Crycek woke to the sound of scratching.
Right away he started thinking rats. Started thinking big rats. Because the sound he was hearing at the door was not a little sound, but a big sound, the sort of scratching noise that goes up your spine and scrapes around in your skull. The cabin was dim, though not exactly dark. Cook and Fabrini were sleeping. Everyone was sleeping. Except for Crycek and what was outside the door.
Saks had said there were rats on the ship and he also said that was a good thing, because when the food ran out… and it was going to, yes sir… then rats could keep a man alive. Some parts of the world, he said, rats are considered a delicacy. But listening to that metallic scratching out there, like tenpenny nails drawn over rusty iron, Crycek wasn’t so sure about rats.
You know better than anyone else that this ship is not empty, a chill voice said in his head. There’s something here listening and watching and waiting. Not the Other from the fog, the devil-thing.. . no, not that. That was big, gigantic, cosmic… this was localized. What waited here was… was… more of an echo, a sentient lunatic echo… something starving for company…
It was not a scratching at the door now.
It was a tapping. A gentle rapping, tapping like in that poem by Poe Crycek had to memorize in tenth grade. Tap, tap, tap. Yes. And who exactly was that tapping at the chamber door? Crycek did not want to know, not really, yet he swung his legs off his bunk and sat there, wondering and willing whoever or whatever it was to just go away. Go scratch at Saks’s door. Go anywhere but here.
Tap, tap, tap.
See, now it wasn’t sounding so much like a harmless tapping, now it was sounding like fingers drumming impatiently. And if it was fingers, then it had to be a person… didn’t it? But who would be out there now? And if they wanted to come in, why didn’t they just use their voice?
Yes, fingers drumming now. Whoever owned them was not going away because they knew Crycek was in there and they knew Crycek was awake. That he could hear what it was they were doing. Come out and play. Come out, come out, wherever you are…
Crycek licked his lips and his tongue felt thick, ungainly. “Cook,” he said in a whisper. “Cook…”
But Cook was sleeping and that’s the way it had to be, Crycek knew. For whatever was out there wanted it that way. It would have it no other way. What waited beyond that door was for him and him alone. And the very idea of that filled him with a numb, white silence. The terror on him and in him was so extreme, so marrow-deep, that he thought he would have slit his wrists if a razor had been handy.
He thought: I’ll go back to sleep because I’m probably not even awake.
And outside the door, those fingers kept tapping and drumming. They were getting impatient. For some reason – and Crycek could not begin to imagine what it might be – whoever or whatever was out there, could not just burst in, they needed to be invited in. Like a vampire scratching at your window or clawing at your door, you had to let them in. But why? Crycek did not know, but maybe it was just the politics of this particular virus of madness.
Crycek got up, stood over Fabrini for a moment, but Fabrini was lost in a deep, almost narcotic slumber from which there was no waking. Cook was stretched out like a body on a slab and was pretty much lost to the world.
Crycek turned to the door.
He stopped two or three feet away, balling his hands into fists so they wouldn’t inadvertently reach up and pull the latch, let that clutch of creeping shadows come whispering in. Because it was there: a need to open that door. That crazy, suicidal urge the human animal has at times, to destroy itself completely just for the morbid thrill of it. Like having a gun in your hand and wanting to feel the cold steel of the barrel against your temple or wondering what it might be like to dive out a tenth-story window. The urge was there. And at times of great stress or confusion, it became active, wanted to assert itself. Such a time was now for Crycek. His fingertips were actually tingling, wanting to feel the latch beneath them. Wanting to know it. Just as his ears wanted to hear the creak of that latch, his eyes wanted see that grinning malignancy on the other side, just for one shivering second before his mind blew apart from the sheer horror of it-
“What the hell are you doing, Crycek?” a voice on the other side of the door wanted to know. “Why are you just standing there, you goddamn idiot? What aren’t your hands opening this door and letting me in?”
That voice… maybe not real at all, maybe just echoing through the silent corridors of his brain… it was human, or nearly so. But funny. Like it was full of wet sand. Crycek recognized the voice: it was Morse. Captain Morse. The skipper of the Mara Corday and Crycek’s boss.
He wanted to come in. He sounded pissed-off and desperate.
But was it Morse? Maybe Morse had survived and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there was only this voice and nothing corporeal to go with it.
“Crycek? Crycek, what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Morse said with that thick, slopping voice. “Don’t you know what I’ve been through? Stuck out in the darkness where there’s nothing to touch and nothing to feel? Open this door, boy. Open it right now. That’s a goddamn order…”
Crycek felt tears welling his eyes.
Felt his hand going up to the latch, his fingers brushing it, something on the other side of that door getting excited, breathing hard, almost panting now with a wet, drooling sound. Oh yes, it was happy, so very happy.
“Crycek.”
It was Cook. He was sitting up in his bunk. His eyes were shining black bb’s. “What the hell are you doing over there?”
Crycek started to say something, but stopped… he honestly wasn’t sure what he had been doing. “There was someone… someone at the door. They wanted to come in”
Cook’s voice was thin, dry. “Who? Who was at the door?”
“It… it was Morse,” he said. “Captain Morse.”
“Morse is dead, Crycek.”
Crycek nodded. “Yes, he is… but he wanted to come in anyway.”
With that he went back and laid on his bunk, something like a distant scream sounding in his head.