Dead Sea

Fabrini stood up. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right. I mean, think about it… why aren’t there more people here? Christ, should be lots of people here. We survived and they should have, too. Where are they? What happened to them?”

“They were purged,” George said, jumping in.

Everyone was looking at him now.

“I don’t have a better word for it, people. Whenever that Fog-Devil wakes up, goes kinetic like Greenberg said, then it goes hunting minds, human minds. And the next time it comes, none of us’ll be left.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said.

Fabrini was scared. You could see that. But he wanted to say something and he did: “When we were on the Cyclops, Cook and I found the ship’s log and…”

He told them what he remembered about it, breaking off again and again and saying how he wished Cook was alive, because Cook could tell it better than he could. But he got most of it right. The crew from the Cyclops visiting a Danish ship called the Korsund and what they found there… the burned men, their eyes cremated from their skulls, their brains boiled to jelly. All the horrors of that dead ship. And how what happened there, happened then to the Cyclops… one man at a time until there was no one left but the first mate who had gone mad, waiting for the Fog-Devil to come for him. When Fabrini had finished, he was breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and a tic in the corner of his lips.

“I never saw that fucking book,” Saks said. He looked to Menhaus and Crycek and they both shook their heads. “Where was it?”

“Cook,” Fabrini said. “He tossed it overboard. Did something with it. He didn’t want you guys reading it, getting freaked out.”

Saks made some derogatory comment under his breath.

Menhaus just said, “Cook… he was a good one. A real good one.”

“So that gives us an idea of what this thing does,” Cushing said to them. “It might be radioactive in nature. Regardless, it’s extremely dangerous. If we don’t want to be part of the next purge-”

“Then it’s time to shit or get off the pot,” George said.

“Meaning what?” Saks asked him.

George looked at him, at all of them in turn. “It means, Saks, that we can either head our asses back into the Sea of Mists and hope like hell that vortex opens for us again or we can go up to the Lancet.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s our only chance,” Cushing said. “We go up there and find Greenberg if he’s still alive or we find out the secret of that ship, find out why Greenberg thought it was the key. Deliverance, maybe.”

“And?” Menhaus said.

“Maybe death.”

“Well, you girls have fun,” Saks said. “Drop me a line from hell.”

“He’s right, Saks,” Menhaus said. “It’s our only chance and we got to take it.”

They voted on it right then and there and everyone but Saks was in favor of making the trip and taking the chance. Elizabeth voted to go along, too, but she figured it was more to protect Cushing than anything.

“You don’t know what that place is up there,” she said. “You don’t know all the souls that have been eaten up there… you have no idea what it is you’re going up against.”

“Do you?” George asked her.

But all she would do was stare holes through him.

19

Later, when George went up on deck, he found Cushing and Elizabeth up there. His first reaction was to go back below, like maybe he was interrupting something. But he saw he wasn’t. They were both leaning on the rail, looking out into the fog.

“Anything going on?” he said.

Cushing shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

George started watching, too.

The fog was very thick, thicker than it had been earlier. But it was still day and the mist was still backlit by itself, though heavy and roiling like some crazy fusion of smog, steam, and smoke. A gushing gaseous envelope. You could smell the dankness of it, feel its moisture on your skin like jungle damp.

“What is it I’m looking for?” George said, lighting a cigarette,

“Just wait,” Cushing said.

So George waited. Waited and smoked and wondered when the real question would be broached, that of when they were planning on making their pilgrimage up to the Lancet. Way he was looking at it, it was something they had to do and soon and also something that might kill them.

“There,” Cushing said. “You see it?”

George did, all right. A dull blue glow off in the fog that brightened, flickered for a few moments like a loose light bulb and then vanished. About two minutes later it did it again, then not for another five. Irregular, but artificial-looking. Like maybe somebody was turning on and off a light out there or something, something electrical, was shorting out.

“Like neon or something,” George said.

Of course, Cushing was quick to point out that it was more like argon. Electrified neon gas had a reddish glow to it, but electrified argon was blue. And this was definitely blue. “What do you make of it?” George asked him.

But he said he didn’t know. “Could be just about anything… could even be some weird chemical reaction, you know, some sort of gas mixing with the fog.”