Cushing smiled. “Did she say that?”
“Way I heard it.” Gosling sighed. “If we got in here, who knows, same thing that sucked us in might shoot us back out.”
“Do you really believe that?” Soltz said, despondent as ever. “Some cages have no keys.”
Gosling ignored that. He touched upon some of the things he had read or heard over the years, see what the others thought. “There must be some connection between this place and ours. Has to be. I’m just hoping it’s still open or it might open back up again and soon.”
He told them that he had read about a plane that vanished once. It was flying into Nassau or one of them places, supposed to touch down on some little strip there. People on the ground could hear the plane flying over, but they couldn’t see it. They were in contact with the pilot on the radio who said he could see nothing but mist above and below. That was the last anybody heard of that plane.
“So, maybe these two worlds are closer than we think,” Gosling said.
He said he’d also heard stories about shortwave radio operators picking up transmissions from ships or planes days after they’d disappeared. In some of the wilder tales, it was years later. Then there was the famous case of the five Navy Avenger bombers that disappeared in 1945 off of Fort Lauderdale. A ham radio operator claimed to have picked up their distress call many hours after they would have run out of fuel and been forced to ditch.
“I’m thinking that might tie in with that distress call we heard earlier,” Gosling told them, knowing everyone had been scared shitless after hearing that. Himself included. “That might have been something sent twenty years ago or fifty… who can say? Maybe in this place, radio transmissions keep bouncing around and now and again, they just slip out and somebody hears them.”
There was a mixture of total belief and total disbelief in the eyes of both Soltz and Cushing. But mostly just confusion set with terror. Because they were all remembering that transmission, hearing it echoing in their heads as it probably always would.
“… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog… it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and
… it’s knocking at the door… at the door… ”
And what they all wanted to know then as they did now was what exactly was coming out of the fog? What was on the decks and knocking at the door? And what in God’s name was that eerie booming sound in the background that sounded like a hollow, metal heart beating?
Gosling, however, was not about to comment on that.
Soltz had no such compunction. “What do you think it was? What got that ship? And don’t look at me like that because we all know that something got it. You heard the sound of that voice… I’ve never heard such terror before. That person was scared out of their wits.”
Gosling said, “Don’t jump to conclusions here. It could have been just about anything. It doesn’t have to be something supernatural.”
Soltz barked an almost pained sounding little laugh. “Who said anything about the supernatural? That wasn’t what I was thinking at all.”
“Oh? And what were you thinking?” Cushing asked him.
But Soltz would not say. He just sat there, staring into the mist, characteristically morose.
“Listen now, all I’m saying is that there could be lots of reasons for what we were hearing,” Gosling said.
“Don’t treat us like children, please,” Soltz said to him. “Whatever happened… whatever that ship was calling out about.. . it was not normal. Something came out of the fog. Something horrible. And whatever it was, it left an empty ship behind.”
The derelict.
It came out of the fog, huge and dead and forbidding, something you didn’t dare look upon and something else you didn’t dare look away from. To turn your back on it, would have been like turning your back on a razor coming at you in the darkness. The men in the lifeboat saw it and to them, it was like looking at some graveyard described by thin moonlight. It inspired the same sense of mystery and horror, an almost instinctive phobia. For this ship was like something abominable yanked from a burial ground, a relic dragged from a cursed tomb. Something diseased, sepulchral, and ancient. A tombstone emoting gray silence, a mausoleum echoing with dead whispers, blackness and lunacy. Nothing good could come of it.
Cook saw it, rising out of the mist, and it pulled his guts up the back of his throat in cold, coiling loops. Looking upon it, he could barely breathe.
It was a dire and morbid haunted house made of iron and rust and decay, thrust up from that forest of tangled, spreading weed. And though it was dead and rotting, you got the horrendous feeling that it was not dead enough. That somehow, it was unspeakably alive and aware and… hungry.
“Like a skull,” Crycek said in a wounded, despairing voice. “It looks like a skull stripped of meat.”
Fabrini said,” Knock it off.” But his voice was almost a whisper, as if he was afraid something on the ship might hear him.
