George liked none of it. He felt like a white man finding the fabled elephant’s graveyard in Africa. He was seeing something that he was not supposed to see. No man was meant to see this and live to tell about it. Some things, he knew, were best left as folklore and twice-told tales.
There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.
“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water… but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”
“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”
Gosling nodded. “Maybe. But even with big diesels or steam turbines, you’d run out of fuel sooner or later, wouldn’t you? And then what?”
“Then you’d drift,” Marx said.
“And be brought right back in here.”
They all thought about the hopelessness of it all, those hundreds of ships trapped here, fossils in some grim collection. They looked out over them. They looked eerie and haunted in the mist, backlit by whatever made the mist glow. Those twin moons had come out again, the huge red one casting a bloody glare over mastheads and yards, stacks and cargo booms.
Pollard was saying nothing. He did not look exactly surprised about any of it. Chesbro, however, looked downright scared.
“I don’t like this place,” he said. “It looks… it looks like a cemetery.”
And it did.
The cemetery of the seas. Only in this unhallowed sea, the cemetery was restless and uneasy, a loathsome necropolis of dead and drowned things, slimy things ribboned with weeds and crepuscular fungi. It vomited back up what it could not hold down in its black charnel belly: waterlogged tombs and mildewed caskets, wormy coffins and crumbling sepulchers, floating crypts and oblong boxes draped in floral tributes of rotting kelp and vaporous green shrouds. They rose from the noxious weed, in whole and in part, clustered with morbid shadows, leaning this way and that like ancient headstones and webby monuments. The ships here were mummies and husks, cadaverous hollow-eyed things made of pipes and bones and ossuary girders. Derelicts welded from yellowed femur and gray ulna, mildewed rungs of rib and stark meatless vertebrae. They were alien exoskeletons and spectral ghost ships, exhumed wraiths resurrected from moldering abyssal mortuaries.
Yes, just skeletons and things that wanted to be skeletons. Things that sought blackness and depths, sluicing vaults cut in muddy sea bottoms, bathypelagic catacombs of drifting sediment and burrowing marine graveworms.
Jesus, George was thinking, it’s like some fucking shrine.
But not a good one. Not one that inspired cherished memory or peace, but one that inspired an almost atavistic horror. A place of malignance and spiritual violation. They were all so alone here. So far from everything decent and warm and caring. All those ships, just dark and hollow and scratching with a secret darkness that was devouring them bone by bone.
George was seeing those ships and feeling them, too, swallowing great black silences and tenebrous echoes, feeling the memory of those ships fill him, drop his dreaming brain into some pit where he could hear voices. Yes, the voices of those lost souls who had perished aboard those ships or simply went mad. But they were all there, all those tormented voices shrieking at him, showing him dark truths that made him want to scream. He was at the bottom of a dripping, brine-stinking well, feeling them feel him, touch him, whisper and laugh and cry. They were many but one, a single withering presence, a monster of deranged mourning with ten thousand hands and fifty-thousand steel fingers. George listened because he had no other choice. Just as Cook had channeled the last sensory impressions of Lieutenant Forbes aboard the Cyclops, George was channeling them. Knowing their thoughts and memories, their pain and sorrow and rage.
He saw all those great ships, all those three- and four-masters ghosting along beneath a pall of moonlight, slicing through high seas and thrashing water. Spars were creaking and blocks whining shrilly. Rain dripped from sail and rope and backstay. The masts and yards rode up high and cutting. Sails snapped and whistled. Hands hoisted and lowered cordage and shrouds. And the sea was a constant, a raging and rolling and pitching thing. Those sharp bows sliced through it and the seas broke before them like wheat before a scythe. He felt the coming of that cemetery fog. The stars blotting out, the breathable air sucking away, ship after ship after ship drawn into a misting tunnel of non-existence.
Ship’s bells ringing.
Voices shouting.
Oh, please, oh, please, get us out of here, oh God above get us out of this awful place, Lord.
Please.
We’re lost.
We’re becalmed.
We’re adrift.
