Dead Sea

Cushing explained that all the time curvature business was highly theoretical. He told them about something he’d read once, the “Grandfather Paradox”, wherein you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather before he married your grandmother. Hence, your parents would never have been born and neither would you… so how could you possibly have traveled back in time? One theory said, he told them, was that time was self-perpetuating, that it would maintain its own integrity. So that at the moment you killed your grandfather, you would cease to exist… as would everything that had anything to do with you, your parents, etc. Bam, it was all gone, never happened. It was all pretty much fringe-thinking and open to endless debate. He said that everyone knew the Ray Bradbury story where a guy goes back in time to the Jurassic, steps on a butterfly, comes back to the present and the world has been completely changed by that one insignificant butterfly’s death which set up a chain-reaction that totally subverted the future.

“But that’s all speculation,” Cushing finished by saying. “And we don’t have the time to worry about crap like that. What we need to decide is how we’re going to go about getting out of here.”

“Maybe we can’t,” Saks said. “Maybe Crycek’s boogeyman, maybe he won’t let us out.”

Maybe it was Saks’s attempt at some cruel joke, but nobody thought it was funny. On the subject of that mysterious other, they had absolutely no sense of humor.

“The Fog-Devil,” George said.

“Good name as any,” Cushing said.

“Oh, Christ,” Saks said. “Here we go.”

But nobody was paying him any attention on that subject anymore. They had all pretty much written off his skepticism as fear. He could not accept such a thing, could not live with the idea of such a thing, hence it did not exist. Simple. George figured it was the same sort of self-denial you had back in the world concerning UFOs or aliens… the very idea of such things existing was too much for the human mind, so it denied and ridiculed. Sort of a psychological self-preservation so you could sleep at night and not lose your mind wondering when the little green men might come for you.

Crycek said, “Greenberg talks about that, too, in his letter. How that Lancet might be the focal point of this thing.”

Which, Cushing said to them, had to make you wonder about that ship and what it was exactly. According to Greenberg it was a cursed vessel, but a place of revelations, too. The keys to deliverance and also maybe the hopping off point of something incalculably dangerous.

“Was it it, though?” Menhaus asked. “What is this thing?”

But nobody was even going to hazard a guess on that one. They had ideas in their heads, but they wouldn’t speak of them. Not just yet. Maybe it was some sort of alien ghost and maybe it was the very thing that had inspired the idea of Satan on earth… and a thousand other worlds.

“Listen now,” George said to them. “Right now, it doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve felt it and so have all of you. It’s out there and that’s enough. I don’t know how many times out there in that goddamn fog I felt like I was being watched, felt like something was getting close. I saw things, too. Things that couldn’t be. I think the Fog-Devil is responsible for a lot of that.”

“I think I’ll take a walk until story-time is over,” Saks said, getting up. “You run out of ideas, there’s the one about the guy with the hook-hand out in lover’s lane.”

“Sit down, Saks,” George said.

“What?”

“Sit… down.”

“Fuck you think you are, bossing me around?”

George was up on his feet now and so was Fabrini. “I think I’m the guy that’s gonna put you on your ass and make you listen whether you fucking like it or not.”

“Think you’re up to the job?”

“Maybe not. But I’ll bet Fabrini is.”

Saks sat down. “All right, all right, go ahead. Tell me your fucking spook stories. Hey, Elizabeth? You got any popcorn?”

But if he thought it was some big joke, the cocky grin on his face didn’t last too long. Not when George brought out the VHF radio from the lifeboat and set it on the table in front of him. His grin faded and his eyes widened. The blood drained from his ruddy, unshaven face drop by drop.

“This is bullshit,” he managed with little conviction. “Fucking parlor games.”

“Let’s see,” George said. “Let’s see what’s out there…”

Elizabeth helped Aunt Else up. Aunt Else had dozed off now and Elizabeth woke her and helped her to the doorway leading to the cabins. But in the doorway, Elizabeth paused. “You… all of you. .. you better think about what it is you’re doing, what you might be invoking out there…”

Then she left on that ominous note.