The blue glow was coming from a freighter.
When they got up close and it came up out of the mist at them, they all felt it down in their guts like some wasting disease, something pernicious and destructive. The ship was just another old derelict listing in the fog, a container ship with great holes eaten through its sides, rusting and silent with weed growing up its hull. .. yet it was so much more. There was something grimly monolithic about it, unhallowed like a moldering tombstone over a heretic’s grave or an ancient altar where human sacrifice had been practiced. Whatever it was, it felt like doom and insanity. Tendrils of mist wrapped up its superstructure, oozed and drifted like fingers of ectoplasm.
Go away, the ship seemed to be saying, this is none of your damn business. Just go away while you still can.
But they weren’t heeding its warning.
They were all there, save for Crycek who had stayed behind with Aunt Else. In Elizabeth’s boat, they poled closer to the wreck through the weeds, feeling its weight and ominous pull.
George felt like it had reached out and taken hold of him, held him tightly in a cold fist and would not let him go until it had squeezed all the good, decent, human things out of him.
“Christ,” Pollard finally said. “It… it gets under your skin, doesn’t it?”
Everyone agreed wordlessly.
Even old tough-guy Saks was having trouble pretending there wasn’t something, something bad you could feel, smell, and taste.
If ships could go insane, this one had. There was something decidedly wrong about it. Empty maybe, but not untenanted. And how long it had drifted alone and derelict, no one could say. But it might drift for another hundred years or maybe a thousand, a worm-holed, mist-shrouded coffin bobbing in the weed, holding darkness tight in its belly like black earth. A thing of silence and mist and dire memory. If anything called it home, then it could not possibly be sane. Could not possibly be anything you would want to look in the face.
“Boarding ladder’s down,” Saks said.
“Just like the Cyclops,” Fabrini said.
They tied off the scow and went up one after the other. They carried lanterns and flashlights. George carried the. 45 that had been Greenberg’s. The others had axes and gaffs. Menhaus had a pike.
The decks were covered in slime and mildew, were almost spongy in places. The beams of their flashlights bounced off the heavy fog. The lanterns threw weird, crawling shapes over the bulkheads. That blue glow was coming from this ship. They knew that much. They’d seen it strobing as they approached it, but now they had not seen it in ten minutes or more.
Like somebody turned off the light, George thought.
The idea of exploring another old hulk didn’t sit well with anyone, but they had come this far and no one mentioned turning back. The decks were crowded with orange plastic containers stacked one-high that appeared to be bolted down. They stopped before a row of them.
“What do you suppose all this shit is?” Fabrini said.
The plastic containers held yellow metal drums. In the light of the fog, it was easy enough to read what was stamped on the containers themselves:! RADIOAKTIVE MATERIALIEN DER GEFAHR! GEFAHRLICHE VERGEUDUNG! And beneath that, a symbol for radiation.
“German,” Saks said.
Cushing nodded. “Radioactive materials,” he said. “Must be barrels of radioactive waste they were taking to dump or store somewhere.”
“Oh, shit,” Fabrini said.
“Relax, they look sealed,” Saks said.
They did, but no one liked the idea of being on a freighter full of stuff like that. It was not exactly reassuring. Especially with that funny blue glow they’d been seeing. Cushing explained what it meant to Elizabeth.
“We better get our asses out of Dodge,” Menhaus said.
“Maybe not,” Saks said. “Look…”
There it was again, that pulsing pale blue glow. It lit up, flickered, painted one of the aft cabins an electric blue. Then it died out again.
“What do you make of it?” George asked Cushing.
“I know what I make of it,” Fabrini said. “Some of this shit leaked. That’s what we’re seeing and we’re probably all fucking contaminated now.”
“Well, at least your dick’ll glow in the dark, Fagbrini,” Saks said. “Menhaus ought to get a charge out of that.”
But Cushing just shook his head. “Radioactive waste might glow.. . maybe… but not like that.”
“Let’s see what does then,” Saks said.
He led them aft, beneath a framework of winches and derricks, around great chasms eaten through the deck plating, and to the cabin beyond. The hatch to the companionway was open.
“Shall we?” he said.
They started down after him, his flashlight beam cutting through the murk, revealing motes of dust and grimy bulkheads, iron steps that were warped and buckled. Near the bottom of that ladder, the blue light pulsed again, casting a ghostly, ethereal illumination over them. They saw it was coming from an open doorway.
George smelled something rank that made his eyes water. The air was thin and dry, rarified like gas in a vacuum tube. It was hard to breathe, but then, maybe it was just panic on his part. His throat felt tight, constricted to a pinhole now. He was smelling something like rotting fish. But other odors, too, hot and acrid smells.
They stepped through the doorway, flashlights and lanterns held before them, weapons at the ready. The first thing they saw was some sort of machine on the floor of what might have been a machine shop once. It sat on a crude frame of welded bars that housed a large oval disk of shiny metal. Above that was something like the scope from a hunting rifle, though three feet in length. Connected to the disk by two-foot rods at either end were two large, circular mirrors set upright… at least things that looked like mirrors. The entire contraption was making a low, humming sound. Charged particles of luminous blue danced across those mirrors, then faded.
Looking at it, George could not say what it was. But it appeared as if that scope-device was lined up dead center of those off-set mirrors. And what could the point of that be?
The machine thrummed again and George could feel the deck vibrating beneath him. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. Static electricity crackled in the air and there was a sudden, gagging stench of burnt ozone and fused wiring. Then the machine made a funny whining sound and a transparent pencil-thin beam of light like a laser beam came out of the back end of the scope and struck the rear mirror. The mirror was suddenly suffused with white light, making a sharp sound like rustling cellophane. It glowed and reflected a series of prismatic beams at the front mirror which broke them up into a blue beam of light like a searchlight, directing that blue radiance at the bulkhead. You could see that blue energy crawling, rippling, making the bulkhead beneath seem insubstantial.
Then the scope cut out again.
“What the hell is that?” George said.
And maybe somebody would have answered him, but that’s when they saw that they were not alone with the machine. There was something else in that room and it was not a man. What it was… they couldn’t say at first, it was so utterly alien in appearance. It looked at first like an elongated lizard squatting on its hands and knees, but it was no lizard. It was not anything that anyone had ever seen before. It rose up off the floor, a corded and rawboned thing made of rubbery blue-green flesh. It did not have legs as such, but something like a tripod of stout and boneless limbs ending not in feet but in pads like those of a treefrog.
“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said.
“Keep away from it,” Cushing said, as if that needed saying.
It had the general body shape of a pond hydra – cylindrical and up-curving like a banana, but hunched and contorted, set atop that tripod of legs that looked more like pythons than legs. It moved back a step and those spade-feet made wet, sucking sounds as they were pulled from the metal deckplates. It stood there, tall as a man, a nightmare sculpted from wrinkled, convoluted flesh with a bony head full of hollows and draws like an irregular, knobby cone pressed flat on top. From which, there was a nest of coiling blue-black tendrils, each as thick as a man’s thumb. They could have been some kind of alien hair, but they looked more like bloated worms looking for blood to suck.
“What the fuck is that?” Saks demanded to know.
“I think… I think it’s the thing that made that machine.”
It had three blue-green leathery arms ending in whipping clusters of root-like tentacles that might have been called fingers on some distant world. From throat to legs, there were a series of short, blunt, hollow tubes running down its underside. They looked like sheared-off sections of garden hose… but greasy, horribly-alive, twitching. They could have been organs of speech or reproduction for all anyone could say.
And that was the crazy thing about this horror: you couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t look at it and say, yes, it’s invertebrate. Yes, it’s a worm or a snake or an insect. There was no possible frame of reference for this thing on earth. Its anatomy was completely alien, its evolutionary biology unguessable.
Now George knew where that revolting, dead fish smell was coming from. But closer like this, it wasn’t exactly the smell of dead fish. Like that, but sharper, higher, with an almost gagging chemical smell mixed in.
Everything about the creature inspired revulsion. And the worse part was that it had a face. If you wanted to call it that. A fissured, wizened sort of face with a triangular arrangement of close-set eyes, each pink as strawberry milk, glistening and oozing with mucus… all three of them. And each about the size of a tennis ball. But those eyes, they soon saw, were not pink. Not really. There was only a membrane of pink skin over them. Like drapes opening, the membranes pulled away in tandem, slitting open in the center and revealing eyes that were red as rubies. The membranes did not pull back all the way… just enough so that the eyes looked pink with a luminous and jellied red slit in them.
And those eyes… they sucked the spirit right out of you.
What was to be done?
What really was to be done?
They watched it and it watched them, checkmate.
There was a pair of short, powerful-looking tentacles at its mouth. One to either side like they might have been used in feeding. They were a bright, cobalt blue with pink undersides, tiny razored suckers set into them. The creature stood there, rubbing those tentacles together with a slippery sound like a man stroking his chin, thinking what to do, what to do.
George watched it, noticing now that it was making a sort of shallow, gasping sound and as it did so, those tubes on its underside inflated, then deflated. Sure, it was breathing. That’s what those things were. Aspirators of some type. Probably not anything like human lungs at all, but more like the book lungs of a spider or maybe the gills of a fish. Organs of respiration that separated breathable gases from the toxic ones. And in this place, George knew, that could have been oxygen… but with all the rotting weed out there, it could have been methane, too. Maybe a little of both with some nitrogen mixed in.
Nobody had made any threatening moves on it yet and it had not done a thing to provoke any. But it was coming. If not from the thing itself, then from the people gathered there. You could almost smell it in the air: a hot, seething intolerance for this creature. And you could see it on the faces of those gathered there: an atavistic, marrow-deep race hatred that was involuntary and automatic. This thing did not belong. It was spidery and evil and obscene. It was offensive to the human condition. You wanted to crush it. To kick it. To stomp it. It was an abomination that disgusted you in ways you could not comprehend… so it had to die. It had to be purged. It was simply too different to be allowed to live.
No, none of them were truly aware at a conscious level of what they were truly feeling, but it was there. A race memory, an inherited predisposition that was acid in their bellies and electricity in their veins. That communal need to destroy, to kill, to rend for the good of the tribe. Slay the beast, kill the monster, protect the hive…
And everyone was suddenly very aware of the weapons in their white-knuckled fists, how their muscles bunched and their nerve endings jangled. Those weapons needed to be put to use.
“Let’s kill it,” Saks said and you had to expect it to come from him first. “Ugly cock-sucker, let’s put it down.”
And everyone there seemed more than willing to let that happen. They were like the same animal with the same bones and claws and teeth. The same wide, predatory eyes.
But Cushing said, “Now take it easy. Just take it easy. It… it must be intelligent. To build something like that.”
Menhaus felt his mouth begin to speak: “You… you know what it is, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Saks said, his voice hollow-sounding.
“That flying saucer… that ship in the weeds… that’s where it came from.”
Cushing didn’t even bother inquiring about that one, he just said, “It’s smarter than we are… it might be able to help us, to get us out of here…”
George just stood there, feeling numb and stupid. His body was thick and ungainly like he was stuffed with wet rags or had been shot up with Thorazine. If the thing had moved suddenly, he knew, it would have had him. There was just no way he could have hoped to evade it. Maybe this was from fear and maybe it was the result of that thing looking at him and into him. And he wondered if that wasn’t it… because with those alien eyes burning into his head like arc lights, he had a mad desire to draw a razor over his wrists.
Those eyes were bad.
Nothing on earth had eyes like that.
Glaring and hateful and insectile. And this was only accentuated by its mouth which was little more than an oval, puckered hole set off to the side… like the mouth of an old man without his teeth in. The total effect was that of a wicked, evil alien face.
It stood there, watching them, not directly threatening, but infinitely repulsive. Maybe it was intelligent, but it had no right to be so. Not in the thinking of anyone looking at it. The idea of this slinking nightmare being intelligent was like the idea of an intellectual spider or centipede… appalling.
Fabrini took a step towards that weird machine and the thing tensed. Those tubes running down its belly shuddered. Something like black saliva ran from them and when it struck the deck plating, it sizzled like butter on a hot griddle.
“I don’t recommend pissing it off,” Cushing said.
George had to stay his hand now from bringing up that. 45 and putting a few rounds into it. Maybe more than a few.
Yes, he was thinking, it is intelligent. You can see that. But it’s the wrong kind of intelligence. It’s not our kind, but a profane, blasphemous sort of intelligence. Cold and cruel and arrogant. Looking at it, he was struck by its unflinching superiority, its… arrogance. Because, yes, it was arrogant. You could see that. It hated them. It hated them with the warped, inborn bigotry and aversion that its entire race felt for lower orders of life.
“We should try communicating with it,” Cushing said. “So it can understand we mean it no harm.”
And George almost burst out in hysterical laughter. Cushing suddenly reminded him of that dumb scientist in The Thing from Another World, the old 1950s sci-fi/horror flick. The one that tries to reason with the hulking, blood-sucking vegetable man from Mars and gets swatted aside by the bastard for his trouble. This scenario was too much like that. Mean it no harm? That was a good one, because George did want to harm it and he knew that, if there weren’t so many of his kind around, that hideous Martian or whatever in the fuck it was, would have killed him without a second thought.
Because George was getting a strong vibe from this thing.
Looking at that pissed-off face and those glaring, hating eyes, he was understanding this creature. Yes, it was intelligent and methodical… but so was a cruel little boy who pulled the wings off of flies and lit the tails of cats on fire. The intelligence of this thing was like that – tyrannical, sadistic, and maybe more than a little fanatical. That’s why it had started when Fabrini took a step too close to its machine. Because it had built it and inferior things like men had no right to touch it. Men were nothing but mice to it, shit-eating apes that belonged in cages with dirty straw. Something to be gawked at or laughed over, but certainly not equals. So don’t be touching my machine, you stupid rutting ape.
“So, go ahead, Cushing,” Saks said, badly wanting to hack the thing to bits, “try talking to that fucking puke. Go ahead. Take us to your leader, you ugly shit.”
Cushing opened his mouth, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It always looked real easy in those old movies, but the reality of such a situation was a little different. This thing was such an angry, grotesque creature that talking to it, trying to reason with it would have been like trying to reason with a spider when you were caught in its web. Don’t sink your fangs in me, okay? Don’t suck my blood out and cocoon me up… can we agree on that?
Yeah, it was ridiculous, George knew.
Maybe this thing had harnessed the power of the stars and the secrets of life and death, but there was no hope of communicating with it. Yes, its intellect was vastly superior, but cold and unreasoning. It had a mindless, stupid hatred for any but its own kind. You couldn’t barter with such a creature. It got its hands… or tentacles… on you, most you could hope for was to be dropped into a jar of preservative and labeled or maybe dissected alive. And if it was in a particularly dark mood – it was – then maybe it would yank out your nerve ganglia and prod it with a knife, study your agony with an icy, alien detachment.
Fabrini said, “Fuck this. Let’s get out of here. I can’t handle that prick looking at me like that… looks like it wants to suck my eyeballs out of my head.”
And George was thinking, why don’t we just get it over with? We’re going to kill it and we know it, so let’s just do it already.
“Let’s just go,” Elizabeth said, the last sane voice to be heard.
For now the men were moving. Slowly, but moving all the same. And the thing was aware of it, but maybe uncertain as to what to do about it. The men were forming sort of a loose ring around it and its machine. A nauseating, sour stench came off of it and George wondered if it was afraid. If it sensed what was about to happen. It must have felt like a modern man being ringed in by Pliocene apes. So vastly far above them, yet no match for their numbers and brute strength.
It started to move with a writhing, fluid motion. Wiry muscle flexing with a smooth, serpentine grace under that rubbery flesh that was seamed and sinewy like old pine bark or driftwood. Those tubes on its belly began to undulate, pissing more of that black juice to the deck where it steamed and sizzled. The tentacles at its mouth drew back and apart like the pincers of an ant. And its face… dear God, that wrinkled, bony face positively leered. The membranes of the eyes pulled completely back, exposing the glistening red jewels of those eyes themselves.
And nobody seeing those eyes in their multi-lensed, scarlet glory had ever seen such raw, blistering hatred before.
Nothing in the universe… or out of it… could hate like this monstrosity.
The mouth distorted into a shriveled ovoid like it wanted to scream and those eyes, they narrowed in their sockets, filled with a deranged wrath. If such a thing could go insane with rage, it was pretty damn close.
Pollard was the one who started it.
He didn’t mean to. He stepped to the side, maybe trying to get away from that monster and almost tripped over the alien machine. He stumbled, knocked it aside… surprised at how very light it was. .. and found his feet again. And you could see the thing’s anger consume it like lye. Hot and bubbling and lunatic. The tentacles it had for fingers began to coil and writhe, those tubes on its underside shuddered and the thing began to make noise. It had been silent thus far… but now it began to make a sibilant, hissing sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss sort of sound like that of a rattlesnake preparing to strike. The crazy thing was that the sounds came not from its mouth, but from those tubes that spit acid and sucked air.
Saks said: “Watch it-”
But that’s all he got out, because the thing moved. Jumped, slithered, something. It moved in too many directions at the same time and its blue flesh seemed almost plastic and oozing. Nobody noticed in the midst of this that the alien had something like a small cylinder of golden metal in one of its tentacle-hands. By the time it brought it up, it was too late to do anything.
It aimed it right at Pollard.
It was a weapon. What came out of it was not a laser beam like on TV, but a sparking cloud of pale green gas that hit Pollard in a wet mist. He froze-up solid and… and in the space of a second or two, his flesh went liquid like hot wax and melted from the bones below. And this almost before he had time to fall over and die. He collapsed in a fleshy, steaming blur and George caught one insane glimpse of his face running from the skull beneath like tallow down a candle stem, his left eye sliding down his chin. Pollard hit the deck like a Halloween skeleton with clipped strings. He folded up in a bony, smoking, bubbling mass.
And George started shooting.
He put three rounds into the thing and it screamed with a high, keening sound, those tubes standing erect for just a moment. It slumped over, pulled itself up, and Elizabeth tossed her machete at it. It struck the arm that held the golden cylinder and with such force it nearly severed it. The cylinder hit the floor. The thing crab-crawled around, like some half-crushed spider, watery green blood spurting from the holes in its hide, its shattered arm, gouts of it pissing across the floor like lime Kool-Aid… and the crazy thing was, it had about the same consistency.
And it stank… Jesus, stank like spilled bleach.
The men closed in from all sides with their weapons, moving now purely on automatic for it was time to slay the beast, this alien defiler, this absolute violation of all that they knew. Bleeding and damaged, the creature knew it, too. It looked upon them with absolute hostility, those bright red eyes narrowed and hating. Maybe there was horror there, too, or disgust at the sight of those animals that hemmed it in… those four-limbed, two-eyed, pink-skinned monstrosities. To it, they were a crawling pestilence that needed to be stepped on, purged. Vile, idiot things with their crude weapons and simple nervous systems. Yes, maybe there was disgust there, but more than that there was simply hatred and rage that these pale apes would dare kill it.
And that’s what George was seeing as he leveled the. 45 at it again: a cheated fury. For it was a master of time and space and all other life forms were its slaves. Yes, the alien looked on him, scarlet eyes smoldering like electrodes, and George felt his mind boiling to mist. It was so easy for this thing to dominate and crush a single human mind. Maybe even two or three. And it wanted George to know this, wanted him maybe to understand what waited for men at the dark rim of the universe.
Cushing saw what that monster was doing to George. Maybe they all saw it. Saw how that awful thing was sucking his mind dry. Cushing, however, did not wait for completion. He swung his axe at the thing, bringing it right down on the crown of its skull, slicing through those blue-black writhing tentacles and splitting open the top of its head. The axe did the job neatly… but upon impact, there was a flash and Cushing was knocked senseless on his ass, the axe still buried in its head. The thing let go with a shrill, grating, oddly metallic scream that was pure rage and agony. It sounded like the starter of a car whirring or iron placed against a grinding wheel.. . sharp, piercing, deafening.
Everyone fell away from it as it thrashed and whipped and leaped, more of that green juice spilling from its cloven skull along with a brownish sort of slime. The axe was still in there, the handle hot and smoking now. Saks didn’t get out of its way quick enough and one of its tentacles… because they were not arms as such, but coiling tentacles… lashed out at him, catching him across the knee and he cried out, fell right over. That tentacle had burned right through his pants to the kneecap below.
George put three more bullets into its head, splattering goo and green steaming blood against the bulkheads as the thing twisted in upon itself, screeching and thrashing and whipping, corkscrewing over the deckplates like it had no bones… squirming like a salted slug and worming like a leech, then dying, dying with a bellowing, cacophonous scream of violence, frenzy, and absolute dementia. The sound echoed through that steel-plated room and dropped more than one of the thing’s attackers to the floor, sick and vomiting from that overwhelming sonic intrusion.
Ten minutes later, there was nothing but the stink of the thing and the survivors standing there looking down at the remains of Pollard and the corpse of the alien. It was just as ugly dead as alive. It was still steaming and smoking. Its flesh was decomposing fast, seemed to be liquefying. Its eyes had filmed yellowed, fallen back in its skull and it seemed to be decompressing, collapsing, fragmenting. The green blood had pooled around it now, its body creaking and cracking, limbs falling free, tentacles curling up like dead snakes. Everything about it was hissing and bubbling.
If it had a soul, they decided, then it must have been a black and cancerous one.
“Pollard,” Menhaus kept saying. “Oh, Jesus, look at him… oh shit.”
There didn’t seem much to say about it. Pollard was dead. He had died very quickly, but also quite horribly.
“I’ll send flowers,” Saks said with his usual compassion.
Menhaus glared at him. “How can you be… you’re an asshole, Saks. That’s all you are. Just an asshole.”
“Have I ever denied it?”
The palms of Cushing’s hands were badly burned. “When I hit it with the axe… Christ, it was like swinging an axe into a live two-twenty line. Knocked me right on my ass. It must’ve… I guess the thing must’ve carried an electrical charge to it like an eel.”
Saks’s knee was burned, but it wasn’t bad. “Ugly cocksucker,” he said. “Looks like Fabrini’s mother. Smells like her, too.”
“Fuck you-”
“Look,” George said. “Look at that…”
Everyone was numb and senseless in the aftermath. Elizabeth was bandaging Cushing’s hands and fawning over him. Nobody seemed particularly interested in looking at what George was seeing, but they did, all with that same oh-God-what-now look on their faces.
The hindquarters of the alien were shaking. Quivering. The tripod of its snaking legs were trembling. There was a wet, sloshing sound and a puddle of green-gray jelly spread out behind the thing. There seemed to be bubbles, bubbles about the size of softballs trapped in that flux of jelly.
“What… what the hell is that?” Menhaus said. “Those things, like…”
But they could see what they were like and what they were. All those bubbles were connected by a network of tissue. Not bubbles, but sacs or membranes of transparent, pink skin and inside each one…
“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said in a squeaky voice. “Pregnant, it was pregnant, pregnant…”
It was. Birth sacs. A dozen oval birth sacs with grayish-looking fetuses veined with blue. And the worst part, the very worst part is that those fetuses were not dead. They were wriggling and slithering, all those tiny unformed limbs moving and trembling.
Saks got to his feet, hobbled over there. “Ugly little bastards,” he said.
He took up a gaff and began squishing them. Ripping open the sacs and smashing what was inside. Elizabeth made a disgusted sound and turned away, as did the others. Saks didn’t stop until he was done, going at it like a little boy smashing earthworms after a rain. One of the fetuses splashed out of its sac and undulated sickly at the toe of Saks’s boot.
He stepped on it.
George let go with an involuntary shudder at the sound… like stepping on a ripe, watery peach.
“So much for higher fucking intelligence,” Saks said.