The Hanged Man

by K. D. Edwards

  “Anything else?” Brand asked.

  “Yes. Apparently you really do swear like a sailor.”

  I stepped on something that crunched, and looked down to see a spinal column. My humor drained. The skeleton was in pieces, trailing from an overturned whaleboat. Rotting flags, life jackets, and first aid supplies spattered the ground.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” I said, subdued.

  Brand sighed and made an after-fucking-you gesture.

  * * *

  None of the steep stairways on the ship were easily transversed. The floor of one level was right in front of you as you descended, more or less at forehead height. There were no rounded corners or padding—walk into it, and you were catching a metal edge in your skull.

  The level below us buzzed with energy. Not just the ghost memories, but actual stored power, the type you found in traumatized ruins. I manifested two light cantrips, then sent them across the room, chasing away ambush points.

  I turned in a slow circle at a hatch door and saw a long series of compartments running along the side of the ship. Kitchen galleys, mess areas, and further along something that almost looked like a concourse.

  I’d have expected to hear creaking or groaning, or the rattling of old pipes. But the ship was as silent as the end of the world.

  In the corner of that first room was an open chapel. A wooden altar; two rows of easily storable and collapsible benches; a podium draped with a purple cloth, and the blue and white stars of America. On the altar was a two-sided cross, which could be reversed for different Christian services. The side facing me showed the Jesus, a hanged man of a much different temperament.

  I felt the edge of a ghost memory vibrating in front of the altar. I tapped Brand’s forearm and then wrapped my fingers around it.

  I relaxed into the grayness. The handsome young man—Pretty Boy— was on his knees in front of the cross, on a painted metal floor that had the unforgiving feel of concrete. Another man squatted beside him. He said, “You’re cracking up, buddy boy.”

  “I’m not,” Pretty Boy whispered. “You’ll see. People are already missing, aren’t they?”

  “Probably sleeping off some of that moonshine crap one of the zilches snuck aboard. Exec is crapping exclamation points over it.”

  Pretty Boy peeled his eyes off the altar and gave his friend a small, sad smile.

  “Hey-o, I know what’ll make you feel better,” his friend said, with a glance over his shoulder. “I stole some twelve-hour liberty chits off port watch. We can use them when we reach the islands.”

  “We won’t reach the islands.”

  “Yeah? God tell you that?”

  Pretty Boy looked back at the altar, at its reversible metal cross. “That’s the problem.” His eyes glazed over with tears. “How can I believe in one god, now that I know there are twenty-two of them?”

  The memory faded away.

  “Let’s walk through these rooms,” I suggested.

  The mess hall with the chapel was separated from kitchen galleys by a metal grill painted in white. The first room was unmistakably a bakery, holding a dough mixer that was twice the size of a water barrel. There were also racks of canned goods with old-fashioned labels like Victrypac Dark Sweet Cherries, and a row of petrified black discs that may have once been fresh pies.

  The next two galleys were separated by bulkhead doors that could be sealed in the event of an emergency. Broken, rusted tables. A caged storage area filled with the dried remains of rotted lettuce and a gnarled, old forest of spudded potatoes. The occasional bone. On one table, perfectly preserved with that unholy blend of stasis and time magic, was a pristine game of dominoes.

  “What’s that open space ahead of us?” I asked, pointing. The air in that direction vibrated, heavy with memory.

  “Stores,” Addam said. “Quite literally—a recreation area where sailors could congregate and buy things. I think there are other . . . amenities? I cannot think of the word. Practical shops, such as barbers and cobblers.”

  “Like a village square,” I said. Magic was always heavy in places like that, which was designed around basic human appetites.

  The floor on the other side sloped up, sharply enough that I felt the change in my ankles. There were collapsible tables here as well—some upright with brittle playing cards on their surface; some overturned and eaten to rust fibers. Grilled shop fronts lined every wall. They weren’t stores the way I expected—just counters, where only the clerk had access to the merchandise.

  The world flashed gray. Ahead of me, across the room, a sailor in a dark jacket was shooting a flamethrower. Without color, the flame was as bright as a magnesium flare.

  The entire image vanished a second after it appeared. “Shit,” I whispered. “They must have been scared witless to be using a flamethrower.”

  “What?” Brand said.

  I shook my head and continued. Old pieces of mail crunched under my feet as I moved across the room. An ice-cream machine was surrounded by vats of calcified powdered milk. Behind more grillwork were rows of unfiltered cigarettes.

  “Damnit,” Brand said. “This place is making my skin—”

  The past tore across me. Brand and Addam were gone and I was swimming in static gray that quickly settled into clear, grayscale memory.

  I walked through the past—across the empty rec room, the fallen mail and playing cards, now clean and new, and a batch of ice cream melting across the floor.

  I didn’t have to see a single twitch of movement to know I wasn’t alone, though. The area stank of fear and sweat, and if I listened closely, I could hear the low breathing of men, just shy of hyperventilation.

  They were hiding all around me. Terrified. And I knew I’d been right—that the Hanged Man had grown tired of picking off the crew one by one. By this point in the story, the main focus had gone from the slow stalk of a predator to the frantic scattering of the prey.

  “We can lock ourselves in the gedunk!” a black man hissed, tripping into the room. A white man ran after him. Shock had turned the white man’s complexion to a shiny transparency. He had one arm pressed against his stomach, and the wrist ended in a bloody stump.

  The black man began ramming key after key into a grated door. On the other side was a counter lined with bottles of bright, colored syrup.

  I heard a clatter behind the mailroom counter. I went over and looked through the glass pane of a small door. Inside, a sailor had knocked over a typewriter. He’d piled chairs and a tipped cabinet next to a waist-high black safe, a makeshift barrier. Then he froze, and looked through a mail slot, in the direction of the soda fountain where the other men were trying to hide.

  I heard a horrible scream from that direction—the ripping shriek of someone who was being irreparably damaged—consonants rising and falling with the force of the violence being done to him.

  I did not look. I did not risk being drawn that close to that memory— or worse, drawn to another observer of them, from another time like my own.

  The mailroom clerk opened the huge safe with shaking fingers. He pulled bags and stacks of paper from the inside, along with two removable shelves. Then he climbed inside, weeping, and shut the door behind him.

  “Godsdamnit!” I yelled as Brand took about an inch of flesh off my love handles.

  “I pinched,” he said angrily.

  “It’s been several minutes, Rune,” Addam said. “What are you seeing?”

  “People running and hiding. Him pursuing them. This is sick.”

  I was still standing in front of the door to the mailroom. The glass was now cloudy and caked with grime. Through it, the old black safe was still shut. I knew what I’d find if I opened it.

  If that was the end of the story, how horrible must the middle have been? How bad had it been if suffocating yourself in a safe was preferable to even taking a chance at surviving?

  “I’m not even sure where to go next. There are ghost memories everywhere.”

  “Let’s go r
ight,” Brand said, watching my face. “We can check down there.”

  I took a few steps and Brand said, “Wait! Look down.”

  “Tripwire?” I breathed.

  “No. Look at your shoes, and imagine that someone drew an L and R on them. Now ask yourself if you just turned to the fucking R.”

  I gave him a dirty look. “Yes, I’m distracted, point made. But I still need to see this.”

  So I took my other right. The open concourse of kitchens and shops immediately narrowed into a single iron hallway. A brass sign above a hatch told me that I was entering a supply department, though the plaque was too clouded with age to make out the specific division headings.

  “What’s up here?” Brand whispered to Addam, taking point.

  “Tailors. Barbers. Cobblers. Laundry and print shops below us. There are stairs to engine rooms two levels down, as well, but I seem to remember that this is largely a dead end.”

  Brand held up a hand. He flicked two fingers toward one of my light cantrips, then flicked them toward the ground. I followed the direction, and lowered my light cantrips so they floated an inch above the join between floor and bulkhead.

  I saw what Brand had already seen. The sweeping here was imprecise: but along the edges, in the caked dust, you could see partial footprints.

  Brand knelt. “Bare feet.” He pointed at another partial imprint. “Boots. Same size. Not a high traffic area.” He rose from his squat and took point again.

  The narrow corridor opened into a cul-de-sac. A metal stairway led down, and the landing around the stairway had hatches, doors, and wired cages. It stank of old oil and burned metal, probably from the engines below.

  “What is that?” I asked, not entirely easily, while pointing to a door in front of me.

  Addam’s eyes reflected the pale yellow of my rising light cantrip. “That compartment? The barber shop, I believe.”

  “We’re not going in there,” I said. I felt the emanations from the room, and it didn’t take much creativity to picture what a serial killer would have done with scissors, swivel chairs, and razors. I swallowed and said, “I’m not feeling portal magic anywhere around here. I’m just sensing dark murdery shit.”

  “Let’s go back down the other side of this deck,” Brand said.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I want to make absolutely sure we’re on the same page. Are you saying we should have gone left and not right?”

  Just before Brand could tell me to fuck off, Addam froze and turned his head sharply. “Do you smell that?” he whispered.

  “All I smell is old engine oil,” I said, but Brand bullied past me and started sniffing like a bloodhound.

  “Sweat,” he said, softly, and looked down the stairwell. “How about that.” He palmed a knife, turned sideways, and began to descend the steep stairs in a prowl.

  I followed him. At the bottom, I called my lights to me, and sent them spiraling toward another dead end. Smudged bronzed signs announced a laundry compartment and a print shop, and something called a lucky bag. I could smell what they did, now; an underlying stench of unwashed body.

  Brand had pulled out a penlight and was shining it along the floor, looking for scuff marks and disturbances in the dust. He seemed very interested in the shortened corridor leading to the lucky bag.

  “What’s that? What’s a lucky bag?” he asked Addam, who was climbing down the stairs behind us.

  “A bit like a lost and found. Allow me.” He swiped a finger over one of the sigils on his belt, and sent his own light cantrip bobbing in front of his face. His hands whistled with moving air for a second, then he did something I couldn’t follow—until a brilliant spotlight knifed through the air in front of him and hit Brand squarely in the eyes. Brand dropped both of his hands to his side, each with a knife, and lowered his head—the portrait of an assassin frozen in the moment before heavy swearing.

  “What did you just do?” I asked cheerfully.

  “Sorry about that . . . Somewhat stronger than I expected,” he said. “I used an Air spell to create a lens, and then used a cantrip as a light source. You have inspired me to be creative with my spells.”

  “Nice one,” I said, and meant it. “Shine it in there.”

  Brand glared at Addam, and put his back to the light, taking the lead. The lucky bag was a closet-sized space with a wire door. I’m not sure what it would have looked like on a working battleship, but here, someone had turned it into a nest. Three rotting mattress were stacked in a corner, as well as a pitiful pile of ragged shirts and pants.

  “Whatever lives here wears clothes,” I murmured. “That’s encouraging.” Brand said, “There’s a glass of water by the mattress. This isn’t abandoned. Maybe Sherman was right about a caretaker. Let’s head back.”

  We backtracked to the recreation area, this time taking the hatch along the other side of the ship from the way we’d entered. The string of compartments started with a cleared mess hall, and then a second mess area, and then a third and large space.

  “What’s ahead of us?” I asked Addam.

  “Berths. And the surgical suites. Across from . . . some sort of soldier compartment? Special naval soldiers?”

  “Marines,” I murmured. And I thought: Ah. “That’s where the portal is. That’s where it is. The exec was joining a plan to free the marines. And surgical suites . . . have instruments. For after. When the resistance failed. Trust me, that’s the last place I want to look, but . . . It would have been a godsdamn candy shop for the Hanged Man. We need to go there.”

  I almost tripped over a bowling ball that was sitting in the hatch door, only the bowling ball was really a skull, which was a pretty grim omen for what we’d likely see in front of us.

  Brand said, “Rune, send your cantrips—” But I already had them moving ahead.

  Brand holstered his knives and drew the gun from his ankle holster. He approached the door at a crouch, kicking the skull so that it vaulted ahead and clattered against a far metal bulkhead. He waited for it to startle any potential ambush, then, satisfied, slipped into the room while bringing his gun in a semicircle, from wall to wall.

  “Shit,” Brand said again, with feeling. Then, reluctantly, “Clear.”

  I walked into the clean, dry remains of a slaughter.

  About a dozen rows of benches were facing a film screen. The ground was littered with skeletons—most of them relatively whole, excepting gouge marks on the bones below necks, biceps, faces, thighs. Stasis magic had preserved the bones in a bleached, cinematic whiteness.

  I felt the past tremble. Before I could drown in it, I pulled Clarity around me like a Kevlar shroud.

  “I’m guessing this is where he got tired of the ambushes,” I said heavily. “This is the middle part of the story.”

  When we were well clear of that compartment, I pulled Clarity off me again, keeping it on Brand and Addam to preserve its duration for as long as possible.

  The sleeping berths started in the next room. Rows of mattresses were slung from the ceiling by metal chains. The beds were frozen in time, their surfaces surprisingly springy, still smelling like detergent and cheap soap. One of them had bloodstains faded to a rust color.

  On the other side were shower areas, and past that another corridor. Before we could step into it, though, a clank echoed toward us, brutal and loud in the stillness.

  We stood there, frozen, for six minutes. I knew without counting it’d be that long—Brand always waited six minutes, never five.

  When the sound didn’t repeat itself, I whispered, “It’s late, and we’re overthinking this. We’re just one deck below open air. We are not trapped—there is no bulkhead that can keep me from making an exit. So let’s move out. Let them hear us come.”

  I strode past them, into the corridor. Brand didn’t waste energy arguing. He kept his gun pointed at the ceiling, one hand on his opposing wrist to protect his aim, and followed.

  I had no doubt this was the path to the portal. I felt the odd flicker of its ma
gic in the distance, not unlike a desert mirage. And the educated hunch was backed by swept floors; by the stasis-fresh walls; by the way the edges of my vision trembled with history.

  The paint on the walls went from dark tan to olive green. The corridor opened into a platform with a descending stairwell. Brand flashed his penlight down, but my own attention was drawn forward, at the next series of compartments.

  “Look there,” Addam said, coming up to my side. He stared, with me, at the large slabs of bulkhead lying across the floor, revealing the skeletal structure of the walls. One compartment was completely peeled open, showing a room filled with an old-fashioned diving suit fallen to the ground—complete with a round Jules Verne helmet and a sealed, astronaut-thick suit.

  “Brand,” I said quietly. “Let me hold onto you. I may be able to get a sense of where the portal is anchored. We’re close. I can tell.”

  “The marine quarters are there—on the right,” Addam offered as Brand looked around us unhappily. “The medical suite is on the left.”

  “Brand, please,” I said again, only I was halfway through lowering my defenses as I asked, because I wanted to see what was in front of us.

  As the past seeped across my vision in gray and white flickers, I felt the weight of my Companion settle against my side.

  There was a ghostly group of men in front of me, all with guns, all in active wartime gear. They were lined in a barricade formation. They faced away from me, and before them—opposite my own position at the rear— was the one called Pretty Boy.

  “You need to listen to me,” he said in a broken voice. “He is hunting us.”

  “Son, stand aside,” the exec said.

  “Listen to me!” Pretty Boy yelled. “You don’t understand—he said he would let me go, but he didn’t, he followed me, because no one ever tells him no. He is angry and when he’s through we will all be gone. There are people like him, things like him, and they do not ever reveal themselves. That’s why he won’t let us go. Don’t you understand?”

  “Son, I will say three things, and I will say them with minimal fucking patience,” the exec barked. “One, what you are saying will get you court-martialed. Two, if I hear one more word about monsters, I will lose my shit. And three, we are being attacked by an enemy, and we are prepared for this, because we are the US Navy, and we stand on American steel, armed with American firepower, ready and willing to put American bullets in some un-American fucking heads.”