He didn’t comment on what they were seeing anymore than that. The sickly yellow light of the lantern created wavering shadows, made the skeleton look like it was leaning forward, then back, made the skull grin like it was laughing at them.
And maybe it was.
Because it knew things they did not. It knew plenty of things that they would not know until it was too goddamn late to do anything about them. It sat there, laughing in its sea of fungus and ancient rot, flashing a toothy mortuary grin. Filled to bursting with a grim, macabre mirth. You could almost hear it saying: Well, well, fucking well… look what the cat dragged in… or will soon drag out. Almost ninety years I’ve been waiting for someone and now here you are looking in on me, isn’t that sweet? And you want to know what it was like when I was clothed in flesh, when good dutiful Lieutenant Forbes was a man and not a fungal wraith? Yes, you want to know what it was like for him, sitting in here, waiting and waiting, hearing voices and lost souls whispering in the corridor, things scratching and clawing and hissing his name. How it was for him, his mind gone to a soft quivering rot because he knew he was alone and that thing was coming to claim him. You want to know what it was like, him sick with radiation poisoning… because that’s what it was and you know it. The breath of that thing is radiation, a wasting frozen atomic fission born in black godless cosmic voids… the sort of radiation that melts holes through the fabric of time and space and is a cold fire burning in your guts until you vomit out your insides in glistening, greasy loops. Yes, that’s what it was like for Forbes. His guts coming up his throat and then that doorway suddenly radiant with a flickering, supercharged energy that was so very bright it was actually the purest form of darkness, the absolute darkness of black holes and dead stars. Then it came through the door, passing straight through the metal because solid matter is like a mist to it and that’s when Forbes saw it, something immense, something sinister and intensely alien. Something that perverted three-dimensional space with its very arcane, impossible existence. An obscenity ancient and undying born in a tenebrous antimatter firmament of sentient slime where physics and geometry are screaming, cabalistic cancers. This, my friends, is what our good Lieutenant Forbes saw. What he feasted upon and what feasted upon him. Something lunatic and profane in appearance, a violation of known space that squeezed his brain dry like a sponge just seeing it. A crawling and slithering accumulation of arcing colors and flesh that was not flesh but smoke… colors with texture and sound and smell… writhing, hideous waxen colors that looked into him with green crystal eyes that bleached his own eyes white and boiled his brain to soup just looking upon them, turned his gray matter to a white radioactive jelly that ran from his ears and eyes and mouth…
All of it, whether memory or psychic invasion, blasted through Cook’s brain in a searing wave that left him gasping, a choked whimpering in his throat. His head spun and he fell into Fabrini who held him up, scared now, wanting to know what in the hell was happening. But Cook could not tell him. Could not tell him anything. Because he had seen it, he had seen and felt and physically witnessed the merest fraction of Forbes’ final moments and it left him wriggling with a fear that was so big, so total, it blotted out everything for a moment… even his own mind. He stood there, hanging onto Fabrini and for a few, lunatic moments his mind had been washed clean like a blackboard and he did not know who he was or where he was. And then it all came surging back, leaving him breathless, his temples throbbing.
But what had it been?
Bones were just bones and they could not have sent those images into his head. Cook could not accept such things. Could not let himself go there. Pitted, yellow bones holding, after all these years, a distant and feral memory, a reflection, an echo of a horror beyond human experience… was it possible? Or was the answer far worse? Was it just a telepathic linkup to that thing’s mind, its consciousness, letting him know but a sliver of the fate that was in store for him? For all of them?
“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini was saying. “Are you all right?”
And Cook was nodding his head. “I think the air in here is bad or something. I got all woozy or something. I’m… I’m okay now.”
Maybe Fabrini believed that and maybe he didn’t.
Regardless, he led Cook up and out of those subterranean passages and onto the deck where the air was somewhat cleaner, fresher. Even the mist didn’t look so bad after what was below.
After a time, Fabrini said, “Should we go back to the boat?”
“If you want.”
But Fabrini shook his head. “Let’s look around some more.”
