Dead Sea (49 page)

Many were mastless and bilged, punched through with great cavities like torpedo holes. Caught by the weed, they were unable to sink completely, slowly deteriorating, their crews long dead, their superstructures atrophied to sagging beams and leaning uprights. Some of the old sailing vessels looked almost seaworthy, but most were listing badly to port or starboard, dead and decayed things looking for a grave.

These were the ships that caught the eyes and imaginations of the men in the raft and lifeboat. Not the modern iron ships, but those flaking mummies from centuries gone by: brigs and schooners, four-masters and square-riggers. Their sails had long ago decomposed to dingy rags, but you could almost feel the history behind them, feel them riding high, creaking and groaning, shrouds snapping and flapping. But that had been long, long ago. For the weeds had claimed them now, held them in a green fist like cemetery dirt and would not let them go, would not let them seek the oblivion they deserved. No, the weed had ensnared them, grown up over their hulls, completely engulfing some so you could only see the general shape of a ship under all that growing, glistening, knotted weed. It sprouted from open portholes and roped over taffrails, noosed halyards and wreathed deckhouses.

But it wasn’t just the weeds, for here in this steaming, stagnant swamp, fungi had settled thickly over topmasts and mizzens, meshing jibs and topgallants. It was born in the putrescent hothouse nurseries of the weed and grew up over the masts in snotty lacework and nets, filaments and oozing vines, festooning like cobwebs, drooping and hanging like Spanish moss.

Yes, so thick was the weed and creeping gray fungi, that it was hard to say where the seaweed gardens ended and the ships began. For most of those derelicts looked not like things made by man, but things fashioned by nature out of roping green and yellow growing things that were mockeries of man’s work.

“Oh, my God,” George said, feeling an exhilaration and a despondency he could not shake. “How long … how long has this been going on?”

Marx just stared. “How long have men been plying the sea, son?”

There, of course, were newer vessels, too. Sleek ferries and frigates with ice-cutter bows and radar beacons, satellite dishes and radio aerials. There was, in fact, few ships, few types that were not represented in either pieces or in whole.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gosling said. “In all your born days?”

Cushing just shook his head. “No … but I was expecting it, I was expecting something like this. Weren’t you all? Down deep, weren’t you all?”

Cushing told them that this was the real Sargasso Sea, the real ship’s graveyard, the great boneyard of the world’s oceans … except it wasn’t anywhere on earth as sailors had long thought, but here, here in this pestilent cellar. This dripping, miasmic, vaporous sea which was just about due south of nowhere.

“This is what they saw,” Gosling said, excited now. “All those old stories you heard of the Sargasso, the ship’s graveyard, the devil’s graveyard … Jesus, just like you thought Cushing, this is it. It ain’t just a story, it’s real.”

“Aye, that it is,” Marx said. “Ships must have passed through here, saw all this, and passed back out to tell the story … maybe thinking the whole time they were stuck in the real Sargasso.”

George liked none of it. He felt like a white man finding the fabled elephant’s graveyard in Africa. He was seeing something that he was not supposed to see. No man was meant to see this and live to tell about it. Some things, he knew, were best left as folklore and twice-told tales.

There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.

“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water … but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”

“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”

Gosling nodded. “Maybe. But even with big diesels or steam turbines, you’d run out of fuel sooner or later, wouldn’t you? And then what?”

“Then you’d drift,” Marx said.

“And be brought right back in here.”

They all thought about the hopelessness of it all, those hundreds of ships trapped here, fossils in some grim collection. They looked out over them. They looked eerie and haunted in the mist, backlit by whatever made the mist glow. Those twin moons had come out again, the huge red one casting a bloody glare over mastheads and yards, stacks and cargo booms.

Pollard was saying nothing. He did not look exactly surprised about any of it. Chesbro, however, looked downright scared.

“I don’t like this place,” he said. “It looks … it looks like a cemetery.”

And it did.

The cemetery of the seas. Only in this unhallowed sea, the cemetery was restless and uneasy, a loathsome necropolis of dead and drowned things, slimy things ribboned with weeds and crepuscular fungi. It vomited back up what it could not hold down in its black charnel belly: waterlogged tombs and mildewed caskets, wormy coffins and crumbling sepulchers, floating crypts and oblong boxes draped in floral tributes of rotting kelp and vaporous green shrouds. They rose from the noxious weed, in whole and in part, clustered with morbid shadows, leaning this way and that like ancient headstones and webby monuments. The ships here were mummies and husks, cadaverous hollow-eyed things made of pipes and bones and ossuary girders. Derelicts welded from yellowed femur and gray ulna, mildewed rungs of rib and stark meatless vertebrae. They were alien exoskeletons and spectral ghost ships, exhumed wraiths resurrected from moldering abyssal mortuaries.

Yes, just skeletons and things that wanted to be skeletons. Things that sought blackness and depths, sluicing vaults cut in muddy sea bottoms, bathypelagic catacombs of drifting sediment and burrowing marine graveworms.

Jesus, George was thinking, it’s like some fucking shrine.

But not a good one. Not one that inspired cherished memory or peace, but one that inspired an almost atavistic horror. A place of malignance and spiritual violation. They were all so alone here. So far from everything decent and warm and caring. All those ships, just dark and hollow and scratching with a secret darkness that was devouring them bone by bone.

George was seeing those ships and feeling them, too, swallowing great black silences and tenebrous echoes, feeling the memory of those ships fill him, drop his dreaming brain into some pit where he could hear voices. Yes, the voices of those lost souls who had perished aboard those ships or simply went mad. But they were all there, all those tormented voices shrieking at him, showing him dark truths that made him want to scream. He was at the bottom of a dripping, brine-stinking well, feeling them feel him, touch him, whisper and laugh and cry. They were many but one, a single withering presence, a monster of deranged mourning with ten thousand hands and fifty-thousand steel fingers. George listened because he had no other choice. Just as Cook had channeled the last sensory impressions of Lieutenant Forbes aboard the
Cyclops,
George was channeling
them.
Knowing their thoughts and memories, their pain and sorrow and rage.

He saw all those great ships, all those three- and four-masters ghosting along beneath a pall of moonlight, slicing through high seas and thrashing water. Spars were creaking and blocks whining shrilly. Rain dripped from sail and rope and backstay. The masts and yards rode up high and cutting. Sails snapped and whistled. Hands hoisted and lowered cordage and shrouds. And the sea was a constant, a raging and rolling and pitching thing. Those sharp bows sliced through it and the seas broke before them like wheat before a scythe. He felt the coming of that cemetery fog. The stars blotting out, the breathable air sucking away, ship after ship after ship drawn into a misting tunnel of non-existence.

Ship’s bells ringing.

Voices shouting.

Oh, please, oh, please, get us out of here, oh God above get us out of this awful place, Lord.

Please.

We’re lost.

We’re becalmed.

We’re adrift.

We are dying.

We are losing our minds.

The fog is eating the flesh from our bones.

And the ships drifted on, enshrouded and doomed and despairing. Falling one by one into the weed and into rot, bathed in that slimy tideless sea, pulled into crawling depths and moist graveyards of weed where there were things with unseeing eyes and bloated tentacles and slavering mouths. And maybe, oh yes, something far worse that would come drifting from that misting effluvium, something vile and diseased and burning, smoking and sparking and vomiting ice.

And the voices screamed at the memory of that which walked alone.

The well vibrated and shuddered with their screaming, howling voices blown from contorted mouths fed by terror-wracked minds that were going to pulp and ash. And those ships, they became coffins. Lids snapping tight and weeds ringing them shut while white fingers scraped at satin and silk and-

“Jesus H. Christ, George,” Gosling was saying. “You all right?”

They were all looking at him.

Gosling was shaking him.

And he realized his mouth was wide and his eyes bulging and he was screaming silently. But then it was gone and he was on the raft and there was nothing, nothing but a lot of derelict ships and a handful of men wanting to know what in the hell he was doing.

But he couldn’t tell them. He could just say, “I’m … fine.”

Nobody bought it, of course, and long after the other eyes had abandoned him, Pollard was watching him, knowing things he shouldn’t know, but that was just the way of this place. It was the amplitude or something. For sensitive minds could hear things they had no business hearing and maybe Pollard had heard that scream of his though no one else had.

And maybe they would have all questioned him over his little episode, but there were other and more important things to be considered.

“Look at that,” Marx said. “Did you see it? Just at the edge of the mist there.”

They saw it. Some huge, nebulous shape had passed beneath the weed or maybe through it, a colossal luminous form that dipped beneath the wreck of an old three-masted brig and vanished from site.

“What the hell was that?” Gosling said.

Maybe they wanted Cushing to give them some rational scientific explanation for it, but all he said was, “I don’t know … but I hope to hell it doesn’t come back.”

“Hungry,” Menhaus was saying. “I can’t seem to remember what it is not to be hungry.”

Saks thought that was funny. “Yeah, but look at yourself. You’ve already dropped pounds. You’re looking good. Just imagine how good you’re going to look after a month, two months, a year-”

“Okay, Saks,” Cook said. “Once again, quit trying to piss people off.”

“I’m kidding, for chrissake. In case you don’t know what that is, Big Chief, it’s also called a joke or a funny, a laugh. Boy, Cook, ever since you decided you were the big cheese, you’re a real fucking pain in the ass.”

Cook could only sigh.

In command? Oh Christ, of all things.

Command of what exactly? A lifeboat with four men who were ready to tear out each other’s throats at the drop of a hat? Even Fabrini wasn’t weathering any of it real good now. After what they’d seen and experienced on the
Cyclops,
something in him had shut down. What was left was irritable and angry and looking for something or someone to vent on. Cook had tried to draw him out more than once, but each time he did Saks was there, asking if he wanted to breastfeed Fabrini, too. Maybe wipe his ass and tuck him in to boot. And Cook had to wonder how long it was going to be before Saks and Fabrini
really
went at it, how long before their knives came out and blood was drawn. At least on the
Cyclops,
they’d settled down, had enough room to get away from each other.

Sure, Fabrini had been very good about it, when you considered things. Like the fact that Saks had cut off part of his ear with a knife. Most guys, they’d be wanting payback for that, but Fabrini let it go. That was big of him. But now? Well, Fabrini kept touching his bandaged ear and staring at Saks. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what he was thinking.

And Saks knew it, too.

Cook had to watch them all the time.

And he pretty much had to do it alone because Menhaus was pretty much whiny and pouty twenty-four/seven now, withdrawn really, talking from time to time, but more to himself than anyone else.

And Crycek? Well, Crycek had his moments.

So, essentially, Cook was wading these dark waters alone. He had to keep them from each other, offer them hope, squelch Saks, reassure them that they were not going to starve to death or get eaten by horrors out of the mist. Then, if that wasn’t enough, Cook had to keep directing them, giving them something to hold out for and this when he was dying inside, had considered more than once how easy it would have been to slit his own wrists.

“How do you like this fog, Crycek?” Saks said.

Saks had been asking him this question about every half an hour or so, needling him, trying to get under Crycek’s skin … and pretty much trying to get everyone riled up. Because Cook knew that’s what Saks was: a catalyst. That’s how he saw himself. The more disorder he could create, the sooner Menhaus and maybe even Fabrini — God forbid — would want him back in charge.

Crazy thing was, Cook had even considered handing back the reins to Saks. Wondering if maybe that arrogant, selfish piece of shit might have some ideas about what they should do that he would only share once he was firmly back in the driver’s seat. But, ultimately, Cook had weighed it out like a man deciding whether or not to emasculate himself with a paring knife … and decided it wasn’t exactly prudent.

“You hear me, you crazy shit?” Saks said. “How do you like this fog?”