“It’s just an old ship,” Cook said to them. “God knows how long it’s been here.”
“Sure, that’s all it is,” Menhaus put in. “Just an old ship.”
“You boys keep telling yourself that and you might even believe it,” Saks said.
Crycek was shaking his head. “It’s full of death… can’t you feel it?”
And they all could, a low and unpleasant thrumming in their heads, the sound of some dark machine idling… waiting to cycle to full rev.
Saks chuckled low in his throat. “Scares you girls, eh?” But it had gotten to him, too, and you could see that. Tough-guy Saks. Whatever was in that ship was scratching blackly in his belly just as it was with the others.
Cook was overwhelmed with a mindless horror at the sight of it. He tried to speak, but his throat was thick like it was stuffed with wool and rags. It took him a minute or two. “Let’s not get superstitious here. It’s just a derelict. It can’t hurt you. Might be something we can use on it.”
Fabrini looked at him. “You’re not… I mean, you’re not suggesting that we board it, are you?”
But Cook’s answer to that was to get the oars out.
The ship was caught fast in a bank of weeds. They had crawled right up her hull in glistening green mats like the ship was slowly being devoured by some colony of parasitic plants.
Fabrini and Cook rowed in closer until they hit the weeds which were so thick and congested, they had to use the oars as poles to push the lifeboat through them. Up close, the mist receding, the ship had to be four- or five-hundred feet in length with long decks and high, twin stacks rising up into the gloom. Cook had never seen a ship quite like her before. What he assumed was the bridge or the wheelhouse was suspended over the foredeck on steel stilts. And from just behind it, running aft to the stacks themselves were a skeletal framework of booms and gantries and derricks rising up like fleshless ribs. It made the entire ship look like the skeleton of some gigantic sea monster trapped in the weed.
As they poled down its length, Cook felt a sickly uneasiness in the pit of his belly. The sight of her up close – huge and lifeless and stark – left his skin cold, made his teeth want to chatter. Dead, certainly, but not untenanted.
The lifeboat slid through the weeds pretty easily, actually riding atop of them and sliding over them for the most part. Yet, it was hard work, poling along like that. But the exertion and the sweat felt good.
After what seemed about an hour, they swung around aft and got up behind her. As they passed through her shadow, the weeds suddenly seemed almost black. Not gray as a shadow might make them, but jet black and oily. When Cook looked again, it was gone.
It was like going into a cemetery at midnight, it occurred to him. You weren’t really afraid of ghosts and the dead were just dead, but. .. you just didn’t want to do it. You didn’t know why, but you didn’t want to. You just didn’t belong there.
As they came along the starboard side, pushing through those weaving mists, Saks said, “Looks like we’re expected.”
They all saw it: the boarding ladder was down. Cook and Fabrini urged the lifeboat nearer the ship where the weeds were so thick and snarled it was like pushing through mud. Finally, they reached the ladder.
“What’s that shit all over it?” Fabrini asked.
“Some kind of goo,” Menhaus said.
Cook was wondering that, too. The steps and handrail of the boarding ladder were festooned with something like cobwebs. On closer inspection, he saw it was a gray-white fungus, a fusty-smelling excrescence that looked like it had grown up out of the weeds and was slimed up the hull of the boat in oily-looking clots and clumps. He prodded some of it with the blade of his oar and a black sap ran from it.
“You ever seen fungus like that?” he asked Crycek, hoping the man’s knowledge of marine life had not abandoned him.
But Crycek just shook his head.
Saks said, “Looks like it’s eating right into the metal.”
And it did.
Cook said, “Menhaus? You feel up to standing guard over Saks here? Can you do that?”
What he was really saying, of course, was can we trust you not to feel sorry for that so-nofabitch and untie him?
Menhaus nodded, his eyes stern. “What about Crycek?”
“I’ll stay right here,” he said. He seemed to have his wits about him finally. “I’d rather do that than go on that old hulk.”
“Me and you both,” Menhaus said.
“Jesus Christ,” Saks said. “Untie me already. I’m okay now. I just lost my head was all. I’m fine now.”
Cook lashed the lifeboat to the boarding ladder, avoiding the fungus and wincing as the nylon rope cut into that shivering mass, making it bleed black again. “Just the same, Saks, you’ll stay tied until we decide different.”
“Which is probably forever,” Fabrini told him.
