George looked out at the sea which was slimy and scummed in a membrane of algae and rotting organic matter. To all sides were those huge and heaving islands of decomposing weed. Yes, mentally it would kill them eventually and maybe physically, too. God only knew what sort of poisons they were breathing in minute by minute.
George sat there, feeling sleep heavy on him.
He was staring at the back of his hand when he realized there was light shining on it. A dim, dirty sort of light and it wasn’t from the fog. He didn’t know how long he’d been seeing it.
He looked up and saw where the light was coming from.
Everyone else was seeing it, too, staring up blankly at what was above them, above the mist.
“Well, I’ll be a cocksucker,” Marx said.
For above the mist, hazy and obscured, but still quite visible, the moon had come out. In fact, two moons had come out. The first, which seemed to be directly above them, was much larger than the full moon back home. This one was the size of a dinner plate and the color of fresh blood. The other, farther off behind them, was small and a dirty yellow-brown like an old penny pulled from a sidewalk crack.
Cushing just said, “Shit.”
Gosling and Chesbro just stared up at those moons in rapt fascination, savages considering the face… or faces… of their god. Pollard refused to look, did not want to see them.
George stared dumbfounded, thinking for one moment that they were not moons at all, but eyes set in some gigantic misty face. But they were moons, all right. Alien and somehow spooky, but moons all the same. Satellites caught in the orbit of whatever this place was called.
“Well that settles it,” Marx said. “This ain’t the Gulf of fucking Mexico after all.”
And that made George laugh.
Bad thing was, he couldn’t seem to stop.
S O THEY DRIFTED THROUGH the weed for what might have been hours upon hours, or possibly days and weeks and maybe a year. Time was compressed in that place, flattened, drawn-out… it was plastic and shifting and refused to hold shape. It moved painfully slow or ran so quickly it left you dizzy. And maybe, just maybe, time did not move at all. Maybe it was stagnant here. Dead and rotted like everything else.
“And maybe it’s all our imagination,” George said.
They were on the oars again, pushing through that congested sea, through the heavy, grim fog which was a fuming mass of vapors and veils and contaminated brume. It drifted over the raft and lifeboat in snaking tendrils that looked like they wanted to strangle you, wanted to crawl down your throat and nest.
“What’s that, George?” Gosling said, working the oars behind him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud, I guess.”
George felt the oar in his hand, liked the feel. It was something to hold on to, an extension of your own muscles and sweat and drive. It was a good thing meeting the Dead Sea as they were, meeting it and fighting it and maybe besting it with nothing but human compulsion, will, and hard work. And when your muscles were taxed, were aching and throbbing and flexed tight as bailing wire, well, it tapped your strength and that was a good thing. Because then your mind did not have all that extra energy to feed itself with, to create fantasies and nightmares that made your flesh crawl.
That’s what George liked about rowing.
That’s why he liked the feel of that oar in his hand and just wished he had two of them.
Because lately, well, his mind was turning a little too quickly and the old bullshit machine called imagination was spinning tales with the best of ‘em. Things George shouldn’t be thinking about. If he thought about them too much he was afraid they would become obsessions and that was only a few feet away from a full-blown psychosis in his way of thinking.
No time for that. Not here. I’ve got to keep on my toes, George thought, and not just for myself, but for the others. They need me and, dear Christ, I cannot let them down. Not in this horrible place.
And what of this horrible place? George’s mind put to him. What about it? Have you ever really, really thought about where you are? And not in the context of whether this is an alien world or some dead-end dimension stuck between two universes, nothing like that. Because, George, you know that point is mute. It doesn’t matter where this place is. Just a black corridor of cosmic insanity with earth at one end and something unknowable and unthinkable at the other end. There. That’s it. But have you ever thought about what this place is and who might be behind it?
And, honestly, George had not.
