A Spider In The Eye

by Mark Hayes

  The infamous Muldarin, remember him? Well, he liked to skin English officers alive, very slowly.

  I’m also told that he was rather fonder of the odd crucifixion than you would have suspected as a Hindu. A fate which, I’m reliably told, is far from a doddle.

  Then, while we are on the subject, there were these Thuggie strong men who Muldarin used to take along for the ride. They apparently consider it a test of strength to crush a man’s skull with their bare hands. If, so they tell me, you were really lucky, you got one of the ones who were actually capable of doing this feat of strength first time. If you were unlucky, the lesser Thuggies would take it in turns to try to do so, until your head went pop.

  None of these fates, or the numerous other nasty ways to dispose of British officers which rebels have come up with over the years, held much appeal to me.

  So there I was, cramped up in that little secret hold. I’d followed my evasion and escape training to the letter and taken stock of my inventory. So I decided to make the best use of that inventory I could think of.

  I started drinking the rhaki.

  My reasoning was simple enough. If I was going to die a painful, slow and nasty death at the hands of the hijackers, I might as well be blind drunk when it happened.

  Say what you like about rhaki, it may not be real scotch, but it will get you drunk quicker than it will rot your insides. Only marginally, it’s true. So by the time I’d finished the first bottle, I’d ceased to care about the taste and any lingering effects it might have on me.

  I was on my second bottle, the world by this time a blur, when I heard footsteps in the hold. Heavy booted ones and more than one pair.

  I tried to focus on how many I could hear and picking out the individual ones. Which was harder than you may think as it was hard to focus with my head swimming with booze the way it was. However, by listening very carefully, I figured out there was a heavy-footed big guy, another heavy-footed big guy, the big guy in boots with steel nails in the sole, and a light-footed one. So maybe four hijackers, maybe more.

  Thinking on this, I took another drink.

  In my defence, getting drunk may have been a damn fool idea, but I was out of good ones. This way, at least, I might die with a smile on my face.

  My stomach lurched a little as the ship gained altitude again. I didn’t feel too good, and the footsteps on the deck plates were only getting closer. So I took another swig of the paint stripper that masqueraded as liquor and fumbled with my revolver. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my drunken logic told me if I had a gun in my hand they would probably shoot me and it would be over quick. I might even take one with me though I personally doubt I considered that. Not that I’m not capable of being vindictive, you understand. But I wasn’t sure at the time that I knew which end of the gun I was holding.

  I think I cried out at some point, as my gun stuck in my holster and I got myself in a tangle. “Bloody arse briskets.” Or something equally absurd. Realising that these could possibly be my last words got my gander up a tad.

  I’ve always wanted my last words to be more like, ‘That’s it, dear, suck harder.’ Uttered in my dotage to some girl a third my age at the time. It’s a vulgar idea, I know, but there you are, a man can dream these idle dreams.

  “Behind there,” I think someone said, though it may not have been those words or in English. I just knew with dreadful certainty what the sounds meant for me.

  The deck plates rang out with further footsteps. Then there was a scraping of metal, and the flimsy plate covering the wall was pulled away. Revealing my good self in all my somewhat worse for wear glory.

  I looked up into the light of hand torches, fancy Tesla power things that shone in on me, making it impossible to see anything but their light.

  ‘Bravely’ for want of another word, I levelled my pistol in what may have been the right direction and uttered something that probably sounded incomprehensible to them. But, I reasoned at the time, if you can’t have a whole dream, you can, at least, have a bit of one.

  “That’s it, dear, suck harder.”

  All the while trying to remember how to pull the trigger.

  Which was when I heard the words… “Mr Smyth, so that’s where you’re hiding…” spoken by a voice I recognised, even through the fog of the rhaki. An impossible voice in the circumstances, but having said my desired last words or not, it led me to say something else.

  “Miss Wells?”

  The fog of the rhaki cleared long enough for me to recognise her face peering down at me with, of all things, a black eye patch over one eye. It made her look like a pirate, which I suppose she was right at that moment. She smiled down at me, nodded, then offered her hand towards me. No doubt in an effort to help me out of my ridiculous hidey-hole.

  It was at that point the rhaki in my stomach finally rebelled, and I lurched forward, catching myself on my hands before my head hit the deck plates, and in utterly unheroic fashion vacated the contents of my stomach all over them.

  And as my ill luck would have it Miss Wells’s well-polished, black boot.

  It wasn’t my finest hour.

  CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH

  The Famed Shangri-La Or Some Other Mythical Place.

  So, I’ve had better moments. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? Instead, let’s jump ahead a little. If only to preserve a little of my dignity.

  What happened next was I spent the next several days or more, a week perhaps, locked up in my cabin. Not that they needed to lock the door all things considered, because I was nursing a stomach that rebelled every time I ate food, and had cramps worse than needles the rest of the time.

  On top of that little indignity, I also had a recurring case of the runs on the rare occasions I actually kept anything down. And of course, nothing but a bucket to squat over that was emptied once a day by an angry-looking man. He looked like he considered bucket duty an insulting task, and that he would be more than ready to vent his spleen on the subject by way of giving a good kicking if I gave him any gyp. All things considered, not least how bad I already felt, I kept my mouth shut for once. Perhaps that’s a sign of personal growth on my part. Or just a healthy sense of self-preservation. Either way I spent most of the time curled up on my bunk and lying to myself, “Never again…”

  It was, at least, three days, but could have been more like five, before I was fully in charge of my faculties once more. A bout of severe rhaki-induced alcohol poisoning on top of the spicy food I wasn’t used to, were not the only things that had laid me low. I believe I was suffering from mild hysteria as well if I’m honest. I had been very out of it, such that it all felt a little akin to a near-death experience. Combine this with seeing the delightful Miss Wells in all her glory, like the light of heaven, coming to my rescue bathed in a halo of light. Though that could have been just her framed in the torchlight.

  Of course, I then threw up on her, which spoiled the mood somewhat. I suspect she was the one that gave me a nasty little kick to the head at that point. Payment for the insult done her. Judging by the bruise I had on my temple she had meant it too, though that could just as well have been caused by me falling down.

  Most of those first few days in my cabin were a bit of a haze, truth be told. I have a vague recollection of Saffron coming in at some point and strapping an odd monticule thing over my head, which covered my left eye. It had a green tint to the lens that made my vision seem strange. One eye normal, while one had this green sheen to everything.

  When I examined it in the mirror, I noticed it had an odd design on the lens. One I could not see from inside it. The design was made with lots of little wires and odd components. I wanted to remove it to take a closer look, but something told me that would be the definition of unwise. Uncomfortable though it undoubtedly was, it was definitely doing something. I could no longer feel that almost constant itching I’d hated but grown so used to. Whatever she’d made me wear it seemed to have put the spider in my eye to sleep. A little discomfort was a sm
all price to pay for that, all considered.

  Besides which I was not the only one wearing strange devices. Miss Wells had one much the same as mine. It was this I’d mistaken for an eye patch in my drunken haze. It didn’t take too much of a wild guess to figure out the device was some way to subvert The Ministry’s control of its little spider. I was, as I said, all for it.

  After a few days, I was feeling my more robust self again. Enough that I asked the bucket carrier to bring a tub of water for the sink in my room so I could clean myself up at the very least. The ship didn’t have running water in the cabins. It was, after all, no liner, just a tatty old gunship that should’ve been sent for scrap years before. But it did have a little sink with a drain, and a mirror which showed me a stranger whenever I looked in it. A haggard mess with a month’s worth of beard, which made it look all the worse. I hadn’t looked that bad after my stay in the New Bailey.

  The bucket fetcher growled something in Hindi at me that I vaguely recognised as an insult when I asked for water, but he came back an hour later all the same with the second bucket of relatively clear stuff. I didn’t ask for a razor despite the beard getting the better of my chin. It was, after all, an unlikely request to be granted. Whatever else was going on here, I was reasonably certain I was a captive. I hadn’t tried to leave the cabin, at any rate. Some things are clear without words needing to be spoken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what happened if I did.

  Besides I had a razor already. Surprisingly my stubble slicer was still in my boot. These pirates, or whatever they were, had been somewhat lax when it came to searching my person. Possibly that was due to me vomiting everywhere at the time. So something good came from my disgrace as. Small victories and all that. Yet I thought it wise not to give the secret of my razor away and went without a shave, no matter how tempting it was.

  I did my best to make myself presentable. Partly this was just a pride thing, and a desire to straighten myself out a bit. Even the beard didn’t look too bad once I had scrubbed at it a while and forced it into some kind of order. If I am honest it wasn’t just a pride thing; it was also partly in the hope Miss Wells might come back to see me now I was a tad more human again. It wouldn’t do to be unpresentable in that event. Vain of me, I know, but one must keep up one’s appearance. Even if, as I suspected, the impression I left in the cargo hold was one I would never quite live down.

  The days dragged past slowly. The deck plates vibrating with engine noise. The air growing thinner. Wherever we were headed, it was at high altitudes. Up in the mountains, I suspected. Not that it was much of a leap of deduction to make. The Himalayas have always been the haunt of bandits and brigands. It’s all those hidden little valleys offering such fine places to retreat to when things got nasty. For your Johnny come lately insurrectionist, they were just too damn inviting.

  What little I could see through the tiny porthole in my cabin seemed mostly cloudbanks and mist. From the glow of the sun, however, I’d gathered we were predominantly heading east. What little I recalled of sub-continent geography from my school days made me suspect that meant Nepal, which is, after all, a kingdom of those nice little hidden valleys. It was that or we were going to turn north at some point to cross the whole range over to China. Either way, it mattered little as I had damn all say in it. But wherever we were going, it was away from Imperial India. Which made sense, as you don’t go stealing British gunships and hang around where they might find you, but it didn’t bode well for me. The British haven’t been popular in Peking since before the boxer rebellion. While the Nepalese have been staunchly independent for the last century or so, and were left to it as they didn’t have much of anything anyone wanted. Indeed the mountain kingdoms made for perfect buffers between the great powers, and neither us nor the Chinese wanted each other for neighbours. Each empire had enough to keep themselves busy between our African adventures and China’s continued attempts to annex what was left of Japan.

  I always felt a little sorry for the Japs. Tying themselves so closely to the Americans had cost them dear when the US fell to its inner turmoils just as the Land of the Sun had started to rise. Of course officially we British disapprove of China’s empire building across the Sea of Japan.

  ‘Going around invading a sovereign nation and sticking your flag in the ground is dashed foul play, don’t you know?’ says the greatest empire builders the world has ever known.

  I may be a tad cynical, but I’ve long suspected the main cause of British disproval of Chinese foreign policy in this regard was not due to outrage at Japan’s invasion, but because the Chinese got there before us…

  But regardless of my opinion on such trivialities as foreign policy, Nepal, buffer though it may be, was no place for an Englishman. Not since those couple of lackaday adventurers, Dravot and Carnehan tried to set themselves up as kings around those parts a century or so ago.

  But as I didn’t have much say in the matter, I tried not to let it worry me too much.

  I spent most of my time sleeping, eating what they gave me as slowly as I could in the hope my stomach would retain it and wishing I’d a book or two to pass the time, not that I’m much of a reader as a rule. Mostly though, despite my predicament as a captive of some unknown force of rebels or pirates, who in all likelihood just hadn’t gotten around to killing me yet, I was bored to tears.

  Odd I know, but I can tell you from bitter experience that being a prisoner awaiting your death is one of the most boring things imaginable you can live through. Death cells don’t go in much for entertainment, either in the Old Bailey or locked in a cabin on a stolen airship. Either way, the end result is much the same, boredom then death.

  I’ll admit I was feeling a little morbid at the time. Though as the days stretched on, I felt there was at least a little hope that I wasn’t for the chop straight away. They kept feeding me for one thing. Though that could have been them using a weird way to kill me off considering the quality of the food. Rebels and pirates never seem to have good chefs in my experience.

  That I know this to be the case, says a lot about my experiences…

  If anything, however, I realised after a few days I was probably safer now than I’d been with my actual crew. The realisation of this led to me even cheering up a little and made me look at the bigger picture. Mostly the bigger picture I looked at was imagining Captain Jackson and Second Officer Singh trying to explain how they lost their command. Which I suppose is a tad petty of me. But, thoughts of those who did me a wrong one suffering, well such thoughts always brighten my day.

  Small victories and what have you…

  In any regard, somewhere around the seventh day or so by my reckoning, which was shaky at best, I felt the ship sinking for the first time in what seemed like an age. Investigating through the little porthole, I could see little. Just a veil of cloud which enveloped us as we descended and obscured my view of what lay beyond the ship. We started being buffeted by the turbulent mountain air pockets, and I will admit I started to worry a little.

  Only two kinds of pilots take a ship down through clouds in a mountain range. Though who know exactly what they are doing and where they are going, and utter morons. The way the ship was being swung about I had to hope it was the former, because the latter was going to get us all killed.

  There was one thing for certain, however, we were definitely going down into some kind of valley.

  What should have happened next I realise, at least for literary merit, is that the clouds should have parted to reveal the wondrous valley into which we were sinking. Some kind of remote nirvana, high in the Himalayas. The famed Shangri-la or some other such mythical place.

  Sadly what actually happened was the ship stopped going down suddenly, and a few minutes later I heard the winch start up. At which point I realised the clouds we were descending through were more like a dense fog, and I still had no bloody idea where I was.

  On the bright side, the ship had not been torn apart on rocks, and we seem to have
made safe harbour, wherever we were. Having avoided being involved in a god awful crash, my day could have been going a lot worse on the whole.

  I stalked around the tiny cabin for a while. Listening for footsteps on the deck plates outside. Then popped open the porthole in the hope of hearing what was going on outside. It was of course way too small to climb through. Not that it would be a wise course of action if it were. I may not know where I was, but I could hazard a guess that there would be no one friendly about. If I started trying to escape the most likely thing to happen would be capture and chains on my legs. That or something sharp in the guts at any rate.

  I could hear muffled voices outside, much as I expected, however, they weren’t speaking English so even if I could’ve heard them properly, I’d a chocolate fireguard’s chance of learning anything.

  Somewhere a dull ringing sound came out of the fog. Deep and low sounding, it took me a moment to realise it was from some form of a bell. A slow deep ring more like a thud than a peel. I realised we were definitely at some place with people and not just hunkering down for the night. If I seem surprisingly keen to find out where, possibly it was just because I was bored sick of looking at the inside of my cabin.

  An hour or two must have passed before they sent anyone for me. My guess was the crew were reporting in first. Your guess as to with whom was as good as mine at that point. I was, however, hoping that I was missing with my guess. Coincidences seemed to be piling up, you see. Maythorpe on the liner, Bad Penny in the hotel, Saffron and her pirates just happened to steal my airship. There was an air of the inevitable about it all. As if a story was being written and I was just being pulled along by the narrative.

  I know that sounds ridiculous, but a week of isolation at thin altitudes can give you all kinds of odd ideas…