The woman returned with tin cups steaming with coffee. Just the aroma was enough to make George want to weep. Maybe he did. He took the cup she offered him and it was warm and soothing in his hands. The coffee wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but right then, he couldn’t remember ever having any that good.
“The squid only hunts at night,” she explained to them. “During the day, it dives deep. It does not like light.”
“I take it you’ve had dealings with it before?” George said.
She ignored him, was watching Cushing with Gosling. Watching him very intently. There was almost a softness around her mouth when she looked at Cushing, like maybe he reminded her of someone else. And maybe he did.
“Are you a doctor, Mr. Cushing?”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve had a little medical training. Just enough to get by.”
She stared at him for a time, turned away. “The squid only surfaces at night. Your lights might have drawn it in. I think it hunts by motion, by body heat… it may have been curious about your light. And then… its claws are venomous. Your friend could die.”
“You know a lot about that creature, don’t you?” Cushing said.
“It’s been here long as I have.” She considered that a moment. “I think it may live in the bottom of one of the old derelicts.”
“How long have you been here?” Chesbro asked.
She sighed. “I’m not sure. For a time we kept track, but not anymore. It seems like I’ve always been here. It’s been years, I know that much.”
“You said ‘we’… are there others?”
She shook her head. “There is myself, my Auntie Else… nobody else. There were ten of us once. The squid killed three the first week. The others… they were attacked by other things. My Uncle Richard, he died… was it last year? I can’t remember. He died of a heart ailment, I think. He went in his sleep. Now it’s just we two.”
George was struck by her almost formal mode of speech. It was peculiar. The sort of diction people used at one time in written correspondence. The idea of that started giving him some funny ideas about how long she’d been there.
“Where is your aunt?” Chesbro asked.
“Sleeping. She’s old… she’s not in her right mind most of the time. Please understand that when you meet her. She’s been through a lot.”
“How do you live here?” George asked. “I mean, what do you eat? Where do you get your food?”
She told him that they lived basically by scavenging. New boats showed up in the seaweed sea all the time, many each year. She raided them for food and supplies, clothing and blankets and fuel oil, anything she could get. She was always looking for survivors, too, but most of them were either dead, missing, or mad by the time they made it this far.
“I’m not the only person here, you know,” Elizabeth said. “I know of five or six others. Most of them are mad, though. You’re all welcome to stay here with us for as long as you want.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” George said, smiling, but getting nothing in return.
Your boyish charm doesn’t shine shit with this girl, he told himself. So just cool it. Besides, quit thinking what you’re thinking
…you’ve got a wife and kid back in the world.
True enough, he knew. But Elizabeth Castle was desirable. There was something very savage and untamed about her, exotic even. Those eyes, that lilt of hungry mouth, the long-limbed muscular grace she exhibited. But George told himself to stop right there. For he was married and even if he wasn’t, this woman looked at him about as cold as cold could be. You got out of line with her, she’d scratch your eyes out. That was the feeling he was getting from her. She reminded him of a warrior maiden. A woman you knew could out-fight you and probably out-think you, too.
Besides, he thought, you see how she’s looking at Cushing. Ain’t the way a sister looks at her brother, you catch my drift.
Sure, Cushing. He had an easy, open way about him. You knew looking into those blue eyes of his that he was intelligent and compassionate, loyal and steady. He was also tall and blond-haired, handsome in a Nordic sort of way. Women probably always went for him.
She told them that she couldn’t honestly remember much of her life before the ship she was on — the Catherine Belling — was pulled into the mist en route from Savannah to Bermuda. George figured she could, but didn’t want to. She said that, after a time, the only thing that really mattered was survival, staying alive. That it became a mantra after awhile. There was always work to be done and her days were occupied, so there was very little time to think about what was and what could have been. George figured that was bullshit, too.
“We have a lot of food,” she told them. “Canned and dried, salt pork and bacon. Often, when a new ship arrives, I find fresh meat and fruit, a variety of things. I grow vegetables on another ship in soil that came in boxes. Things grow very fast here.”
“Like the weed,” George said. “That fungus.”
“Yes.” She looked very stern. “You must always be careful about what you eat or drink. You have to boil the water out there before you drink it. It’s salty, but not as salty as the seas back home. But it has germs in it. They can make you very sick. Mostly, I drain water from the tanks of ships. One more thing. You’re welcome here, but understand that there are rules. And the most important is that you never leave this ship unless I’m with you. Later, once you know this place, you can… but not until then.”
“How long does the night last?” George asked her. “A day? Two days?”
At that question, it seemed like Elizabeth was real close to a smile. Close, but not quite there. “I’m so used to this… sometimes it’s hard to remember day and night back there, back where we came from.” She sat on the settee, placed her hands on her knees. “The day here… what we could call the day… lasts about three of our days, sometimes four. The night lasts about two days.”
She said that the mists were so thick that you never actually saw the sun there, though at certain times of the year you could catch a glimpse of it. But never for long. Not like you could with the moons when they were full. Which got George to thinking that if there was a sun and moons, well, then this wasn’t just some cosmic dead-end, it was a world. A planet caught in the orbit of some star he’d never heard of. One that no earth astronomer had probably ever heard of either.
Cushing asked her how large the seaweed sea was and she couldn’t tell him. It was vast, she knew, maybe hundreds if not thousands of miles in diameter, but the exact dimensions were unknown. “I know that you could travel for two days straight and never find anything but weed and water. I’ve never seen any land and never heard of anyone that has.”
“There must be thousands of ships and planes out there,” George said.
“And they keep coming,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes nothing for months and then, suddenly, three or four, five or six. In batches, they always come in batches. But as far as you go in the weed, you’ll find wreckage. Some of it very, very old.”
Chesbro had his head bowed over, praying silently.
Elizabeth Castle was watching him intently. “Is he a minister?” she asked.
But Cushing just shook his head. “No, he just has a deep and abiding faith,” Cushing said with all sincerity.
Good for you, George thought.
Anyone else might have said that Chesbro was a Jesus freak, a religious nut… but not Cushing. He wouldn’t go there and you couldn’t make him. That’s the kind of guy he was.
“You are very quiet, Mr. Pollard,” Elizabeth remarked.
He nodded. “I guess… I guess I don’t have much to say.”
“He’s okay,” Cushing told her. “He’s been through a lot.”
She and Cushing sat there discussing the specifics of this mad new world, the sort of things that lived there and all the people that must have perished there through the centuries, through the eons. It was real cheerful stuff. Elizabeth spoke of this place as something to be beaten down, something you had to fight at every turn, but nothing you could ever conquer. She was a stubborn, hard-headed woman by all accounts and maybe that’s how she had survived here — through ingenuity and rigid persistence. Maybe all the death she’d seen had made her cling to life all that much more tenaciously.