He was thinking about the black tissue, wondering what it was and what it wanted. Was it trying just to suffocate Makowski? Was that it? Or, given time, would it have devoured him, bones and all? It all made Menhaus remember when they’d first rowed through the weed around the Cyclops. At the stern, there had been a patch of oily darkness in the water, shifting in the weeds. Not a shadow exactly. Like a shadow, but more solid. Cook had seen it, too.
And what had Crycek said?
Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…
Yeah, Menhaus did not doubt that at all.
He could hear Saks and Cook out in the corridor, arguing with lowered voices. Knowing Saks and his ways, it could go on for some time.
“It was my turn,” Makowski suddenly said.
Menhaus turned, his flesh gone rigid. There was a chill moving up the small of his back. “What? What did you say?”
“It was my turn,” he said again. He turned and looked at Menhaus, his head revolving with an almost mechanical slowness like that of a puppet. His eyes were glistening and mad. “It was my turn tonight and you ruined it.”
“I… saved you,” Menhaus mumbled.
But Makowski just shook his head. “She’ll come again… when she’s ready. Maybe tonight or tomorrow. Maybe this time she’ll come for you…”
“It’s just something you need to see,” Saks was saying. “You’re in charge and you have to know about things like this. I’ll just be glad to wash my hands of it.”
Cook didn’t like the idea. Didn’t like it at all. Going on a walk with Saks made you wonder if you were going to come back again. Made you wonder a lot of things. Fabrini was against it, of course. He did not trust Saks and never would. Cook told him just to stay with Crycek, that they were going to look at something and Saks said it was the sort of thing that Crycek definitely should not see.
“You think I’m up to something, don’t you?” Saks said to him when they were moving down the companionway to one of the lower decks. Just them and that great creaking ship, the kerosene lantern creating macabre shapes around them.
“Are you?” Cook said.
“No, I’m not. Shit, Cook, I’m just trying to help you out here. Way I see it, you the man. You’re in charge. Okay… then you better see this. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something. You don’t wanna? Fine. You think I’m luring you down here so I can knife you, then let’s go back right now.”
They went down that fungi-strewn corridor past staterooms that were rusted shut. The air was congested with a briny, stagnant odor. After a time, you almost got used to it. Almost.
Saks stopped before a stateroom door. “It’s in here. I found it after we first came aboard, when I took my little tour.”
Cook nodded. He remembered Saks coming into his cabin after his little tour, as he called it, saying he heard scratching in the walls, thought it was maybe rats. Had a real funny look in his eyes that Cook had thought was either fear or something like it.
Cook said, “I think Fabrini and I checked this door, it was locked tight. Rusted shut.”
“Well, it wasn’t rusted shut when I came down here,” Saks said. “It was open.”
Those words hung heavy in the air, full of dark implications Saks wasn’t about to put into words.
Cook said, “Maybe… maybe it was just locked from the inside. Maybe Makowski was hiding in there.”
Saks smiled. “You think so?”
Cook took hold of the latch, the door groaning as he pushed it inward. The sound was sharp and creaking like nails pulled from a coffin lid. It went right up his spine, sounding to him as if the door was screaming. In the light of the lantern, dust motes and flakes of filth swam like sediment disturbed in the bowels of a sunken ship. Everything in there was dirty and crumbling, like what you expected in an Egyptian tomb. The porthole was so thick with grime it looked practically furry.
But what paused Cook at the doorway was the smell in there. He could not immediately associate it with anything else. Certainly, there was a dry tang of age and nitrous decay and rust, but there was more, too. An inexplicable odor that reminded him of ozone, a sharp and heady almost chemical odor mixed with older corruption.
Right away, Cook figured that was trouble.
“You don’t want to go in there, it’s okay with me,” Saks said, maybe smelling it, too, or feeling it down deep as Cook had.
