Dead Sea

There would be no more legal motions by her. There would be no more of anything. She was in her bunk, a twisted and incinerated thing. The stench of cremated flesh was unbearable.

Elizabeth made a choking sound and turned away.

George was sickened by it, yet he looked long enough to see that the sheets below her were not charred in any way. As if, Aunt Else had been tossed into a blast furnace, fished out, and dumped back here. By they all knew by that point what had happened and it was not from heat. Not as they understood heat.

They found Crycek next.

He was not dead, yet very close. He was badly burned, but his face was more or less unmolested. His hair had gone white and his eyes had gone white with them. He was laying in his bunk, gasping and drooling and coughing out tangles of slime that were suffused with a shine like the fungus on deck. A terrible transformation had overtaken him. And it was more than those eyes like mirrors whitened by steam or that glowing mucus running from his mouth. It was much more than that. For Crycek looked like he had aged a hundred years, had been taken high into unthinkable heights and at such momentum that he had been burned raw, worn to a nub.

Although he could not see them, he knew they were there. “Oh yes, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it came while you were out… it came with colors and fire and eyes and ice… it came and kept coming. ..”

George wanted to block his ears, because he did not want to hear these profanties. Did not want to feel them spearing into his brain, tearing him open in too many places at once. Because in Dimension X there were things that you could fight and others that were ghosts and malignancies and creeping haunted matter and you didn’t stand a chance, you just didn’t stand a fucking chance and how was that for divine guidance?

Crycek was still talking, alternately cackling and moaning and making high, lunatic sounds no sane mind could produce. “You… you ought to see it… oh it’s so cold… so bright and hot and cold and damp and dry… it pulls you into its mind and the blackness. .. the searing frozen blackness of forever… oh, oh, oh, you’ll see… you’ll feel it and it’ll feel you…”

Then he died.

In mid-babble he just went stiff as a board and stayed that way.

Nobody seemed capable of moving then. They were just as inanimate as Crycek’s corpse. They could only look at each other or not look at each other and just feel each other. Feel the settling, iron weight on one another’s souls and feel the indecision re-making them into statues and mannequins and silent, immoveable things.

But Cushing?

No, not Cushing. He knew better as they all knew better, he knew how dangerous it was to stay. How each passing moment was cellular death and chromosomal suicide. Like standing on a hot skillet, waiting to sizzle and sputter like greasy strips of bacon.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, leading Elizabeth away by the hand. “Don’t touch anything, don’t handle anything… this entire place is radioactive waste now…”

Sullen, wordless, they let him lead them back up into the fog and down into the scow. And when they were in it, he and Menhaus poled them away from the Mystic which was now little better than the leaking core of a nuclear power plant. And all Cushing kept saying was: “The fallout… oh Jesus, the fallout, the black rain…”

24

So there were four of them, then. Not a lot, but something. A collective mind, a collective force, a last flexing muscle of humanity in that godless place, in that Dimension X or Dead Sea, that awful and nightmarish place of rended veils beyond the misting, black looking glass. Yes, they had come in numbers and this place had whittled them down like hickory, scattering shavings and chips in every which direction. And now they were just this last flexing muscle, but they had motion and drive and one last, gasping hope before the darkness took them. And they were going to put that muscle to use, they were going to hammer this place like hot metal, punch a hole through it, make it work for them. Before that other came, before that devil of fogs and anti-dimensions chewed the meat from their souls, they were going to make a stand.

Just one stand.

Because it was all they had, all they would ever have.

So they rowed through the noisome fog, fought through the ship’s graveyard, clawing through the weed that was clotted jungle foilage and slipped around the carcasses of dead vessels until they cut their way into channels indicated on Greenberg’s chart. Then the real work began, filling that last, lone lifeboat with ugency and steel, propelling it through the channels of slopping water and into the haunted wastelands of the Outer Sea.

And somewhere above, getting closer like jaws ready to snap, was the Lancet and the fabled Sea of Veils.

Closer and closer still.

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