Dead Sea

“Bring this fucker around!”

Menhaus did, gunning the throttle and bringing them around in an arc, creating a surging wake and then pushing them forward into the mist again. George was hoping, praying that they had not gotten turned around. He slid another flare into the gun and waited.

Waited for what came next.

Not letting himself think about what he had just seen or what kind of spiderish monstrosity could spin a floating web up in the mist and make Cushing look like he’d been dunked in a bath of acid in under a minute.

They kept going, pushing on and on.

And then George looked at the compass.

The needle was moving.

31

The needle on the Geiger Counter was moving, too.

It shuddered, fell back, began to move steadily upwards with a lazy sort of roll and Greenberg just watched it, feeling tense but exhilerated. This was it then. No more toying about with mathematical equations on paper, no more speculating on the vagaries of interdimensional physics, no more hiding in lead-lined vaults and coughing up blood and vomiting and watching his hair fall out from radiation poisoning.

This was it.

This was really it.

The thing was coming. Coming for him and there wasn’t a single force born of man, nature, or God that could stop it. Stop this breathing, hissing abomination that could chew through time and space like a maggot through dead meat.

Don’t get emotional and imaginative, Greenberg warned himself. You are an observer, a scientist. Keep that in mind. Do not look at this thing and tremble. Do not let it see your fear.

But it was too late for that and Greenberg damn well knew it. For the Fog-Devil had been smelling his fear for some time know. It had been licking at his brain for weeks, gnawing on his thoughts and sucking the salt from his subconscious with a growing, impossible hunger. Yes, carefully working him and savoring him, unwrapping the candied layers of his psyche and now it had found the creamy, rich nougat at the center… fear. Mindless, mad, human fear and such a thing was a luxury to this Devil of Fogs and anti-space. It had marked Greenberg with its wasting breath, sweetening him up, letting him ripen like a succulent grape on a vine, and now it would claim him.

Now it would eat his mind raw.

Easy, easy, he cautioned himself.

But it was not easy. Not at all, because the Geiger Counter was clicking away now, the analog meter jumping and falling rapidly, showing a high-end reading of three hundred counts per second. Well beyond the safety level of Roentgens. Greenberg watched the needle.. . yes, five hundred, seven hundred, up and up, not falling at all now. The clickings were so fast now they sounded like the static from an old radio. The analog needle was pegged now and Greenberg knew he was being inundated by a crackling swarm of charged subatomic particles that were burning right through him.

Dear God, dear God.

He was suddenly gripped with an almost hysterical, superstitious terror that was building inside him like plumes of poison gas. And the fog… dear Christ the fog, look at the fog…

It was being consumed by a sort of thrumming luminosity that was filling it with light and motion and flickering shapes. Yes, now it was exploding with a gushing, polychromatic brilliance that was running like wet paint, seeming to drip and ooze and puddle, diffusing now like ink dropped in water. Yes, it was colors and prisms and a spreading dark vortex-adumbration of depthless black matter that was bright and blinding… deranged geometrical shapes and living polyhedrons and, yes, more, more all the time. The fog was fog and yet was not fog. It was liquid and solid, then gas, then a roiling putrescence expanding like a balloon blown with filth.

Greenberg could feel it, yes, feel it down deep, chewing into his mind, filling his rioting brain with things unknown, unseen, and blasphemous.

His hand tightened on the pull cord of the dirty bomb.

Hesitated.

Not yet, not yet, not just yet. I must see it, I must see it, God help me but I must… see… this… nightmare…

But some gods were not meant to be looked upon by mortal eyes and Greenberg’s eyes were unclean, impure, and he could feel a wave of heat reaching out to burn his eyes out of their sockets. Waves of agony shot through his brain and blood ran from his nose and ears, but he would see, he would see this thing, God yes, he would look upon it and know it.