But the kind of jellyfish that swam the Dead Sea. Its bell was maybe thirty feet across, all those hissing bladders and floats that surrounded it as big as basketballs. They were inflating and deflating, like the thing was breathing. The water was roiling now with hundreds of pale yellow tentacles that fanned out in every direction. Some were wire thin, others thicker than a man’s arm and veined with a ruby-red networking that might have been arteries… or nerve ganglia for all anyone could say. Some of those tentacles must have been hundreds of feet in length.
“Jesus Christ,” Gosling said.
And George wanted to say something, too, but he was positively breathless. His lungs were filled with dust devils and blowing sand and that was probably a good thing… for if his voice had come, managed to push past his lips which were melted together in a gray line, it would have been a scream. The mother of all screams. For what was bouncing through him at the sight of this monstrosity, this evil living hot-air balloon and its attendant floats, was sheer, unbridled terror. Raw and stark and mad.
It could not be.
This thing could not be.
The water was a seething, undulating forest of its tentacles now and they had completely encircled the raft like coils of cable. They were underwater in thick, roping clusters and breaking the surface in tangles so thick you could have walked across them.
As far as George could see… tentacles. A writhing, heaving mass of them, congested like vines in the jungle.
When he found his voice, gagging on the heady vinegar-like stench of the thing, all he could say was, “What the fuck? What the fuck now?”
But nobody answered him.
Cushing and Gosling sat stock still, maybe afraid that if they moved that gargantuan alien jellyfish would sense it, would know exactly where they were and envelop them in a dripping sweep of tentacles. George decided he was going to follow their example and lock down his muscles, even though every muscle and nerve-fiber in him was snapping like high-tension lines.
So they sat and waited and the fog swirled and coalesced, was born in luminous plumes and sparkling shrouds, died in its own arms and was reborn again. Steam misted from the weeds and marshy water. And the raft waited silently with three ice sculptures onboard, an immense nightmare medusan ringing them in like a nickel tangled in a bed of kelp.
What finally broke that leaden, weighty silence was Soltz.
He moaned, groaned, made a wet gasping sound. His lips parted with a dry smacking. His face was beaded with perspiration and his unbandaged eye looked glazed and milky. “Water,” he was saying. “I need… water… need water… a drink of… water…”
And George, even though he knew the man was sick, wanted desperately to stuff a rag in his mouth, tell him to shut the hell up. Because that repeated, dull cadence of his voice was stirring up the jellyfish. Its tentacles were vibrating as if they were hearing it. Around the rim of its bell there was a fan of colorless cilia that looked like waterlogged spaghetti. They had been hanging limp before, barely moving with a sort of drifting motion like sea grass, but now they were twitching and trembling. Maybe the jellyfish couldn’t hear, but maybe it could sense the vibration caused by sound.
Cushing moved and a half dozen tentacles jerked as if in surprise.
“Sit fucking still,” Gosling said in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, just not exactly where…”
Soltz began to stir. He shifted and shook, the waterproof blanket sliding down to his knees. He was up in what passed for the bow and the thing’s tentacles were mere inches away from him over the lip of the raft.
His motion made those tentacles flutter. They changed from the color of wheat to a bright, neon-yellow. Most of them just lay motionless in the water, but a dozen or so above the waterline began to coil in lazy rolls like pythons. It wasn’t just the tentacles that changed color, but the bell, too. It looked oddly synthetic, George had thought upon first seeing it, like something poured from a Jello mold. A perfectly circular mass of transparent jelly that looked deep enough to drown in, skinned with a rubbery membrane like cellophane wetted down with cooking spray. And now it was changing color, too. From that rich purple to hot pink and then scarlet and orange and indigo… it looked like gasoline on water.
“Why the hell is it doing that?” George said under his breath.
“Chromatophores,” Cushing said just as quietly. “Pigmentation cells… it can either control its pigment or it’s reacting to mood swings like a squid…”
But George wasn’t sure if he was buying that.
What he was thinking was insane… but what if it was responding to their voices? The subtle vibrations they caused? Only when they spoke did the bell effuse color. What if it was… Jesus
… intelligent and it was trying to communicate?
