He was in a damned hurry and Cook could just about guess why. That eerie, strident wailing was distant now, but still audible enough to create an awesome, childhood terror in Cook, one that made him want to run himself.
The hatch clanged open.
Cook could hear footsteps on the deck above.
He knew he should be hurrying himself, but he just could not bring himself to. For there were limits to everything. Limits to what you would allow yourself to do. He mounted the steps, taking them slowly, listening, feeling, watching, on guard now.
At the top, he stood before the hatch.
It was open two or three inches and in his mind Cook could hear Gosling yelling at the men about leaving hatches open. Dear God, there was a sort of comfort in hearing the memory of the man’s cursing voice.
Cook pushed open the hatch, was ready to put bullets in the first thing that moved, even if it was Makowski. But nothing moved, nothing stirred. The decks were wreathed in shadows, the booms and coaling derricks rising up like alien tombstones. Cook stepped out, smelling the sea and the mist. The fog was thicker than earlier, churning like stormclouds. It was luminous and sparkling, reflecting a stark illumination like moonlight against the ship.
Cook walked further out on deck, looking in every direction, some giddy voice of self-preservation in him saying, well, so much for that. Makowski’s gone, so you might as well turn back and get your ass below, because there’s nothing to see here, nothing at all-
And, no, there was nothing to see.
Nothing but that yellowed light dappled by reaching shadows, but there was certainly something to hear: the woman. The thing she was or the thing that pretended to be her. It was singing its mourning dirge, loud then soft, pure and then dirty. It bounced around the decks, echoing off the superstructure so that it could have been forward or aft or three feet away.
Footsteps.
A creaking.
Then… oh Jesus, what in the hell was that?
It was a sound of motion, a busy tapping/scratching sort of sound ringing off the rusted metal decks. Like a hundred pencils tapping simultaneously and Cook knew that it was her. That she was making that sound, the sound of a thousand spidery legs.
The boat deck.
Yes, Cook saw now.
A shadow up there… it was Makowski’s shadow thrown against a bulkhead by the ghostly, shimmering illumination of the fog. Cook could not see him, but he could see that shadow. It looked stiff and artificial, its owner more mannequin than man. An effigy and nothing more. The singing was louder now, the tapping, the creeping of too many legs.
Cook made to climb the ladder up to the boat deck… then he paused.
He was smelling that acrid, ozone-like stink again. It was sharp and nauseating, filled his mind with a sickly plastic warmth that was consuming, that shut him down on some primary level.
Cook teetered.
The voice was loud, very loud. Sweet and profane and somehow soothing.
He shook it off, put a foot on the ladder… and got no further.
She was coming.
Cook could not see her, not really, and he was grateful for it. What he saw silhouetted against that bulkhead above was her shadow approaching that of Makowski’s. His was an inert form, something cut from black paper and immovable. Hers was hunched and contorted and bulbous, a chimeric thing that was not really a woman, but maybe two women slinking along in a gunny sack, trying to look natural. But whatever she was, whatever the lunatic memory of Lydia Stoddard had mutated into, subsisting on blackness and stark remembrance, it was not natural. She skittered along, hunched-over and lurching. She moved with the sound of crackling static electricity, with the sound of a thousand fingernails drawn over a thousand blackboards… squeaking and scraping and tapping and rustling.
Cook felt something die inside of him.
Felt it gasp its last breath and fall to moldering bones. Just the see-sawing shadow of Lydia Stoddard was enough to fill your mind with venom, enough to leech the light from your soul… but to look upon it, to actually see it in the flesh, moving and writhing and staring at you with a cold, remorseless appetite… that would have stripped your mind barren.
Cook knew he had to run.
Knew he had to get away before he saw something that would haunt his nightmares far worse than what he’d already seen, but he had to look. His thinking brain demanded proof that this could possibly be.
And it got it.
Got it as a scream filled Cook up, needing to be vented and coming out in a pitiful, airless gasp.
When the woman’s shadow got within a few feet of Makowski’s… she opened up, she bloomed like a spider orchid, erupted into a hideous collection of waving, clicking appendages that reached out like a hand, reached out and grasped Makowski.
