A Spider In The Eye

by Mark Hayes

  All of which was creepy as hell.

  Indeed if it wasn’t for my memories of the night, there was no evidence at all. It really could have all been a dream, just a crazy dream.

  But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t…

  I got up and despite the odd tinge of cramp and a killer hangover, I managed to stumble across the room to the window she had left the room via. Looking out of it I saw the rock hard pavement below, knowing with all certainty that if the fall hadn’t just plain killed her, it would’ve most likely crippled her. No one could have made that drop in one piece and while there were no bloodstains on the ground or anything obvious like that, if they could clean the room, they could clean bloodstains as well. So clearly my Bad Penny was dead or captured by the Sleep Men. About which I felt strangely disappointed for some reason.

  What it did do however was spell the end of my American lady friend’s interference in Ministry affairs and more importantly my own.

  Okay, so no, I didn’t believe that for a second either.

  This mightn’t be a penny dreadful story, a tale of the type which ignores common sense and logic. The kind of logic that says three-story falls from windows taken at high-speed head first tend to kill people. But all the same, I’d a feeling she’d turn up again like that proverbial, well yes, that proverbial Bad Penny. Whatever her real name was.

  And just as I was sure that like a Bad Penny, she would be back, I was damn sure determined I wouldn’t be taken unawares by her next time.

  Well you have to be wrong about something occasionally, don’t you?

  Confused, muggy from the gas, and slightly nauseous, I dressed, skipped breakfast, paid my bill and hailed a taxi for the Company aerodrome.

  I did that in the full knowledge I was going to commit the number one crime in the eyes of any captain that a new crew member could commit. I was going to be late.

  “You’re late,” were my new captain’s first words to me.

  The captain in question was in his mid to late forties and sported a handlebar moustache with flecks of grey in it. He was weather-beaten and worn much like his airship. He also had a face that wasn’t built for smiling. Which was lucky as he wasn’t when he said those words to me. He was also a native, which did surprise me, as were all his crew, which didn’t. Indeed, I appeared to be the only colonial on board. Which made me very much the outsider, which, I have found, is never the most comfortable of positions to be in.

  Captain Jackson turned out to be a fifth-generation Anglo-Indian. The Anglo side of that equation had been somewhat watered down by successive generations. His first name was Mahatma, as I discovered later, and his family had converted to Hinduism in the second generation. His western surname was a gift from a Scottish great-great-grandfather. Technically, therefore, he was entitled to a British passport. It was this distant ancestor that had enabled him to rise to the exalted rank of Captain and have command of his own ship.

  Say whatever you wish about British colonialism, but it’s a broad church, and treats all men equally. Just so long as they can hold a passport stamped at the court of St James…

  “My apologies, sir, there was an incident at the hotel,” I said quickly, while not expanding to say that the incident in question was a mad woman with scalpels for fingers trying to perform major surgery on my eyeball. I had a feeling that would be an explanation that would get me nowhere.

  “Waylaid by a veshya, I’ll be bound. I’ll not have it. Bad enough Company House forces me to take a bought commission Johnny on as the first officer. But you turn out to be a laggard as well. I won’t have it, do you hear me, Mr Smyth? I won’t have it. I have no time for laggards. Be late reporting to my ship again, and I will pack your arse back off to London so quick you’ll have to run to keep up with it.”

  He was, as I am sure you can tell, following that fine service tradition of ranting. Indeed Jackson’s accent may have been local, but his choice of words had Surrey Downs all over it. I kept my eyes steady on the wall and wondered what a veshya was, though it was no wild stab in the dark to assume it was the local word for a woman of negotiable virtue.

  ‘Oh, but if only that was the case, Harry old son,’ I caught myself thinking, then pushed the thought from my head and focused on the wall again while he roasted me for my lateness.

  This wasn’t the introduction to my new berth I had been hoping for. Getting off on the wrong foot with a new captain was a sure way to end up without a leg to stand on.

  Of course, I personally would’ve welcomed being packed off back to Blighty with my tail between my legs. It was certainly a more inviting prospect than spending a tour of duty on this junkrat of a ship, or months of dull patrol duty in the arse end of India. However, I strongly suspected that The Ministry would have words to say if I was.

  Words like, ‘Back to the Bailey with you and have a nice short walk when you get there’. So, all considered that wasn’t an option I wished to pursue.

  “It won’t happen again, sir. I will sleep in my cabin before I risk it. It really wasn’t my fault, sir,” I said, trying my best not to sound like an utter toady, while at the same time toadying for all it was worth. Which earned me a leer.

  “See that it doesn’t,” he snapped, then made a passing impression of looking at the transfer papers before him. Though he didn’t waste much time looking. Captains never do.

  “Experience?” he snapped once more.

  “I was a gunnery officer in the Royal Air Navy for five years,” I replied, expecting this to buy me at least a little slack. It was clear enough to me that any captain of a tub like this should be all too happy to have a RAN officer on board. RAN officers are the best-trained airmen in the world and for all my foibles, being one had been something that I’d been inordinately proud of.

  Captain Jackson looked me lazily in the eye for a moment or two, then spat on his own deck plates. It swiftly became apparent he didn’t think that much of the Royal Air Navy or its officers.

  “So, you hunkered down in a bomb bay for a few years and waltzed around in a shiny uniform on your days off trying to get laid by gullible young ladies. Doubtless, you know next to nothing about actually flying a ship like this. Let me take a wild guess, oh yes, I’d wager you got into some trouble back home, some lass or other, was it? I know your type… Or are you one of those buggers who think they want a bit of an adventure and thought to buy the better commission you couldn’t earn in the Navy. Oh, I know your type only too well, Mr Smyth. Doubtless, you’re a blaggard or a wastrel if I’m lucky. We get your sort down here all the damn time, Smyth. Thieves and philanderers, that’s all the RAN ever sends us, because good officers get promotions and the shite have to buy them in India. And lucky me, office politics land you on my boat. Oh yes, because we have to have a white face around after all.” He spat on the deck again at that point. “Well I’ll see to it you shape up or I’ll have you out, and sod anything the shit for brains clerks at Company House have to say about it. So take that as the only warning I’m going to give you, Mr Smyth. Your last warning…”

  There was a venom to his words, as you can probably tell from reading them. I have no doubt it came from bitter experience. A story lay behind it, no doubt, but it was one I wasn’t about to inquire of right then if at all.

  Besides which he was uncomfortably close to the mark.

  “Mr Singh!” Jackson shouted, and the officer who had first shown me into the Captain’s office appeared in the doorway. He was a younger man, round about my own age, a native of the sub-continent and one with keen looking eyes. I also couldn’t help but notice he had first officer’s pips on his shoulders like my own.

  “Yes, Captain?” he asked crisply as he approached the desk, before pulling off a salute that looked textbook. Something which I suspected was as much for my benefit as the Captain’s. He knew who I was after all and why I was there. Well, that is he knew the reason they’d been told I was there. And it behoves a crew to show their captain respect in front of a new offi
cer. Just to make sure he knows the captain has the crew’s respect, while the new man himself has yet to earn it.

  Captain Jackson returned the salute, and his tone changed from berating to apologetic as he told his man the news he undoubtedly already knew. In a pantomime also for my benefit, I was sure.

  “Take the pips off, lad. Afraid you’re going back down to second for a while. The Company has sent us another of their clowns.”

  Many a less experienced man would’ve protested this. A captain shouldn’t start out by belittling his new first officer in front of his new crew after all. But I was all too aware how this game was played. I was being pushed to see when I would push back. The captain, doubtless, wanted a chance to chew me out some more, and to do so with his man present. So I let it slide by with barely a wrinkling of my moustache. But all the same, I suspect my displeasure was obvious. Hopefully, however, so would be the image of a man willing to work to gain his new captain’s respect.

  Of course, he might just see this as a display of a weak spine, but it couldn’t be helped either way.

  “Very well, sir,” Singh said sharply, saluting once more before he unclipped the pips and placed them on the Captain’s desk. Then he turned to me and nodded slightly before throwing me a salute which was blunt, half-hearted and a mere slither above an open insult. So the games continued.

  “Be about your business, Mr Singh. Keep the ship tight. We hoist in an hour. We are already running behind thanks to this fool as it is,” the Captain barked.

  So saluting Jackson flawlessly a final time, the newly demoted second mate turn and stalked out of the office seeking, I’d little doubt, men to yell at.

  I stood before the desk awaiting orders while Captain Jackson carefully signed another couple of documents. Then he looked up from the papers and did a vague impression of being surprised to see me still standing there. Which of course he wasn’t at all, he had just been setting up the next rollicking to come my way. Some moves in the game are as old as sin. He scowled at me and found his best bawling out voice once more.

  “What are you still doing here, man? Get after Singh. If you’re lucky he’ll show you the ropes. Or else he’ll get you slung over the guardrail at the first opportunity you give him,” he snarled.

  I was, despite expecting the first part, a little shocked despite myself. Games were one thing, but to hear a captain talk openly about his new first officer being ditched from a great height by his second? That went beyond games. I stared back at him trying to figure out from his expression if it was just the Captain playing up to see what shook loose.

  “Sir?” I said a moment later, without meaning it to be a question.

  “Mr Singh has been the first officer aboard my ship for seven years. And I shall tell you this, he is the best damn first officer in the fleet. Yet this is the fifth time a commission-buying fool like you has been dumped on me and taken his job. Yet, Mr Smyth, he still does that job, a job you blatantly can’t. So if he has the crew ditch you out over the wilds, then I doubt I shall blame him overmuch as long as he does the paperwork for me. So, I would get after him and learn your ship if I was you, Mr Smyth. Might be you’ll prove useful if you do. While I would be surprised if it was the case, you might actually be a worthy first officer if you let Singh do his job and don’t get in his way. And if you are then maybe that will keep you alive a bit longer. So go learn the ship and don’t step on any more toes. From what I’ve seen of you so far I’m not full of confidence you’ll last a week.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, saluting in a hurry and all but running out the door after the newly demoted Second Officer Singh, winner of this week’s ‘Who wants to kill Hannibal Smyth’ award. There is nothing as satisfying as discovering you’ve a new mortal enemy before you’ve even had chance to have breakfast I’ve found.

  The second officer was hard at it, shouting commands in Hindi to a crew who to a man eyed me with suspicion. As for Mr Singh himself, he didn’t even bother to hide his contempt when he caught sight of me. Then set about shouting some more and said something that made the crew laugh, and turn as one to look at me. It was a nasty gleeful sort of laugh at that. The kind of laugh that only members of an oppressed native majority can make when they are presented with an opportunity to indulge in some payback against one of their colonial masters.

  Suffice to say, Captain Jackson had not lied once in his little rant, and stood on the foredeck of the Jonah’s Lament, I felt as welcome as a case of the clap in a nunnery.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

  A Blade At My Throat…

  ‘W H E R E I S W E L L S’

  I’ll say this about painful, blinding, flashes of light burning into your iris, as a means of communication it has one overwhelming advantage over other methods. No matter how tired you are, no matter how long a shift you have just put in, no matter how exhausted mentally and physically you are, no matter how much your mind and body just want to shut down.

  It grabs your attention.

  ‘W H E R E I S W E L L S’

  I was lying on my bunk just after a shift that stretched longer than twenty-four hours because neither the SO nor the Captain bothered to tell me I had drawn the dog’s watch.

  I say drawn, that is a tad misleading, it implies that the rota had been drawn up in some reasonably fair equitable way. Rather the Captain had just decided that his new first officer could do the overnight watch. While the SO, whose job it would normally be, got a good eight hours in the sack. So from sunset to sunrise yours truly had command of the ship. At least in a theoretical sense at any rate.

  I had to walk the decks. Make sure the guys in the engine room were keeping the boiler stoked. Watch the pressure gauges, the alt meters, the lateral barometers and everything else, and make studious notes on the readings every half hour. It was dull, tedious work that I should have been able to delegate out to subordinates, only with the majority of the crew asleep, and the rest more than likely to ignore me if I tried to order them to do anything.

  None of which would have been quite so tedious if the ship had been moving rather than tied up for the night as we were, in still relatively friendly territory, at a small way station just north of Surat. And, more importantly, had I not spent the whole day following the SO around, while being generally ignored by both him and the crew. Save of course for the occasional snide comment in relation to my competence to serve as the first officer.

  In other circumstances, I would’ve put placing me on the dog’s watch down to simple hazing. You know the kind of things, see what the new guy is made of, and all that. Push his buttons a little, shake the tree, make them pull the longest of shifts, and what not. But this wasn’t a little hazing, it was simple vindictiveness. No one wanted me here, the SO even less than anyone else.

  So after a long day learning, frankly, very little about the Jonah, and feeling somewhat resentful about the whole thing, I followed the SO to the cabin we were to supposed share. I’m not sure why I was surprised to see it only had the one solitary bunk when we got there. Even on the newest RAN ship, crew and officers alike were expected to share bunk space to save on weight. True on a RAN ship it was the junior officers who shared bunks, and the first officer would normally rate a cot of his own. But the Jonah was an old ship by any standards, and me and the SO were the only officers other than the Captain. So a shared bunk it was, and I wasn’t going to get to sleep in it this night, clearly. I knew that even before he said the fateful words…

  “You have the night watch, Chutiya,” without even bothering to say ‘Captain’s orders’ or anything to justify it. Indeed throwing his hat on the tiny desk by the wash basin he just climbed into our bunk. Turned over and proceeded to go straight to sleep. I’d no idea at the time what ‘Chutiya’ meant. But I guessed it was not a term of respect.

  So ten long hours of the dog’s watch stretched out in front of me, and while it was very tempting to find somewhere quiet to hunker down for a couple of hours in the middle of it, I could h
azard a guess the Captain was a nightwalker. Particularly on this night if it meant he could catch his new first asleep on the job. I would not have put that past the SO either. So I made my way to the mess room and loaded myself up with what was probably coffee at one time but had since become watered down tar. And set about studiously following the rulebook as far as an officer of the watch was concerned.

  At the end of the night, I handed the logs over to the Captain, saluted, and was more or less ignored until he could be bothered to dismiss me. Then headed back to the cabin, where the SO was still shaving and collapsed into the bunk.

  I didn’t even bother to listen to whatever veiled insults came my way as I was utterly exhausted by that point. Then about ten minutes later, just after the SO left the cabin and crashed the door shut behind him to wake me one last time, I dropped off into a fitful exhausted sleep, about five minutes before…

  ‘W H E R E I S W E L L S’

  The message burned into my iris one letter at a time and casting ghosts of itself everywhere I looked, ghosts that stayed when I closed my eye.

  I shot out of the bunk somewhere around the second E and found myself leaning heavily on the sink for support by the first L, dry heaving as panic took me and my head pounded with an instantaneous migraine.

  I’d been there before, if you remember, on the Empress that first morning. Let me tell you, it doesn’t get any easier just because you have gone through it before. Luckily though this time, I wasn’t trying to shave.

  As I got the hyperventilating under control, I looked up into the tiny four-inch mirror that we were supposed to use for shaving and in the vain hope that whoever was watching me could lip read, I mouthed, “How the hell would I know?”