S O THEY DRIFTED THROUGH the weed for what might have been hours upon hours, or possibly days and weeks and maybe a year. Time was compressed in that place, flattened, drawn-out… it was plastic and shifting and refused to hold shape. It moved painfully slow or ran so quickly it left you dizzy. And maybe, just maybe, time did not move at all. Maybe it was stagnant here. Dead and rotted like everything else.
“And maybe it’s all our imagination,” George said.
They were on the oars again, pushing through that congested sea, through the heavy, grim fog which was a fuming mass of vapors and veils and contaminated brume. It drifted over the raft and lifeboat in snaking tendrils that looked like they wanted to strangle you, wanted to crawl down your throat and nest.
“What’s that, George?” Gosling said, working the oars behind him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud, I guess.”
George felt the oar in his hand, liked the feel. It was something to hold on to, an extension of your own muscles and sweat and drive. It was a good thing meeting the Dead Sea as they were, meeting it and fighting it and maybe besting it with nothing but human compulsion, will, and hard work. And when your muscles were taxed, were aching and throbbing and flexed tight as bailing wire, well, it tapped your strength and that was a good thing. Because then your mind did not have all that extra energy to feed itself with, to create fantasies and nightmares that made your flesh crawl.
That’s what George liked about rowing.
That’s why he liked the feel of that oar in his hand and just wished he had two of them.
Because lately, well, his mind was turning a little too quickly and the old bullshit machine called imagination was spinning tales with the best of ‘em. Things George shouldn’t be thinking about. If he thought about them too much he was afraid they would become obsessions and that was only a few feet away from a full-blown psychosis in his way of thinking.
No time for that. Not here. I’ve got to keep on my toes, George thought, and not just for myself, but for the others. They need me and, dear Christ, I cannot let them down. Not in this horrible place.
And what of this horrible place? George’s mind put to him. What about it? Have you ever really, really thought about where you are? And not in the context of whether this is an alien world or some dead-end dimension stuck between two universes, nothing like that. Because, George, you know that point is mute. It doesn’t matter where this place is. Just a black corridor of cosmic insanity with earth at one end and something unknowable and unthinkable at the other end. There. That’s it. But have you ever thought about what this place is and who might be behind it?
And, honestly, George had not.
Had not and did not want to. Sure, he’d given some thought to his little theory of the Fog-Devil, the Nemesis of this place. But he had never, for one solitary moment, let himself believe that this Fog-Devil was calling the shots. For Earth, they said, had its own devil, but he was not in charge of things. The creator, they said, had brought light and breath and life into the world; the Devil just corrupted it when he or she or it got the chance. And George had applied this old world thinking to this new, awful place. This was not Hell, this was just a back alley of creation where terrible things crawled and slithered in the evolutionary soup. That’s all it was. A dimensional sewer of the sort science fiction writers and even some scientists themselves had confessed might exist. That’s all. Nothing more and this purely figurative, hypothetical Fog-Devil was just another of its natural/unnatural occupants.
But what if he was wrong?
Not about the Fog-Devil or any of that business, but about the very nature of this place? What if it was all the playground of some demented and arcane intelligence? Something that watched and learned, but showed itself no more than the watcher of a TV showed himself to the actors being taped? What if this was all some grand amusement for something alien and omnipotent, so far above man it could rightly be called a god? It was crazy thinking, but George thought it regardless. If any of that were true, though, then maybe all of this was in his head, maybe it was all images projected into his mind by something with the power to do so. It reminded him of an old Outer Limits episode where the crew of a downed bomber were trapped in a weird sea
… only to discover it was a drop of water beneath some immense alien microscope.
“George,” Gosling said. “Why’d you stop rowing?”
“I’ve just been thinking some bad shit,” he said.
To which Gosling simply said, “Well, stop it for chrissake. Grab that oar and fucking pull on it.”
You couldn’t beat stripped down logic like that.
George started rowing.