THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  For a moment he allowed himself to remember how it felt to be a captain, how the welfare of his ship and crew would never have allowed him to think twice about such obvious decisions, and the part of him that still cared started to grieve again for the man that was lost. But he was a master at subjugating such moments of emotional weakness, and he skilfully stamped out its weak flame before straightening up to face towards the bow.

  For once, the gin could wait. He would go take a look.

  The harshness of the tungsten lights cast hard but conflicting shadows across the deck, and as he walked, he was aware of his own dark shape crossing itself and multiplying in certain pools of light where the beams fought to illuminate the same patches of confusing metal shapes.

  The cargo deck was over two hundred metres long, and the open hatch doors of the remaining eight holds that protruded over the walkway took on a formality in the light and shade, like the complex geometric topiary that might have lined some Boston colonial mansion’s driveway.

  He moved between them with a gingerness that was as much to do with his reluctance to trip drunkenly, as it was to be on alert should the noise recur.

  It recurred as he reached hold six. But this time it had a shape.

  From the corridor that separated holds two and three, running from port to starboard, something dark darted out, and vanished as quickly as it had appeared into the space between holds one and two. It happened so quickly that Cotton stopped and blinked, doubting his own vision, but the increased beating of his heart confirmed that even if his mind took its time to catch up, his eyes had already conveyed a primeval panic to his internal organs.

  What was it? It had been big. At least as big as a small to medium man. But the residue of image it left on his retina had not been that of a man at all. In the fraction of the second he had had in which to register it, the shape had seemed more animal, but moving like an insect or a reptile, unnaturally quickly and with a gait that was unpleasantly unfamiliar.

  Cotton blinked and tried to calm his heart. An animal on board, a big one. What sort of animal? But that was ridiculous. Of course, he might simply be more bombed than he realized, his suppressed senses merely witnessing a guilty deck hand up to no good, trying to hide from his first officer. The thought delivered a welcome injection of courage to his veins, and from his current advantageous position, placed as he still was at the end of the holds, Matthew could scan the surface of the hatch covers and the corridors that ran between them, deciding which way to proceed. If it was a deck hand, Cotton would make sure he was sorry for making him use up some extra heart beats on his behalf. And hopefully, the explanation of what the hell he was doing out here would be interesting to say the least.

  There was no more movement, and Matthew decided to take a route that would double back, crossing to the port side of the deck and creeping up under the shadow of the hatch covers until he reached hold one.

  Slowly and as silently as he could he dropped down, keeping his body low as he moved to the port side of hatch eight.

  His plan was good. The bright illumination made the shadows dark by contrast, and there was at least a five- or six-foot-wide line of deep black under each hold’s hatch cover that gave him almost complete concealment. The only place in which he could be seen would be when running across the mouth of each well-lit corridor that separated the holds. He scrambled from the cover of hold eight to hold seven, then paused in the black to listen again. Nothing.

  Now that he had regained his nerve, his concern was that his quarry might escape back to the accommodation block by utilizing the same guerrilla on the starboard side. He stopped to think about that, gazing out at the space between his dark hiding place and the taff rail.

  The deck glistened in the light. He narrowed his eyes.

  The trail of refuse slime was running parallel to his oblong of shadow, taking a bold path along the metal walkway mapped out for sailors between the yellow lines. Cotton glanced ahead at the empty starboard deck, licked his lips and, still keeping low, moved forward, out of the shadows. Here, the trail was not hardened and flaky. It was wet and sticky and he bent to touch it with his finger. A stench arose from it, and it was with some disgust he discovered that it had a viscosity to the touch that made him want it off his finger tip the moment it made contact. He wiped it hurriedly on his trouser leg and squinted at the line of mess. It was clear in patches, with a milky effluent marbling running through it, exactly, as Felix pointed out, like the run-out from a refuse bag.

  But it had an under-layer of reddish brown, a tainting of its clarity with a cloudy darkness, that most definitely resembled watery blood. The dilute nature of it reminded Matthew of a discarded wound dressing, or the residue of butcher’s-meat blood on the bottom of a supermarket carton of steak. His unease returned and he moved quickly back into the shadow.

  The scuttling noise again. He snapped his head up and listened. It was brief, but it had almost certainly come from the bow.

  Matthew caught his breath, clutched the spotlight and ran. He sprinted from hold to hold, glancing anxiously to his right each time he crossed a white-lit corridor, dreading and hoping in equal measures that he might glimpse his target doing the same.

  He reached hold two, dived into the shadow of its hatch cover and panted against the cold metal. His head was spinning, and since the only organ that got any regular exercise was his liver, his heart was having to struggle to keep pace with its owner’s unusual exertions. The only way to surprise his prey, he decided, was to move quickly. He regained his breath then scampered forward to the corridor between bolds one and two and grabbed hold of the metal rail that guided the covers together. With one swift movement he pulled himself up onto the hatch cover and crouched low as he regained his balance, allowing himself a quick glance back up to the distant bridge to see if Renato was visible again yet.

  He was not. But in that fraction of a moment, when Matthew Cotton turned his head back to face across the split hatch covers, something else was. It was crouched lower than him on the opposite cover, the fifteen-foot trench of opened doors between them, the figure hidden in the inky black shadow cast by a derrick. But it was watching him with an intensity that prickled his scalp.

  In the time it took Matthew to open his mouth and attempt to draw breath, it had leapt from the shadow, scrambled across the metal surface and disappeared with a brief, obscene rustling and squelching, into the abyss of the hold.

  Cotton stayed very still. His body was ice and the mouth he had just opened stayed that way. He tried to recapture what exactly he had just seen.

  It was an impression. Just an impression. Blackness and decay. Bits of things that couldn’t possibly be part of an organic creature. Shards of metal and patches of scabbed fur. Rotting flesh and melted plastic. Bone and fabric, and blood-matted hair.

  Cotton swallowed back bile. If the contents of hold number two had really formed themselves into that hideous semblance of a man, he was unable to find the strength to move forward and confront it again. He crouched in the same position for a long, long time, and when the two deck hands sent by an exasperated Renato approached him with subservient offers of assistance, he climbed down silently and walked back to the accommodation block without acknowledging their existence.

  Her hands were on either side of the window and her forehead touched the glass. Attempting to work had been pointless, and eating even more so. As proof, a pork chop lay with a solitary slice taken from it, in a congealed half-crescent of gravy, and Esther’s notes and tapes lay scattered around the sofa and floor where they had been since the boy had left her cabin hours ago.

  The worst of it was, she was a girl who could work out stuff. Esther had a velocity of thought that could either impress or intimidate, depending on who was witnessing the process. Perhaps it was a primitive skill, the very essence of survival, or the reverse, an example of a modern mental finesse that had taken millions of years to achieve. Either way, Esther had it, and knew she had it, which wa
s why it had taken her a matter of seconds to realize there was no rational explanation for the boy’s display whatsoever. The rest of the time, she had simply spent fretting.

  She had been through everything. From the conversations at meals she had contributed to since boarding, right back to making the phone call home from the bar on the dock when she met Cotton. And there was nothing, not a single lapse in any of her social intercourse, that would have revealed a fraction of the information that the young Filipino boy had so cheerfully repeated.

  She banged at the glass with a fist and turned back into the room. Was he a mind reader? A clairvoyant? And most importantly, did it matter? She remembered his patted groin and his parting words, and decided, that yes, a total stranger being privy to that kind of personal detail mattered very much indeed.

  She looked down at the tray. The milk had been quickly consumed, but the food had stuck in her throat. Esther stared at the grey meat for a moment, then took a deep breath.

  It was nearly midnight, but she needed to get out of the cabin. She would take the tray back to the galley and if the boy was still about, confront him. Or even better, maybe she would talk to Becko.

  Esther rounded up the plate and cutlery with a clumsy clatter, grabbed the tray and left her room.

  The well-lit corridors confirmed that it was late, humming with fluorescent light and an underlying silence that was not dissimilar to the eerie nocturnal stillness of a hospital. She crossed to the narrow stairs and descended carefully, trying not to let the plate slide from the cheap plywood tray.

  The corridor that served the galley and mess rooms was more comforting in that it contained a low murmur of human conversation. On any ship with rotating shifts, there are always those whose day is night, and right now two of them were having a smoke and a coffee from the machine in the crew mess diagonally opposite the galley entrance.

  Esther was surprised at the relief she felt on hearing the curious staccato of Filipino voices in the room, realizing now as she did that the galley was completely empty of its hard-working kitchen staff. She looked in and nodded to the two men as she passed, and they returned the gesture through a veil of smoke with minimum effort and inscrutable gazes.

  All the lights were on in the deserted galley, the long, stainless steel surfaces scrubbed clean and shiny, and the thick-bottomed aluminium pots all stacked and ready for another day of mediocre institutional cooking.

  It felt intrusive, being in this room when its master, the chef, was not, but Esther found it mildly thrilling. She had hoped that maybe at least one of the staff would be there, although thinking about it now, she had no idea why. Of course, they would be on duty very early in the morning, but for now they were in their cabins asleep and she had the opportunity to look around Becko’s little kingdom at will. She placed the tray near the big sinks, and scanned the room.

  Esther enjoyed detail. She’d waited plenty of tables in her time, shouted at her share of short-order cooks to get her three soup and crackers quickly, but it was interesting to her to note the differences between a ship’s galley and the kitchens of the greasy diners she’d worked back in Texas.

  Here, the stoves had rails around the hotplates to stop the pots sliding off in a swell, and everything was on a smaller scale, being designed to fit into the space that the ship afforded it rather than demanding the room it needed. She walked along the line of stoves and ovens, running her hand over the scarred steel top, burnished by a thousand circular wire-wool marks, feeling the residual warmth beneath the metal as if it was skin.

  There was always something comforting about a kitchen, no matter how municipal. She had always wanted one. A real one. Not the phoney walnut-veneered, swing-down cabinets of the trailer, the tiny aluminium sink with foot-pedal faucets, and the crappy little propane hob that Benny heated up his tins of beans and hash on. Something like the Waltons’ kitchen was more what she had in mind. A football-pitch-sized room with gingham cotton and colonial pine dressers, and a table that was always groaning with food and ringed with laughing diners. Something, in other words, that she had never had, and probably would never have. The commercial kitchens of the diners had provided the next best thing. Big and noisy and hot, clanging with industry and profanities, but ultimately friendly.

  She wondered if the same atmosphere prevailed in this floating version.

  Undercutting the buzz of the lights was the buzz of insects, a few fat ugly blue-bottles darting in and out of the galley from the half-open door she assumed was the storeroom.

  The trainers at base camp who had given Esther top marks for just about everything would have patted themselves on their backs at the unconscious physical nature of her response, although their pride in their training would have been misplaced. Esther had been born to the philosophy of survival, not taught it, and the scrublands of trailer park hell had made the military’s simple obstacle courses seem laughable.

  Because while her mind was still mulling over the kind of sloppiness that would have allowed rogue food to be left out in the storeroom, and contrasting it with the obsessive cleanliness of the galley, her body had already naturally assumed a position of defence.

  She had rocked onto her toes, her hands were now above waist height, palms open, held a few inches from her body, her balance and posture perfect for either swift flight or sudden defence, and as she moved forward, which she did without having planned to, it was with impressive stealth and precision.

  Two or three flies buzzed around her face, banging against her like drunks trying to pass through a late-night movie line, but without causing her to blink or alter her posture.

  The storeroom was lit, and as she approached the half-open door she paused. Esther Mulholland had no idea why she was uneasy about the presence of a couple of flies in rooms dedicated to the preparation and storage of food, but there was no doubt whatsoever that she was.

  With a caution that would have seemed misplaced and ludicrous to any casual observer, she slid her body round the frame of the metal doorway and entered the storeroom.

  It was a space that had been divided meticulously into the perishable and the non-perishable.

  Behind the sacks of potatoes and shelves of giant cans that could last a whole voyage without spoiling, the back wall housed the massive walk-in freezer, the room-within-a-room that contained everything from the catering packs of greens that Becko would systematically ruin by ruthless boiling, to great haunches of meat swinging from hooks.

  The reason that Esther could know its secret contents so intimately was that the freezer door was hanging open, its icy atmosphere seeping onto the warmer floor in small puffs of vapour that spilled across the lip of the doorway onto the metal floor of the storeroom. To the side of the door a red light burned brightly.

  This was where ship was no different from diner. Anyone who had worked near a walk-in freezer knew the rules. You turned the light on when you entered, and you turned it off when you left. That meant that even in the event of some moron closing the door on you, they would know you were still inside if that light still burned red. The light on the Lysicrates’ freezer door was still red. She listened, trying to make out if the person responsible was moving around, and heard nothing.

  Esther moved forward and slid cautiously along the edge of the storeroom shelves. She should have called “hello,” should have coughed and made her presence known, but somehow she wanted to remain undetected until she had worked out what was wrong with this picture.

  Quickly she gained the space behind the freezer door. Her gaze started at the top of the large cream door and dropped to the floor. There was a piece of meat lying half out of the door, red and shiny and skinned. It was on this portion of opportunity that the flies were busy. Whoever was in there was hardly being a model food hygienist. She put a hand up to the large chrome handle and pulled the door open all the way, stepping out from behind it as she swung back the weighty slab.

  Blood is interesting when it freezes. Perhaps its most inte
resting aspect is its tendency to crystallize. All around the torso of the corpse that lay splayed like a crucified Christ on the freezer floor was a large pool of flaky, iced blood, jagged and whitened at the edges where the temperature was at its lowest.

  Where the heat of the outer room had got to it, right here, at the leg hanging over the threshold that Esther now realized was human and not porcine, there was just regular thick, congealing liquid. She didn’t scream. She didn’t even step back. She crouched and turned, covering her back, flicking her eyes only briefly one more time to the unbearable horror in the freezer.

  It resembled an anatomical drawing. The flesh was still intact, since only the skin had been removed. It was where the flesh had left the face that she saw the tell-tale sign of a task that had been done in a hurry. Eyes bulged from sockets, devoid of lids to give them expression, and one had been dislodged so that it hung precariously against a shining, bulbous cheek.

  But despite the skill with which the body had been liberated from its skin, there was a glaring aesthetic atrocity. The torso was slit from collarbone to navel, and a gaping ovoid between the ribcage grinned up at Esther.

  She was out of the storeroom, through the galley and into the crew mess hall before the flies on the skinned leg could stir, orbit and settle again.

  The two men who looked up at Esther’s entrance needed no great command of the English language to understand that their presence was somewhat urgently required.

  9

  “Panic,” the captain had said quietly as he’d stood impassively over the boy’s body “… is the enemy of survival.” But that had been three or four minutes ago. A lifetime away. Now, Matthew gripped the taff rail and bit the inside of his cheek in a vain attempt to stop a second stream of hot vomit from scouring up his throat. It was too late. He arched his back and threw up noisily over the rail.