“You ever been shipwrecked before?”
“Once,” Gosling said, “off the coast of Labrador.”
“How long?”
“Six hours before I got picked up. I was a mate on an ore freighter. She was improperly loaded, they said. Ore shifted, snapped her in half. Lost twenty men. I was one of the lucky ones. I floated on a piece of planking until I saw a channel buoy. I made my way to it, waited there. A Coast Guard ship picked me up.”
George floated in the slimy water, wondering maybe if it was contaminated with something. Maybe the ship had been carrying chemicals and maybe that weird water quality was due to the fact that they were bobbing in a sea of toxic waste. Sure, he found himself thinking, you’re probably already poisoned, shit’s eating through your skin.
A normal explanation like that would have been almost preferable.
“Was it better or worse than this?” George asked. “That other time?”
Gosling wouldn’t qualify it, though. “Well, water was cold. And there was this shark that kept circling me. Never came close. Just circled. When I was on the buoy, he finally gave up.”
“Shit, you must’ve been terrified.”
“Was. At first. But after a time and he didn’t attack, I got used to him. Called him Charlie. I talked to him all the time. The only time I was really afraid was at night when I couldn’t see him.”
“And he never attacked?”
“Nope. Never even came close.”
“Well, if a shark comes along,” George said, “you talk to him.”
That made Gosling laugh, only it wasn’t a good sort of laughter.
They floated on, the water around them gelatinous and syrupy, clumps of weed drifting past from time to time. The water was warm like a mud bath, but the air was chill and dank. It made steam boil from the surface. And the fog? Yellow and white, billowing and thick like a fine cottony weave, charged with that ghostly radiance. It was moist on their faces, left a greasy residue on their skin.
That stink was there, too, but they were used to it now and didn’t smell it much more than a bum smells his own body odor.
George was wondering when his lifejacket would get saturated and he’d go down like a brick, down into those awful black depths. The idea of that made him shiver, despite the heat surging around him. It was hard to imagine all that water beneath him. Like some huge alien world that only fish, crawling things, and dead men ever saw. He could almost see it down there himself. Desolate mountain ranges and abyssal pockets of blackness. Like the geography of some distant planet, some submerged graveyard.
George was thinking this, knowing such morbid thoughts were probably not a good idea, and that’s when he saw something drifting in their direction not ten feet away. That crazy shine in the fog was reflecting off its surface which looked smooth and wet and oddly circular.
“Hell is that?” Gosling said, a note of panic in his voice.
George was looking at it, shivering again now, thinking it looked like some immense, rubbery eyeball rising from the depths. And the idea of that made him go hollow inside.
“Jesus… I think,” Gosling began, “I think… I think it’s a survival raft.”
They started paddling over there, Gosling in the lead. George trying to keep up with him. As they got close, George could see it was nothing so fantastic as an eyeball, but something the general shape of a donut. It didn’t look much like a raft, but then he realized it must have inflated upside down. When they boarded the Mara Corday, Gosling went through the drill with all of them. Lifeboat stations and the like. He had explained to them that the survival rafts were in containers and would inflate automatically, that if the containers were submerged in ten or twelve feet of water-like if the ship sank-a hydrostatic mechanism would release the rafts and they’d bob to the surface, inflating.
Gosling and he took hold of the righting strap and heaved back with everything they had. On the third try, the raft broke the suction of the water and flipped over, sending George underwater momentarily. He came back up, gasping and spitting water from his mouth. Maybe he couldn’t smell the stink of it any more… but the taste, the feel of it in his mouth was horrible. Like a mouthful of slime warm as bathwater. Sickening.
Gosling thought it was pretty funny. “I told you she’d come over quick when she did,” he said.
George ignored him. The raft was big now that it was floating right side up, looked something like a tent floating on tubes. Just the feel of it made George feel safer, stronger. His fingers closed on the rungs of its small boarding ladder. He and Gosling hung there for a moment and caught their breath. This, they decided, was an unbelievable bit of luck. And when you considered that heavy fog, it was surely that.
Gosling pulled himself aboard and then helped George in.
“Home sweet home,” George said, curled up on the deck plates.
He was grateful to be out of that water. The raft had a canopy overhead that you could zip free if you needed to. It was wonderful to be in there, to be in a dry enclosed space. The raft was built to accommodate a dozen men, so there was plenty of room.
“She’s a beauty,” Gosling said, “our savior is.”
And she was.
It was well-equipped, George found out, as Gosling pointed out all the features. There were countless pockets for equipment, flares, inflation valves that you could pump with a bellows (included), and a survival kit. The survival kit, probably the most exciting feature, came in a waterproof, rubberized box. It contained 18 pints of fresh water, 8 flares, 2 bailers, fishhooks, fishing line, a signal mirror, flashlight, extra paddles, bellows, a first aid kit, and food. The latter consisted mainly of chocolate, bread, freeze-dried soups and stews, glucose and salt tablets.
There was a line running from one end into the water. George was examining it. “What’s this do?”
“That’s our sea anchor,” Gosling explained. “Sort of like a water parachute. It keeps us from drifting due to the wind.”
“They think of everything,” George said. And they had.
There was even a small waterproof flashlight and extra batteries, a bunch of lightsticks. Using one of them, Gosling set up the radio beacon and VHF radio. He started transmitting right away.
George swigged from a plastic water bottle. “Hell, we should be okay now. I mean, hell, at least we won’t drown. Sooner or later, this fog has to lift and then…”
But he didn’t finish that and Gosling did not comment on it. For that was really what they were both wondering: what came next? What would happen next? Because something had to and that something could either be good or bad. Sure, they were safe and sound in the raft and Gosling was an old hand with survival equipment. He’d keep them alive. But beyond that?
No answers.
No nothing.
Gosling finally gave up on the radio. “Nothing out there. Just static. Kind of a buzzing sound now and then.”
“Do you think it’s a signal?” George asked, trying to keep that hopeful tone from his voice.
Gosling just shrugged, his face artificial-looking in the glow of the lightstick. “If it is, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”
George sat there, telling himself he had to be satisfied with what they had because things had definitely improved. And he had to be happy with that. But he wasn’t happy with that, he was not satisfied by any of it.
“Paul,” he said, realizing it was probably the first time he’d called Gosling by his Christian name. “Paul… what the hell is this all about? The fog, the wreck… all of it, it’s not right and we both know it. You had to watch what you said before when we were aboard ship because I was a passenger and you were in charge. But now you might as well come clean… where in the Christ are we?”
Gosling pressed his lips tight, looked stern. Maybe he was formulating a lie, a half-truth, something that would keep George’s spirits buoyant. But in the end, he just shook his head and ran fingers through his graying crewcut. “Don’t know, George. Don’t know where we are or how we got here anymore than you do” He took a sip of water. “Sailors, they like to tell stories and one they’ve been recycling for ages is the one about the Sargasso Sea, the Devil’s Graveyard, the Sea of Lost Ships and all that… some awful place where ships and their crews never return from…”
He recounted the tales of the mythical Sargasso for him, explaining that there was nothing truly mysterious about it. That, yes, lots of ships had disappeared there, many derelicts had been found drifting, but he couldn’t say as to whether it was worse than any other body of water. It was a seaweed-sea, he told George, a floating desert of weed and those weed banks were as large as islands in some places. It was like a whirpool of sorts, with conflicting currents at its edges creating a great dead, weedy area. In the age of sail, ships had been becalmed there and quite a few never escaped. They were found crewed by skeletons. When men did come out, they told unpleasant, disturbing tales of things they’d seen.
“But it doesn’t mean anything, George. It really doesn’t. None of it proves a goddamn thing,” he said, trying to dispel the import of what he’d already said. “There are sane, logical explanations for most of that business. But most sailors? They prefer the more outlandish explanations. Makes for a good spooky tale to pass the hours with.”
George didn’t like any of it, didn’t actually believe it any more than Gosling did… but it accounted for a few things and that’s what dried the spit up in his mouth.
“And you’re saying our last confirmed position was at the edge of the Sargasso Sea? The real Sargasso Sea?” he asked.
Gosling nodded. “Yes. And then…”
But George knew that part.
That fog rolling at them, the air being sucked away… and then they were lost, navigational instruments acting funny. Sure, he knew that part just fine. Gosling wanted very much to dismiss it all, but once the cat was out of the bag, just try and get it back in.
“What if there is something to it, Paul? What if we’ve sailed into one of those dead zones you mentioned, a dead sea? What then? Where in Christ does any of that leave us? What can we do?”
But Gosling just shook his head.
He took his lightstick and went over to the doorway of the canopy, adjusting the drag of the sea anchor. He explained that while there was no wind, they were still moving, being pulled gradually by what he surmised were subsurface currents.
“The anchor will keep us moving in pretty much a straight line,” he said. “Because… yeah, we’re moving, all right… there’s tension on the line. We’re being dragged somewhere.”
George was at the doorway with him, watching the mist out there, moving around them. Patches of red were reflected against it from the flashing beacon atop the raft. Other than that, sometimes the mist was dim and other times brighter. The illumination it threw was about what you got at twilight… things were visible, just not terribly distinct.
Gosling took up a handful of water, examined it by the light of the stick. It was not water as such, but a slime of liquid jelly and sediment in an aqueous suspension. And it was pink in color, almost red it seemed. It smelled like rotten eggs up close.
“That’s not right,” George said. “I’ve never seen water like that.”
Gosling admitted he hadn’t either, but said it reminded him of “red tide”, when patches of ocean went crimson from dense concentrations of microscopic algae. “I don’t recommend drinking it.”
It was the first time George had seen the stuff by true light. And it made him remember that when they’d righted the raft, he’d gotten a mouthful. But he hadn’t swallowed any… he didn’t think so, anyway.
“Fucking place,” he said.
Gosling laughed. “You got that right.”
George cleared his throat, remembering the taste of that slop in his mouth. “I wonder if the others-”
He never finished that, for out of the fog there came a high, keening wail that was strident and ear-piercing. It rose up sharp and whining like a cicada in a summer field, then faded away just as quickly.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, digging at his left ear with a finger. “What the fuck was that?”
Gosling just shook his head.
They sat there in silence, waiting for it to come again, but it never did. There was something about the quality of that wail that was alarming, that got right inside of them and made them want to hold on tight. It reminded George of some high-pitched version of an air raid siren… except he didn’t think it was a mechanical device. He had the crazy, frightening idea that something living had made it. But what that could be, he did not know. Regardless, it left him feeling numb, helpless, wanting to cry out, but not daring to.
“Well,” Gosling said. “Well.”
That pretty much summed it up, for what else was there really to say?
And maybe, given time and peace, they would have tried to figure it out, tried to come up with something rational that would have wrapped it up nicely, but there was no time. For something thudded into the bottom of the raft. Something big, for it lifted the raft up five or six inches and dropped it back down again. George cried out in surprise, maybe it was more of a scream than a cry for Gosling grabbed him by the arm and his grip was like a clamp.
Again, they were waiting.
Whatever it was, it did not strike the raft again. But it passed beneath several times and its wake made the raft bob and sway, sent that jellied sea to rolling in slow, slushy undulations like ripples in a mud hole. George could barely breathe, could barely pull a breath past his lips they were pressed so tight. Gosling’s hand was still on his arm, tight and crushing.
Five minutes later, it had not returned.
“Must have been big,” Gosling finally said, releasing George’s arm. “Must have been goddamn real big.”
Which was exactly what George was thinking. Except the word bouncing through his head was colossal. It was the only one that satisfied his runaway imagination. He was thinking something like a whale or the mother of all sharks. Jesus.
“It’s gone,” Gosling said, his voice a little forced. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“But-”
“But nothing. It didn’t attack us, so the hell with it. Just because something’s big, don’t mean it’s nasty.”
George supposed there was logic to that.
He stayed by the doorway, watching, guarding against he did not know what. Gosling went back to his radio and George was glad of it. For what was there to say? What could they possibly manufacture to explain that one?
But he got to thinking: Still don’t mean shit and you know it. Still don’t mean you’re lost in the Bermuda fucking Triangle or something like that. It could have been a whale for chrissake. Quit panicking already.
George started going through every whale he’d ever seen on every nature documentary on the Discovery Channel. He tried to remember their names and what they looked with. For reasons he wasn’t even sure of, this calmed him. This put something to bed in his imagination and locked the beasts of childhood terror in their respective cages.
He looked at the sea anchor line. It was clotted with weeds and green nets of something like an aquatic moss.
“Scrape it off,” Gosling told him, handing him one of the little rubberized oars.
George took it, leaned over, started peeling the stuff away, a big and heavy clump of it was tangled on the oar. It smelled rank. He tossed it aside, heard it splash, and then saw that there was something still stuck on the blade of the oar. It was about the size of a shoe. In the dim light he could see it was a clot of something. .. something odd. He pulled the oar in, made to brush the mass aside with his fingers.
The mass moved.
George cried out in shock, dropped the oar. It floated just behind the raft, the mass still intact. Gosling was there by then, he cursed George for dropping the oar and brought the lightstick out so he could grab it.
But he didn’t grab it.
He didn’t dare.
George saw it and just stared. Sitting on the end of the oar was something like a round, thick spiderish body, ringed by dozens and dozens of legs. They were segmented and dirty-brown in color. Two of them were up in the air, shuddering. From the top of its body there was a cluster of things like yellow grapes that he realized must have been eyes. As Gosling brought the light closer, a pink membrane slid over them.
George wasn’t sure if it was an insect or a crustacean or a mollusk for that matter. Only that it was disgusting and he had a mad desire to smash it.
“What in the Christ?” Gosling said.
It just sat there, looking oddly grotesque and comical at the same time with all those eyes. George could see that they were set on stalks and jerked slightly as it looked about.
Carefully, Gosling grabbed the end of the oar, tried to shake that beastie off, but it held on tenaciously. Taking up another of the oars, he swatted at it and it moved. George had a nightmarish image in his mind of the thing running up the oar and wrapping itself around Gosling’s arm, but it didn’t happen.
Gosling swatted it again, this time making contact.
It made a weird, almost birdlike peeping sound and ran off. Actually ran over the surface of the water, skimming along easily like a water strider. Then it vanished in the fog.
“What do you suppose that was?” George asked, more amused than anything. The idea of it being on you was offensive, but he didn’t really think it was dangerous. “What sort of critter is that? And please tell me you’ve seen one before, Paul, or I’m going to start thinking hard on that Sargasso-shit you told me”
“No, never seen a critter like that before. Like a sea spider gone all crazy,” was all he would say.
He went back to his radio and George sat there, wishing he had a cigarette or a drink, just about anything to pass the time with. Because with that ever-present fog, time was distorted and he just couldn’t seem to get his internal clock moving.
Again he waited, wondering what the next thing would be and whether it would amuse him or scare the shit out of him. Gosling was suddenly very talkative, going on and on about an old Chevy Bel-Air he was fixing up.
But George wasn’t paying attention.
He was seeing something out in the fog… or thought he was. He kept watching it, his skin feeling so tight it felt like it might split open. His eyes would not blink. Yes, there it was again. A huge amorphous shadow, passing deeper into the mist.
“There’s something out there,” he said, his voice dry as sand.
“Could be another raft,” Gosling said, grabbing a flare pistol to signal with. He got up by George and watched, saw something vague out there, but just for an instant
“It’s not a raft,” George said.
“It’s too far, you can’t tell.”
“Oh,” he breathed, “I could tell.”
Gosling just looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is unless rafts have big green eyes that shine in the dark, that was no raft.”