But even as the words fell from his lips, he wasn’t so sure. Weeds? No, this did not look like a harmless patch of weeds, in fact, Cook was thinking it looked like… well, it looked like a head of hair just beneath the surface. That was crazy bullshit, but that’s what he thought momentarily. Like the gargantuan head of a woman, her hair fanning out in every direction. If it was just weeds, then it was different weeds. For these were not the average creepers and stalks, leafy branches like kelp that made up the weed banks. No these hairs or tendrils or whatever in the Christ they were, were fine, were wire-thin and as that patch got closer to the boat, Cook was thinking that they looked much like waterlogged pasta, thin and reedy and pale.
“Put those blades away,” Menhaus suddenly said.
He was soft and friendly, your favorite uncle or brother-in-law. A good neighbor or a guy to drink beers with or cookout in the backyard, bowl with… but he had no real balls and they all knew it. So when he barked out an order in that I’m-taking-absolutely-no-shit tone of voice, it was uncharacteristic and everyone listened.
Now Saks was watching that submerged shape moving at the lifeboat, too, and there was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind: it was not accidental, that thing was moving at them on purpose.
“Get ready for the shit,” Saks said.
Sure, and that’s exactly what everyone was doing… except, they did not know exactly how to get ready for this. At sea, in a normal body of water, you saw a shark or a jellyfish or sea snake moving in your direction, your mind had some ready ideas because it knew what these things were and what they were capable of. There were certain evasive maneuvers you could attempt. But what about this… thing? How could you prepare for something that looked like nothing you’d ever seen?
Cook was watching it.
It was circling around the boat and seemed to be moving in the general direction of the bow now, where he was. It was brushing aside clumps of weeds and there was no doubt it was a solid object. But looking at it, you wouldn’t have thought so. It had come up out of the water maybe two or three inches now, just enough so that it broke the surface of that algae-scummed sea. What Cook was seeing was an irregular, somewhat oval hump that seemed to be made of those wiry strands of material. They were yellow and green in color, incredibly thick and profuse and tangled like discolored angel’s hair. They radiated out from that shaggy hump in twisting filaments that were snarled and matted in places, others free flowing and incredibly long.
“What is it, Cook?” Menhaus said. “What does it want?”
And Cook was thinking that what it wanted would not be a good thing… for this thing inspired a shivering primal disgust in him like seeing a spider under a microscope, a bulbous body covered with fine hairs. Something so alien and abhorrent it could not truly be alive. He watched the thing, seeing that it had no eyes… just those wire-thin projections cast about in the water from that hump. As he looked upon it, those cilia-like hairs seeming to twitch and writhe in the water, he saw his own death. It came on him suddenly and with complete conviction, this thing was death. It was his death, the same death that had been dogging him for thirty-eight years. It was here now and it was ready.
Cook saw this and knew it to be true and the knowledge of that was like a razor scraped across his brain. It was painful and destructive and emptying. He had an odd, almost hallucinogenic sense that something inside him wanted very badly to rip through his skin and escape. He couldn’t seem to breathe and he could feel his heartbeat slowing, as if preparing for the inevitable.
“I don’t like this, Cook,” Saks was saying. “Shoot that fucker.. .”
And they were all telling him to and he figured they were right, but then he also knew that this new and mystical certainty which had bloomed in him like a death-orchid was simply beyond them. It was not their time.
“Cook…” Fabrini began.
The thing began to rise up before the bow… and, Jesus, what was it? It came up out of that stinking, vile sea, dripping water and slime and clots of decomposing matter, plumes of steam rising from it. It came up ten or twelve feet, viscid and alive and utterly impossible.
Menhaus gasped.
It had a nebulous, abstract sort of shape, something made of bumps and mounds all threaded with those tendrils of hair, matted and knotted and sweeping and moving. It was a flowing thing and a braided thing, a diaphanous spider clustered in hairballs and filigree. A snaking expanse of living cobwebs that were in constant, creeping motion. That hump they’d first seen rode atop the mass like a head, but it had no face, no anything… just a net of that webby hair hiding something black and glistening beyond. And it had two limbs or maybe three… boneless things that were not tentacles or the appendages of a crab, but just long and scaly sticks that shuddered and dripped ooze.
