“Jesus,” Gosling said, “lookit this damn fog now.”
Marx was standing up in the lifeboat, the mist so heavy he looked ghostly. “Shitting bad,” he said. “It’s like the peas without the soup.”
The fog had come in now, really come in. Before it had only hinted at its arrival, but now it had come. It was easily as bad as it had been on the Mara Corday when they’d first entered its sucking, execrable depths. It was not a casual envelopment. The fog fell over them in winding sheets and moldering rugs, an immense and billowing fleece, encompassing them in its viscous, woolen gulfs which were moist and decayed-smelling like coffin linings. It was steaming and hazing and brewing like a dirty, greasy mantle of steam rising from a black and bubbling cauldron. It carried a briny, gray stench to it and it literally descended on the raft and lifeboat like a blizzard, like a sandstorm… blinding and dense and coveting.
George saw it come.
Saw it come rolling over the weeds and dank waters like a storm of ectoplasm, felt it find him and cover him. Find and cover them all, bury them in its fetid, leaden depths. Within seconds, he could barely see the men in the lifeboat just to his left. They were wrapped up in the stuff, frosted in it. Just grainy silhouettes working their oars and, at times, completely invisible through that hungry mist.
“Should we lay-to?” Marx said.
Gosling considered it. “What in the hell for? We’re just in a pocket of this shit, we might as well row ourselves out.”
Everyone was happy for his decision. The idea of waiting in fog that thick was unpleasant, unsettling somehow.
“These weeds are getting thicker than ever,” Cushing said, scraping a glistening green tangle of them off his oar.
And they were. Maybe, in this heavier fog, they had lost their channel and maybe the channel was just simply gone in the profusion of the weeds. They floated in great, leafy masses, wet and rank, oozing tendrils of vapor. It looked like you could walk across them.
“Start pulling,” Gosling said.
They did. The bow of the lifeboat slit through the weeds easily and the raft seemed to slide right over the top of them. But you could hear bushy thickets of seaweed brushing along the bottoms like scraping fingers. In some places, that weed was so thick it brushed along the sides, too.
Before it had been getting dark, those lurid moons coming out.. . and now? No, it was like day had returned again. The fog and everything else was lit with that glimmering, dirty illumination. Maybe it was the fog itself and maybe there was truly no day or night there.
“What the hell was that?” Cushing said.
Something had passed beneath the lifeboat, bumping its entire length. Marx told him, whatever it was, it wasn’t trying to eat him so keep fucking rowing. They pressed on, making good time, George was thinking, moving along at a pretty good clip despite the weed. From time to time, things bumped into the raft and boat, but they never saw what they were. But they were big things, some of them.
“Hold up,” Marx suddenly said. “Look here what we got.”
Just before the bow of the lifeboat there was what looked like an old plank, waterlogged and knitted with mildew. There were other scraps of wood in the weeds. Off the starboard side of the raft, George was seeing something long and green and fleshy.
Gosling prodded it with his oar. “It’s… it’s a log, part of a fallen tree. Something like a palm, I’d guess.”
“Maybe we’re near land,” Chesbro said.
“Maybe.”
The log was from no tree George had ever seen. It was pea-green and scaly, something very primordial-looking about it. Like a backyard weed grown to fantastic proportions.
“Looks like sort of a primitive cycad,” Cushing said. “Sort of a prehistoric palm.”
“And that’s fine,” Marx said. “As long as the prehistoric wildlife don’t come with it.”
They kept rowing, the fog enshrouding them, thick as ever. They continued to bump into things and most of the time, the fog hid them before they could get a good look. But from time to time they saw more logs and planks. Once, something like a bush torn from an Oriental garden. Chesbro said he saw what looked like a styrofoam cooler, but it was gone before they could all see it. Regardless, each man was given hope. Because they all knew that they were getting closer to something.
“Just don’t be disappointed when you see it,” Pollard said more than once.
It seemed they pulled through the weeds for hours and then came revelation of a sort. They bumped into something else, only this something was not moving. They thudded into it and stopped dead, everyone almost getting thrown forward.
“What in the hell now?” Gosling said.
They went forward, not knowing what it could be this time and, generally, expecting the worst. But what they saw was harmless, just immovable. To George it looked like the roof of a house jutting from the tangled weeds, the peak sticking up, but set with crusty marine deposits.
“It’s a hull for chrissake,” Marx said. “Goddamn shitting hull from a ship. She must have turned turtle here in the weeds.”
They could see about fifteen or twenty feet of it, the rest was under water and weeds. George got a weak feeling in his belly looking at it, almost like he was getting some disturbing psychic vibe from the thing. But he supposed that wasn’t surprising, for whatever had happened to the ship was probably a dark, depressing story and one that had taken lives.
They rowed around it, deeper into that grim cultivation of seaweed. Pausing only to clean off their oars from time to time. But every man was expectant now. The signs were there – planks and logs, the hulls of sunken ships – and they were getting optimistic. They felt it in their bones and blood, they were very close now to something.
And George was thinking, I just hope it’s something good. God knows we need something good-
And those thoughts had barely exited his mind when they passed by some huge and amorphous shape in the fog, something vague that disappeared into the mist before they could really get a good look at it. But they knew. They all knew.
“A ship,” Gosling said. “I think it was a ship…”
And that stopped them from rowing, stopped them from doing just about anything. The ship had been off their port side, but now it was gone. The question was: Did they stop rowing and try to find it?
Which was pretty much what Gosling was thinking about when something happened that stopped him from thinking. Stopped them all from thinking or doing anything else – the fog began to lift.
It ran thin, then thinner, became diaphanous like something sheer and clingy. It began to unravel and unwind, casting aside motheaten rags and guazy wrappings and misting cerements. Disintegrating and pulling apart like moist blankets and ancient shrouds. Yes, like a stripper, the fog disrobed, tossing its dressings aside, and revealing the bare bones beneath. And that was pretty apt… for everywhere, bare bones.
Cushing said it before anyone else could: “The ship’s graveyard. Jesus, it’s the ship’s graveyard…”
And they saw, they all saw.
The mist was still there, but it was more of a haze now. The weed stretched in every direction, a watery, seeping matted carpet of green tendrils and coiled leaves, stalks and bladders and rotting creepers snaking through it. It was green and yellow, tinted with flowering pink buds. And set in it like tombstones in viscid, crawling vegetation… wreckage. Keels and undersides, bows and bulwarks, bowsprits and spidery tangles of derricks latticed in marine growths and slimy bloated ivies which were pulling them down deeper into the weed itself. Here were shattered skiffs and gutted scows, the ribbed frameworks of schooners sunk in the weed on their sides. It was some endless, weedy junkyard of the sea, of dead ships stripped of meat and masts, crumbling skeletons encrusted in shells and barnacles and growing things. Dozens and dozens of them thrusting up from the verdant bed of weed.
There was so much of it, it literally took your breath away.
But it wasn’t just sunken and dismembered ships, but nearly intact derelicts and hulks, some riding up high and others dipping down into that creeping green proliferation. This was the fabled graveyard of the seas, hundreds of ships held immobile in the fields of thick seaweed. Freighters and tankers, fishing vessels and yachts, tramp steamers and whalers. Some were recent additions, but some… old beyond old, barks and packets, clippers and 18 ^th century brigantines. George saw a moldering, weed-infested relic laying low in the growth and black polluted water that could have been the worm-holed, riven cadaver of a Spanish treasure galleon.
Many were mastless and bilged, punched through with great cavities like torpedo holes. Caught by the weed, they were unable to sink completely, slowly deteriorating, their crews long dead, their superstructures atrophied to sagging beams and leaning uprights. Some of the old sailing vessels looked almost seaworthy, but most were listing badly to port or starboard, dead and decayed things looking for a grave.
These were the ships that caught the eyes and imaginations of the men in the raft and lifeboat. Not the modern iron ships, but those flaking mummies from centuries gone by: brigs and schooners, four-masters and square-riggers. Their sails had long ago decomposed to dingy rags, but you could almost feel the history behind them, feel them riding high, creaking and groaning, shrouds snapping and flapping. But that had been long, long ago. For the weeds had claimed them now, held them in a green fist like cemetery dirt and would not let them go, would not let them seek the oblivion they deserved. No, the weed had ensnared them, grown up over their hulls, completely engulfing some so you could only see the general shape of a ship under all that growing, glistening, knotted weed. It sprouted from open portholes and roped over taffrails, noosed halyards and wreathed deckhouses.
But it wasn’t just the weeds, for here in this steaming, stagnant swamp, fungi had settled thickly over topmasts and mizzens, meshing jibs and topgallants. It was born in the putrescent hothouse nurseries of the weed and grew up over the masts in snotty lacework and nets, filaments and oozing vines, festooning like cobwebs, drooping and hanging like Spanish moss.
Yes, so thick was the weed and creeping gray fungi, that it was hard to say where the seaweed gardens ended and the ships began. For most of those derelicts looked not like things made by man, but things fashioned by nature out of roping green and yellow growing things that were mockeries of man’s work.
“Oh, my God,” George said, feeling an exhilaration and a despondency he could not shake. “How long… how long has this been going on?”
Marx just stared. “How long have men been plying the sea, son?”
There, of course, were newer vessels, too. Sleek ferries and frigates with ice-cutter bows and radar beacons, satellite dishes and radio aerials. There was, in fact, few ships, few types that were not represented in either pieces or in whole.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gosling said. “In all your born days?”
Cushing just shook his head. “No… but I was expecting it, I was expecting something like this. Weren’t you all? Down deep, weren’t you all?”
Cushing told them that this was the real Sargasso Sea, the real ship’s graveyard, the great boneyard of the world’s oceans… except it wasn’t anywhere on earth as sailors had long thought, but here, here in this pestilent cellar. This dripping, miasmic, vaporous sea which was just about due south of nowhere.
“This is what they saw,” Gosling said, excited now. “All those old stories you heard of the Sargasso, the ship’s graveyard, the devil’s graveyard… Jesus, just like you thought Cushing, this is it. It ain’t just a story, it’s real.”
“Aye, that it is,” Marx said. “Ships must have passed through here, saw all this, and passed back out to tell the story… maybe thinking the whole time they were stuck in the real Sargasso.”
George liked none of it. He felt like a white man finding the fabled elephant’s graveyard in Africa. He was seeing something that he was not supposed to see. No man was meant to see this and live to tell about it. Some things, he knew, were best left as folklore and twice-told tales.
There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.
“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water… but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”
“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”
Gosling nodded. “Maybe. But even with big diesels or steam turbines, you’d run out of fuel sooner or later, wouldn’t you? And then what?”
“Then you’d drift,” Marx said.
“And be brought right back in here.”
They all thought about the hopelessness of it all, those hundreds of ships trapped here, fossils in some grim collection. They looked out over them. They looked eerie and haunted in the mist, backlit by whatever made the mist glow. Those twin moons had come out again, the huge red one casting a bloody glare over mastheads and yards, stacks and cargo booms.
Pollard was saying nothing. He did not look exactly surprised about any of it. Chesbro, however, looked downright scared.
“I don’t like this place,” he said. “It looks… it looks like a cemetery.”
And it did.
The cemetery of the seas. Only in this unhallowed sea, the cemetery was restless and uneasy, a loathsome necropolis of dead and drowned things, slimy things ribboned with weeds and crepuscular fungi. It vomited back up what it could not hold down in its black charnel belly: waterlogged tombs and mildewed caskets, wormy coffins and crumbling sepulchers, floating crypts and oblong boxes draped in floral tributes of rotting kelp and vaporous green shrouds. They rose from the noxious weed, in whole and in part, clustered with morbid shadows, leaning this way and that like ancient headstones and webby monuments. The ships here were mummies and husks, cadaverous hollow-eyed things made of pipes and bones and ossuary girders. Derelicts welded from yellowed femur and gray ulna, mildewed rungs of rib and stark meatless vertebrae. They were alien exoskeletons and spectral ghost ships, exhumed wraiths resurrected from moldering abyssal mortuaries.
Yes, just skeletons and things that wanted to be skeletons. Things that sought blackness and depths, sluicing vaults cut in muddy sea bottoms, bathypelagic catacombs of drifting sediment and burrowing marine graveworms.
Jesus, George was thinking, it’s like some fucking shrine.
But not a good one. Not one that inspired cherished memory or peace, but one that inspired an almost atavistic horror. A place of malignance and spiritual violation. They were all so alone here. So far from everything decent and warm and caring. All those ships, just dark and hollow and scratching with a secret darkness that was devouring them bone by bone.
George was seeing those ships and feeling them, too, swallowing great black silences and tenebrous echoes, feeling the memory of those ships fill him, drop his dreaming brain into some pit where he could hear voices. Yes, the voices of those lost souls who had perished aboard those ships or simply went mad. But they were all there, all those tormented voices shrieking at him, showing him dark truths that made him want to scream. He was at the bottom of a dripping, brine-stinking well, feeling them feel him, touch him, whisper and laugh and cry. They were many but one, a single withering presence, a monster of deranged mourning with ten thousand hands and fifty-thousand steel fingers. George listened because he had no other choice. Just as Cook had channeled the last sensory impressions of Lieutenant Forbes aboard the Cyclops, George was channeling them. Knowing their thoughts and memories, their pain and sorrow and rage.
He saw all those great ships, all those three- and four-masters ghosting along beneath a pall of moonlight, slicing through high seas and thrashing water. Spars were creaking and blocks whining shrilly. Rain dripped from sail and rope and backstay. The masts and yards rode up high and cutting. Sails snapped and whistled. Hands hoisted and lowered cordage and shrouds. And the sea was a constant, a raging and rolling and pitching thing. Those sharp bows sliced through it and the seas broke before them like wheat before a scythe. He felt the coming of that cemetery fog. The stars blotting out, the breathable air sucking away, ship after ship after ship drawn into a misting tunnel of non-existence.
Ship’s bells ringing.
Voices shouting.
Oh, please, oh, please, get us out of here, oh God above get us out of this awful place, Lord.
Please.
We’re lost.
We’re becalmed.
We’re adrift.
We are dying.
We are losing our minds.
The fog is eating the flesh from our bones.
And the ships drifted on, enshrouded and doomed and despairing. Falling one by one into the weed and into rot, bathed in that slimy tideless sea, pulled into crawling depths and moist graveyards of weed where there were things with unseeing eyes and bloated tentacles and slavering mouths. And maybe, oh yes, something far worse that would come drifting from that misting effluvium, something vile and diseased and burning, smoking and sparking and vomiting ice.
And the voices screamed at the memory of that which walked alone.
The well vibrated and shuddered with their screaming, howling voices blown from contorted mouths fed by terror-wracked minds that were going to pulp and ash. And those ships, they became coffins. Lids snapping tight and weeds ringing them shut while white fingers scraped at satin and silk and-
“Jesus H. Christ, George,” Gosling was saying. “You all right?”
They were all looking at him.
Gosling was shaking him.
And he realized his mouth was wide and his eyes bulging and he was screaming silently. But then it was gone and he was on the raft and there was nothing, nothing but a lot of derelict ships and a handful of men wanting to know what in the hell he was doing.
But he couldn’t tell them. He could just say, “I’m… fine.”
Nobody bought it, of course, and long after the other eyes had abandoned him, Pollard was watching him, knowing things he shouldn’t know, but that was just the way of this place. It was the amplitude or something. For sensitive minds could hear things they had no business hearing and maybe Pollard had heard that scream of his though no one else had.
And maybe they would have all questioned him over his little episode, but there were other and more important things to be considered.
“Look at that,” Marx said. “Did you see it? Just at the edge of the mist there.”
They saw it. Some huge, nebulous shape had passed beneath the weed or maybe through it, a colossal luminous form that dipped beneath the wreck of an old three-masted brig and vanished from site.
“What the hell was that?” Gosling said.
Maybe they wanted Cushing to give them some rational scientific explanation for it, but all he said was, “I don’t know… but I hope to hell it doesn’t come back.”