That even stopped Saks from using his knife which he was actually getting ready to do. And Cook knew that no one was going to stop him, but this stopped him. This stopped everyone. This filled them with something cold and shifting and made them all look out into the churning fog and wonder if something was looking back.
Menhaus was breathing hard. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I just want to get back home. That’s all I want.”
“Ask Cook,” Crycek said, his voice dead and emotionless now. “Go ahead, ask him. Ask him why he’s afraid to listen to the VHF, why he’s afraid to broadcast on it. Ask him.”
They were all looking at Cook now. But he just shook his head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
But in their eyes, all their eyes, he could see that they did not believe him.
Crycek said, “Tell them, Cook. Tell them why you don’t like that static on the radio, how you can feel something out there, something listening. Go ahead, tell them.”
“Shut up,” Cook snapped.
“Cook doesn’t have the guts to say what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling,” Crycek said and his sudden, rational calm was even worse than his earlier hysteria. “Because he knows it’s out there, just like I do. It makes a buzzing sound like… like an insect. And maybe it is an insect. But it’s out there, believe that. Something cold and cruel… out there in the fog, listening, watching us. It wants to eat our souls, it wants to devour our minds…” He held a finger to his lips. “Ssshh. Just. Listen. You can hear it out there, hear it listening, hear it waiting, feel it thinking about us… in here.” He massaged his temples. “It’s in here, in all of us, eating us from the inside with fear.”
And the thing was, they were all listening.
Listening to the fog and hearing distant things and things that were not so distant. Suggestions of movement. Whispers of motion. And underneath it all, a low constant thrumming sound like a generator on stand-by, waiting to power up.
For a long time after that, nobody said a thing.
But they were thinking things.
Things that were not good, especially trapped in that fog.
Things about the horrors in the fog and how they could be positively minor in comparison to an evil that was huge and cosmic and had come to eat their souls.
There were things in the fog and there were things in the minds of men and sometimes it was truly hard to say which was the worst. That which you could see and which could kill you… or that which remained unseen that slowly ate away your mind, your resolve, your sanity. And then, according to Crycek’s psychosis, there was that forbidding third grouping: that which you could not only see, but what could see you. Could feel you. And to this devil, if Crycek was correct, flesh and blood were of only marginal interest. What it wanted were minds to fill with gnawing pestilence and souls it could eat raw and squirming.
George Ryan was not in the lifeboat and he didn’t need to be, for he had felt this other and more than once. He could sense it on the VHF, something hidden in that static like a hive of wasps hidden in the trunk of a blasted oak. Something that used the static for camouflage or maybe was the static itself. Both, maybe, and neither.
The easiest thing to do was to tell yourself that you were being paranoid, imagining soul-eating bogies out in that draping fog. For imagining such a thing under such conditions was perfectly natural. For the human mind was like that, wasn’t it?
If it had no answers, it created them.
It filled in the blanks so it didn’t burn out circuits and relays trying to answer that which was ultimately unanswerable. Maybe there was no discarnate intelligence out there, no depraved puppet master working the strings. Maybe it was just nature, raw and ravenous and alien. Such a thing was entirely possible, George decided. But it did not satisfy that very human sort of logic that declared that there always had to be someone in charge, if not God then the Devil and if neither of them, something vile and nameless so above us on the evolutionary scale that it might as well have been a god.
Humans had need of such higher powers.
Maybe it was because our society was empirical, based on social pecking order and always had been. Everything had to have levels and classes, we decided, a food chain of sorts. And every food chain had its apex predator… the big guy, the boss man, the chief.
And in that awful void of fog and nightmares, well, there had to be one, too. It definitely was not man so it had to be something else. For the idea of a place existing, being left under the chaotic charge of old Mother Nature… that was not acceptable.
For every ship had a captain and there had to be one here, too.
Didn’t there?
Well, didn’t there?
