the tip. It gave easily, sank down deeper into the darkness.
And then it came back up. Fast.
Like maybe it was pissed-off and it wasn’t the sort of thing that took kindly to being prodded with oars. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. You mess with me… look out, Charlie.
George thought maybe he let out a little involuntary cry when the thing came up out of the water and slime. It was flapping great wings or fins and he couldn’t decide which they were. Just that they spread out about six-feet tip to tip. It came up, flapping those wings and spraying the raft with water, looking oddly like a devil-ray that had learned how to fly. It hovered behind the raft like a moth at a windowpane, getting no closer, but surely getting no farther away. It carried a nauseating, briny stink to it like sun-boiled seaweed.
“Keep away from it!” Gosling warned them, taking out another flare in case he had to give this monstrosity a taste.
It was roughly diamond-shaped, with long triangular wings or pectoral fins. Its body was streamlined like that of a manta ray, flattened-out with the cartilaginous flesh of a shark. A dirty slate-gray above and mushroom-white below. There were a series of horizontal slits below where the wings met its body, maybe gill slits, and hooked brown claws, two on each wing tip. It had a long whiplike tail with raised, barbed spines that looked much like the needles of a pufferfish.
George and the others had moved clear of the stern now.
“If I had a gun,” Gosling said. “I’d shoot the ugly cocksucker.. .”
And it was ugly. Plain dirt-ugly. Something you saw crawl out from under a log that you instinctively stepped on without giving it a chance. George was feeling it, too, though he could not exactly describe even to himself the disgust this thing inspired. He didn’t want to kill it exactly… but he sure as hell didn’t want to hug it. It was simply so offensive and outrageous in form, it made you want to look at it. Like a couple spiders mating, you watched even though the idea of it made your flesh crawl and your guts pull up in sickening yellow waves.
It belonged in a jar or stuffed in a museum… but it did not belong alive and vital
It’s just a dumb animal, he told himself, it’s just being curious. It’ll get bored and leave. Sooner or later.
It reminded him of some weird mutant death’shead moth. Almost.
One that had mated with some slimy thing from a primordial sea.
And the thing-whether bird or bat or fish — just hovered there, looking much like a kite as George had thought. Its wings flapped and its body tipped forward, then back, as if it were balancing itself. When it tipped back, George could see that it had a series of small remora-like parasites hanging from its belly. They looked like deflated balloons. When it tipped forward, he saw that it had something like a head, a narrow disk lacking eyes but set with four pale yellow segmented stems like lobster antenna that were whipping about. They were tipped with bright pink nodules that looked something like eyes, but were probably some sort of sensory apparatus.
And it had a mouth… a vertical gash that moved side to side rather than up and down like the jaws of a spider. Beyond that maw, you could see not teeth, but a slick and squirming tongue-like projection of tissue that was just as white as a ghost-pipe. As they watched, it uncoiled like rope from spool and came out tasting the air. It was hollow as a garden hose and about the same thickness, jutting in and out of the mouth maybe six or eight inches like a frog’s tongue after a fly.
Cushing jabbed the oar in its direction and it jerked back, but did not leave. If anything, it came a little closer now, just hovering there like a hummingbird, those wings fluttering and vibrating madly.
“What the hell are we gonna do?” George asked.
As if it heard him, it started making a weird hissing sound, sort of a repetitive whirring like a grasshopper in a distant field.