Dead Sea

“You’re right,” Cushing told her. “As usual, you’re absolutely right.”

And George knew she was, too.

There was evil as in human evil and then there was the other kind. Cosmic evil. An evil so malign and ravening that it was practically supernatural to the human mind. The alien had been like that. Evil to the fourth power. Evil fucking squared. And thinking such thoughts, feeling embarrassed and, yes, liberated by thinking them, George found himself doing something he had not done since childhood: praying. Yes, in his head he was praying to anything that would listen to him. Hoping, begging for some sort of divine guidance and protection. He’d never had much use for religion, but now? Oh yes, he needed it. He needed to feel a guiding hand on him that would deliver them from this hell. And he thought that if there was no god, no superior consciousness out there, then the human race and all the other struggling dumbassed races in the universe were seriously screwed. Because things like that alien would crush them and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. If there was no creator, no divine protector… then, shit, that meant that the human race was just a bunch of upright, intelligent apes scratching in the dirt for meaning, for revelation. Trying to make sense out of something that was innately senseless.

The idea of that was terrifying.

They kept poling along and then, gradually, the Mystic began to come out of the mist at them, taking form and solidity as the fog abandoned it. George sat there looking at it, getting a funny vibe off of it that he could not classify. For some unknown reason, he was equating that ship with a tomb.

Menhaus paused on his pole, squinted into the mist. “It’s changed,” he said.

Elizabeth had stopped poling, too. The scow slid into the weeds and came to a stop. She was staring up at the Mystic and looking tense, looking concerned.

“Looks the same,” Cushing said, as if maybe he didn’t believe it for one moment.

George was suddenly aware that he felt very rigid. All his muscles were contracted and tight. His eyes were wide and his breathing shallow. His ears were open and his mind was totally clear of anything but the ship. He was feeling it, too. The ship had changed. But how? He could not put words to it, but something about it, about its aura maybe had been violated. It just felt wrong. He wasn’t about to put any of what he was feeling down to some latent psychic gift brewing in the basement of his being, yet it was surely something like that. Something tenuous, but there all the same. Some ancient network of fear powering up and telling him to get ready for the shit, because it was definitely coming.

Menhaus, very calmly, said, “Something happened after we left. Something… something was here after we left.”

Cushing seemed to be feeling it now, too. He swallowed and then swallowed again. “Let’s go see what it was.”

23

On board, that sense of danger became positively electric in George. It was here, something was here, something had passed in the fog and left… he wasn’t sure what it had left. But the atmosphere of the boat was certainly different. That sense of desecration was there, was very palpable. And George knew it the way you knew when something intimate to you was handled roughly, touched by hands that had no business touching it. Like the objects in your room had been touched, put back an inch or two out of place. Not so anyone would notice except for you.

They stood on the deck, fingers of fog drifting around their legs like hungry cats. The mist was luminous and pulsing behind them. If there could be a soundtrack to all this, George knew, it would be someone plucking the strings of a violin. Strings off-key an octave or two.

First thing they saw was that the aft bulkhead of the main cabin was blackened. When Menhaus prodded it with his axe, it flaked away like it had crystallized in a firestorm.

“Like what Fabrini said of the Cyclops,” George said. “That Swedish ship him and Cook read about in the log.”

“Danish. The Korsund, he called it. It was out of Copenhagen.”

Several sections of the deck had been charred black and there was a snotty tangle of something like fungus hanging from the main mast. It was glowing with a shimmering, internal light.

They all noticed that, too.

They went below.

The companionway walls were smeared with clots of some phosphorescent matter as if something huge had forced itself down the stairwell, bits of it breaking off above, below, and to either side.

“Don’t touch that shit,” Cushing warned them.

They made it into the saloon cabin. Everything was burnt. The carpet was ashes beneath their footsteps. Elizabeth was taking it all in. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her right hand locked tight on the hilt of her machete. Her lips were pulled into a tight line.

They found Aunt Else first.