by Nancy Holder
“Mother,” he whispered.
And something nearby did, and didn’t, answer him. Boots echoed on the deck. He closed his eyes and tensed. His face throbbed. His broken fingers ached.
Curry hefted himself to a sitting position. He was drained; there was nothing left of him. He was sinking into the ship, the cursed ship; he was dying and Reade would have his soul. Damned, and deserving of it; Curry had murdered a hundred people, and he had devoured their flesh to stay alive.
A noise, distant, a piece of death.
Dead fish float, he thought incoherently. If he died, dear God, don’t let him sink. Let him float, far away, out to sea, where Reade couldn’t touch him.
Three hours of searching, and no one knew where the captain was, and they wouldn’t let Donna go onto the bridge, and no one seemed to give a good goddamn that her gun was missing.
She shook her head and folded the map she’d taken from the stateroom. She’d conscientiously gone through all the public areas, and a few reserved for the staff. Now she’d meander, in time-honored police tradition, and hope something came of it. Jeez, she had to bump into somebody sooner or later: the list of people she was looking for was growing by the minute: Phil, Elise, Ramón, Reade, anybody in charge.
What was that ship she read about in Flotsam, the one where everybody disappeared? Marie Celeste, something like that. Yeah, well, the Pandora was proving to be her sister ship.
Scowling, she took some stairs marked “Crew Only.” They were steep, and dirty; she hoped she didn’t get her red dress too scuffed up. She must look great, sandals and satin. Glenn would—
Her heart became a fist. Fuck Glenn.
The stairs dropped her below decks into the bowels of the ship. It wasn’t so pretty there; no carpets and white walls, no quaint hurricane light fixtures. Just rusty, greasy guardrails and metal steps, loops of electric wires and utility lights clipped to them. No need to play dress-up for the crew, who knew what ships were really all about: grease and oil and lots of cogs and gears meshing together, and a hull that cut the water into two parts: the surface, and everything else.
The thunka-thunka of machinery slathered the air with a greasy tang of diesel fuel as Donna descended another flight of stairs and stepped out onto space on a catwalk perhaps two feet wide. The sides were flimsy and painted with Rust-Oleum, and the whole thing shook as she walked along it. To her left, riveted sections stuck out from one another like the cutaway of a dirty stereo cabinet: big shelves, little shelves, junk inside them: wrenches, Coke cans, beer bottles, paper-backs. Wadded-up cigarette packs.
A pair of snazzy bikini underpants, ice-pink with lace inserts. New, expensive. Maybe Elise van Buren-Hadley was slumming?
Donna walked on, keeping to the shadows whenever possible so she wouldn’t get busted and sent back to Go. Voices drifted by. The catwalks and cables extended in both directions; it was like being inside a blimp. Somewhere below her, the cavern must be divided into neat watertight compartments. All she saw when she leaned over the side were more catwalks and hundreds of pipes and valves. Christ, if you wanted to hide out on the Pandora, it would be a cinch.
She didn’t have a watch because it was on the Morris, but it had to be almost midnight. The air rose and fell around her like breath, and the handrails were sweaty and slick; now and then she almost heard a deep, shuddering sigh; and though she chalked it up to machinery, the sound prickled her scalp. She was snooping around in the innards of the ship, in the greased-up guts, with the catwalks intersecting each other like hundreds of feet of intestines; the oceanic space was a giant stomach cavity. Voilà Officer Osmond, bobbing through it like some dot of bacteria.
After a second of indecision, she chose the right-most of two stairways (ladderways, she corrected herself; on ships they were ladderways) and clomped down it, clang, clang, clang, attention, please, here I am. Wondered idly if Captain Nemo was a mother yet.
Someone else walked down a ladderway: footfalls clanged against hers with a discordant metallic ringing that made her grimace and run her tongue along her front teeth. It was like listening to someone run their fingers down a chalkboard. She saw no one, though. She went on.
Down, farther down, where the shadows lengthened despite the lights; and the dank living smells grew stronger. Donna ducked her head beneath an electrical cord silhouetted in the gloom; and another, looped and roped haphazardly across the catwalk. Wires and cords dangled every which way, coiled around metal posts, trailing over the catwalks, punched into square blocks of extension cords. If she wasn’t careful, she would fucking hang herself.
Then from down below, a set of rolling vibrations expanded into the silence, whum, whum, WHUM, whum, whum, WHUM. They rumbled through her palms as she held the rails; the soles of her feet, her knees. Her groin. It sounded like a huge, unbalanced washing machine, or a fly-wheel when the timing was off.
Or a boy, spinning on a lake …
Donna peered below. No light shone at all. The vast blackness spread beneath her feet like a maw, and she hadn’t brought a flashlight.
Okay, time to go back up. She imagined herself a scuba diver, tapping a watch at a dive buddy and pointing her thumb toward the surface: See ya at decompression, bro.
She turned around. Saw the double stairways and decided to go up the left one this time.
Chips of ice flow with the current of the glass-clear water; ice packs the spaces between the mountains; rivulets of opaque water like rivers of solid water in a world of liquid ice.
The frigid water and the absence of salt preserve. Centuries of wood lie scarcely blemished; rusted metal only rusts.
Fish move in and out with the ice. They dart into the holes, the wounds, the shattered windows. They swim into the porcelain sinks, the bathtubs, the toilets, and out again. They trail the broken masts and coil around the anchors.
Above, the sun glides over; the moon.
The ice glistens. The fish shimmer.
The silverware sparkles. The glasses fill with sand, empty with tide.
Jewelry glitters. A fragment of fabric waves.
In the captain’s chair, a body sits. It is dressed in a black suit and it wears a black cap, and an eye patch. Its hair is red and its eye, its single eye, stares through the ice. It lifts slightly with the undulation of the current; the fish swim around but do not light upon it. It sits, it stares, it dreams.
It dreams for—
COME.
“Shit!” Donna cried, sagging against the railing. She whirled around and hung over it. Her hair fell forward, momentarily blinding her.
Panicking, she brushed it away. She was shaking all over. She was on the verge of wetting her pants.
Goddamn, what was that? Hallucination?
“Goddamn. Goddamn.” Something at her, something in her—ice water in her brains—she’s the one—
the one
the one
Bile rose in her throat. Her hands trembled badly as she wiped her hair from her face and fought to control herself.
the one
“Fuck,” she spat harshly, and started up the stairway fast, hard, though her muscles lurched and her mind was screaming.
Screaming.
COME.
Cha-cha stepped from the shadows as Officer Donna ran up the ladderway, for a moment diverted by the idea that he could see up her dress.
COME.
Then he turned his attention back to the hatch, oh, yes, baby, yes; maybe she’d heard it, too, and that was why she’d stopped dead and then started cussing. Oh, yes, ’cuz there was something in there, something psychedelically supercalifrage, and Cha-cha had whooped like a fire horn when he found the hatch that would lead him to it. He had spent hours looking for it, down,
down
down
in the bowels of the ship, the good, empty belowdecks, after he had … after …
He couldn’t remember, but he knew whatever he’d been doing had had something to do with a knife, which he had dutifully put back
in the museum.
Now he ran his hand along the exterior metal plate. There was a slash about three inches wide near the bottom of the door on the left side. He got on his hands and knees and peered into it. Knock, knock, who’s there? Why, it’s Cha-cha, baby, ready to go down the hatch. He giggled high, very high, like a teakettle.
He saw nothing, so he stuck in his hand. Was something there? Did he hear a strange slithering noise?
“Rats,” he said worriedly, and withdrew his hand. He rose and ran his hands over the door. Not rats, no, baby. Something was in here, and it was good.
With a sigh, he laid his cheek against the metal. Never mind the grime and dirt. Diesel residue was part of nature, man, and he was into nature.
“Here I come, ready or not. Here I come.” He wrapped his hand around the handle.
And then another voice swept into his brain:
Cha-cha, Cha-cha, me boyo, me bravo. Cha-cha, move away from that place. Move
away from it!
Cha-cha cocked his head and jerked up his hand, to show it wasn’t loaded. “King? That you, baby?”
Away from it. Away away away. Intense, heavy, worried.
He looked around. “Your Majesty?”
“Cha-cha!”
Cha-cha ducked down and whirled around, shielding his eyes from the harsh beam of a flashlight.
“Cha-cha, what are you doing?”
“What?” He looked over his shoulder at the hatch. He had wanted very badly to go in there. Hadn’t he? There was a treat in there.
Wasn’t there?
He reached again for the latch.
“No!” the figure shouted. Cha-cha jumped. It stepped into the light, and sure enough, it was King Neptune in his captain’s uniform. “You may not go in there.”
Cha-cha squinted at him. “There’s someone in there,” he ventured.
“No.” The king slung himself over the rail and walked toward him. Halted when he was about fifteen feet away. He made a half turn, standing in profile. Such a king. Such a big guy. Cha-cha admired him, began to forget where he was, and why.
COME.
“There!” Cha-cha cried. “Did you hear that?”
“I … I don’t hear anything.” King Neptune pivoted on his heel, slow motion. Stared at the door. He shook so hard Cha-cha could see it. “I am the captain,” he whispered. “I am.”
“Yeah,” Cha-cha said, confused. “But—”
“Cha-cha, come with me. Fast.” His Supreme Oceanic Majesty held out his arms, and Cha-cha shuffled through the rat poop and the trash and the stinky, slidy stuff toward him.
“But there’s—” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, then rubbed his hands together. “Isn’t there someone in—”
“No!” His arm around Cha-cha’s shoulders, he bounded to the railing and flung one leg over. The way he pulled on Cha-cha, he almost fell over.
“But we should—”
The king ran up the ladderway, dragging Cha-cha behind.
Below, something called:
COME COME COME COME COME COME COME COME.
Called urgently. Tantalizingly.
And someone groaned. Cha-cha looked over his shoulder.
“Hurry, damn you!” King Neptune shouted.
Cha-cha and his cosmic karmic commander headed for the surface of the ship.
At the top of the ladder, the captain stopped. Under control, stay under control … why this mindless panic?
There was nothing in that room. In that room, that dying room, where he sent the dead men. The sacrifices. Nothing in there.
He was the captain! He was the way, and the power, and
alone, alone, all, all—
and the waters had churned as Captain Reade, late of the Royal Grace, reached for the bottle and uncorked it, dear God, he was so cold; he had drifted into ice floes, and the waters churned and from the depths arose
“Come, Cha-cha,” he said in a loud voice, drowning out—
drowning out
a bad dream, and nothing else.
“My love.”
Gasping, Ruth raised her head from the sink. Her throat ached. Blood gushed from her nose and ran down her chin. Her hands were clenched around the porcelain sides and as she threw back her head and gasped for air, her knees buckled and she fell to the floor.
She sprawled on her back, staring up at the light fixture as her chest worked spasmodically. Her fists opened, closed, opened again.
She coughed and a jet of watery vomit gushed from her mouth. She rolled over on her side, marveling distractedly that so much could have collected inside her.
And the blood! A torrent from her nose, a bucket of it as she got to her hands and knees, slipping in the wet, and pulled herself to a kneeling position at the sink. The water was the color of rust. Was there any left inside her head?
Hacking hard, she rested her cheek on the sink. Sweet Jesus. Dear, sweet Jesus, what had she been doing?
My love.
“Oh,” she gasped. “S-Stephen?”
Unsteadily she rose, not daring to let go of the sink to wipe her mouth. Fresh blood plopped into the sink. Her wet hair streamed into her shoulders; she knew when she looked into the mirror she would see an aged crone, a bloodied skull-thing that would terrify Matty if he saw it.
She closed her eyes as she lifted her head, because it would terrify her as well.
And then she opened her mouth to scream, though no scream came out.
Because she was no longer holding on to the sink. Her hands rested in someone else’s.
Stephen Hamilton, lost at sea these eleven months, stood before her.
“Ruth,” he said, pulling her to him. “Ruth, my darling.”
She put her arms around his neck and began to cry. Her blood smeared across his white Windbreaker; he held her head and rocked her. His heart beat in her ear; his sun-leathered hand cupped her under the chin.
“Ruth.”
She couldn’t speak. She only nodded. He was here. He was here and he had been here all along. She knew it now. She knew. She knew.
They stood for a long, long time, in a fuzzy darkness that was somehow soothing. She didn’t know where they were now; she didn’t understand how; she didn’t care. There are more things on heaven and earth. There are more things.
There is Stephen.
He stroked her hair, her cheeks. Daubed her face with the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. After a time, she seemed to awaken as if from a doze; she started and he said, “Shh, shh, it’s all right now, dear.”
He took her hand and led her—
startled, she looked around—
—led her through a maze of tables in an immense and beautiful ballroom. The walls were paneled and lacquered with art deco figures of the sea gods and goddesses; and above the dais where band instruments were arranged, a golden statue at least twenty feet tall watched over them. Robes flowed around the figure in streamlined grace, and his hair coursed down his shoulders. In his left hand he held a trident; Neptune, Ruth supposed, though he reminded her more of God. The features of his face were pleasant, though modeled with a heavy hand, imbuing them with an underlying sense of power.
No, not Neptune, for he was missing an eye. And his features were those of another man.
“Captain Reade,” she breathed. The unmoving form gazed down on her like a guardian.
“He brought me to you, Ruth,” Stephen said.
Past tables draped with jade and salmon, glittering with silver, he escorted her, easing her along on her sore legs. Her knees were bruising; her stomach was upset and her nose had begun to bleed again. With her free hand she wiped fiercely at it, rubbed her fingers on her nightgown. It was covered with blood and vomit; he didn’t seem to notice.
“Sit, darling.” He eased her onto a padded chair at a table for two. “Sit, and I’ll order drinks.”
He raised his hand. A steward appeared at the far end of the room, on the other side of the dance floor, and floated toward them. Floate
d, his feet inches above the ground.
Ice poured through Ruth’s head and she doubled forward and grabbed it. Questions, terror flooded in—what was happening? Dear God, how was he here? And how—
“Champagne for my love.” The steward nodded, floated away. She knew that man. She knew him. He was … She blinked hard. Her head ached with the cold. He was Kevin! The surfer boy on the Morris!
The room spun around and around. A strange rattling sound orbited her, chatter, chatter, chatter-scrabble. Her closet door, on the Morris. She was kneeling by her porthole and dreaming all this; and someone had whispered in her ear:
Jump overboard, Ruth.
Jump now.
Before it’s too late.
Her heart stalled. Then Stephen slid his hand over hers and squeezed between her fingers, the way they used to do when they first got married. He liked to see their wedding rings side by side. His gleamed on his hand—
his hand of black pulp—
No, on his wonderful, tanned hand; his strong, brilliant hand.
The steward reappeared with a tray. On it sat a bottle in a silver bucket and two champagne flutes.
“Kevin?” she ventured.
He winked at her. “Hi, Mrs. Hamilton. Surf’s up.” With a flourish, he presented the bottle. “Retrieved from the Titanic. Never opened.”
It didn’t look like a champagne bottle. It was green, with gold stripes running through it, and there were jewels around the neck.
Kevin wrapped a towel around the top and pushed at the cork with his thumbs. Stop, she wanted to say. Stop; this is a dead man’s bottle and it holds a dead man’s potion; it will kill me if I drink it. It’s a libation; they used to pour blood on the deck to ensure a good voyage; and that was a symbol of the earlier days, when they would kill someone, actually kill a living person. A slave—
How did she know that?
What was he doing here? What was she doing here?
“Oh, Stephen,” she blurted in a flash of panic. “Stephen, Stephen, I don’t understand!”
He faced her and wiped her wet hair away from her face, caressing her cheeks.