It was the sort of wild, implausible rescue that, looking back on it later, George could scarcely believe had happened in the first place. There they were, about to be eaten by that monster-squid and then flames began to spread over the weeds… and out pops a woman, tossing fuel oil at the beast and driving it off. She said her name was Elizabeth Castle. That they had about two minutes to get out of there before Mr. Squid came back, probably not in the best of moods.
After that, to George’s thinking, things were a little fuzzy.
Everything happened very fast. They threw what gear they could into her boat… one of those flat-bottomed things that looked like a big box, you saw them on TV, people poling around the bayou in them
… and carefully brought Gosling aboard, still not knowing what any of it was about and just goddamn happy they were being rescued.
Of course, Chesbro had to get some preaching in, saying, “You were sent by God, Miss, you surely were.”
To which she politely replied, “If you say.”
George and Pollard grabbed poles and joined the lady in directing them wherever it was they were going. That flat-bottomed little scow was really something in the weed. It glided right over the most tangled and knotted patches. Elizabeth Castle was apparently an old vet, because she steered them through the congested weed, darkness, and mushrooming fog where you couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. She brought them back to a big sailing yacht that said Mystic on her bow and couldn’t have been in the weed for too long.
On the way, Elizabeth had Chesbro toss pailfuls of fuel oil over the water at irregular intervals and light them up.
“The squid,” was all she would say. “For the squid.”
Then they were on board the yacht and had hoisted her flat-bottom aboard and that was it. It all came down quickly and efficiently. Elizabeth Castle was some kind of woman, all right.
And the Mystic?
Oh, she was big and beautiful.
That’s what George thought as she came up out of the mist, sleek and proud with a bow sharp enough to slit paper. He never thought he could love something so abstract as a boat, but he loved this one. He loved her size, her sleek lines, her draft in the sea. She was a big sailboat and he was in love. And, admittedly, he would’ve loved her had she been but a leaky barge loaded with sewage and buzzing flies.
After that U.S. Army-issue tin can that wasn’t much more than a buffet for the squid, yeah the Mystic was a beauty. Sure, she’d been through some rough weather and tough times-the sails were hanging like dirty rags from the shrouds and the masts themselves looked haggard, leaning awkwardly like they were ready to come down any minute-but all in all, the Mystic was looking pretty damn nice in comparison to the other hulks and derelicts going to rot in the weeds.
They went into the main cabin. Like the rest of the boat it smelled of dampness and dank mildew. It was carpeted in a thick, rich burgundy shag that nearly swallowed your feet. And it was dry, warm. Nice. There was a fixed oak table in the center of the room and a settee along each wall upholstered with fat cushions the color of blood. There was a bar with a leather bumper bad encircling it. It was a big, roomy place and George figured twenty people could’ve lounged around in there comfortably. In the back of his mind he could almost hear the laughter and drinks being poured, smell cigarette smoke and women’s perfume. He didn’t know who’d owned the Mystic, but he was willing to bet that whoever they’d been, they’d been rich.
“Is this your boat?” Cushing asked.
Elizabeth Castle shrugged. “Now it is.” She went into the next room, a galley probably and they could smell wood smoke. Again, it was nice. When she came back, she announced, “I’ll heat some coffee.”
They had Gosling stretched out on one of the couches. Cushing had given him a preloaded syringe of Demerol and he was feeling no pain. Which was about all they could do for him. Everyone introduced themselves and George gave her an encapsulated version of how they’d ended up in the Dead Sea and how it was they’d been on the transport plane.
“I watched you,” she told them. “I saw you coming through the mist on my telescope while it was still light. I had hoped you’d choose a better vessel than that one.”
George felt oddly like he’d been chastised. He swallowed. Elizabeth Castle was the first woman he’d seen in… Jesus, it was getting so he couldn’t remember anymore. But it had been awhile. Since they’d sailed on the Mara Corday from Norfolk. He wasn’t sure exactly how long that had been now. Days and days. Maybe weeks. Regardless, he hadn’t seen a woman since the docks. He supposed, at that moment, he was in love with Elizabeth Castle as he figured they all were. She would never be called beautiful, he decided, she was simply too hard-looking, too intense, but she was certainly striking. Tall and sleek, a sort of feline intensity about her green eyes, a full-lipped mouth that was unabashedly sensual.
She wore clothes that looked homemade… gray woolen pants and a matching baggy-sleeved shirt, worn leather vest and high black boots
… like the outfit of a 19 ^th century sailor. They were shapeless garments, designed for practicality rather than vanity, but she fit them very well. With her long auburn hair tossed over one shoulder and those green eyes blazing, she made you want to stare and keep staring.
“Your friend,” she said, standing over Gosling, “the squid?”
George nodded.
She didn’t look exactly concerned, but not unconcerned either. She was oddly emotionless, toughened by this anti-world, wore a mask that you didn’t dare try to lift.
“If you battle the squid,” she said, “you’d better understand the squid.”
With that, she went back into the galley. They could hear her in there, rattling tin cups.
“Maybe I’m dreaming all this,” George said.
“Maybe we all are,” Cushing said. He went to Gosling, checked his pulse and then his eyes. Did not look exactly optimistic about any of it.
The woman returned with tin cups steaming with coffee. Just the aroma was enough to make George want to weep. Maybe he did. He took the cup she offered him and it was warm and soothing in his hands. The coffee wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but right then, he couldn’t remember ever having any that good.
“The squid only hunts at night,” she explained to them. “During the day, it dives deep. It does not like light.”
“I take it you’ve had dealings with it before?” George said.
She ignored him, was watching Cushing with Gosling. Watching him very intently. There was almost a softness around her mouth when she looked at Cushing, like maybe he reminded her of someone else. And maybe he did.
“Are you a doctor, Mr. Cushing?”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve had a little medical training. Just enough to get by.”
She stared at him for a time, turned away. “The squid only surfaces at night. Your lights might have drawn it in. I think it hunts by motion, by body heat… it may have been curious about your light. And then… its claws are venomous. Your friend could die.”
“You know a lot about that creature, don’t you?” Cushing said.
“It’s been here long as I have.” She considered that a moment. “I think it may live in the bottom of one of the old derelicts.”
“How long have you been here?” Chesbro asked.
She sighed. “I’m not sure. For a time we kept track, but not anymore. It seems like I’ve always been here. It’s been years, I know that much.”
“You said ‘we’… are there others?”
She shook her head. “There is myself, my Auntie Else… nobody else. There were ten of us once. The squid killed three the first week. The others… they were attacked by other things. My Uncle Richard, he died… was it last year? I can’t remember. He died of a heart ailment, I think. He went in his sleep. Now it’s just we two.”
George was struck by her almost formal mode of speech. It was peculiar. The sort of diction people used at one time in written correspondence. The idea of that started giving him some funny ideas about how long she’d been there.
“Where is your aunt?” Chesbro asked.
“Sleeping. She’s old… she’s not in her right mind most of the time. Please understand that when you meet her. She’s been through a lot.”
“How do you live here?” George asked. “I mean, what do you eat? Where do you get your food?”
She told him that they lived basically by scavenging. New boats showed up in the seaweed sea all the time, many each year. She raided them for food and supplies, clothing and blankets and fuel oil, anything she could get. She was always looking for survivors, too, but most of them were either dead, missing, or mad by the time they made it this far.
“I’m not the only person here, you know,” Elizabeth said. “I know of five or six others. Most of them are mad, though. You’re all welcome to stay here with us for as long as you want.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” George said, smiling, but getting nothing in return.
Your boyish charm doesn’t shine shit with this girl, he told himself. So just cool it. Besides, quit thinking what you’re thinking
… you’ve got a wife and kid back in the world.
True enough, he knew. But Elizabeth Castle was desirable. There was something very savage and untamed about her, exotic even. Those eyes, that lilt of hungry mouth, the long-limbed muscular grace she exhibited. But George told himself to stop right there. For he was married and even if he wasn’t, this woman looked at him about as cold as cold could be. You got out of line with her, she’d scratch your eyes out. That was the feeling he was getting from her. She reminded him of a warrior maiden. A woman you knew could out-fight you and probably out-think you, too.
Besides, he thought, you see how she’s looking at Cushing. Ain’t the way a sister looks at her brother, you catch my drift.
Sure, Cushing. He had an easy, open way about him. You knew looking into those blue eyes of his that he was intelligent and compassionate, loyal and steady. He was also tall and blond-haired, handsome in a Nordic sort of way. Women probably always went for him.
She told them that she couldn’t honestly remember much of her life before the ship she was on – the Catherine Belling – was pulled into the mist en route from Savannah to Bermuda. George figured she could, but didn’t want to. She said that, after a time, the only thing that really mattered was survival, staying alive. That it became a mantra after awhile. There was always work to be done and her days were occupied, so there was very little time to think about what was and what could have been. George figured that was bullshit, too.
“We have a lot of food,” she told them. “Canned and dried, salt pork and bacon. Often, when a new ship arrives, I find fresh meat and fruit, a variety of things. I grow vegetables on another ship in soil that came in boxes. Things grow very fast here.”
“Like the weed,” George said. “That fungus.”
“Yes.” She looked very stern. “You must always be careful about what you eat or drink. You have to boil the water out there before you drink it. It’s salty, but not as salty as the seas back home. But it has germs in it. They can make you very sick. Mostly, I drain water from the tanks of ships. One more thing. You’re welcome here, but understand that there are rules. And the most important is that you never leave this ship unless I’m with you. Later, once you know this place, you can… but not until then.”
“How long does the night last?” George asked her. “A day? Two days?”
At that question, it seemed like Elizabeth was real close to a smile. Close, but not quite there. “I’m so used to this… sometimes it’s hard to remember day and night back there, back where we came from.” She sat on the settee, placed her hands on her knees. “The day here… what we could call the day… lasts about three of our days, sometimes four. The night lasts about two days.”
She said that the mists were so thick that you never actually saw the sun there, though at certain times of the year you could catch a glimpse of it. But never for long. Not like you could with the moons when they were full. Which got George to thinking that if there was a sun and moons, well, then this wasn’t just some cosmic dead-end, it was a world. A planet caught in the orbit of some star he’d never heard of. One that no earth astronomer had probably ever heard of either.
Cushing asked her how large the seaweed sea was and she couldn’t tell him. It was vast, she knew, maybe hundreds if not thousands of miles in diameter, but the exact dimensions were unknown. “I know that you could travel for two days straight and never find anything but weed and water. I’ve never seen any land and never heard of anyone that has.”
“There must be thousands of ships and planes out there,” George said.
“And they keep coming,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes nothing for months and then, suddenly, three or four, five or six. In batches, they always come in batches. But as far as you go in the weed, you’ll find wreckage. Some of it very, very old.”
Chesbro had his head bowed over, praying silently.
Elizabeth Castle was watching him intently. “Is he a minister?” she asked.
But Cushing just shook his head. “No, he just has a deep and abiding faith,” Cushing said with all sincerity.
Good for you, George thought.
Anyone else might have said that Chesbro was a Jesus freak, a religious nut… but not Cushing. He wouldn’t go there and you couldn’t make him. That’s the kind of guy he was.
“You are very quiet, Mr. Pollard,” Elizabeth remarked.
He nodded. “I guess… I guess I don’t have much to say.”
“He’s okay,” Cushing told her. “He’s been through a lot.”
She and Cushing sat there discussing the specifics of this mad new world, the sort of things that lived there and all the people that must have perished there through the centuries, through the eons. It was real cheerful stuff. Elizabeth spoke of this place as something to be beaten down, something you had to fight at every turn, but nothing you could ever conquer. She was a stubborn, hard-headed woman by all accounts and maybe that’s how she had survived here – through ingenuity and rigid persistence. Maybe all the death she’d seen had made her cling to life all that much more tenaciously.
George thought she looked healthy. Her eyes were bright and her hair was lustrous, her teeth white and strong. But she was pale, her complexion like flawless porcelain. But that was probably due to the lack of sunshine. If people lived here generation by generation, breeding in this place, sooner or later they would have lost all skin pigment.
“All we’ve been holding out for,” Cushing said, “is a way out.”
“There is no way out,” Elizabeth said, her voice stern.
“Have you ever tried?” George put to her.
She gave him a hard, withering look and he felt himself sneak about two inches closer to death. But he didn’t give a shit if it offended her or not. He hated that smug certainty in her voice. Maybe she was satisfied with this place, but there was no way in hell he ever would be.
“Tried? No, I haven’t. Where would I begin?” She kept looking at him. “After a time, there’s only survival. That’s all you can think about.”
“How long have you been here?” Cushing said. “You said years, but-”
“What year did you sail to Bermuda?” George asked, getting right to it.
“What year? Well, I remember that very well. It was March, the second week of March, 1907.”
That landed like a brick and now everyone was staring at her, eyes wide and mouths hanging open.
“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “1907? Oh my God…”
There was a sudden vulnerability to her, she looked lost and confused and she was certainly those things. She chewed her lip. “I. .. I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?”