Three days adrift in that fetid cage of fog.
Fog that stank like a wind blown from the throat of a corpse.
Just Styles in the little dinghy, alone. Not a man anymore, not really, just something silent and waxen and waiting. Something small and existential, something crushed and discarded, flaking and decaying and dissolving. And, yes, something that was afraid to look into the fog and something that was afraid to listen, because if you listened there were sounds out there. Awful, terrible sounds that-
But Styles was not listening because he was alone and there was nothing in the fog and he had to remember that.
The reality of his shipwreck and exile into that stillborn sea was this: no food, no water, no hope of the same. Just that silent becalmed sea and the mist and his throat swollen and red from screaming, screaming for help and knowing there was none to be had.
Yes, Styles was alone like a man lost on Mars or one that had fallen shrieking into some ebon pit beyond the edges of the universe and he was frightened. Frightened of just about everything. Just him and his mother’s silver crucifix at his throat. The both of them, then, stretched out in the dinghy, listening for the sounds of sails or oars or a ship’s bell and never hearing them.
Never hearing anything but the fog.
Because if you had nothing to listen to but the papery rustle of your own heartbeat and the scratching of air in your lungs, then you would start listening to the fog like Styles was. And you would realize, soon enough, that the fog was not dead, not really, it was a living, dividing flux of organic material. And if you listened very closely you could hear the blood rushing in its veins and the hum of its nerve endings, a distant rushing sound like respiration. The sound of the fog breathing.
Yes, the fog and always the fog.
A sucking gray mist that stank of rotting seaweed and dead things on beaches, moving and shifting and enclosing. A mildewed, moist shroud that was equal parts corpse gas, teleplasm, and suspended slime. It was thick and coveting, claustrophobic and suffocating.
Styles’ first day in it he was amazed by its contours and density. The second day he hated its fullness, its completeness, the way tendrils of it drifted over the dinghy and sought him out. And the third day? The third day it simply scared him. Because he was hearing things in it. The sounds of pelagic nightmares that called it home. The things that were waiting for him to fall overboard, things with yellow eyes and tentacles and sawblade teeth, malignancies and monsters.
And he kept telling himself: Don’t think about that, don’t think about any of that business because it’s all in your head… imagination, that’s all.
And that was sensible, but it didn’t hold water because he was alone and all he had for company was his mind and it liked playing tricks on him, nasty tricks. It told him that it honestly didn’t matter if he thought about those things, because they were thinking about him. That was insane, but then his mind turned dark and asked if he couldn’t feel them out there, those black and demented horrors in the fog, thinking about him and concentrating on him and he had to admit that, yes, God yes, he could. He really could. And he had been feeling something out there from the moment the ship went down and he scrambled shivering and mindless into the dinghy.
But what?
What could possibly be out there?
He didn’t know, but he knew that they were out there, unspeakable things melting and oozing into the mist, crawling, grinning abominations with hollow moons for eyes, contaminated things and diseased things with bone pits for minds. Things whose breath stank of graveyards and tombs, things with lamprey-mouths that sought to suck away his air and his blood and his mind. Things which reached out with hooked, fleshless fingers.
Shut your mind down, shut it right down or they will hear you thinking and if they hear you thinking they will find you.
Styles concentrated, reduced his thoughts to a pinprick of light, something weak and insubstantial. His mind pulled into itself and collapsed into the cellar of his psyche and he kept it there, hiding it away from what was in the fog, what was calling his name and whispering obscenities into his ears.
So when he saw the ship, he doubted its reality.
He blinked and demanded that it dissipate, but it refused. It edged in closer, a high brigantine made of mist and ether and ghostly-white ectoplasm. A shade, a shadow, a ghost ship. That was all. Yet… he could hear it, hear its deadness. The fore and aft sails hung limp at the mainmast. The high shrouds and rigging drooped and swayed, tendrils of fog climbing them like snakes. The foremast and jibs were creaking like timbers in a haunted house.
Still, Styles did not believe in it.
Even when the men called to him from the foredeck and put a boat down, he did not believe. Not until they rowed over to him and touched him with damp, chilled hands.
And then he screamed.