Dead Sea

“A terrible business,” the captain said. “We’ll never know for sure what happened there. When we reach port there’ll be a formal investigation. But even then… who can say?”

Fabrini giggled dryly. “Who can say? What kind of bullshit is that?” he wanted to know. “We saw him. We all saw him. The guy was covered in blood screaming that something had him, something was inside him.”

Saks’s heavy brow furrowed. “Shut the hell up, Fabrini. You saw a guy with blood on him. A guy totally out of his mind for chrissake. If he said Jesus and Mary were chasing him down the hallway with chainsaws would you believe that too?”

Fabrini shook his head slowly from side to side. “You know, Saks, you’re really starting to piss me off here. What’s with you? What’s with all you guys?” He looked around at them with accusing eyes. “You know something’s totally fucked up here. This fog ain’t right. The captain here is serving up the bullshit on a platter and expecting us to chew and swallow and Saks? Saks is pretending nothing has happened. Well, I ain’t fucking buying it. No way. And neither are any of you.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Saks said in disgust.

Soltz just shook his head. “He’s right. Something’s wrong here.”

Cook and Menhaus kept silent, but their minds were going full tilt. Cook was the sort of guy who rarely said anything. Menhaus didn’t like confrontation; he would wait and see what the majority thought and then adopt this thinking himself.

The next one to speak was George Ryan. What he had to say was simple and to the point. “What is it you think is happening, Fabrini?”

Cushing nodded, smiling thinly, seeming to enjoy the anarchy. “Yes, tell us.”

All eyes were on Fabrini now. His dark face was somehow flushed, a vein at his temple throbbing. “I don’t know what happened. But it sure as hell wasn’t just some guy going nuts and jumping overboard. There’s more to it than that. Christ, look at that fog. I’ve seen fog before and it doesn’t fucking glow. And it doesn’t suck away the air.”

Captain Morse just stared, then cleared his throat. “I’ll be the first to admit we’ve experienced some strange phenomena here, but nothing that has happened is what I would call supernatural, gentlemen. I’ve been sailing the Atlantic for over thirty-five years and it still never fails to surprise me.”

“What is it you think happened, then?” Cushing said, amused by it all.

“I don’t know really. My guess is that we experienced some bizarre atmospheric anomaly. The fog is just the result of some strange weather pattern, maybe the sun acting on a cold sea. The lack of air and those gases that nearly suffocated us all, those could have came from a mile down… a bubble of methane, maybe. It’s happened before.”

“That’s right,” Saks said. “A day or so and we’ll be out of this, so all of you knock it off with the spooky stories here.”

Cushing and George looked at each other. Like Fabrini, they knew bullshit when they heard it. They knew when somebody was telling them something just to shut them up and that’s exactly what was going on here. The real ugly, unpleasant part of it all, they knew, was that nobody knew what was going on. And that was scary.

“This is pointless,” Fabrini said and stomped off.

Soltz followed suit.

There was nothing more to say.

18

Gosling wasn’t present at the session between Morse and Saks’s crew. But the captain filled him in on it. Morse wasn’t a guy who enjoyed lying. He would’ve liked to have told the others the truth. The only problem being he didn’t know what the truth was. No one did. Yes, something was wrong, but what? They were sailing blind here. No navigational aids. No radio contact. Even the radar was acting screwy. The thick fog made visual navigation impossible… there were no stars that could be seen. It was all very disturbing.

Gosling had never been in a situation like this.

It was insane.

He assumed they were somewhere between Norfolk and South America, which was pretty much saying they were a needle in the biggest haystack in creation. Somewhere between Norfolk and French Guiana.

That was slick. Like telling someone the contact lens they’d dropped was somewhere between Milwaukee and Buffalo.

But where else could we be? he asked himself. Sure, the fog and everything else is goddamn strange, but it doesn’t mean much in itself. We’re caught in some freakish weather pattern here and like Morse said, it’ll blow over sooner or later. So what is it I’m worried about?

He had no answer to that.