Howard sat on the messdeck after his watch and shuddered and giggled at the tremble in his hands. He stuck an index finger into the coffee to see if the finger was still alive. Then, like a smart robot who has just discovered originating thought, or like an idiot uncovering a reason for slobbering, Howard took off his foul weather jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He examined the right shoulder of the jacket with close and minute attention, searched for the impress of awful fingers, the marks of a dead world where air was always mist, and where mist was the supporting surface for weightless feet.
In the bow, anticipating his relief, and with his tongue licking mist from teeth and lips, Howard’s first thought was that Glass silently approached to take the watch. In that unspoken code of men pressed together in close quarters, Glass had never before touched Howard. Glass had firm hands, no doubt, but Howard—who would have been shocked had he ever thought about the matter—would not have concluded that Glass had stern hands. The hand that silently gripped Howard’s shoulder was as unremitting as bone.
Howard turned to complain to Glass, but, of course, there were some codes that even Glass did not break. Howard turned to find that Glass had not yet arrived, nor had anyone else. The mist swirled, the whistle arrowed into the mist like a screech of despair.
Howard looked all around him, saw Glass approaching, and found that a help. Howard managed not to run and shriek. He mumbled to Glass, went below to the messdeck after cowardly telling Glass that all was routine.
Brace slopped at tables with a wet rag. From forward the whistle vibrated. Howard watched Brace, that outlander to the messdeck, and Howard shuddered from fear or premonition, or because it seemed to him that he had never really looked at Brace before. Howard’s teeth ticked and clicked against the coffee mug. Being aboard Adrian was not like being in Illinois. It was not like being in Ohio, either.
Chapter 14
The apparition seemed born of werelight, and, as if no cock would ever crow the dawn, it took its time a-building. It came from Hester C., which lay canted on the mudflats. Later on, no man could tell at which pointing, mincing moment the manifestation shook like a rumple-furred dog and detached itself from the mist. Some men did not see the apparition at all.
In later years, cooking at the Base, Lamp would claim that he was the first man to see Jensen, and he would believe it. Lamp’s interpretation rose from that spacious imagination that swelled like a circus balloon filling his huge frame, giving reason for that frame’s existence. Lamp actually saw nothing for several days, or rather, he saw no apparition. Nor did Brace.
“I thought it was a reflection at first,” Glass told Howard after enough time had passed to still Glass’s trembling.
Adrian had once more swung against the pier. Cutter Abner had disappeared into the mist, having towed Theresa into Gloucester, then caught a search to the south in company with the lousy cutter Able. Men joked, made sympathetic noises in behalf of Abner’s crew. Gunner Majors claimed that Able was searching for the overdue yacht Seascamp, and Abner was sent along to keep Able from getting lost. It was a dull joke, made even more dull because of a general suspicion that it described the facts.
“I’m trying to convince myself that it was a reflection.” Howard acted like a man prepared to bargain his half interest in the hereafter in return for the assurance of a reasonable world.
“Reflection of what? That’s what I want to know,” Glass said. “Reflection of what?”
Glass had been standing the in-port midwatch on the bridge in a muffled night of foghorns and the crackle of the radio. Lamp was resting his well-exercised tongue under the fog of sleep. Mist swirled about Adrian and was cut by a light breeze. The mist lifted in small whirls, gave way to narrow views and tunnels of clear darkness. It was like paint being stirred, folding in smooth swells that colored and became more solid with the mixing. Glass, having lived for so long with the mist, was bored, unimpressed, but he logged the fact of the breeze with some interest. He would have said, and did, that the breeze put different odds on the tote board.
The breeze was not a dancer. It held no cyclonic persuasions. It was interrupted. Sporadic. If it swirled, it did so because of broken flow that bent around buildings and vessels. Glass, in cynical sureness of the value of prophecy, would not ordinarily bet ten cents on a race that was fixed. Still, Glass was a child of New England. He shivered on the warm bridge, while the radio crackled, chattered, buzzed. Glass later confided to Lamp that he felt like “saying a little more about that breeze.” Since he did not know what to say, he simply logged it.
The breeze folded the mist, opened dark and narrow alleyways down which a man might peer, then closed the far entry, as if it were blocked by the appearance of a blacked-out and prowling police car.
A pale light appeared on the mudflats where it was not possible that a light could be. It was like foxfire, luminous, indifferently unblinking as it flavored only itself while not revealing its surroundings. The light came and went and came and went, as mist ran in small torrents across the mudflats. Glass reached for a pencil, looked at the log, looked at his hump nose beneath untidy and lengthening hair reflected on the blacked-out screen of the radar, which behind its open mask took a faint sheen of red light from the night bulbs. Glass laid the pencil down, picked up binoculars. The light expanded, contracted, seemed in an effort of concentration. Glass watched, put the binoculars aside, picked up the telescope, although Hester C. lay within three hundred yards. The light was coming from the hulk. As Glass watched, it began to change, focus, become more incandescent.
“Like a work light,” Glass told Lamp. “Like when you see one-a these lobstermen putting over traps after dark. It was even swinging, like he was riding a swell.”
The mist whirled, swept, cloaked; and, through the wavering telescope, revealed a figure bent over the engine box. The figure was shadowed by the sideways cant of Hester C. The unwalkable deck seemed not to affect the figure at all. Glass would swear that if the thing had feet, it was using them to walk on mist. The figure was vague. It busied itself with its own concerns. It seemed to be drawn into the framework of the hulk, or into the engine box. Then it would rise as if attempting to step free of the wreck. Glass saw arms that waved in despair or struggle. The mist closed down, opened, closed.