George watched that dead, misting sea and it almost felt like it watched him, too. You watched that graveyard expanse long enough, you started thinking of the sea as more than a natural force but as a living, breathing entity. Something sentient and calculating, a huge evil intelligence that plotted your death with inhuman patience.
And when you were talking about the sea George was watching, those ideas came to you real easy.
Like someone or something wants me to think that.
But he wasn’t going back there again.
That was Fog-Devil territory.
So George kept his mind busy by thinking of food, of drinks. Cigarettes. He was pretty sure he would’ve sold his soul for a can of beer.
He kept watching the sea and that’s when he saw… well, he didn’t know exactly what he was seeing. Something in the fog. Nothing gigantic or especially threatening this time, just, well a shadow or shape flitting around in the mist.
He looked and it was gone. But it had been there. Something had been there.
George swallowed, figured he was hallucinating. It wouldn’t have been the first time. You stared into that dirty fog long enough, you could see just about anything. Some things you wanted to see and others you’d rather not look upon. It was the nature of the fog, always slowing drifting and churning like the steam coming off a bubbling pot, but slower and thicker and almost curdled-looking.
Again, a suggestion of movement out there.
He looked over at Soltz and Cushing. They were sleeping. Gosling was, too. It was George’s watch. And what had Gosling said to him? Just sweep your eyes back and forth, George, never stare at anything too long or you’ll start seeing things that ain’t there. Gosling had been dead serious when he said that. There was not so much as a glimmer of humor in his eyes. Gosling had spent a lot of his life on watches and he knew the funny things you might see out there.
George saw that flutter of motion again and shook his head. Jesus, but a cigarette would have been good. A cigarette and a cup of hot coffee. They would have straightened his head right out.
He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked around in the raft. Just those three men dozing in the roomy interior beneath the canopy and George himself at the door, the fog moving out there, drawing him in.
You need me, Gosling had said, you wake me, hear?
Gosling. Jesus. Mother Hen.
George looked away from the fog, had to force himself to, and studied the water instead. It was steaming and rank, filmed with a rotting membrane that seemed to be equal parts sediment, slime, and decaying organic matter. From time to time it quivered like jelly, as if some underwater current was stirring it. Little islands of weed and knotted creepers floated on it, a scum of pink algae.
The mist itself seemed chilly and damp, but the sea was warm. Like a mud bath, it was warm and oddly inviting.
Something moved out in the fog again.
When George looked up, it was gone.
Every time he averted his eyes, it moved. Like maybe it did not want to be seen, not yet. Which got George to think something was playing with him. Something was playing headgames with him, maybe wanting to scare him or disturb him or just make him goddamn uneasy. If that was the case, then they or it were doing a fine job for George was all those things. Gooseflesh had spread out on his lower belly and his balls had sucked up now, like they were afraid of being exposed.
Motion again.
Then it was gone.
Like some child, it occurred to George, some kid out there flitting about in the fog, playing hide-and-seek and catch-me-if-you-can. Wanting George to get a peek, but no more. Not yet. Not until he or she was ready, because then it was going to be real funny-
But it wasn’t funny.
George badly wanted to pop a flare out there and see what was lurking beyond the fog, sliding in and out of it like a naughty little boy hiding in the curtains.
George kept swallowing, but he couldn’t seem to moisturize his throat. It felt like old machine parts, rusty and seized-up, choked with dust and mouse droppings.
The sea was quivering a bit, those clots of fetid weeds sluicing about as if something was pushing them from below. A great dark mass of them swept against the side of the raft with a weird, whispering motion like somebody breathing.
George caught the movement this time.
And this time, it did not try to hide.
What he was seeing was a figure standing just at the periphery of the fog bank, enshrouded in wisps of fog, yet very visible. So visible that he could see that the figure was small and that it was a little girl of all things. She stood stock still like a mannequin or a puppet waiting for fingers to work her.
George blinked and rubbed his eyes.
When he looked back, she was still there.
There was a chill moving up his spine now, spreading out over his shoulders and forearms. He was telling himself that he could not be seeing a little girl standing out there. She would have sank like a rock and what would a little girl be doing out in the mist in the first place?
George looked back toward Gosling, wanted to say something, wanted to rouse him, but his throat was simply too dry. It had constricted down to a pinhole now and he could barely draw a breath.
You need me, you wake me, hear?
But George could not. He was barely breathing. Locked tight, motionless, his heart just a shallow pattering in his chest.
The girl was waving to him now.
And George could do nothing, not a goddamn thing. He didn’t have the strength to wave back. And the idea of waving, of drawing attention to himself… it was unthinkable. For in that little girl was the embodiment of every fear he’d ever known, every adult anxiety and childhood terror alive and breathing and rustling.
The girl was moving now.
George could see it happening and was telling himself madly that he had to push these awful images from his mind, because it was all hallucination, just some dark fiction vomited up from the depths and if he let it root in his mind, if it got too strong of a hold there. ..
But he didn’t think he was hallucinating.
He was seeing some little girl in what appeared to be 19 ^th century period dress moving in his direction, getting closer and closer and he was absolutely helpless to do anything but watch it happen.
He told himself: You are not seeing a little girl out there. I don’t know what in Christ that is, but it cannot be a little girl. It’s something else. Either a fiction your mind created and fleshed out… or something worse. Something that wants you to think it’s a little girl.
And that made perfect sense to him.
Yes, something vile and degenerate, the sort of thing that haunts black submarine valleys and lives in the rotting hollows of sunken ships. Something that picks through the bones of drowned men and howls through high masts and calls ships down into abyssal plains. Yes, that’s what it was. The living, phobic personification of all the men, women, and children lost at sea and drawn into murky graveyards of swaying kelp and gutted coffin-ship and barnacle-encrusted bone that no light would ever touch.
George thought maybe she was standing on an island of weed, but that wasn’t so. She was moving, yes, but standing perfectly still, drifting in his direction very slowly, just above the water. She was wrapped in tendrils of fog, but he could see that she wore a royal blue silk taffeta dress trimmed in white ribbon and braid. A party dress. There was a gold Celtic cross around her neck.
A ghost, his mind told him, a ghost of some little girl sucked down into the dead sea, a shade that haunts the mist…
As she got closer, he saw her hair was done in golden ringlets and her face was smooth and white like porcelain. A Victorian doll. She looked exactly like a Victorian doll.
No, not at all.
That face was corpse-white, bleached by seawater, the eyes just huge black pits punched into it and filled with a misty yellow glow like full moons sinking into a cloudbank. Hazy and misty and ghastly. She was only ten or fifteen feet away now and he could see that she was fouled with strands of weed that draped over her shoulders and were tangled in her hair. Her dress was a dingy rag spotted with mildew. Fog was steaming from her, boiling inside her and blowing out through innumerable holes torn through her like she was burning up inside. She came on with a wake of churning, smoky mist, tendrils of fog seeping from her outstretched fingertips.
George felt something shatter inside his head like glass in a faraway room.
Closer and closer yet. He could see the fog bank through the fissures eaten through her, could see the green marine worms burrowing at her throat. Her eyes were wide and glistening and yellow, a rope of drool hanging from her lips.
There was something building in George, something raging and sharp and violent: a scream scraping up the back of his throat.
Your soul… she’s come to suck away your soul.
Those puckered white fingers reached for him and her mouth opened like a black, seething blowhole.
And George screamed.
Screamed until she was gone, dissipated like vapor, and he could hear his voice echoing through the fog, becoming something else and coming back at him like a dozen taunting voices. None of which sounded like his own.
Then there was a hand on his shoulder shaking him and Gosling was yelling something.
“What?” George said. “What?”
“Was is it?” Gosling demanded, his hands on George strong and sure. “What in the fuck is it?”
Both Cushing and Soltz were staring at him with barely-concealed horror.
But George couldn’t tell what he saw, because he just wasn’t sure. So, instead, he let go with the first lie his mind produced: “I… I must have fallen asleep, had a nightmare…”
But they didn’t look like they believed him anymore than he believed himself.
He only hoped they couldn’t hear what he was hearing. A high, mocking childish giggling from somewhere deep in the fog.