Harry Knight - Slimer

Her right foot began to tingle. It was an extremely unpleasant feeling, much worse than pins-and-needles. Vaguely alarmed, she raised herself painfully on her elbows and looked down.

Something was moving under the blanket down by her feet. Shocked, she flung the blanket to one side and froze… Her right foot had disappeared. Beyond the cuff of her jeans there was nothing. Just empty space.

The awful tingling sensation was in her left leg now as well. She saw it was covered with a black, glistening liquid and that a long tendril of the same substance ran across the floor from the end of the bunk… She remembered the woman with the black, slimy worms hanging out of her mouth.

She tried to scream but it was too late. Her upper torso was now under attack as well. Her shirt caved inwards and her head fell back onto the pillow. With wide terrified eyes she stared helplessly at the ceiling, her mouth working frantically as she tried to suck air into lungs that no longer existed.

Then the substance moved over her eyes and the light faded. She waited for merciful oblivion.

It didn’t come.

They were stopping it from eating.

When it was stronger they would be powerless against it. It would scare them away as if they were minnows but now it was confused and the spark of violence was dim. It was weak. It needed food. If only it could return to the sea but they wouldn’t let it…

The problem was that it could not really understand where they were. Sometimes it felt their presence close by and was aware of the power they were exerting over it. But even at these times it could sense their terror. It knew they would be easy prey if only it could find them. Yet it never could…

It knew instinctively that in this alien environment it could not rely on its senses any more. Everything was different. No longer was it possible to move effortlessly through the fluid medium that also served as an extension of its sensory organs; this simplicity had been replaced by a strange, dry world where it felt heavy and awkward. Sounds didn’t carry as well and the light was too bright and harsh.

Why had everything changed, it sometimes wondered. And the fact it was capable of rudimentary curiosity revealed that it too had changed. Strange thoughts and images now flickered through its mind where before its consciousness had been untroubled by anything except the urges to eat and mate.

And in spite of all the changes the former urge remained the dominant one, as it had in the sea. The need for food would blot out everything else and it would be seized in a terrible blood lust that would send it stalking through the endless white corridors, images of torn and bloody flesh filling its mind.

But there was no food to be found within them any more. It was all gone. And they wouldn’t let it go back to the sea where the food was plentiful. But they were getting weaker too. It could feel it. Soon they would be so weak they’d be unable to prevent it from returning to its own world. And there it would overwhelm them completely.

Then it would be free to feed endlessly.

And grow…

Christ, it’s cold! thought Paul Latham. His face was red raw from the wind except for two white patches on either side of his mouth caused by the effort of keeping his jaws clenched together. He wasn’t going to let his teeth chatter like those stupid clockwork dentures that Mark had found so funny back on the yacht.

He knew he would have to give in to the weather soon but for the moment it was important to him to be the last to surrender. Four of the other five in the small boat were holding their thin clothes tightly together and pressing hard into the only source of warmth they had — each other. Mark and Chris looked like they were welded into a single, motionless statue, the only sign of movement being Chris’s long red hair whipping across the front of Mark’s blue plaid shirt. Linda was burrowed against Paul, her face turned from the wind and Rochelle was similarly clinging to Alex.

Alex, like Paul, was playing the stoic. Both sat upright in the dinghy, shirt collars undone, taunting the cold unnecessarily. Paul’s eyes never met Alex’s, but his peripheral vision was on full alert for any sign of Alex giving in to common sense. And he knew that Alex was waiting for the same sign from him.

It was, Paul realised, a stupid and futile game they were playing. There could be no clear winner, except the weather itself. But at least it kept him occupied and stopped him from sinking into the despair that he knew gripped the other four.

Not that they didn’t have good reason for feeling low — they had been adrift now for nearly three days and their meagre supply of food and water had practically run out. At first they had been confident that they would be quickly rescued; the yacht had sunk, after all, in the middle of one of the busiest sections of the North Sea. Mark, whose father’s yacht it had been, had said it would only be a matter of hours before they were picked up. But then dawn had broken to reveal a grey mist that hadn’t been there the day before. And the mist had stayed ever since, reducing visibility to less than a hundred feet in any direction. On several occasions during the last three days they had heard the sound of a helicopter flying overhead, no doubt on its way to or from one of the many oil rigs in the area, and once they had heard the sound of a ship’s fog horn close by, but though they had yelled themselves hoarse they had remained undetected.

The only thing in their favour was the calmness of the sea. True, it was the middle of summer but that was no guarantee of good weather in the North Sea. Yet ever since the yacht had sunk the water had been remarkably calm and even now with this cold wind that had suddenly sprung up there was only a light swell. It was as if the small dinghy had been nailed to a huge, grey board.

He felt Linda shift slightly. She raised her head, put her lips to his ear. ‘I need to take another piss,’ she whispered.

He felt a stab of annoyance. ‘Again? You had one only a few hours ago. Where’s it all coming from? All you’ve had to drink today is a half a cup of water.’

‘I can’t help it,’ she protested, a little louder. ‘It must be the cold.’

Paul looked directly at Alex. He was obviously straining to hear what they were saying. Paul whispered, ‘Try and hang on for a while longer. It must be late afternoon by now. It should be getting dark soon.’

She sighed. ‘Okay, I’ll try. But I don’t know if I can wait that long.’

Alex was the cause of this exchange. Whenever anyone had to answer a call of nature over the side of the boat the others all politely looked away. With the exception of Alex. He regarded it as a great joke, particularly when one of the women was involved, even Rochelle. He would leer openly at them and make obscene comments. On the last occasion, when Linda had needed to urinate that morning, Paul had come close to attacking Alex even though he knew that any kind of struggle in the small boat would capsize it. But Linda had succeeded in calming him down just in time.

Alex. Paul hadn’t known it was possible to hate another human being so much. Before the trip he hadn’t even disliked him. On the contrary, he admired the good looking Mexican-American with his cool, street-wise manner and the impressive stories of doing drug-runs from Columbia to Florida. But then on the voyage to Morocco, living with him in such close proximity for several days, he realised he was an arrogant, unpleasant pain in the arse. And then, when he had made a blatant play for Linda right in front of Paul…