George thought maybe she was standing on an island of weed, but that wasn’t so. She was moving, yes, but standing perfectly still, drifting in his direction very slowly, just above the water. She was wrapped in tendrils of fog, but he could see that she wore a royal blue silk taffeta dress trimmed in white ribbon and braid. A party dress. There was a gold Celtic cross around her neck.
A ghost, his mind told him, a ghost of some little girl sucked down into the dead sea, a shade that haunts the mist…
As she got closer, he saw her hair was done in golden ringlets and her face was smooth and white like porcelain. A Victorian doll. She looked exactly like a Victorian doll.
No, not at all.
That face was corpse-white, bleached by seawater, the eyes just huge black pits punched into it and filled with a misty yellow glow like full moons sinking into a cloudbank. Hazy and misty and ghastly. She was only ten or fifteen feet away now and he could see that she was fouled with strands of weed that draped over her shoulders and were tangled in her hair. Her dress was a dingy rag spotted with mildew. Fog was steaming from her, boiling inside her and blowing out through innumerable holes torn through her like she was burning up inside. She came on with a wake of churning, smoky mist, tendrils of fog seeping from her outstretched fingertips.
George felt something shatter inside his head like glass in a faraway room.
Closer and closer yet. He could see the fog bank through the fissures eaten through her, could see the green marine worms burrowing at her throat. Her eyes were wide and glistening and yellow, a rope of drool hanging from her lips.
There was something building in George, something raging and sharp and violent: a scream scraping up the back of his throat.
Your soul… she’s come to suck away your soul.
Those puckered white fingers reached for him and her mouth opened like a black, seething blowhole.
And George screamed.
Screamed until she was gone, dissipated like vapor, and he could hear his voice echoing through the fog, becoming something else and coming back at him like a dozen taunting voices. None of which sounded like his own.
Then there was a hand on his shoulder shaking him and Gosling was yelling something.
“What?” George said. “What?”
“Was is it?” Gosling demanded, his hands on George strong and sure. “What in the fuck is it?”
Both Cushing and Soltz were staring at him with barely-concealed horror.
But George couldn’t tell what he saw, because he just wasn’t sure. So, instead, he let go with the first lie his mind produced: “I… I must have fallen asleep, had a nightmare…”
But they didn’t look like they believed him anymore than he believed himself.
He only hoped they couldn’t hear what he was hearing. A high, mocking childish giggling from somewhere deep in the fog.
“Either you’re with me or against me,” Saks said, aiming the Browning in the general direction of Fabrini and Cook and Crycek. “You’re either with me, Menhaus, or you’re with them. What’s it going to be?”
“Saks,” Menhaus said breathlessly, “come on now.”
He was directly in-between the opposing sides now. Saks was in the stern and the others were up near the bow and he himself was seated roughly amidships. This is where things got complicated and dangerous. If he went to Saks, the others would never trust him again. And if he stayed with them, Saks would think everything he’d said was bullshit.
“What I would like, everyone, what I would really like is for all this to stop,” Menhaus told them, trying desperately to sound calm and reasonable, but probably only succeeding in sounding like a scared little boy. Which was pretty much how he felt. “This can’t go on. It just can’t.”
Saks’s reply to this was to aim the gun directly at Menhaus. There was a deadly gleam in his eye. He looked very much like a man who wanted very badly to hurt someone.
He’s going to kill me, Menhaus thought.
“Get your ass over here now,” Saks said, “or get over there with them. If you’re with me, you’ll live to tell the tale. With them… you get the picture, don’t you?”
Menhaus looked around uncertainly. He was almost wishing those horrible fish would come back, even the big one. Or maybe that something even worse would come sliding out of the mist. At least then, they’d have a common enemy.
But he supposed they already did: each other.
“Don’t do it,” Fabrini said. “Don’t go over there. You get involved with that gutless shit, you’re going to be an accomplice to murder. Mine or one of the others. And you don’t want that, do you?”
No, Menhaus certainly did not want that.
“Don’t listen to that goatfuck,” Saks said. “He don’t know shit, Menhaus. Besides… look around you. All of you, look right fucking around you. You think we’re adrift in the Gulf of goddamn Mexico here? Well, we ain’t. Where we are there are no laws. It’s survival of the fittest. You come with me, Menhaus, I’ll keep you alive and I just might get your ass out of here. But you stick with them…”
