THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  From his right came a scuffling. A rat, mistaking the silence for safety, emerged from its shadows and, panicking in the unexpected circle of spilled light, planned a route that would take it across Lloyd Skinner’s case. It was a youngster, no more than four or five inches long. Skinner watched it with his eyes, without turning his head. Watched it as it stopped and sniffed the air with a pointed pink nose, and watched it as it moved quickly forward and hopped onto the flight case.

  His hand came down with such force that the rat’s spine snapped before the message had reached its brain. Its jaws wrenched open in agony and fury, unable to exact any kind of revenge without the co-operation of its body. It screamed and twitched, and Skinner watched it impassively, doing nothing to end its pain. He watched it for three minutes until the twitching became no more than a slight tick, and the body, bent in a hideous upward crescent, became still and stiff.

  Lloyd Skinner picked up the rodent by its long worm-like tail and threw it into the darkness, then slowly, carefully, like a man uncovering buried treasure, opened the case and regarded the contents with the closest his hard blue eyes came to satisfaction.

  7

  Tenghis closed the cabin door, turned the light on, stripped off his shirt and hung it on the radiator where the sweat would evaporate and grant it another day’s use. He ran a hand over his tired face and then moved to his altar and knelt before the Virgin and her imploring outstretched plaster arms. He bent his head and began his muttered gallop through the prayers that were so monotonous and familiar that he was three or four minutes into them before realizing his mind was occupied with anything but piety. Through all the Hail Marys he had merely been freewheeling over a variety of petty mundanities, from the unjust nature of some shift alterations, to the price of a Japanese car back in Manila. He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. The love of Jesus and the purity of His mother on earth stayed with him for around thirty or forty seconds of chanting, until his concentration gave up in favour of whether he was eating too much dairy fat for his own good.

  “She doesn’t hear you.”

  Tenghis jumped up and swung round in alarm. Fen was leaning against the wall at the end of his bunk, staring past his cabin mate at the statue.

  He was naked, his arms crossed, not casually, but as though protecting himself from the cold.

  “Fen. For Christ’s sake.” Tenghis breathed his protest from a body that was fighting to make its heart beat normally again.

  Fen slid down the wall and crouched, still staring at Mary. He smiled, then slowly began to laugh. Tenghis had recovered enough to become annoyed.

  “What were you doing skulking in the dark? And put some clothes on.”

  Fen stopped laughing. “You like it that way, don’t you?”

  “Get dressed.”

  “You like to think of her as soft and loving and forgiving.”

  Fen took his eyes from the statue and looked at Tenghis. His pupils were large and unfocused, but there was no smell of drink from him. Tenghis stepped back without even realizing he had done so.

  “But you see,” continued Fen, “God isn’t like that. God is brutal. Unforgiving. Demanding. He’s the god of shit and death, of tears and torture.” He raised an arm and pointed at the statue. “And that new-made thing is not even good enough to be his whore.”

  Tenghis had had enough. He pulled his shirt from the radiator, opened the cabin door and left. He was going to see the bosun. Clearly, Fen was ill.

  As the door closed behind him he paused, halted by the sound of Fen’s low voice, still talking as though Tenghis was still there.

  “So new, you see. So new the Lord the Sun has risen and set a thousand million times before you even cast your whore’s shadow in his light.”

  And then he laughed again.

  Tenghis put his arms through his shirt sleeves and walked quickly away without stopping to button up the front.

  He wanted to put a hand over his nose and mouth, but the rating standing over him with the mop was watching his every move. Instead, Bosun Felix Chadin attempted to look as calm as his awkward crouch would allow, tapping his knee with a finger as though what he was looking at was perfectly normal.

  There must have been around twenty of them. All fully-grown rats, all dead and every one skinned, with its belly slit open. The bodies had been dropped down the back of a life-jacket fixed shelving unit on C-deck, and so recently that there was no smell. It had been the thin serpentine trickle of blood that had attracted the attention of the rating who had been mopping the floor and now, after extricating the bodies with a length of coat-hanger wire, Felix was trying to figure out what it meant.

  “When did you last clean around this area?” he asked, still staring at the mess of shiny red skin and guts.

  The rating shrugged. “I dunno. I guess about noon yesterday. I didn’t see no blood then.”

  Felix stood, wiping his trouser legs as though there had been physical contact with the dead animals, though plainly there had been none.

  “Go to the galley and get some refuse bags.”

  The rating stared at him, expecting more, his impassive eyes demanding an explanation of the horror.

  Felix stared back. “Now.”

  The man retreated sulkily, dragging his mop and leaving the bosun with the unsightly little pile of corpses and the blossoming horror of what the Christ this could possibly mean.

  She rewound the tape and held her forehead in her hands as it whined backwards. Not Spanish. Definitely not Spanish. But neither did it sound like the other two commonly-used Peruvian languages, Quechua or Aymara. Esther stopped the tape and pressed play again. The boy’s voice was soft but he was clearly enunciating, trying his best to be understood by this strange foreign woman he had so obviously wanted. On the page she had been writing on, she traced with her finger the words translated so far, listening as he spoke, matching the words with her English, ready to stop the tape when she came to the unidentifiable section again.

  “… so we come long time, long long time, to the mountains here… far, now… the sun tells us… we come… he is risen… and when he is fully risen then we will be…”

  She stopped it. It was the next garble of guttural language that had completely stumped her. She cleared her throat, got her pen ready and started the tape again.

  “Kuchitoowah ghukkewal ghukkenalla kareeh…”

  She clicked it off and checked to see if what she’d written matched the phonetics of what she was hearing. There had been a phleghmy, back-of-the-throat quality to the words, like German or Gaelic, so unlike the lyrical sing-song of the boy’s basic Spanish. It completely confounded Esther. Worse. If she were honest, there was something that spooked her about the sounds.

  She sighed and closed her notebook. Doubtless there would be someone on the internet who could identify the dialect, but she was irritated. She had hoped to have the majority of it translated, even roughly, before she docked, and now it looked as though that wasn’t going to be possible.

  Maybe she could work out the context, and therefore its meaning, by labouring through the rest of his lengthy babblings, but judging by what she had already successfully deciphered, none of it seemed to be making much sense. Esther stood up and rubbed her back. She had been working for hours, oblivious to the time, and now she was surprised to find that it was dark outside and she was hungry. The thought of another stilted, tasteless dinner in the officers’ mess filled her with gloom, but she had to eat. She pulled on a sweatshirt and left the cabin to see if there was any alternative.

  The button on the lift glowed red as she passed, indicating that someone was using it, so she moved to the stairs that would take her from D-deck down to the upper deck and the galley. Not that she would have used it anyway. She thought of the tiny cramped box that shuddered up and down between floors, smelling of sweat and stopping at floors without warning, as a hellish device. The peephole on the outer doors told her all she needed to know about how often it might bre
ak down. Why else would you need to see into a lift? Presumably to check the occupants were still alive. She skipped down the metal stairs pausing only to look curiously at the small group of men on C-deck who were standing round the life-jacket shelves, and continuing quickly as the ratings on the periphery returned her inquisitive gaze with inscrutable stares that were not entirely without hostility.

  Esther had learned the layout of the ship sufficiently to know that the entrance to the galley was a few doors down from the officers’ mess, and so she passed along the corridor and halted in the open doorway. The galley was mayhem. Becko the cook was barking staccato orders to three young men, amidst a cauldron of steam and unpleasant cooking smells that seemed always to contain a hint of rotting cabbage. She waited patiently until his frantic gaze swept across the doorway and caught her in its beam.

  She raised a hand. “Hi!”

  Becko stared back mutely then nodded almost imperceptibly and wiped his hands on the filthy cloth around his waist. She was intuitive enough to regard the slight change in his facial expression as a question.

  “I’m working in my cabin right now. Is there any chance I could maybe take something back? A sandwich maybe? Anything really.”

  Becko looked as if he hadn’t heard her, turning back to the large aluminium pot on the stove, but as one of the young men passed behind him, Becko grabbed at him and pointed to the doorway with a terse order. The boy approached Esther and smiled. She hadn’t noticed him before, either above or below deck, and was struck by how beautiful he was. Around sixteen, he was tall and slim with perfect skin and glittering black, almond-shaped eyes. But it was more than just his youthful perfection that made her feel peculiar in his presence. The boy was shining with a kind of inner glow, an almost manic enthusiasm and vigour that made her want to step away from its heat. Becko, she mused, must run a pretty thrilling galley if this was an example of how his staff reacted to his instruction. She fought back a blush she hoped could be attributed to the heat and rubbed at her hair.

  “I was just wondering if I could maybe take away a sandwich or something… you know…”

  The boy nodded furiously and waved his large hands. “I bring you dinner. You say you want.” He turned around and scanned the galley. “Tonight it fish or maybe a little pork.”

  Esther shrugged. “Fish, I guess. That would be great. Thanks.”

  The boy nodded again, beaming at her with a row of gleaming white teeth. “It good. Real good.”

  She smiled back. “Shall I wait?”

  He gestured for her to go. “I bring. I bring.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She smiled again, then turned and left. Behind her, the boy watched the empty doorway until Becko kicked at him and called his mother a cock-sucker. The boy, beaming, went about his tasks, unaware that Leonardo Becko’s narrowed eyes were following his every move, weighing up what drug his normally sullen surly trainee cook had taken that was making him float around like a girl on her first date, and had done for the last three or four hours.

  “What do you reckon?”

  Cotton held his hip-bones through his trousers and shook his head at the pile of corpses.

  His captain tried again. “Ever seen anything like it?”

  “Nope.”

  Lloyd Skinner sighed and gestured to the rating clutching the plastic bin bag that he could shovel away the rats.

  Felix Chadin had waited long enough. He was bored with this group of silent men standing around the bloody mess as though examining a car at auction. “What shall I do, Captain?”

  Skinner looked up and regarded him with distaste, almost as though he found him responsible for the outrage. “Find out who did it.”

  The bosun returned the look and crossed his arms across his chest, biting back the sarcastic retort that had already formed itself in his native tongue. He looked to the first officer for something a little more expansive, but Cotton’s attention had already moved from the pile of rats now being bundled into the bag, to the area of floor at the bottom of the stairs.

  It was clear that the rating had started mopping there, working his way towards the life-jacket shelf and then stopped abruptly on finding the horror. What made Matthew so sure of this was the fact that a subtle residue of glistening, snail-like trail was still present on the stairs. If he were a betting man he would have laid money on the fact that there had been more of the stuff. More of it that would have led directly to the shelf, and had mercifully been wiped away.

  Captain Lloyd Skinner let out a long sigh and looked around at the group of men. The flat look in his eyes betrayed that this bizarre event was no more or less than he expected from the complex and irritating species that was humanity, that somehow everybody present had let him down. He nodded curtly to the bosun and left them to their mystery and the mess. Cotton didn’t join the other men in watching him go. He was at the bottom of the stairs, squinting up to where they turned on a landing.

  “Felix.”

  “Uh-huh,” the bosun replied with a dull tinge to his voice as he watched the unconcerned captain’s back disappear around the corner.

  “Come here a second.”

  Felix motioned to the men with the bags to carry on and walked forward to join his first officer.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  The slime trail was so faint that at first Felix Chadin couldn’t understand what Matthew was pointing at.

  Then gradually he picked up the faint reflective sheen of the dried mess meandering up the stairs and at the point it turned the corner, climbing a little way up the wall. It was his turn to sigh. “That, Matthew, is… how you say it?… ass needing kicked.”

  Matthew looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  The bosun indicated the men behind him with a slight incline of the head. “Looks like a burst refuse bag been dragged instead of lifted.”

  Of course it was. It was exactly the residue left on a kitchen floor when a plastic bin bag decides to leak its glutinous contents, except this time, as the man had pointed out, this one had been dragged. Cotton nodded. “Yeah, well let’s find the ass and kick it good.”

  Matthew mulled for a second why he was more upset by this minor piece of insubordination than it merited, or was usual in his own slack command. He was irritable. That was all. His tank needed topping up.

  His tone did not escape the bosun. Felix glared at him. Sure thing. He would find out who was killing, skinning and tearing the hearts out rats, then he would find out what slut of a deck hand was dragging leaky refuse around, and then maybe he’d have some spare time to find the cure for fucking cancer. Meanwhile he knew his captain would be helping out by pottering in his quarters and his first officer would be busy elsewhere drinking himself silly. He could use a little more support. “I got a problem with a greaser right now.” He brought it up not because it was important, but merely to try to burden Cotton with any other difficulty he could think of.

  “Yeah? What kind of problem?” asked Cotton without much conviction, his eyes back on the shiny trail.

  “Fen Sahg. Cabin mate say he’s acting real strange.”

  Cotton looked at him. “Strange enough to go cutting up rats?”

  The bosun shook his head. “Nah. I spoke to him. He sure is uptight, but he’s not going as psycho as Tenghis had me believe. But I reckon I need to split them up.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  The men stayed silent for a moment, then Cotton spoke quietly, conspiratorially. “Any theories? The rats, I mean.”

  Felix studied Cotton’s face and read his eyes. He felt anger rise in his throat again. “Ah, you mean maybe the common Filipino custom? The one where the first born must eat rat hearts to be a man?”

  Cotton looked hopeful. Chadin sighed through his nose, held Matthew in his gaze inscrutably for a second then turned and walked away, leaving his first officer in no doubt whatsoever by the set of his shoulders, of the contempt in which he was held.

  Cotton felt a fool. He closed hi
s eyes for a second and pinched the bridge of his nose. He needed a drink, and in just a minute, when the shame had passed, he would go to his cabin and start working on the evening’s oblivion. This weird shit was already too much for him. And what was worse was the question he couldn’t get out of his mind. The bosun was comforted by the leaking-bag theory, and if Cotton hadn’t known better, he would be too. But he did know better. Whoever did it needed more than just an official reprimand for sloppiness. They needed to explain why they would drag leaking refuse not just up and down the accommodation block stairwell, but more importantly, haul it out from hold two halfway up the ship and then drop it over the side?

  He let the two men brush past him with the bag of rats, then decided to return to his cabin by lift.

  The stairs suddenly seemed rather unappealing.

  8

  The cayenne pepper genus he had chosen was the F1 Apache. That did the best in such small pots, and produced a crop that was as useful as it was decorative. Renato Lhoon felt the soil with a finger to check it was moist, them wiped his hands on his trousers and put his hands in his pockets. He thought of his greenhouse back home in Iloilo and wondered if Mary was keeping the coriander going. The extra that Cotton was paying him would mean that maybe next year he could grow plants to look at and smell, instead of to eat, but the thought gave him little pleasure. After all, if he had Matthew Cotton’s job and the extra salary and pension that went with it, he wouldn’t even be weighing up the choice. And it should be his job. He did it, day in, day out, as well as his own. And he did it better than the captain would ever know. Except Renato was going to make sure that this voyage would be the one on which Skinner found out. Then he might change his mind about his precious first officer, and stop protecting him from the company and every international shipping regulation known to man that said that hopeless drunks shouldn’t pilot ships.