When Cushing saw the boat, it took his breath away.
For one crazy, reeling moment he thought it was bearing down on them, a ghost ship coming at them out of the weed. But it wasn’t moving. It was just dead and vacant-looking, another derelict caught in the creeping weed of the ship’s graveyard. Ribbons and filaments of mist were rising from its decks and derricks as if it were exhaling pale swamp vapors. It was an old wooden purse seiner with a black, scathed hull and a white wheelhouse that had gone gray and dingy with mildew. Her prow was sharp, looked like it could slit open the underbelly of the weed quick as a razor… but beyond that, it was simply dead.
Forgotten.
Abandoned.
Cushing saw it there in the fog and he could tell right away that Elizabeth wanted no part of it. The way she looked at it and then at him, told him that this vessel was shunned like the neighborhood haunted house. And it did look haunted. More than just empty. Occupied somehow, but not lived-in.
Day had broke now… what day there was in the Dead Sea… and Cushing had joined Elizabeth on one of her little expeditions in the graveyard. She had shown him the old barge where she tended her gardens, the freighters which had more fresh water in their tanks than you could drink in a lifetime. And now, there was this old fishing boat, a sixty-eight footer of the sort that had not been seen in years. Cushing was willing to bet her keel had been laid back in the 1920s.
“We should get back,” was all Elizabeth would say.
But Cushing had no intention of leaving. He was standing there in the scow with her, one of the flat-bladed poles in his hands. “Tell me about that boat,” he said.
“Just another wreck.”
“No, it’s not. I can see it in your eyes… this one is different. What’s its story?”
She just stood there a moment, like maybe she was trying to come up with something good that he would believe and would get them out of there and back to the Mystic. Finally, she sighed. “It’s… it’s where the Hermit lives. It’s his boat.”
“The Hermit?”
She nodded. “Some old man. He was here when we first got here. He doesn’t like people much. He has a gun.”
But, for some reason, Cushing wasn’t buying that. “Have you ever talked to him?”
“He’s crazy.”
“And he was here when you got here?”
“Yes.”
Which, of course, added fuel to Cushing’s time-distortion theory. If Elizabeth and the others had arrived here in 1907 and this boat was already here, something that looked like it couldn’t be any older than the ‘20s, then it all came together, didn’t it? This fishing boat was built much later than the ship that had brought Elizabeth’s people to the seaweed sea… yet it had arrived before them.
“I want to board her,” Cushing said. “I want to talk to this Hermit.”
“Mr. Cushing, please…”
“You don’t have to come.”
Cushing smiled.
Elizabeth frowned.
Standing there, seeing it in the weed like that, all wrapped up in tissues of mist, it did look like a haunted house jutting from some overgrown, neglected yard. It was big and ghostly and soundless, the wheelhouse windows boarded shut, the bowline hung with a caul of weed. The decks were wreathed with shadows, a mat of fungus growing up over the aft stanchions and winches. There was a lot of wreckage on the foredeck… metal and fused plastic and all manner of debris that were blackened as if by a fire.
Cushing just watched it, let it fill him up. It was just another boat, yet he was certain that it was saying something to him.
“Let’s take a look,” he said.
She shook her head and they began to pole through the weeds until they were close enough that he could grab hold of her bulwarks and pull them along side.
Cushing pulled himself up and over the railing. The decks were moist and slimy and he almost went on his ass. The planking creaked beneath his weight, but held okay. Elizabeth tossed him a line and he tied off the scow to the fencerail. He helped her aboard, but she was very strong and lithe and didn’t seem to need his help. She looked nervous, uncomfortable, something. Her right hand clutched the hilt of the machete she wore at her waist.
“He won’t like us being here,” she said.
Cushing stood there, feeling the boat under him and around him and he was certain that it was empty. There was nothing here but memory. He could feel it.
He moved forward, up around the mast tower, and up the short steps to the wheelhouse door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing.. . just the echo of his rapping knuckles inside, but nothing else. The door opened with a grating, groaning sound. It was dark and grainy inside. He found a lantern and lit it. Better. The Hermit had turned the wheelhouse into his quarters. There was a cot along one wall, books piled on the floor and in shelves. There was a writing desk scattered with papers and a table crowded with old charts. It smelled like an old library in there, like musty pages and rotting bindings.
Cushing went to the chart table.
Most of the charts were of the Atlantic, the Cape Hatteras region. But there was one that was not. It was hand-drawn. He studied it carefully in the lantern’s light. The longer he studied it, the more excited he became. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.
Elizabeth looked at it. “Yes,” was all she would say.
It was a map of the ship’s graveyard rendered very carefully in ink. It was very detailed, though uncompleted, and must have taken years. Apparently the Hermit had spent his time exploring the wrecks and he had put all their names down. “By God, look at these names.. . the Enchantress, the Proteus, the Wasp, the Atlanta, the Raifuku Maru, the City of Glasgow… these are all famous disappearances tied in with the Devil’s Triangle.”
“The what?” Elizabeth said.
Cushing just shook his head. “Nothing.” He was going over that chart. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships listed, from old galleons to modern container ships. Many were named, others were tagged as “Unknown”. The Hermit had sketched out where the weed was thickest, where the greatest fields of wreckage were to be found, places nearly impassable on account of the great concentration of wrecks. To what would have been east and west on a normal chart were just labeled UNKNOWN or UNEXPLORED. Some ships and some areas of the weed were tagged with skulls and crossbones.
“What do you suppose that means?” he asked Elizabeth.
She studied the chart. “I can’t say what all of them mean… but this one -” she put her finger on one labeled UNKNOWN BARK – “I think… yes… I think this is the one the squid lives in. In the bottom.”
So, then, that made sense. The skulls and crossbones indicated dangerous places. Other ships were marked with circles. The Mystic was marked thus and Cushing figured it meant that they were occupied. There weren’t many marked such. The Hermit had marked the open channels through the weed, the location of planes including what Cushing thought was the C-130. At the southern edge of the weed, was written SEA OF MISTS. And beneath that, OPEN SEA. In the latter there was a red X. It was large and circled several times.
“This must be where he figured he arrived,” Cushing said. “Probably where the vortex dumped him. I bet that’s where we came in, too.”
There was a dotted line leading from the red X to a smaller black X that was labeled Ptolemy, which must have been the name of the Hermit’s boat and its position in the weed.
As Cushing went through the ships, he found dozens of others he had heard of or read about, famous vanishings. About midway into the Sea of Mists, the derelicts were more spread out. But he found the Cyclops, a Navy collier that had disappeared during the First World War. It was marked with a skull and crossbones. To the north of the ship’s graveyard, the derelicts were fewer and the Hermit had marked channels cut through the weed that led to an area of what might have been open water. This was labeled OUTER SEA, and just about everything up there was tagged as being unknown or unexplored. Except, at the upper edge was another seaweed bank with a long rectangle lodged at its lower extremity, indicating a ship. S.S. Lancet, it said. There were a few other wrecks, most unnamed. Above the Lancet was what appeared to be another seaweed sea with wrecks, most of them labeled as being unexplored or unknown. And just above this, SEA OF VEILS. The Hermit had put a series of skulls and crossbones here. Whatever was up there, it must have been pretty damn bad.
“What do you make of this?” Cushing asked her.
Elizabeth didn’t even look where he was pointing. She just shrugged.
“And the Lancet?”
She sighed. “I’ve never been up there. It’s some kind of huge sailing ship… a ghost ship, my uncle said. Nobody comes back from up there.”
“What’s up there?”
“Let’s just go,” she said, avoiding the question.
Cushing rolled up the chart and went over to the writing desk. All the papers were covered in weird notations and complex mathematical symbols. Some of it looked like geometry or possibly calculus. There were dozens of pages like this. Cushing was starting to wonder if this guy was just some lost fisherman or possibly something else entirely. He didn’t suppose he’d ever know for sure.
He opened the desk drawers and found a. 45 Colt auto. It was well-oiled and maintained. He ejected the magazine from the butt and it was fully-loaded. In the top drawer, there was a letter that went on for several pages in a cramped, economical script.
“Look at this,” he said.
Elizabeth pretended interest. “We’d better go.”
But Cushing wasn’t going. Not yet. He began to read:
December 2, Year Unknown
To whom it may concern,
I, like you, have been trapped in this abominable place for more years than I would care to admit. But unlike you, my exile into this void has been self-imposed. Yes, that is true… I chose to come here.
Allow me to explain. I was part of a group of scholars and researchers, yes, mathematicians and physicists and quantum theorists, who had long been aware of the time/space anomalies associated with the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area. Betydon, Connors, Imab, and myself. We had long studied these aberrations… though privately, to avoid the ridicule often associated with such things publicly. Publicly, I say for each of us were at one time involved in what the ONR, the Office of Naval Research, called Project Neptune. Which was and is (I imagine) an ongoing investigation into sundry and shadowy areas of theoretical physics with potential marine/military applications. The group I and the others were involved in were concerned with the aforementioned time/space anomalies. The Neptune Project, of course, is highly classified. But I see no reason not to violate my loyalty oath here. At any rate, our little group studied these things privately after leaving the ONR. We called our little inquiry the Procyon Project. Now, after long years of formulating countless hypotheses (basically, a furtherance of what we had been doing with Neptune), we decided it was time to test our theories. I won’t go into all of it. Just let me say, that we were proven correct and pulled into this place.
Connors died in the Sea of Mists, attacked by some type of sea monster. And the others? Well, I won’t go into it. I’ll only say that we were reconnoitering the Sea of Veils and particularly the S.S. Lancet, a vessel lost in this place in the 1850s and certainly the mother of all cursed ships.
Regardless, I am as surely marooned here as you are.
But what is this place? Where is this place? How can it possibly be? You may well wonder and it has taken me some years to put together the pieces of this puzzle and, even now, much of what I know or think I know is pure speculation ranging from the informed to the fantastic to the downright absurd. Before you toss aside this letter, this confession, and call me a crazy man, I think you owe it to yourself to read on.
First off, understand that if you are here – in this place – then you have undergone what could be deemed hyperdimensional travel. More on that later. No doubt you arrived here by passing into what appeared to be a cloud or fogbank which was luminous. As you may or may not know such phenomena has been reported for a great many years in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area, a place where curvature of space and time is most pronounced. And your ship or plane was, of course, somewhere in this somewhat vast geographical area. The cloud you saw, were pulled into, was actually a sort of matter-energy vortex, a warp or rift in the space-time continuum. To understand how such a thing could be, let me touch on 4 ^th dimensional space a moment. You are probably familiar… or maybe not… with the three dimensions of space – x, y, and z – which are mathematical representations of the perpendicular dimensions of length, width, and depth. Now into this, let us factor in t, which is time, the 4 ^th dimension, and is perpendicular to the other three. Time is not lineal, but cyclical, looping over itself. Imagine a helix and you’ll grasp the general idea. Before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, according to classical mechanics time was an absolute, but we now understand it to be fluid.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, when you passed through said vortex, you were actually passing through the Fourth Dimension. The dimension of time. Though the actual travel time through fourth dimensional space seemed minute to you… you will recall the sudden lack of air, the momentary derangement of gravitational forces as you passed through… probably seconds or minutes at most in your memory, thousands of years may have passed on earth or time may not have passed at all. It may have moved in reverse from your point of entry. Anything is possible.
Trust me, I am doing my utmost not to bore you to tears with celestial mechanics and quantum theory.
Where are you? You are in another spatial dimension, possibly a fractal which, according to non-Euclidian geometry, cannot be assigned a whole number. It would be represented not as the third, fourth, or fifth dimension, but as the 3.5 dimension or the 4.1 dimension etc. At any rate, as I said, you are in a spatial dimension far from home. How far? So very distant it probably could not be measured even in parsecs. Yet… through 4 ^th dimensional space… quite close. Einstein explained in his Theory of Relativity that dimensions or worlds could exist side by side, yet be invisible to one another because they occupy different planes of space. But why are they invisible? Probably for the same reason that if you were suddenly transported to, say, the 5 ^th dimension… and you may be there now… you would not be aware of it. Why? Because you are a three-dimensional creature who is designed by evolution only to detect the three dimensions of length, width, and depth. You do not have the necessary sensory apparatus to detect anything else. Confused? Excellent. Now this spatial dimension or fractal that you are in is a universe unto itself. In that, yes, you are on a planet which no doubt circles an alien star in some unknown void of space. Likewise, this star… though I’ve never seen it through the cloud cover, but do feel its heat… is part of a galaxy which is part of a universe in some deadend space that can probably only be represented mathematically. You’ve probably seen our two moons, but I believe there is a third. My studies of the orbital paths of the other two suggest a third satellite. No matter. We are on a planet with moons and a star somewhere out there. The day here lasts anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-three hours, the night thirty-six to forty-five. This anomaly may be in flux due to the unstable field of this dimension or due to seasonal changes or, perhaps, because that time in this place is distorted from what we know.
But you’re probably asking yourself how one dimension can possibly link with another. To understand how such things can exist, let us picture the birth of the universe – the so-called Big Bang. Evidence suggests that the universe as we understand it was born out of what physicists call a “singularity”. A speck of infinite density occupying zero volume. Boggles the mind, don’t it? Now in the first split-second of the Big Bang, this point of infinite density – which contained all the mass and energy that would become the universe-underwent an exponential diffusion or expansion, an inflation of sorts. This diffusion or explosion created matter, time, space, energy, everything known and more that aren’t. Now this primordial explosion is not simply three-dimensional, but multi-dimensional, and thus creates not only our universe, but all of multi-dimensional space in one fell swoop. This explosion or implosion, would create an endless number of spatial dimensions… those of real space and those of hyperspace.
Now, if you are from the “modern” world… I use this loosely, as I left earth as such in 1983… then you are familiar with black holes. A black hole or “singularity” is created when a large star exhausts its nuclear fuel and implodes, collapses into its own intense gravity. This singularity becomes a sort of matter-energy whirlpool which sucks in anything, even light, and cycles it somewhere else. It may implode on our end, but explode open somewhere else. These singularities, in essence, may become wormholes, passages from one spatial dimension to another. Many cosmologists believe that the known universe is but one of countless parallel universes, sort of like an unknown number of soap bubbles suspended in mid-air. Normally, these universes or dimensions would be out of reach of one another, but according to Einstein’s equations, there may be a series of tubes or channels – wormholes – that connect these universes. Technically, these wormholes would be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, tunnels that connect two distant spheres of time-space. And you, my friend, have proven their existence for you have passed through one!
Wormholes. According to the most radical and theoretical particle physics of my day, these wormholes would be composed of a sort of exotic matter, a “negative matter” which is not antimatter, in case you were wondering. This negative matter would possess a naturally powerful antigravity field and it would be this field that would hold these wormholes open forever or for short periods of time. Let me give you the classic wormhole analogy to illustrate this. If the universe was a pear, say, then an ant wanting to travel from the front to the back would have a long trip ahead of him, but if a worm had tunneled through the pear, then the ant could take the shortcut. And, essentially, wormholes are just that: time-space shortcuts.
Now, to simplify things, from here on in, where we are is called Dimension X (to borrow the name of an old radio show). Now I believe that an infinite number of these wormholes were created during the Big Bang. Some have closed up and others are still open and new ones are being created by star implosions all the time. Regardless, even those that have closed are as precarious as earthquake fault lines, in that a certain combination of forces can rip them back open as easily as a poorly-mended hem. Here, in Dimension X, where the energy field is somewhat unstable, these wormholes are something of a naturally-occurring phenomena much like tornadoes. When the proper atmospheric conditions exist, an energy flux of some type here opens one of these wormholes… sometimes to our planet and probably sometimes to many others. So, if you can imagine our dimension and Dimension X lying side by side, grids of a sort composed of perpendicular lines, then you can understand that now and then these lines would, simply by random chance, line up, become parallel to one another and maybe it would be this, more than anything else, that would weaken certain areas of space so that wormholes would be sort of an inevitability.
Okay, so you’ve passed through a wormhole, you’ve experienced what could be called interspatial teleportation through interspace. You have passed from one spatial cycle to another without having to transverse the limitless space itself. If you’ve been paying attention and I hope you have, then you realize that the shortest distance between two points is through the 4 ^th dimension. Instead of climbing over a mountain or going around it, you tunneled straight on through. You’ve bypassed the curves. What the vortex did was to propel you like Captain Kirk and his warp drive. Hyperdrive, would be the actual term, passing through the curves of limited three-dimensional space by dropping out of it and then back in somewhere else.
Now what? Well, you’ve made the trip, can you make the trip back? Theoretically, yes. You can return. It will be a matter, I think, of returning to your stepping off point into this world. Which I am certain is somewhere in what I have called the Sea of Mists (see my chart). It really will be a matter of waiting for the wormhole to open and being in the right place at the right time. If it opens, using a boat or plane, I think you can punch your way back through. But, by all means, do not enter a wormhole in any other geographical location or you will find yourself God-knows-where. If my theory is correct, the wormhole that brought you here… all of us here… will only open in that locality. Now beware of one thing. If you are lucky enough to pass through to our world, consider the time distortion factor. Einstein discovered that gravity and other forms of linear acceleration can cause a distortion in the curvature of fourth-dimensional time-space. Essentially, this acceleration can bend time. And you, my friend, accelerated through hyperspace at an impossible speed… well, you may be in for a surprise. What may happen is what’s known as temporal stasis or the slowing down of time. You may return to the world you knew or you may return a million years in the past or future. It’s impossible to say. Conversely, the bending of time may counteract itself when you pass back through.
Again, I’m just guessing.
This brings my little sermon to an end. Once again, I am traveling to the Sea of Veils, to the Lancet. Because what the three of us – Imab, Betydon, and myself – discovered there, was revelatory indeed. When I say that the Lancet is the key, I know of what I speak. If we had had more time… well, no matter. I will go up there again. To satisfy my own scientific curiosity, if nothing else. For that ship holds secrets. And it is, I believe, the focal point for what caused the horrible deaths of Imab and Betydon. For, if you have been here any length of time, you may have felt the presence of another. What this thing is, I cannot say, only that I believe it to be destructive and sentient. Something that may lie dormant or inactive for extended periods of time. A sort of potential energy waiting to spend itself. Lately, I’ve felt it building. I believe it is about to become kinetic.
God help us, God help any creature with a conscious, reasoning brain when that happens.
I will die, perhaps. But I will die knowing. Not just the nature of that thing (something that boggles the mind), but of the secret of the Lancet. For there, I think, are the keys to deliverance from this place.
This, then, is my mission. I leave you this letter, my chart. Help yourself to my gun and supplies. For I no longer will need them. Please, do not come after me.
May God protect you,
John R. Greenberg
That is where the letter ended.
Cushing stood there, amazed and informed, depressed and confused, feeling a great many things. Maybe there was hope now and maybe there was a complete lack of it. There were certainly a lot of questions he needed answered and, unfortunately, this Greenberg… the Hermit. .. was not there to answer them.
“What do you know about this guy?” Cushing asked Elizabeth.
She just sighed and shook her head. “He was a crazy old man who didn’t like people. My Uncle knew him… visited him sometimes.. . he was out of his head.”
“Maybe not.”
“We should go,” Elizabeth said.
Cushing found himself staring at her. “You didn’t want me seeing this, did you?”
She shook her head.
“You knew he was gone?”
“Yes.”
“And-”
“And I didn’t want you filling yourself with his crazy ideas. I didn’t want you to get filled with false hope,” she said to him, “because it is false.”
It was confession time. She told him her Uncle Richard had been something of an acquaintance of the Hermit. That he believed implicitly in the Hermit’s science. Uncle Richard spent days on end trying to find that vortex that would carry them out.
“But he didn’t find it?”
She shook her head. “No. He never did… and it broke something in him. Destroyed something in him. Made him give up. That’s what killed him… he had no hope left. None at all.”
“And Greenberg never returned from the Sea of Veils?”
“No one ever does.” She swallowed. “Can we please leave now?”
Cushing had a fair idea that Elizabeth was not telling him all she knew. The letter… it was dated in December. But this December or the last or five past? He knew Elizabeth wouldn’t tell him. At least not yet. But for his money, Greenberg had probably only just set out for the Sea of Veils a few months back. He didn’t know that to be true, yet he was certain it was.
“Please,” Elizabeth said. “We need to go.”
Taking the chart, letter, and gun, they did just that.