He brought his light up so they could all see. See that forest of white, pulsating things that grew up through an immense rent in the hull of the ship. They looked at first like the stems of some weird plant, but as Saks held the light up, they could see that they were wormlike, about as thick as fence posts and hollow. Hundreds of them, slithering and rustling, black mouths set at their ends.
“What the fuck?” Menhaus said.
“Worms,” Cook told them, his skin crawling at the sight of them. “I think they’re tube worms… like the kind you see around smoker vents on the ocean floor.”
It was hard to say whether they were dangerous or not and nobody was getting close enough to find out, but they were certainly hideous. Squirming and horribly alive, standing straight up like saplings, mouths opening and closing like those of fish.
Cook almost felt like screaming at the sight of them.
In his mind, he saw himself lost without a light, stumbling around down here, falling into the bilge and dragging himself back up, all snarled with weeds and then… then falling into that creeping mass of tube worms. Feeling them coil around him, brushing his arms and face with their hot, rubbery corpse-flesh.
But it was only his imagination hurting him here. The worms appeared to be stationary and they couldn’t get to him. But such thoughts, once born are not so easily dismissed. They exist in the dark spaces between rational thoughts, in the shadows of logic.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Saks said.
And then they were moving, trying not stumble over one another or fall into the bilge. Behind them, they could hear those worms moving and sliding against one another and by the time they got up the stairs to the engineroom, they had to stop themselves from running in blind panic.
No more was said about it.
As they made their way out of the engine room, they heard a sound. They all heard it.
Footsteps.
The sound of footsteps.
Someone was coming down the companionway ladder.
Everyone froze
Everyone just stood there.
Cook went for his gun, thinking that this had to be the very worst thing you could possibly hear on an old derelict: the sound of footsteps coming in your direction. He thanked God then and there than he was not alone. He wasn’t sure he could have handled this alone.
The footsteps stopped outside the hatch. They could hear someone out there, someone breathing hard as if they’d run a long way. Of course, in everyone’s mind, it was not that at all, it was something far worse. Some dead and dripping thing sheathed with fungus coming to pay them a call.
There was the sound of scraping as the latch was worked from the other side. That harsh breathing. The door opened a few inches and Saks, good old hardass Saks, pulled it open all the way and took hold of whoever-or whatever-was on the other side and pitched them or it to the floor with a quick, violent jerk of his hand.
It wasn’t an it.
It was a he.
And whoever he was, the moment Saks pitched him to the deck, he let out a wild surprised cry and tried to find his feet. At which point, Saks kicked him in the side with enough force to knock the wind out of him.
“That’s enough,” Cook told him.
The face looking up at them in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp was round and streaked with dirt. Great, sunken half-moons were dredged beneath staring eyes. The lips were trembling. The face belonged to a chubby little man wearing jeans and a denim shirt so greasy and filthy, it looked like they’d been used to clean out a chimney.
“You… you’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “Not supposed to be on this ship… this is my ship… I’m supposed to be here, but not you…”
He was breathing hard with a rattling sound as if his lungs were clogged with phlegm.
“What’s your name?” Cook asked him.
“I… my name,” he said, examining his left hand like maybe it was written there. “I don’t know…”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Fabrini said. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“He’s crazier than a grub in shit,” Saks said with his usual sensitivity.
The man kept babbling, not making a squirt of sense. Something about how they were not supposed to be there, that them being there was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Maybe he has amnesia like in one of them movies,” Menhaus speculated.
But Cook found it hard to believe it was something so simple. Not here, not in this place. Whatever the reason was, he knew, it would be overblown and fantastic like everything else. What Cook was really wondering was: How long had this guy been aboard? Had he been here all the time, hiding from them or had he just arrived?
“Just tell us your name,” Fabrini said. “How you got here.”
But the guy just shook his head.
And Crycek, who’d been silent so far over the whole matter, said, “His name is Makowski, Bob Makowski. He was an oiler on the Mara, our ship. Guys called him ‘Slim’’’
Now all eyes were on Crycek.
“So why didn’t you say so?” Saks said.
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Crycek explained. “It looked like him. .. but that don’t mean nothing. Not here.”
