They did what they could for Soltz, which wasn’t much.
Gosling, who had a pretty good working knowledge of first aid, bandaged his wounds and stopped the bleeding. Gave him some pain killers and washed out his eye with sterile solution, put a bandage over it. But that was about it. That was all they could do under the circumstances. They covered him with one of the waterproof blankets and pretty much hoped for the best.
“He isn’t going to make it, is he?” Cushing said.
Gosling just shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Soltz had lapsed into something like a coma now. He moaned from time to time and shivered violently. He was feverish and sweating, a sweet unpleasant smell coming off him that reminded Cook of burnt hot dogs.
George was watching the bat-thing.
It was dead now.
Just drifting through the weed same as they were. He wasn’t sure what had killed it. Not really. Only that it had died maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it had fallen into the water. The only damage they had done it was smashing up its antennae. Would that have been enough? Could it have died from damaged sensory apparatus? George didn’t think so. Cushing was of the mind that it had asphyxiated, that it had been a water breather and it had just been out of the water too damn long. Simple, pat. But it did not explain why the thing had those streamers of yellow pulp floating from its mouth like it vomited out its own intestines.
George was thinking change in pressure.
Like one of those deep-sea fish brought up in a trawl net, the kind that sort of explode from the loss of pressure.
“I don’t know,” Cushing said. “That bastard seemed pretty lively to me, George. Abyssal creatures tend to be pretty sluggish when they come up, if they’re alive at all.”
Point. The bat-thing had been hovering for some time behind the raft. If it was suffocating, why hadn’t it just dived back in? Curiosity? It didn’t understand what the raft and the pink creatures in it were so it had to find out even at the cost of its own life? No, that was silly. Animals could be curious, but only to a point.
Maybe it was sick, George got himself to thinking as he prodded its carcass with the oar, maybe that’s what it was about.
But then looking over at Soltz, he figured it out.
Or thought he did.
Soltz was either dying or close to it. Gosling said his cuts were severe, but not life-threatening… yet he was feverish and shaking, seemed to be in some sort of a coma. Like the guy had contracted some weird tropical disease or was full of infection. And maybe, just maybe, it was both. The bat-thing’s saliva had burned him, gotten into his cuts… and who knew what kind of parasites and germs it carried? Things deadly to human biology perhaps, alien things our immune system couldn’t hope to fight against. So, if that was true, maybe the same was true in reverse: the biology of that thing was killing Soltz, but maybe his biology had killed it off first.
He told Cushing this and Cushing liked it. “Makes sense, George. You’ve got a logical, scientific turn to your mind and you never even knew it.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but if he’s infected with something… we could all be in danger.”
“Does that worry you?” Gosling asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “And what are our alternatives?”
George knew what they were. “We don’t have any.”
And they didn’t. Living in a raft at close quarters pretty much ruled out the possibility of quarantine and there were no emergency rooms handy. Soltz was one of them. Infected or not, they had to care for him even if it meant getting sick themselves. They could not abandon him… if they did that, they were no better than, well, Saks for example.
“You’re right, we don’t have any. So?”
George just shrugged. “So I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Figured you’d say that.”
Good old Gosling. The supreme pragmatist. You could always count on him to see the practical side of just about anything.
Gosling had repaired the tears in the gunwale of the raft using the repair kit and had aired it back up using the hand-pump. They had taken some water, but not enough to be alarmed about. The inflated arches were pretty much toast, though. The creature’s barbed tail spines had literally shredded them and that was that.
George was starting to drift off when he realized that there was something in front of the raft. Another shadow, though this one was larger than the devil ray beast. Much larger. Whatever it was, it had to be easily twenty-feet across and seemed to be getting larger by the moment.
Maybe it was a submerged bank of weed, maybe something else.
He was about to draw Gosling’s attention to it when Soltz came out of his fugue, started babbling about the rusted chain on his bicycle in-between ragged breaths of air. Gosling went to him with Cushing at his side. Cushing mopped sweat from his brow and Gosling checked his vitals.
“How is he?” George asked, to which Gosling just shook his head.
And that pretty much said it all.
Soltz was fading and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and watch him die. And the idea of that just about sucked the lot of them dry.
That shadow was closer now. Easily within ten feet of the raft. Whatever it was, either they were drifting toward it or it was drifting toward them. Take your pick.
“You see it?” George said, knowing Cushing had.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
Gosling had seen it, too, but was preoccupied with trying to make Soltz comfortable. Maybe he had, for Soltz had gone back to his dream-island again which was about all you could hope for under the circumstances. If he had to die, it would be better if he went in his sleep.
Even with the semi-brightening of the day and the use of a flashlight, you could only see maybe five or six inches down into the sea. Light would penetrate no farther. That shadow, George figured, was about that far down, maybe less. Just visible as a shape, but no more.
“I don’t like it,” Cushing said.
Gosling was watching it. “Row around it then.”
There’s a mad dog in your path, just walk around it.
He was being Mr. Realism again, of course, but it was obvious that he did not like that big dark mass being on a slow collision course with them either. But he could not come right out and say it. It was not his way. He was used to being in charge of men and that had not left him. Even in this godforsaken place. And when you were in charge, you didn’t admit to trouble very easily.
George was thinking: I don’t know what in the Christ you are, Mr. Shadow, but you’re giving me a real funny feeling in my belly and I don’t like it one fucking bit. Just go away now, go away. Leave us be. We don’t need another flying manta ray from Mars…
And wasn’t that a cheerful thought? That the dead bat-thing might have a big brother or a pissed-off father?
“Here,” Cushing said, putting an oar in his hands. “Let’s get away from it.”
George had his oar on the port side and Cushing had his starboard. Feeling something evaporating in their throats and the patter of their hearts begin to pick up, they began to paddle madly away from the mass. Neither thought they would, but then, when it was maybe five feet from the raft, they broke away and to the right and skirted it, came around it into open water.
There.
Simple.
It was behind them now. Just a huge, spreading shadow. In five, ten minutes, it would be out of sight, another nasty little secret tucked away in the fog.
“Probably wasn’t anything to begin with,” Cushing said, almost like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “Nothing alive. Just something drifting around… some junk.”
And George wanted badly to disagree with that, because he didn’t think that mass was just some harmless patch of submerged weed or clot of muck. It had approached the raft because it wanted to approach the raft.
“Wait a minute now,” Gosling said. “It’s coming back… maybe it’s caught in the line from the sea anchor.”
Sure, George thought, maybe.
It sounded good, sounded damn reasonable… but he didn’t believe it. Whatever was out there it was indeed coming back. Not like something snared on the anchor, but like something moving under its own power.
“Shit,” Cushing said, which summed it up nicely.
The mass was coming back and coming back fast. It was still down deep enough in that foul water where they could not see what it was and maybe it wanted things that way.
Gosling had an oar now, too. “Row for chrissake,” he told them. “Row your asses off.”
And they did, splashing through the water, sliding over patches of weed and cutting across those occasional channels of open, dark water. They were moving, but it was still gaining. Coming even faster now and George thought he saw it moving with an odd pulsating sort of motion.
“It’s gonna hit us,” Gosling said. “Get into the center of the raft.”
They pulled in their oars and did just that.
Still the thing came, not slowing at all. It was going to bump them any minute now. Ten feet, then five, then right on top of them, everyone tensing and gritting their teeth and waiting for it… but it never hit them. Inches from the raft it simply disappeared.
“It went under us,” Gosling said.
And that surely wasn’t good. Because it was bad enough to be dogged in that Dead Sea by some black mass, but at least then you knew where it was. Not knowing, now that was far worse any way you sliced it.
“Where is it?” Cushing asked, trying to look in every direction at the same time.
“Gone,” Gosling said.
And George sat there, the seconds ticking away like separate eternities as he waited for something else to happen. For some nameless horror, perhaps, to rise up from the stark depths and engulf the entire raft like a clam closing its shell.
Up ahead, maybe twenty feet in front of the raft, bubbles broke the surface. Dozens of them until it looked like a submarine was about to surface. But what surfaced was that black mass again. It came nearly to the surface, then dipped back down again like it was saying, yeah, I’m here all right, but you don’t get to know what I am. Not until I decide…
“It’s just sitting there,” Cushing said. “I don’t like this at all
… fucking thing is giving me the creeps. Don’t mind saying so either.”
Gosling smiled thinly and maybe George did, too. But you could see that Cushing did not care one iota. That mass was scaring him just as it was scaring them, but at least he had the balls to admit as such out loud.
So they waited.
The thing waited.
“Haven’t we had enough already?” George said out loud and was immediately sorry that he had. The others were thinking it, sure, but he’d been the one to say it. Something that certainly didn’t need saying.
He kept his mouth shut.
After maybe ten minutes of awful nothing, the mass began to move slowly toward the raft. It was in no hurry. It had all the time in the world and seemed to know it.
“I think it’s… I think it’s coming up,” Gosling said.
It was.
Something was. Something was emerging, breaking the surface in a foam of bubbles and slime, something like an immense umbrella-shaped dome that ran from a lustrous purple at its apex to a fleshy bubblegum-pink around its edges. Thing was, it did not stop coming up. More of it was visible all the time, a hideous collection of floats and polyps and wheezing bladders, white and red and orange and emerald. All glistening and shining and fluttering. Around the outside of the dome, there were a series of dark oily nodules that might have been eyes… hundreds of them, black and jellied and staring.
“It’s a… a jellyfish,” Cushing said and you could hear it just beneath his words, that peculiar combination of wonder and terror and revulsion they were all feeling.
A jellyfish.
But the kind of jellyfish that swam the Dead Sea. Its bell was maybe thirty feet across, all those hissing bladders and floats that surrounded it as big as basketballs. They were inflating and deflating, like the thing was breathing. The water was roiling now with hundreds of pale yellow tentacles that fanned out in every direction. Some were wire thin, others thicker than a man’s arm and veined with a ruby-red networking that might have been arteries… or nerve ganglia for all anyone could say. Some of those tentacles must have been hundreds of feet in length.
“Jesus Christ,” Gosling said.
And George wanted to say something, too, but he was positively breathless. His lungs were filled with dust devils and blowing sand and that was probably a good thing… for if his voice had come, managed to push past his lips which were melted together in a gray line, it would have been a scream. The mother of all screams. For what was bouncing through him at the sight of this monstrosity, this evil living hot-air balloon and its attendant floats, was sheer, unbridled terror. Raw and stark and mad.
It could not be.
This thing could not be.
The water was a seething, undulating forest of its tentacles now and they had completely encircled the raft like coils of cable. They were underwater in thick, roping clusters and breaking the surface in tangles so thick you could have walked across them.
As far as George could see… tentacles. A writhing, heaving mass of them, congested like vines in the jungle.
When he found his voice, gagging on the heady vinegar-like stench of the thing, all he could say was, “What the fuck? What the fuck now?”
But nobody answered him.
Cushing and Gosling sat stock still, maybe afraid that if they moved that gargantuan alien jellyfish would sense it, would know exactly where they were and envelop them in a dripping sweep of tentacles. George decided he was going to follow their example and lock down his muscles, even though every muscle and nerve-fiber in him was snapping like high-tension lines.
So they sat and waited and the fog swirled and coalesced, was born in luminous plumes and sparkling shrouds, died in its own arms and was reborn again. Steam misted from the weeds and marshy water. And the raft waited silently with three ice sculptures onboard, an immense nightmare medusan ringing them in like a nickel tangled in a bed of kelp.
What finally broke that leaden, weighty silence was Soltz.
He moaned, groaned, made a wet gasping sound. His lips parted with a dry smacking. His face was beaded with perspiration and his unbandaged eye looked glazed and milky. “Water,” he was saying. “I need… water… need water… a drink of… water…”
And George, even though he knew the man was sick, wanted desperately to stuff a rag in his mouth, tell him to shut the hell up. Because that repeated, dull cadence of his voice was stirring up the jellyfish. Its tentacles were vibrating as if they were hearing it. Around the rim of its bell there was a fan of colorless cilia that looked like waterlogged spaghetti. They had been hanging limp before, barely moving with a sort of drifting motion like sea grass, but now they were twitching and trembling. Maybe the jellyfish couldn’t hear, but maybe it could sense the vibration caused by sound.
Cushing moved and a half dozen tentacles jerked as if in surprise.
“Sit fucking still,” Gosling said in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, just not exactly where…”
Soltz began to stir. He shifted and shook, the waterproof blanket sliding down to his knees. He was up in what passed for the bow and the thing’s tentacles were mere inches away from him over the lip of the raft.
His motion made those tentacles flutter. They changed from the color of wheat to a bright, neon-yellow. Most of them just lay motionless in the water, but a dozen or so above the waterline began to coil in lazy rolls like pythons. It wasn’t just the tentacles that changed color, but the bell, too. It looked oddly synthetic, George had thought upon first seeing it, like something poured from a Jello mold. A perfectly circular mass of transparent jelly that looked deep enough to drown in, skinned with a rubbery membrane like cellophane wetted down with cooking spray. And now it was changing color, too. From that rich purple to hot pink and then scarlet and orange and indigo… it looked like gasoline on water.
“Why the hell is it doing that?” George said under his breath.
“Chromatophores,” Cushing said just as quietly. “Pigmentation cells… it can either control its pigment or it’s reacting to mood swings like a squid…”
But George wasn’t sure if he was buying that.
What he was thinking was insane… but what if it was responding to their voices? The subtle vibrations they caused? Only when they spoke did the bell effuse color. What if it was… Jesus
… intelligent and it was trying to communicate?
That was scarier than just about anything he could imagine. The idea of some revolting dumb predator was infinitely preferable to one that could reason. For if it could reason, then it was only a matter of time before it figured out how to get them out of the raft.
This was bad. George had thought it had all been bad up to this point… the giant eel attacking the raft, that crazy devil-ray bat
… but none of that had been like this. It was one thing to be able to fight back, regardless of how disgusting your adversary was, but to just sit here and wait and wonder helplessly while your mind turned upon itself like a top, showing you all the unpleasant details of your death… yeah, now that was really bad. The sort of bad that reached down inside you and yanked your guts out through your mouth until there wasn’t a goddamn thing left in you but an echoing void like the hollow of an empty drum.
Somebody better do something, George thought, or I’m gonna crack, see if I don’t.
And maybe he was close, maybe they were all close, but he held it in check best he could. He felt gutless and sick and scared. Very scared. For how could you not be? Waiting there like that in the foggy silence, feeling like a condemned man waiting for execution, everything inside you tense and bunched, ready to explode. And in the back of your mind there was that primitive urge to fight, to do battle, even though the idea was ludicrous. There was no chance of victory against something of this immensity… yet, that primal man inside said it was better to die that way, fighting and slashing and cutting with blood in your mouth, than to take it like this. Just sitting there, letting it happen. And George figured that made real good sense, for maybe the jellyfish would kill them quicker that way. Maybe the very defiance of them hacking at its tentacles would piss it off. And a quick death would be better than waiting, better than feeling your mind going to a cold slop as those tentacles embraced you like living ropes.
George didn’t honestly think he could handle being touched by it. That was just unthinkable. Repellent. Like being webbed up by a spider and feeling it lick you… your mind would go to sauce.
The tentacles continued to unwind, slithering over and around each other like a tangle of nesting snakes slowly waking.
The minutes ticked by.
George could hear those tentacles now brushing up against the sides of the raft with a squeaking sound. Many of them, questing and scraping and investigating. One of them rose up, hovered directly over Soltz’s head and everyone on the raft held their breath… it passed within two, three inches of his face, found the gunwale of the raft and tapped against it, withdrew.
But that was hardly the end of it.
Those tentacles were real busy all of a sudden. It seemed as if maybe the jelly was intelligent to a certain degree, for it kept touching the raft, trying to figure it out. One of the tentacles slid up the side of the raft and wormed its way inside, just touching things… the blanket that covered Soltz’s legs, an oar, the zippered compartments that contained the survival equipment. It found a lightstick and darted back as if it did not like the feel of it. Then it slid back over the side. Four or five others began tapping their way along the gunnel as if looking for something.
One of them got real close to George.
It was the pale, waxy yellow of a gourd. An undulant and rubbery thing like a great blind worm rooting through mulch. Not aggressive, merely explorative. It brushed over the tip of George’s boot, paid it no mind.
And George, feeling hot and loose inside, thought, what the hell does it want? What is it looking for?
Other tentacles passed very close to Gosling and Cushing. Cushing had to move his arm out of their way.
There were things about this creature that Cushing wanted to tell them about. He knew jellies, had done a great deal of reading about them, and this was not exactly a jelly. A jellyfish, he wanted to tell them, was a hydrozoan, a colonial animal, a colony of specialized cells. Jellies did not act like this. They were not capable of reaching around and grasping things with their tentacles. He also wanted to tell them that if this was indeed a jellyfish, then those tentacles would be lined with stinging cells.
The only good thing, everyone noticed, was that the sort of tentacles that were doing the exploring were not terribly numerous. From what they could see in the water, the thing had no more than a few dozen of them. Which seemed like a lot until you realized that the jelly had hundreds of tentacles. But most were thin, reedy projections that fluttered in the water like long wisps of yellow hair.
It might have went on that way for hours or even days or at least until that medusan grew bored or dried out and had to dive back down to rehydrate itself. That was, if it hadn’t been for Soltz. Soltz awakening in a kind of delirium, sitting up and moaning, licking his lips and breathing hard. His one good eye looking around, but dreamy and unfocused, confused. He tossed the blanket aside and right away those big tentacles started moving around, coiling and corkscrewing.
“What?” he said, barely able to catch his breath. “What is this? What… what… what?”
The sound of his voice triggered chemical changes in the bell of the jellyfish. It went from that livid purple to a soft yellow, then the bright orange and fiery red of a sunset.
“Soltz…” Gosling whispered, but it was no good.
Two of the tentacles came up the side of the raft like snakes. Soltz did not see them. He tossed his blanket aside and it struck them, making them twist like earthworms in direct sunlight.
“Colors,” Soltz said, “look at those awful colors…”
So maybe he did see the jelly. For even the tentacles were suffused with oranges and reds now. The floats and bladders around the bell were inflating and deflating rapidly, the bell was quivering. Three or four more tentacles boarded the raft, looping and creeping. Soltz grabbed an oar and swung at them. They would never have been strong enough to drag a man overboard, for as the oar hit one that was rising up like a rattlesnake in a defensive posture, it went to pulp. It literally shattered in a spray of jelly. The bell went bright red and a dozen tentacles went after Soltz. He hit some with the oar and they exploded, but he wasn’t fast enough.
Two or three others noosed around him and he instantly dropped the oar, screaming and thrashing as the nematocysts of the tentacles, the stinging cells, injected their toxins into him. He stood right up straight as a post and a dozen more ringed him, and he fell thrashing into the water, right into the squirming forest of the thing.
Cushing cried out and Gosling held him back.
There was no helping Soltz.
Not now.
“Do something for chrissake!” George cried out. “We can’t just let him-”
“We don’t have a fucking choice,” Gosling said, just sick with it all. “Nothing to be done… just, just don’t look.”
But George was looking. There was no way he could not. Like seeing a man fall beneath a subway train, you simply had to look. Because maybe, just maybe, what you saw wouldn’t be as bad as what your mind would show you if you didn’t look.
Soltz was pretty much out of his head when he attacked those tentacles. To him it was a dream and he’d been reacting with dreamlike logic. When the tentacles touched him, he felt an instant searing agony spread over his bare arms and face. It was like being stuck with glowing red needles. A stinging, burning sensation that brought tears to his eyes and a scream to his mouth.
And then he was in the water, thrashing in a sea with something like kelp and crawling weed, only that weed was on fire and him with it. He was flailing in that mass of tentacles, covered with them. They were draped over his face and tangled around his arms. Many of them had come apart and hung over him in rags and glistening membranes. The bell was a livid, boiling red, pulsing and shuddering, and Soltz was screaming through a mouthful of jellied polyp as those stinging nettles shot barbs of neurotoxin into him.
Somebody was calling out to him, but the voice seemed to be coming from some distant gulf. It was muffled and unreal. He tried to thrash away, but it was no good. He was knotted in jellyfish. Huge, tortuous waves of convulsive pain tore through his legs, his belly, and now his hands and arms as he clawed and fought, trying to free himself.
“Ah, ahhhh!” he gasped as water filled his mouth. “Help me! Help meeeee!”
He tore at floats and bladders, scratching rents in the bell itself.
He kicked and splashed and ripped at the trailing toxic whips and became further ensnared, his entire body lacerated with blinding agony that made his head buzz with white noise.
He could hear voices shouting, yelling, screaming.
But it was hard to understand above his own shrieks that seemed to be fading now, echoing from an empty room. The pain was unreal and encompassing. It blotted out everything. It was like some impossible Oh-my-God wall of torture rising up around him and he seemed to be sinking down further, embraced by tentacles, his mouth filled with a stinging pulp that bloated his tongue in his mouth.
Then he was sinking, sucking in water and slowly, very slowly, everything was going gray. He could see nothing but tentacles and jelly, ruptured bits of the thing drifting everywhere in the cascading bubbles. And then everything was quiet. Still. No sound. No motion. Just that peaceful womblike grayness swallowing up all and everything
He felt himself sinking deeper.
Felt himself break the surface once again and then submerge for good.
Then nothing.
The men in the raft saw it all, watched it with stunned abject horror. George saw Soltz break the surface that last time, the bandage gone from his bad eye that was red and shining and filled with blood. That eye seemed to see him in the raft, it locked onto him and then sank beneath the foaming, dirty sea like a dying sun.
And that was the last they saw of Soltz.