That was scarier than just about anything he could imagine. The idea of some revolting dumb predator was infinitely preferable to one that could reason. For if it could reason, then it was only a matter of time before it figured out how to get them out of the raft.
This was bad. George had thought it had all been bad up to this point… the giant eel attacking the raft, that crazy devil-ray bat
… but none of that had been like this. It was one thing to be able to fight back, regardless of how disgusting your adversary was, but to just sit here and wait and wonder helplessly while your mind turned upon itself like a top, showing you all the unpleasant details of your death… yeah, now that was really bad. The sort of bad that reached down inside you and yanked your guts out through your mouth until there wasn’t a goddamn thing left in you but an echoing void like the hollow of an empty drum.
Somebody better do something, George thought, or I’m gonna crack, see if I don’t.
And maybe he was close, maybe they were all close, but he held it in check best he could. He felt gutless and sick and scared. Very scared. For how could you not be? Waiting there like that in the foggy silence, feeling like a condemned man waiting for execution, everything inside you tense and bunched, ready to explode. And in the back of your mind there was that primitive urge to fight, to do battle, even though the idea was ludicrous. There was no chance of victory against something of this immensity… yet, that primal man inside said it was better to die that way, fighting and slashing and cutting with blood in your mouth, than to take it like this. Just sitting there, letting it happen. And George figured that made real good sense, for maybe the jellyfish would kill them quicker that way. Maybe the very defiance of them hacking at its tentacles would piss it off. And a quick death would be better than waiting, better than feeling your mind going to a cold slop as those tentacles embraced you like living ropes.
George didn’t honestly think he could handle being touched by it. That was just unthinkable. Repellent. Like being webbed up by a spider and feeling it lick you… your mind would go to sauce.
The tentacles continued to unwind, slithering over and around each other like a tangle of nesting snakes slowly waking.
The minutes ticked by.
George could hear those tentacles now brushing up against the sides of the raft with a squeaking sound. Many of them, questing and scraping and investigating. One of them rose up, hovered directly over Soltz’s head and everyone on the raft held their breath… it passed within two, three inches of his face, found the gunwale of the raft and tapped against it, withdrew.
But that was hardly the end of it.
Those tentacles were real busy all of a sudden. It seemed as if maybe the jelly was intelligent to a certain degree, for it kept touching the raft, trying to figure it out. One of the tentacles slid up the side of the raft and wormed its way inside, just touching things… the blanket that covered Soltz’s legs, an oar, the zippered compartments that contained the survival equipment. It found a lightstick and darted back as if it did not like the feel of it. Then it slid back over the side. Four or five others began tapping their way along the gunnel as if looking for something.
One of them got real close to George.
It was the pale, waxy yellow of a gourd. An undulant and rubbery thing like a great blind worm rooting through mulch. Not aggressive, merely explorative. It brushed over the tip of George’s boot, paid it no mind.
And George, feeling hot and loose inside, thought, what the hell does it want? What is it looking for?
Other tentacles passed very close to Gosling and Cushing. Cushing had to move his arm out of their way.
There were things about this creature that Cushing wanted to tell them about. He knew jellies, had done a great deal of reading about them, and this was not exactly a jelly. A jellyfish, he wanted to tell them, was a hydrozoan, a colonial animal, a colony of specialized cells. Jellies did not act like this. They were not capable of reaching around and grasping things with their tentacles. He also wanted to tell them that if this was indeed a jellyfish, then those tentacles would be lined with stinging cells.
The only good thing, everyone noticed, was that the sort of tentacles that were doing the exploring were not terribly numerous. From what they could see in the water, the thing had no more than a few dozen of them. Which seemed like a lot until you realized that the jelly had hundreds of tentacles. But most were thin, reedy projections that fluttered in the water like long wisps of yellow hair.
