George had his oar on the port side and Cushing had his starboard. Feeling something evaporating in their throats and the patter of their hearts begin to pick up, they began to paddle madly away from the mass. Neither thought they would, but then, when it was maybe five feet from the raft, they broke away and to the right and skirted it, came around it into open water.
There.
Simple.
It was behind them now. Just a huge, spreading shadow. In five, ten minutes, it would be out of sight, another nasty little secret tucked away in the fog.
“Probably wasn’t anything to begin with,” Cushing said, almost like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “Nothing alive. Just something drifting around… some junk.”
And George wanted badly to disagree with that, because he didn’t think that mass was just some harmless patch of submerged weed or clot of muck. It had approached the raft because it wanted to approach the raft.
“Wait a minute now,” Gosling said. “It’s coming back… maybe it’s caught in the line from the sea anchor.”
Sure, George thought, maybe.
It sounded good, sounded damn reasonable… but he didn’t believe it. Whatever was out there it was indeed coming back. Not like something snared on the anchor, but like something moving under its own power.
“Shit,” Cushing said, which summed it up nicely.
The mass was coming back and coming back fast. It was still down deep enough in that foul water where they could not see what it was and maybe it wanted things that way.
Gosling had an oar now, too. “Row for chrissake,” he told them. “Row your asses off.”
And they did, splashing through the water, sliding over patches of weed and cutting across those occasional channels of open, dark water. They were moving, but it was still gaining. Coming even faster now and George thought he saw it moving with an odd pulsating sort of motion.
“It’s gonna hit us,” Gosling said. “Get into the center of the raft.”
They pulled in their oars and did just that.
Still the thing came, not slowing at all. It was going to bump them any minute now. Ten feet, then five, then right on top of them, everyone tensing and gritting their teeth and waiting for it… but it never hit them. Inches from the raft it simply disappeared.
“It went under us,” Gosling said.
And that surely wasn’t good. Because it was bad enough to be dogged in that Dead Sea by some black mass, but at least then you knew where it was. Not knowing, now that was far worse any way you sliced it.
“Where is it?” Cushing asked, trying to look in every direction at the same time.
“Gone,” Gosling said.
And George sat there, the seconds ticking away like separate eternities as he waited for something else to happen. For some nameless horror, perhaps, to rise up from the stark depths and engulf the entire raft like a clam closing its shell.
Up ahead, maybe twenty feet in front of the raft, bubbles broke the surface. Dozens of them until it looked like a submarine was about to surface. But what surfaced was that black mass again. It came nearly to the surface, then dipped back down again like it was saying, yeah, I’m here all right, but you don’t get to know what I am. Not until I decide…
“It’s just sitting there,” Cushing said. “I don’t like this at all
… fucking thing is giving me the creeps. Don’t mind saying so either.”
Gosling smiled thinly and maybe George did, too. But you could see that Cushing did not care one iota. That mass was scaring him just as it was scaring them, but at least he had the balls to admit as such out loud.
So they waited.
The thing waited.
“Haven’t we had enough already?” George said out loud and was immediately sorry that he had. The others were thinking it, sure, but he’d been the one to say it. Something that certainly didn’t need saying.
He kept his mouth shut.
After maybe ten minutes of awful nothing, the mass began to move slowly toward the raft. It was in no hurry. It had all the time in the world and seemed to know it.
“I think it’s… I think it’s coming up,” Gosling said.
It was.
Something was. Something was emerging, breaking the surface in a foam of bubbles and slime, something like an immense umbrella-shaped dome that ran from a lustrous purple at its apex to a fleshy bubblegum-pink around its edges. Thing was, it did not stop coming up. More of it was visible all the time, a hideous collection of floats and polyps and wheezing bladders, white and red and orange and emerald. All glistening and shining and fluttering. Around the outside of the dome, there were a series of dark oily nodules that might have been eyes… hundreds of them, black and jellied and staring.
“It’s a… a jellyfish,” Cushing said and you could hear it just beneath his words, that peculiar combination of wonder and terror and revulsion they were all feeling.
A jellyfish.
