by Ellen Datlow
IV
The captain was one of those splendidly tough and cheerful specimens of seafaring humanity whose combined courage, hardihood, and calmness in difficulty leads them naturally into high positions of trust. He was not the man to be led away by an idle tale, and the mere fact that he was willing to join me in the investigation was proof that he thought there was something seriously wrong, which could not be accounted for on ordinary theories, nor laughed down as a common superstition. To some extent, too, his reputation was at stake, as well as the reputation of the ship. It is no light thing to lose passengers overboard, and he knew it.
About ten o’clock that evening, as I was smoking a last cigar, he came up to me and drew me aside from the beat of the other passengers who were patrolling the deck in the warm darkness.
“This is a serious matter, Mr. Brisbane,” he said. “We must make up our minds either way—to be disappointed or to have a pretty rough time of it. You see I cannot afford to laugh at the affair, and I will ask you to sign your name to a statement of whatever occurs. If nothing happens to-night, we will try it again to-morrow and next day. Are you ready?”
So we went below, and entered the state-room. As we went in I could see Robert the steward, who stood a little further down the passage, watching us, with his usual grin, as though certain that something dreadful was about to happen. The captain closed the door behind us and bolted it.
“Supposing we put your portmanteau before the door,” he suggested. “One of us can sit on it. Nothing can get out then. Is the port screwed down?”
I found it as I had left it in the morning. Indeed, without using a lever, as I had done, no one could have opened it. I drew back the curtains of the upper berth so that I could see well into it. By the captain’s advice I lighted my reading lantern and placed it so that it shone upon the white sheets above. He insisted upon sitting on the portmanteau, declaring that he wished to be able to swear that he had sat before the door.
Then he requested me to search the state-room thoroughly, an operation very soon accomplished, as it consisted merely in looking beneath the lower berth and under the couch below the porthole. The spaces were quite empty.
“It is impossible for any human being to get in,” I said, “or for any human being to open the port.”
“Very good,” said the captain, calmly. “If we see anything now, it must be either imagination or something supernatural.”
I sat down on the edge of the lower berth.
“The first time it happened,” said the captain, crossing his legs and leaning back against the door, “was in March. The passenger who slept here, in the upper berth, turned out to have been a lunatic—at all events, he was known to have been a little touched, and he had taken his passage without the knowledge of his friends. He rushed out in the middle of the night, and threw himself overboard, before the officer who had the watch could stop him. We stopped and lowered a boat; it was a quiet night, just before that heavy weather came on; but we could not find him. Of course his suicide was afterwards accounted for on the grounds of his insanity.”
“I suppose that often happens?” I remarked rather absently.
“Not often—no,” said the captain: “never before in my experience, though I have heard of it happening on board of other ships. Well, as I was saying, that occurred in March. On the very next trip—“What are you looking at?” he asked, stopping suddenly in his narration.
I believe I gave no answer. My eyes were riveted upon the porthole. It seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn very slowly upon the screw—so slowly, however, that I was not sure it moved at all. I watched it intently, fixing its position in my mind, and trying to ascertain whether it changed. Seeing where I was looking, the captain looked too.
“It moves!” he exclaimed, in a tone of conviction. “No, it does not,” he added, after a minute.
“If it were the jarring of the screw,” said I, “it would have opened during the day; but I found it this evening jammed tight as I left it this morning.”
I rose and tried the nut. It was certainly loosened, for by an effort I could move it with my hands.
“The queer thing,” said the captain, “is that the second man who was lost is supposed to have got through that very port. We had a terrible time over it. It was in the middle of the night, and the weather was very heavy; there was an alarm that one of the ports was open and the sea running in. I came below and found everything flooded, the water pouring in every time she rolled, and the whole port swinging from the top bolts—not the porthole in the middle. Well, we managed to shut it, but the water did some damage. Ever since that the place smells of sea-water from time to time. We supposed the passenger had thrown himself out, though the Lord only knows how he did it. The steward kept telling me that he cannot keep anything shut here. Upon my word—I can smell it now, cannot you?” he enquired, sniffing the air suspiciously.
“Yes—distinctly,” I said, and I shuddered as that same odour of stagnant sea-water grew stronger in the cabin. “Now, to smell like this, the place must be damp,” I continued, “and yet when I examined it with the carpenter this morning everything was perfectly dry. It is most extraordinary—hallo!”
My reading lantern, which had been placed in the upper berth, was suddenly extinguished. There was still a good deal of light from the pane of ground glass near the door, behind which loomed the regulation lamp. The ship rolled heavily, and the curtain of the upper berth swung far out into the state-room and back again. I rose quickly from my seat on the edge of the bed, and the captain at the same moment started to his feet with a loud cry of surprise. I had turned with the intention of taking down the lantern to examine it, when I heard his exclamation, and immediately afterwards his call for help. I sprang towards him. He was wrestling with all his might with the brass loop of the port. It seemed to turn against his hands in spite of all his efforts. I caught up my cane, a heavy oak stick I always used to carry, and thrust it through the ring and bore on it with all my strength. But the strong wood snapped suddenly, and I fell upon the couch. When I rose again the port was wide open, and the captain was standing with his back against the door, pale to the lips.
“There is something in that berth!” he cried in a strange voice, his eyes almost starting from his head. “Hold the door, while I look—it shall not escape us, whatever it is!”
But instead of taking his place, I sprang upon the lower bed, and seized something which lay in the upper berth.
It was something ghostly, horrible beyond words, and it moved in my grip. It was like the body of a man long drowned, and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living; but I gripped it with all my might—the slippery, oozy, horrible thing—the dead white eyes seemed to stare at me out of the dusk; the putrid odour of rank sea-water was about it, and its shiny hair hung in foul wet curls over its dead face. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and forced me back and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpse’s arms about my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that I, at last, cried aloud and fell, and left my hold.
As I fell the thing sprang across me, and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. When I last saw him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the dead being, and then he, too, fell forward upon his face, with an inarticulate cry of horror.
The thing paused an instant, seeming to hover over his prostrate body, and I could have screamed again for very fright, but I had no voice left. The thing vanished suddenly, and it seemed to my disturbed senses that it made its exit through the open port, though how that was possible, considering the smallness of the aperture, is more than any one can tell. I lay a long time upon the floor, and the captain lay beside me. At last I partially recovered my senses and moved, and instantly I knew that my arm was broken—the small bone of the left forearm near the wrist.
I got upon my feet somehow, and with my remaining hand I tried to raise the captain.
He groaned and moved, and at last came to himself. He was not hurt, but he seemed badly stunned.
• • •
Well, do you want to hear any more? There is nothing more. That is the end of my story. The carpenter carried out his scheme of running half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of one hundred and five; and if you ever take passage in the Kamtschatka, you may ask for a berth in that state-room. You will be told that it is engaged—yes—it is engaged by that dead thing.
I finished the trip in the surgeon’s cabin. He doctored my broken arm, and advised me not to “fiddle about with ghosts and things” any more. The captain was very silent, and never sailed again in the ship, though it is still running. And I will not sail in her either. It was a very disagreeable experience, and I was very badly frightened, which is a thing I do not like. That is all. That is how I saw a ghost—if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow.
A Burning Sword for Her Cradle
Aliette de Bodard
Now
Bao Ngoc has set her appointment with the witch at dawn—because it would make her leave the house in the dark, at a time when neither her sister nor her brother-in-law would be awake.
Things, however, never work the way they’re supposed to.
She’s made her morning worship at her ancestral altar, leaving oranges and apples for her parents’ spirits, mouthing the familiar litany beseeching them for good fortune, gritting her teeth against the agony in her chest. Now she’s rummaging in the kitchen for coconut water, opening the cupboard in the darkness. In the background, the familiar buzz of the fridge, a warbling Bao Ngoc keeps—with effort, with pain—from turning into the angry remonstrances of ghosts.
The lights go on. They flood the room, harsh, unforgiving. “You’re up early,” Bao Chau says. She stands in the doorway, her white shift outlining the darkness of her skin, the round curves of her belly.
Bao Ngoc loses her fragile grip on the ghosts. They bubble up from the kitchen’s floor: a woman with a bloodied chest; three young children with bare ribcages and shriveled lumps of lungs within. They stare at her and Chau with dark, hate-filled eyes, their voices a low, piercing hiss that never seems to vary cadence or pitch, a litany of hate that ceaselessly worms its way into Bao Ngoc’s brain.
Behave be grateful blend in.
In her chest, the remnants of the sword Bao Ngoc once swallowed start burning in earnest, a sharper pain that slowly spreads to her belly and arms. It’s her protection against the ghosts, the only thing that will let her dispel them without obeying their orders.
The ghosts are the dead of the Federation: the hundred, the thousand unappeased spirits clinging to flats and streets and parks. They want order, peace. They want Bao Ngoc and Chau and all the immigrants from the Khanh nation to fit in. To belong to the Federation as if the war had never happened; as though the Khanh’s own losses and their own dead and their own culture didn’t matter.
This isn’t a price Bao Ngoc is willing to pay.
Be quiet don’t embarrass us quiet quiet . . .
Ten thousand diffuse cuts in Bao Ngoc’s esophagus and in her stomach, spreading like fire. She’s burning up, and any moment now it’ll show on her face, and Chau is going to worry about her needlessly.
Too many ghosts and too much fatigue, and Bao Ngoc’s sword can’t exorcise them all.
No choice. She’s going to have to obey them, if only for a moment, if only for once. To follow a tradition of the Federation rather than a Khanh one. Bao Ngoc closes the cupboard. She reaches, instead of the coconut water she’d intended to take from her personal supply, for the coffee Chau so likes in the morning.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Bao Ngoc’s voice shakes. She can’t control her own fingers, digging into her palms so hard they feel like knife stabs. The ghosts are staring at her—wavering, fading. “Can you find me the milk?”
Chau raises an eyebrow. “You don’t like milk.” She sighs and waddles into the kitchen, opening the fridge to peer inside. “I don’t know where Raoul’s left it. Hang on. . . .”
Chau comes back with the milk, and with butter and jam for herself. Bao Ngoc pours the tea into a mug, slowly and deliberately. The kitchen smells of sliced bread and the acrid smell of coffee, and the ghosts have receded to barely perceptible outlines, their voices subsumed in the faint whirring of the fridge’s compressor. Bao Ngoc breathes out, deeply: The sword’s pain is almost bearable, a mere blood-tinged sharpness in her throat.
Chau moves through the ghosts as though they aren’t there. They turn, briefly, to follow her, and then lose interest. They aren’t aware of Chau’s daughter, just as Chau’s daughter isn’t aware of them—blissfully sleeping in the womb, making bubbles in the amniotic sac as she extends small arms and legs, making small bumps as she punches into Chau’s belly.
But when the baby is born, that will change.
Chau chose to abandon her own sword, to dispel the ghosts by obeying them rather than by exorcising them: She’s fit in and can’t see them anymore. She has peace, at a price.
Her child, newborn and fragile and unable to follow any of the ghosts’ rules, will have no such protection. The ghosts will crowd around her from birth, will mold her into the perfect Federation citizen, obeying them and fearing them. She will forget her own people’s language and culture, and leave her ancestors’ altars untended. She will eat bread and butter, and ignore her Khanh aunts, Chau’s entire side of the family. The ghosts’ hatred and venom will hack away at her heritage, at who she is—until nothing remains.
And the worst is that she’ll never be aware that things could be so different.
Bao Ngoc has tried, again and again, to raise the matter with Chau. Chau doesn’t want to talk about the ghosts. They don’t bother her, any more than they bother Raoul, and they certainly shouldn’t be a concern for her daughter.
She’s wrong.
Hence Bao Ngoc’s appointment with the witch: the one who gave Bao Ngoc and Chau their swords, all those years ago. The one who can help Chau’s daughter.
“I have something to do at work,” Bao Ngoc says, lying with barely any effort. Chau wouldn’t approve of the witch, of superstitions like charms and dark magic. “Early meeting.”
Chau looks at Bao Ngoc suspiciously. Chau works as a magistrate and can tear lying witnesses to shreds in her tribunal, but she’s pregnant and exhausted, and of course she doesn’t want to believe that Bao Ngoc is lying. “You should say no,” she says. “They’re exploiting you.”
Don’t complain don’t make a fuss, the ghosts whisper in Bao Ngoc’s mind, but the sword’s pain is enough to shred their words into nothingness. “It’s just one day,” Bao Ngoc says. “It’s nothing.”
Again, that careful, skeptical stare from Chau. How she’s changed from the rail-thin, starved sister Bao Ngoc remembers from the war, from the camps. Chau, perfect, manicured Chau, with her dark, warm Federation woolen clothes, the kind that would have her sweating buckets, back home. The one with the well-paying job, with the husband and the unborn child—a good fortune she’s worked herself to exhaustion for, following all the rules, all the ghosts’ unspoken injunctions. No rice, no fish sauce, no hint of Khanh language in her home—no pictures of their parents framed on the walls, nor set on the table of an ancestral altar—the older aunties who escaped with Chau and Bao Ngoc seldom feasted at home for fear they’ll be an embarrassment. Chau, who no longer needs a sword’s protection, who has made herself so much part of the Federation she might as well have lived there for generations. No wonder she can’t see the ghosts anymore.
“You know what you’re doing,” Chau says finally.
Bao Ngoc thought she did, all those years ago in the camps. But it’s Chau who now knows exactly what she’s doing, and Bao Ngoc who has to struggle and suffer to fit into narrow, ill-defined gaps. “When is the sonogram?” she asks, to fill the silence. She can see the three ghosts, can feel their anger like a distant storm. They’re at bay; but they will come back, given half an excus
e, given improper behavior.
If Chau knows what she’s doing, she doesn’t let on. She says, with a tired nod, “At five.”
“Are you sure? Raoul—”
Chau shakes her head. “He’s been to all the other ones. I want you there, big’sis.” She squeezes Bao Ngoc’s hand, smiles. It never quite reaches her eyes, but then nothing does, those days.
Bao Ngoc squeezes back. “Of course.” She’ll see the child: Chau’s child, the future. And, if the witch comes through, she’ll have what she needs, to offer her niece the best of all possible gifts: safety.
Then
In the Federation’s camps, there were no ghosts.
Later, Bao Ngoc would realize it was because no one had ever lived there. Because there was no place in this flat, arid barrenness that the ghosts ever called home. Because putting refugees there wasn’t an invasion, but merely the natural order of things.
They heard about the ghosts, nevertheless. Not from the aid workers, but word was going around, in the makeshift temples and exercise rooms, around the narrow fires where they clustered, clutching the odd-tasting food that reminded them they were so far away from home.
The Federation was a land of ghosts—of hungry, angry spirits. Of howling, unappeased dead who hated interlopers and newcomers. Who hated immigrants and refugees, and endlessly tormented them as soon as they set foot on Federation land.
The aunts bought charms and amulets with calligraphied mantras, which they hung around Bao Ngoc and Chau’s necks. It’ll be enough, they said, again and again, their voices like a prayer. We’ll be safe once we’re in the Federation. People live there, and they’re not scared of ghosts. We’ll endure as we always have.
Bao Ngoc was old enough to know when adults were lying to themselves.
One afternoon, after the aunts settled down to play cards and mat chuoc, Bao Ngoc snuck into the tent and stole Ninth Aunt’s sword. She and Chau had their own swords, of course, for their self-defense; but they were small and ineffective. Ninth Aunt’s sword was the smallest of all the aunts’ swords, but it was light and easily wielded, and it was a real weapon.