George couldn’t sleep.
He laid there, feeling the subtle thrum of the ship beneath him. It was nothing he really cared for, but after awhile your body seemed to adjust to anything. The mind was the real problem. A certain paranoia had settled into him now. Before, it had been merely a bad feeling. Like a sense of apprehension a person got before going to the dentist or getting their taxes done. Normal, really.
But this paranoia, it was different.
He knew it wasn’t from Saks’s tales of jungle predators. Things like that were pretty much to be expected in the bush.
This was something else.
An almost black, unrelenting dread that worried at his nerves like a cat at a mouse. It would not leave him alone. Every time he closed his eyes, they snapped back open and he started, gasping awake like he was being smothered. A brooding sense of foreboding.
An almost inescapable knowledge that the shit was about to hit.
Heavy weather ahead.
So George laid there, expecting the worse, wondering what form it would take and when. Thinking maybe he was going crazy, but knowing, somehow, that would be the least of his problems. They would be into that fog anytime now and maybe they already were. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that Gosling had been nervous about that fogbank rolling at them. George didn’t know much about fog and particularly fog at sea… but there was something unusual about this one. And he didn’t believe for a moment that fog glowed like that.
It just wasn’t natural.
What had Lisa said at the docks?
Be careful of those big crocodiles, George. And be careful out on that sea… funny things happen at sea. My dad was a sailor and he always said that. Funny things happen at sea
George was shivering.
Jesus, how prophetic those words were becoming.