“He’s right, you know. Crycek. We’re all going to die,” Saks said almost cheerfully. “Each and every one of us. Look at those weeds.. . sooner or later they’re gonna snare us up and that’ll be all she wrote.”
“Shut the hell up,” Fabrini said.
“You better shoot me if you want to shut me up,” Saks told him.
It looked like Fabrini was indeed considering it.
“Maybe… maybe some day the weeds will part and this lifeboat’ll drift out same way we drifted in… except there’ll be five skeletons in it. It’s happened before. A whole ship one time.. . went missing three years, then it just showed up one day and-”
“Want me to gag him?” Fabrini asked.
Cook seemed to be in charge now. He was the most level-headed one of the bunch. “I don’t know. We’ll leave it up to Saks. Why do you say, dumb ass, do we have to gag you or are you gonna be a good boy?”
Saks went quiet, but you couldn’t wipe the look of grim certainty off his face or erase the mad dog glare of insanity from his eyes. These were constants. Things the others had to pretend they weren’t seeing. But it was no simple matter to look lunacy in the eye and ignore its ramifications. To know, deep down, that under the right conditions, it could take anyone, anytime.
And no one knew this better than Cook.
Nobody in the world.
He’d felt it that day he’d killed his father. The blinding, white-hot, ice-cold slow burn that was true madness, whether temporary or permanent. And until you experienced it, tasted it, filled your belly with it, you could never appreciate it or how ugly it all really was. Because once you’d tasted it, you never got that awful flavor out of your mouth.
Cook didn’t like the idea of being in charge. He would have preferred a very democratic sort of leadership, a council made up of him and Fabrini and Menhaus. Maybe even Crycek because now and then he made sense. But it wasn’t going to be that way. Surely Fabrini was tougher and more physically able than he. Menhaus had been around more, had more experience. And Crycek… if he wasn’t so loopy.. . he was an experienced sailor. Yet, they seemed to be looking to Cook for leadership. He seemed to have the final say whether he liked it or not.
But all he really wanted was to sleep.
He was dead tired… yet he didn’t dare close his eyes. He had to watch Saks and watch him close. If trouble was going to come, it would come from his direction.
At least, that’s what Cook was thinking.
And then something hit the boat.
And then hit it again.
Soltz was pretty certain about it. “I know what I heard,” he told Gosling and the others. “It was a gunshot. My hearing is more acute than yours. I know what I heard.”
George had heard something, too. They all had. A sort of muted cracking in the distance. It could have been a gunshot… but it could have been a lot of other things, too.
“Maybe we ought to get on that radio,” Cushing suggested. “See what we can pick up… somebody might have been trying to signal us.”
Gosling considered it. George knew very well what he was thinking, how he didn’t like the idea of listening to that static. It got to a man and particularly when you had that odious sense that it was not just static, but something alive and aware.
“That’s what we should do,” Soltz said.
Gosling looked to George and he just shrugged. What else could he do?
Gosling went up to the bow where all the survival equipment was stowed in waterproof, zippered compartments. He took out the VHF and began to set it up.
George stayed by the doorway, watching.
The others went with Gosling and George just sat there, thinking, thinking about what he’d seen coming out of the fog earlier. Even now, it left him with a dread sense of horror. Something like that, it got under your skin and stayed there like mites. The image of that horrible little girl… he couldn’t shake it nor the idea of what she might have done to him.
He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. She had been there, all right. But where did that leave him… believing in ghosts?
No, absolutely not, he told himself, I do not believe in ghosts and spooks. I didn’t believe in them before I was lost in this terrible place and I don’t believe in them now.
But if she hadn’t been a ghost, then what?
This is what George had been threading through the reels of his brain ever since it happened. She had been dressed in what he thought was 19 ^th century clothing. He figured he wasn’t too far off there. He rather doubted that if it was all a hallucination, that his mind would have conjured up such convincing antique fashions. And it had been convincing… her hair, her dress, everything. He’d been around and around on this and he kept coming back to the same thing: the little girl was not a ghost, not really, it was just something else pretending to be the ghost of a little girl.
It was no less spookier than the ghost bit, but it made sense.
