Dead Sea

And that was the crazy thing about this horror: you couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t look at it and say, yes, it’s invertebrate. Yes, it’s a worm or a snake or an insect. There was no possible frame of reference for this thing on earth. Its anatomy was completely alien, its evolutionary biology unguessable.

Now George knew where that revolting, dead fish smell was coming from. But closer like this, it wasn’t exactly the smell of dead fish. Like that, but sharper, higher, with an almost gagging chemical smell mixed in.

Everything about the creature inspired revulsion. And the worse part was that it had a face. If you wanted to call it that. A fissured, wizened sort of face with a triangular arrangement of close-set eyes, each pink as strawberry milk, glistening and oozing with mucus… all three of them. And each about the size of a tennis ball. But those eyes, they soon saw, were not pink. Not really. There was only a membrane of pink skin over them. Like drapes opening, the membranes pulled away in tandem, slitting open in the center and revealing eyes that were red as rubies. The membranes did not pull back all the way… just enough so that the eyes looked pink with a luminous and jellied red slit in them.

And those eyes… they sucked the spirit right out of you.

What was to be done?

What really was to be done?

They watched it and it watched them, checkmate.

There was a pair of short, powerful-looking tentacles at its mouth. One to either side like they might have been used in feeding. They were a bright, cobalt blue with pink undersides, tiny razored suckers set into them. The creature stood there, rubbing those tentacles together with a slippery sound like a man stroking his chin, thinking what to do, what to do.

George watched it, noticing now that it was making a sort of shallow, gasping sound and as it did so, those tubes on its underside inflated, then deflated. Sure, it was breathing. That’s what those things were. Aspirators of some type. Probably not anything like human lungs at all, but more like the book lungs of a spider or maybe the gills of a fish. Organs of respiration that separated breathable gases from the toxic ones. And in this place, George knew, that could have been oxygen… but with all the rotting weed out there, it could have been methane, too. Maybe a little of both with some nitrogen mixed in.

Nobody had made any threatening moves on it yet and it had not done a thing to provoke any. But it was coming. If not from the thing itself, then from the people gathered there. You could almost smell it in the air: a hot, seething intolerance for this creature. And you could see it on the faces of those gathered there: an atavistic, marrow-deep race hatred that was involuntary and automatic. This thing did not belong. It was spidery and evil and obscene. It was offensive to the human condition. You wanted to crush it. To kick it. To stomp it. It was an abomination that disgusted you in ways you could not comprehend… so it had to die. It had to be purged. It was simply too different to be allowed to live.

No, none of them were truly aware at a conscious level of what they were truly feeling, but it was there. A race memory, an inherited predisposition that was acid in their bellies and electricity in their veins. That communal need to destroy, to kill, to rend for the good of the tribe. Slay the beast, kill the monster, protect the hive…

And everyone was suddenly very aware of the weapons in their white-knuckled fists, how their muscles bunched and their nerve endings jangled. Those weapons needed to be put to use.

“Let’s kill it,” Saks said and you had to expect it to come from him first. “Ugly cock-sucker, let’s put it down.”

And everyone there seemed more than willing to let that happen. They were like the same animal with the same bones and claws and teeth. The same wide, predatory eyes.

But Cushing said, “Now take it easy. Just take it easy. It… it must be intelligent. To build something like that.”

Menhaus felt his mouth begin to speak: “You… you know what it is, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Saks said, his voice hollow-sounding.

“That flying saucer… that ship in the weeds… that’s where it came from.”

Cushing didn’t even bother inquiring about that one, he just said, “It’s smarter than we are… it might be able to help us, to get us out of here…”

George just stood there, feeling numb and stupid. His body was thick and ungainly like he was stuffed with wet rags or had been shot up with Thorazine. If the thing had moved suddenly, he knew, it would have had him. There was just no way he could have hoped to evade it. Maybe this was from fear and maybe it was the result of that thing looking at him and into him. And he wondered if that wasn’t it… because with those alien eyes burning into his head like arc lights, he had a mad desire to draw a razor over his wrists.

Those eyes were bad.

Nothing on earth had eyes like that.