When Menhaus came awake, he knew instinctively something was wrong.
His eyelids fluttering open, he could not put a name to it. But he could feel it, same way you can feel someone in the darkness with you. You do not need to see them or be told that they are there, you can feel it. An invasive sense of presence… no less palpable than fingernails drawn up your spine.
Saks was snoring lightly.
Menhaus could not see Makowski. It was too dim in the cabin. Shadows nested like snakes, finding each other, combining, mating, breeding a slithering brood of shifting darkness.
Menhaus tried to blink it away, for there was something positively unnatural about that darkness.
He listened. Yes, he could hear it. He could hear the darkness.
Just a subtle whisper of motion, but he’d sensed it, felt it somehow. And now he heard it: a wet, dragging sound. Like a soaked, moth-eaten blanket dragged over the floor. Swallowing, he pulled himself up on his elbows, craning his neck, listening. There. He heard it again. A secretive, moving noise. Menhaus imagined that’s how snakes would sound in the dark… but it wasn’t snakes; he knew that much. Not here. Not in this dead ship in the boundless graveyard sea. No, this was a stealthy, intelligent locomotion. The sound of something trying to be quiet. Something that knew it was being listened to and was trying not to be heard.
He wanted to write it off to imagination, to nerves, but he was beyond all that now.
For not only could he hear it, he could smell it now.
A rank, wet smell. The stink of something from the bottom of a pond.
Carefully, Menhaus found his lighter and flicked it into life.
“Saks?” he whispered softly. “Saks?”
Nothing. Saks was out cold.
Only that rustling, breathing motion.
Menhaus swung his legs over the bunk and hopped off. But quietly, a cat dropping soundlessly to the floor. He snatched one of the candles they’d purloined from the lounge and lit it.
Makowski’s berth was empty.
No, not empty. Not exactly. There was a form there, a shape, a sense of solidity. Makowski was there, all right, but wrapped in a net of shadow.
Except that the shadow wasn’t moving… it was not evaporating as the light hit it.
Yes, as he approached Makowski with the candle the darkness did not retreat. It hung over him like a shroud. Blacker than black, glistening and wet, an oil slick of shadow. It seemed to almost shudder at the intrusion of light like it was not shadow at all, but something pretending to be shadow.
Menhaus felt his heart seize momentarily in his chest.
Makowski was enveloped in the stuff.
He looked like he’d been dipped in tar.
As Menhaus brought the candle closer, closer, the mass began to slide off of Makowski, running like hot wax from his staring face. A thick, serpentine clot of it deserted his open mouth with the sound of viscera yanked from the belly of a fish. He began to convulse, to gag and sob and tremble. The black stuff was like tissue, fleshy and convoluting. You could see the flex of alien musculature beneath that neoprene skin.
Jesus, it was alive… living blackness.
Menhaus saw, for just one brief insane moment, a face in that blackness. The smooth, shining mockery of a woman’s face grinning at him… then it melted away and maybe it had not been in the first place.
He wanted to scream.
Wanted to, but his throat was constricted down to a pinhole. Shaking now, he held the candle out towards the retreating black mass. It moved quickly now, seeking darkness in which to hide in. One crazy, insane moment he could see it fluttering and shifting, the next it had vanished into the shadows or become the shadows.
Menhaus stood there helplessly, the candle flickering wildly in his trembling fist, throwing nightmare shadows over the bulkheads. He wanted to collapse, to cry, to yell, but his lips were glued tight.
Makowski, however, found his voice.
It was a high, mad wailing that filled the cabin, reverberated and pounded through the still air. He fell to the deck and screamed and howled and sucked in great, wheezing lungfuls of air in-between. He fell against Menhaus who nearly dropped the candle, knowing damn well he could not drop it. For if it went out, if it went out…
Makowski was clutching his legs like a terrified toddler, his mouth frozen open, spraying spittle and horror: “IT’S ALL OVER ME CAN’T BREATHE CAN’T-”
Menhaus first tried to kick him away, then went down on his knees, setting the candle on the floor, letting its radiance keep the darkness at bay. He took hold of Makowski and shook him, tried to shake the madness out of him. Makowski fought in his arms like a freshly landed salmon, twisting and turning and clawing at him, out of his mind with panic.
“STOP IT!” Menhaus cried. “STOP IT! MAKOWSKI! STOP IT! IT’S GONE DAMMIT! IT’S GONE AWAY, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
Finally, he slumped into Menhaus’ arms, weightless, powerless, curled up on his lap like a sick child, just shaking, damp with sweat. His hands furled and unfurled.
Saks was out of his bunk by then. “What?” he demanded. “What the fuck is it?”
And what was Menhaus to say? The shadows, he was attacked by the shadows? But saying something like that sounded even crazier that seeing something like that. So he said nothing, feeling his heart racing and his breath coming hard.
Saks was staring at him. “Well? What in the fuck are you two pussies screaming about?”
Menhaus had a sudden, irrational need to laugh. But he didn’t. Instead, he found his voice and told Saks what he’d seen. “I saw it. By Christ, Saks, I mean I really saw it.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Saks said bluntly.
“Fuck you, Saks. What the hell do you think happened?” Menhaus said fiercely, his eyes glaring with rage. “You think we both goddamn well dreamed it?”
Makowski was not saying a thing. His eyes were wide and glassy. Wherever he was, it was a lonely place and certainly not a very good place.
There was a pounding at the door, Cook saying, “What the hell’s going on in there? Unlock this goddamn door.”
Saks, tittering under his breath, did. “Hey, Cook, c’mon in… we got a ghost in here.”
Menhaus helped Makowski into his bunk. “I never said ghost,” he told them. “Ghost is not what I said.”
“Okay, peaches, call it what you want. Ghost, spook, oogie-boogie man. Jesus H. Christ, Menhaus, I bet you still wet the fucking bed.”
“Kiss my white ass.”
“All right, all right,” Cook said. “Settle down. Just tell me what happened and Saks? Just zip it for once.”
Menhaus, sensing an ally, told Cook everything. There really wasn’t much to tell and by the time he was done, he wasn’t even sure if he believed any of it. Sounded like some bullshit story you told around a Boy Scout campfire.
Cook said, “But the light drove it off?”
Menhaus nodded.
“All right. Keep a candle burning then.” Saks didn’t say a word.
Menhaus knew Saks might be acting like some hard-headed rationalist asshole, but he believed, all right. He believed everything Menhaus had said. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit it was all.
“Saks?” Cook said. “Come over to my cabin. I want to talk with you. You okay here, Menhaus?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”
He was thinking about the black tissue, wondering what it was and what it wanted. Was it trying just to suffocate Makowski? Was that it? Or, given time, would it have devoured him, bones and all? It all made Menhaus remember when they’d first rowed through the weed around the Cyclops. At the stern, there had been a patch of oily darkness in the water, shifting in the weeds. Not a shadow exactly. Like a shadow, but more solid. Cook had seen it, too.
And what had Crycek said?
Something… something bad got these people. It slipped up from the darkness below and got them…
Yeah, Menhaus did not doubt that at all.
He could hear Saks and Cook out in the corridor, arguing with lowered voices. Knowing Saks and his ways, it could go on for some time.
“It was my turn,” Makowski suddenly said.
Menhaus turned, his flesh gone rigid. There was a chill moving up the small of his back. “What? What did you say?”
“It was my turn,” he said again. He turned and looked at Menhaus, his head revolving with an almost mechanical slowness like that of a puppet. His eyes were glistening and mad. “It was my turn tonight and you ruined it.”
“I… saved you,” Menhaus mumbled.
But Makowski just shook his head. “She’ll come again… when she’s ready. Maybe tonight or tomorrow. Maybe this time she’ll come for you…”