And the next… the next your eyes were seeing through that weave of October mist, separating fibers and threads and filaments, looking at something that made a speading fever ignite in your belly until you thought your insides would melt and run out through your pores.
When they saw it, they stopped rowing.
They held their breath and forgot how to speak.
For maybe they had not found the Lancet… maybe it had found them.
George had been resting, smoking a cigarette and feeling for that light at the end of the tunnel. He had not been looking up. Had not been taking too much notice that the clumps of weeds were getting thicker or more numerous, were often welded into shoals and married into great, creeping green and yellow reefs. He had not been paying attention to any of that because that would have meant he would have had to look upon the fog and he just couldn’t do that anymore. After days and days in its claustrophobic shifts, the more he watched it, the more it pressed in on him. Got up his nose and into his eyes, filled his pores and fouled his lungs. Made him feel dizzy, asphyxiated, a fish flopping on a beach.
So he was not looking when the Lancet made its appearance like the Flying Dutchman, like a plague ship with a seething, pestilent cargo in its belly. How he knew they had reached it, was that he simply felt it. Felt it coming up at them or reaching out with bony digits. He felt as if a thunderstorm were approaching or a Kansas tornado. There was something like an immediate drop in atmospheric pressure, a change in the air, a shivering in the fog. A thickness and a thinning and a roiling taint. A sense of time compressed and imploded. Everything seemed electric and engulfing and heavy as if the world had been drowned in a black wash of vibrant matter.
He looked up and, yes, there she was.
A big and long five-masted schooner, once high and proud and sharp and now just dead. A death ship. A corpse ship. Some wind-splitting leviathan that had strangled here in the ropes and mats of verdant, stinking weed. Yes, it had died here, thrashed and fought and raged, but finally died, an immense marine saurian dying beneath the pall of its own primeval breath. The flesh was picked from its bones. Its hide was riven by worms and gnawed by slimy things, moldered to carrion beneath a shroud of seaweed and alien fungi. And now it lay in state, a great petrified fossil, a labyrinth of fleshless arches and spidery rigging, skeletal masts and withered rungs of bone. A thing of shades and shadows and rolling vapors.
A ghost ship.
“There, there it is,” Menhaus said, his voice raw and grating like he’d been gargling with crushed glass.
Everyone nodded or maybe they didn’t, but mostly what they were doing was feeling it, that great ship which reeked of death and insanity and blackness. But that was what they were smelling in their heads. What their noses found was a repellent, odious stink of damp moldered earth and slimy bones rotting in ditches. The sort of smell that made your mouth go dry, made something pull up in your belly.
George was feeling that. Like maybe he’d just swallowed something rancid and his stomach was recoiling from it. It was like that, the fear that old ship inspired. It filled your belly in sickening waves, made you want to vomit just looking at it.
He could see it on all their faces — the dread resignation, that acceptance of ultimate doom. That look you saw in old photographs of faces pressed up against the fences of Mauthausen or Birkenau… an intimate knowledge of horror and an acceptance of it.
Cushing said, “Makes you… makes you want to row away from her fast as you can, don’t it?”
And, sure, that’s what they were all thinking as the terror threaded through them.
George had been afraid many, many times since entering Dimension X, as they now all called it. There had been times when he thought his mind would boil down to a sap and piss out his ears. It had been that bad. And more than once. He wasn’t sure if the cadaver of the Lancet was the worse thing yet, but it surely was in the running. Because the terror on him was almost palpable, getting under his skin like an infection and turning his nerve endings to jelly. And as he sat there, thrumming with it, he decided that real terror as opposed to book-terror or movie-terror was much like hallucinating. Like tripping your brains right out on some sweet microdot… reality, as such, was suddenly made of cellophane and there was a great, gaping tear in it. That’s what it was like. Exactly what it was like. It overwelmed you and sank you into a numb stupor.
“Okay, it’s just another dead ship,” Cushing said. “Let’s go see what we came to see.”
Hesitantly then, he and Elizabeth took to the oars and pushed the lifeboat through the weed and up close to that hulk. When they were so close that its shadow fell over them chill and black, Menhaus took the anchor and tossed it up and over the taffrail where it caught fast, striking the deck with a great hollow booming like an urn falling to a crypt floor in the dead of night. Menhaus pulled them in close until the moldering smell of that waterlogged casket was rubbed in their faces.
Up close, the Lancet’s bulwarks were veiled in sediment and marine organisms… things like tiny sponges and barnacles and, of course, a dense matting of seaweed that seemed not to just grow over the ship, but into it.
“Let me see if I can get up there,” Menhaus told them.
And George looked upon him with renewed respect. The guy was just as scared as the rest of them, but he was doing what had to be done and that was the true mark of a man, the true mark of a human being.
Menhaus tugged on the anchor line, made sure it held fast.
It did.
Which was surprising in of itself. The ship looked so rotten, so decayed, George thought that when Menhaus pulled on the line, the entire rail up there would come down on top of him.
Standing on the lip of the lifeboat, he reached up, took hold of the anchor line and pulled himself up it like a kid climbing a rope in gym class. And he did it pretty good, too. There was an unsuspected agility about him that made George think that old Jolly Olly had been an athlete back in the good old days. His feet skidded against the hull, scraping off shells and mildewed things. He shimmied up the rope maybe four or five feet, got hold of the railing and pulled himself up. Up and over.
Then he looked down at them. “I’m too old for this shit,” he said. He looked around up there, staring and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ
…you gotta… you gotta see this…”
And they supposed they didn’t really have a choice.
Elizabeth went up next. She was in good shape and she made it look easy. Cushing followed her with no problem. George figured he’d grab that rope, lose his grip and fall into the weed. But he didn’t. It took some straining, but he got up there, all right. A lifetime spent using his back and muscles paid off.
He flipped himself over the railing, hands pulling on him and then he was up, too.
The teak decks were filthy with dried mud and sediment, the husks of dead crabs and bony fishes protruding obscenely. The masts were bowed and swaying like ancient oaks, their wood discolored from seawater and advanced age. The sails hung in ragged flaps, stained gray with mildew, great lurching holes eaten in them. They looked to be made of graying, threadbare cheesecloth. From the mizzenmast aft to the foremast, all the sails drooped like moldered shrouds, ripped and dangling in ribbons. Most of the stays had rotted away, the jibs gone entirely. Drooping clots of seaweed and webs of fungi were tangled in what remained of the rigging, knotted around mastheads and yards, festooned like cobwebs over the mainsail boom. From forepeak to stern, the Lancet was a dead and decaying thing exhumed from a muddy grave, dripping with slime and netted with fungi and assorted unpleasant growths.