George licked his lips. “Did something come out of the fog?”
But Pollard shook his head. “No, not really. Something came out of the water. Two things came out of the water.”
“What were they?”
“They got Mike,” Pollard said, his hands balled into fists now. “They came out of the fucking water and they took him.”
Pollard started talking fast then, not making a lot of sense to George, but purging what needed purging. He started talking about another guy, someone called Burky. How Burky was a good guy and all the crazy shit Burky would do in port, always with a couple black hookers on his arms, crazy old Burky taking the boys to back room card games and shows with dancing transvestites. How Burky had been on watch and Pollard had come to relieve him right after they went into the fog. And how Burky had been just fine, saying how he was hearing flapping sounds out in the mist like big Jesus birds, joking around about it, but kind of scared, too. And everything was just fine and then Burky lit a cigarette and, bam, something out there… like a bird or a bat with big scaly wings and a sideways beak like a sickle. .. swooped out of the fog and took him right over the side into the mist. Right in front of Pollard. Just goddamn took him and it was like nothing you ever saw in your life. Just swooped down and took him without breaking stride. And Pollard saw it carry him into the mist and the goddamn evil, horrible thing was laughing and laughing.
“Laughing?” George said, feeling the flesh at his spine moving now.
And Pollard nodded, his eyes dark as flint. “Yeah, laughing… it was fucking laughing, but an insane, shrieking kind of laugh like a laughing hyena. The sort of sound… just echoing, mocking… Christ…”
George just sat there, feeling numb, feeling doped-up, unable to say a single comforting or reassuring thing.
Pollard was breathing hard, squeezing his fists so tightly you could hear the knuckles popping. “And Mike… oh then those things got Mike. That bird just went past me and got Burky, then… then those others, they got Mike, you know? Came right up and got him. Not me, but Mike.”
And maybe that was it, George was thinking. Twice now, two of his friends had been snatched away by things and Pollard himself had gotten away without so much as a scratch. Guilt. Maybe that was what was burning a hole through his soul. Guilt. Never him, always his friends.
George found his voice, said, “What got Mike?”
Pollard opened his mouth wide, looked like he was going to scream, then his mouth slowly closed as if the jaw muscles were being gradually paralyzed. “That fog, that terrible goddamn fog… you know how it looks? How it’s dirty and vile and polluted-looking and you hate it. Deep-down you just hate that filthy stuff, like smog just hanging there like a fucking blanket. But other times… those sounds, dammit, you’re almost glad it’s there. It hides you, you can hide in it and those things out there, you can’t see them and they can’t see you. Me and Mike… we were hearing those goddamn awful sounds out there. Things screaming and growling, making slobbering sounds like mud sucked through a hose. We didn’t want to know what those things were, we were afraid of what those things would look like
… what they would do to us…”
George understood perfectly. “There’s bad things out there.”
Pollard gripped his arm. “You know? You know what I was thinking while we waited out there? I was thinking… Jesus, it’s crazy.. . but I was just thinking that those things, them eating us wouldn’t be so bad, because there were probably worse things they could do.” Pollard cradled his head in his hands. “But Mike… what got him, it didn’t come out of the fog, it came up out of the water. Out of that slimy, stinking water. They came up quick and I thought, I thought they were people… they looked kind of like people, people covered in seaweed. Green tangles of seaweed. Those faces came out of the water, except they weren’t faces, but weeds, weeds that were alive and crawling like worms. One of them had an eye and that eye looked at me, right at me and it was a human eye, but… but crazy and psychotic, not human any more at all. They wrapped their weedy arms around Mike and Mike fucking screamed and I think I did, too, and those arms… all them weeds coiling and squirming like snakes.. . they pulled Mike down and he never came up. And I waited… yeah, I waited for hours and hours and maybe it was days, I just waited for those hands to take hold of me, those cold and worming hands…”
Sure, there was guilt and there was horror. There was a lot of horror, George figured. Pollard seeing those weed-people… for lack of a better name… taking Mike like that, taking him down into those black, oozing depths. And then Pollard alone, just waiting and waiting for those hands to take hold of him. Well, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped completely.
