“Shut up.”
Aunt Else slammed her book down. “This has gone far enough! I won’t have you bullying the men! Do you understand me? My husband will have a thing or two to say to you when he returns. Mark my words, Captain.”
“You better listen to her, Captain Bligh,” Saks said to George. “You can’t go on treating us like this.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Menhaus said. “He can’t help that big mouth and small brain of his.”
“I don’t see where this is any of your affair, Doctor,” Aunt Else said. “As I recall you were invited as a guest, not to stir up trouble in general. Why, I’d be surprised if your degree is even from a reputable university.”
“Me, too,” Saks said.
“This place… it’s goddamn crazy,” Crycek said. “Well, you ought to fit right in then,” Saks told him.
Crycek didn’t say anything to that. But George could see it wasn’t just some off-handed jibe. There was more to it than that. A lot more. Crycek had that dazed, scared look in his eyes much like Pollard had when he first met him. He’d seen something that he just couldn’t get past.
“Crycek thinks there’s a boogeyman out in the fog,” Saks said.
“Knock it off,” Fabrini told him.
Crycek wouldn’t even look at any of them. He sat there with Pollard, looking almost queasy that any of it had been brought up in the first place. He buried his face in his hands like he wanted to cry.
“See?” Saks said. “He’s having one of his headaches. You know what that means? That means that the thing out there is getting at him again. Right, Crycek? It’s trying to eat your mind again?”
George reached over and yanked the whiskey bottle from Saks’s hands. “I think you’ve had enough of that on an empty stomach.”
Saks rose in his seat an inch or two, his face red as a ripe tomato. “You do that again, Captain George, and I’ll break that bottle right over your fucking skull.”
Fabrini was ready. “Why don’t you try it, Saks? Because whatever part of you George don’t stomp, I will.”
“I think you’re all forgetting why you’re here,” Aunt Else said. “This is a court of law and you should all behave in accordance. Let’s try and act civilized here. We know who the guilty man is. Let us come together on that.”
George kept watching Saks, trial or no trial. “What makes you think there isn’t something out there, Saks? C’mon, regale us with your wisdom.”
But Saks wasn’t biting. “Because Crycek is crazy. He’s a nutjob and that’s all there is to it. You got to be crazy to believe shit like that, Captain.”
“Then you haven’t felt it?” George put to him.
Everyone was watching them now. Everyone but Aunt Else. They were all watching and listening, wanting, maybe, to have this subject broached. Something they had all thought of, but didn’t dare speak of.
“I haven’t felt shit.”
George just nodded his head. “Well, I have. And I’ve felt it more than once. Go ahead, Saks, smile like an idiot. But you’ve felt it just like we have, only you don’t have the guts to admit it. But that’s okay… because I don’t know what’s out there, but something is. And that something? That devil or boogeyman, it believes in you, Saks. You better believe it does.”
“Crazy goddamn shit,” was all Saks would say. “Kiddie stories.”
“You really think so?” George looked over at the others, one by one. “How about the rest of you? Any of you agree with Saks? You think there’s nothing out there in that mist but weeds and bones and crawly things? Any of you honestly believe that? No? I figured as much. Guess that makes you the odd man out, Saks.”
Saks stood up. “Pussies,” he said. “You’re all a bunch of fucking pussies that are afraid of your own goddamn shadows. I don’t believe in any devil. Not here, not back home. There ain’t no such thing as a devil.”
“Oh, but there is.”
Cushing had come out of the galley and there was a tone in his voice that told them he was not kidding around. “It’s out there, Saks. And it’s not some half-ass Christian oogy-boogey man with a pitchfork and horns, it’s the real thing and it has plans for us. You can believe that.” He sighed, looked around. “But enough of that. Let’s eat, then we’ll get down to business.”
Business, then.
They were all sitting there and the whiskey was gone and now there was just coffee and bloodshot eyes. Some of the men were smoking. George and Saks and Pollard were studying the chart of the ship’s graveyard and environs beyond that Greenberg had drawn. Crycek was looking over the letter Greenberg had written. Cushing had the floor and he was pacing back and forth saying, “So, like I said, this Greenberg… the guy Elizabeth knew as the Hermit… he was one of a group of scientists that got sucked in here because they wanted to. They believed all along that those planes and ships and people in the Devil’s Triangle and Sargasso Sea were getting funneled somewhere. They just weren’t sure where.
So, somehow… who knows… they got themselves pulled in here same way we did.”
