The Fog by Dennis Etchison Read Free Book Online Page B

sprang out at her, and then a rope, rolled charts and the biggest reel she had ever seen. It dropped by her foot and started to move, the line unwinding. They were both looking at her. She felt herself shrinking in front of them.
    “Well,” she said, “I have a thing about doors that won’t open.”
    She sighed and bent to clear up the debris. She heard something move over her, but it was probably another chart or the ropes uncoiling now that the pressure had been relieved.
    Then something cold did in fact touch her back, at the base of her spine, above her jeans, where her sweater was hiked up.
    She straightened so fast she practically knocked her brains out on the door.
    It was water, water coming from up high, seeping in a trickle out of the compartment.
    She pulled open the compartment door and found herself staring at two eyes.
    White eyes.
    Dead eyes.
    And a mouth. Open, lips contorted, teeth exposed in a rictus smile. Water, the very water that had dripped on Elizabeth, seeping out of the corpse’s nose and mouth.
    “Christ!” said Ashcroft. “It’s Dick Baxter!”
    The grotesque body, squeezed flat, looked like a monster that had been netted in some mysterious deep.
    Water was exuding from every pore, seaweed plastered the body’s exposed skin.
    Nick held his palm out, as if to feel the water running out of the dead man’s nose and mouth.
    “Tell me,” he said, his voice barely contained now, about to explode, “how does a man drown on board, without ever touching the water?”
    “We don’t know that he drowned,” said Ashcroft.
    “You have eyes, man! That’s water in his lungs. And look at this. Seaweed. On his throat. See the salt drying on his face? What does that tell you?”
    “It tells me,” said Ashcroft solemnly, “that I want to find Al and Tommy real bad.”
    Elizabeth stopped listening to them. She could only see the dilated eyes, the inflamed nostrils, the open mouth, something green and something brown there between the teeth, the purple lips deformed, opened wide.
    She closed her eyes, threw back her head and let out a scream that reverberated off the walls and continued to echo around them for a long time afterward.
    Reverend Malone floated down the corridors, a specter in his own house.
    His robes flowed open, rustling over the uneven stones as the material filled with dank air and blossomed around his thin body. From time to time his bare heels caught and tripped on the hem, but he took no notice of the tearing of the vestment as he drifted on, circling the pews beneath darkling stained glass, doomed to visit, again and again, without end, the stations of his dispensation.
    “The mark,” he was muttering. “The stain. The corruption . . .”
    He came once more to the enormous gold cross mounted in the apse behind the altar.
    I will lift up mine eyes . . .
    He hovered before it, seeing his unshaven face reflected in its patina, his uncombed hair, his stained teeth, his dried, blistered lips.
    “Filth,” he murmured, and spat at it.
    His spittle ran down to the base, blurring his haunted image but holding the strange tincture that still shone in his hollow eyes, as though they were glowing with a deep ocher light.
    He laughed bitterly, the hoarse sound deflecting off the bricks and beams until it returned to him from the cavernous depths of the building and the farthest corners of the sacristy, an inhuman, sepulchral echo that would inhabit the church forever.
    He shuffled on, tipping hymnals onto the floor as he went.
    His toes chattered over the rough stones, but he ignored the blood and skin left in the wake of his passing, a glistening slime-track that marked the deepening record of his path.
    “Blasphemy,” he said, white foam appearing at the corners of his mouth. “O the blasphemy . . .”
    I’ve always known, he thought, in that isolated part of his mind that miraculously remained rational. I’ve felt it in the walls, in the vestibule, in the dismal and fetid