THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  But it was to be his power. They didn’t know that. They hadn’t known at what dark breast he had suckled in the dense, canopied rainforest: it had been beyond their understanding. If they had known, they would have taken more care. Chelito giggled again, hugging himself with delight, seeing with the giver’s eyes, the delicious course and destination of the blood gutter, and knowing for certain, as he knew all things, that their error ensured that his death would be meaningless.

  Chelito’s hand went to his heart. It was racing now, bursting under a pressure that was becoming intolerable. He stumbled towards a metal bench screwed to the bulkhead, and sat down heavily. Sweat was pouring from him in a fever and he wiped at his brow to clear the salt sting from his eyes. The cavernous room was a blur, but as he scanned its familiar steel buttresses and painted pipe caryatids, his bleary gaze settled on an unfamiliar shape. He sat up and blinked.

  In the dark space that divided two gleaming pistons was a ragged pile. His new knowingness scanned it, probing it to discover its physical truths, its detail, its substance. It was closed to him.

  With an effort, seventeen-year-old Chelito Baylan got to his feet and walked carefully toward the heap. He peered at it, curious as to why nothing could be understood from this jumble of misshapen form, while all around him the rest of the physical and abstract world was explaining itself, turning itself inside-out to reveal secrets.

  It was nothing special. Just a big pile of garbage. But its resistance to his understanding perplexed him, and Chelito took a fraction of a second to scan his chief engineer’s mind to discern whether this trash pile was his. Sohn, the knowledge confirmed, knew nothing of it. His was a spotless engine room. He scanned the rest of the crew and finding no culprit who could have dumped such a pile in the heart of the ship, he turned back to the more conventional use of his human senses.

  Its odour and decomposition was a plain fact that required no supernatural sense to experience. But to Chelito in his heightened sense of awareness, the smell was an unbearable assault. A thin, viscous slime oozed from its base, and he wiped at his eyes again to examine what was causing the discharge. There was a quantity of rotting vegetable matter, welded by decay to what looked like matted fur and twists of bloodied rag. Woven between the mash were shards of metal, glints of steel or tin, dulled and stained, but contrasting with the soft belly of the pile in their sharpness. A bone protruded here and there from the dark mass of discarded matter, and he found himself moving forward with a hand outstretched, wanting to touch it. With a delicacy that would not normally be employed in reaching towards something so repulsive, Chelito put his hand out and made light contact with the edge of what looked like a split and rotten gourd.

  The matter beneath his fingers stirred, making him withdraw as though he’d been burnt. Chelito stared at the pile, then slowly touched it again. There was a shudder beneath the blackened surface, more powerful this time and Chelito giggled, sweat dripping from the end of his nose.

  It was the kiss to the sleeping princess. He put out his other hand and laid them both on the top of the mound, level with his broad shoulders. It might have been only a fraction of a second, it might have been minutes, the boy’s ability to mark time being so skewed, but however long it took, there was a balletic elegance to the way in which the pile of garbage unfolded itself. The matted fur pulled itself free from the body of wet material with a sucking sound to reveal something approximating an arm. It was an arm that terminated in long, ragged pieces of steel and tin, forming a macabre claw.

  It was not animal, though there were clearly parts of several corpses of decayed beasts incorporated in the neck and head. But to describe it as part human would have been equally incorrect. There was a torso of sorts, where red glistening flesh mingled with the pulp of garbage, and the white glint of ribs remained visible under a thin wet skin. Chelito stared at this centre of the creature, fascinated by a collection of internal organs that appeared to be working despite their external location. He continued to stare at them for another reason. This was because he dared not look at the thing’s face.

  All he knew, all he felt, all he had ever cared about was now, this moment. And as the steel shards encircled and gathered Chelito Baylan close to the oozing body, the boy threw his head back and released a hiss of pleasure. It would have been hard to decide exactly when that hiss turned from ecstasy to agony, as his mouth was quickly filled with a thick, semi-solid knot of matter that stopped the sound forever. Nor would it be simple to discern whether the violent shuddering and writhing of Chelito’s young frame was to do with his spiritual arrival at a place of enlightenment, or merely a mortal response to the bone and metal claws that were hungrily slicing and ripping through him. All that could be said for sure was that while his death was nowhere near as quick as Chelito might have elected, it was almost completely silent.

  12

  Matthew sighed and bent his head over his clasped hands.

  “But these are not Peruvians. They’re Filipino, for Christ’s sake. Catholic Filipinos.”

  Esther was still pacing the cabin, flushed with the lecture she’d just given him. She wasn’t for backing down. “Yeah, I know. But if I’m right, that doesn’t matter. And how long did you say you were in dock at Callao?”

  He shrugged and looked back up at her with something approaching disappointment. “Nearly four weeks.”

  She stopped walking and waved a hand at him. “See? Enough time. Plenty.”

  It was Matthew’s turn to pace. He’d heard enough. He stood up, choreographed a walk that finished at the port-hole, and stared out into the black night. “You don’t know the crew of a merchant ship very well, do you? No reason you should.” He turned to face her again. “But if you did, you’d know their interests lie a little more in shopping, gambling and drinking when they go ashore. Signing up to join murdering sects hasn’t featured that large in my experience.”

  Esther set her mouth into a tight line, then picked up her Dictaphone and shook it at him. “The boy had been to Lima recently. Really recently. I’m sure of that now. Now that’s utterly bizarre. This is a tribe that hardly ever show their faces on the high plateau, never mind catch the frigging bus to a city hundreds of miles away. Now even you have to admit that the stuff I translated so far is pretty weird considering what’s gone on here.”

  Matthew nodded. It was, as she said, pretty weird. But the thing he’d been hoping to discuss with her was much, much weirder. He hadn’t expected to be taken back to her cabin and given a lecture on ancient Inca sun-worship. More importantly, it had been a revelation to him that of all the humans on board, many of whom had sailed with Cotton for a few years, the person he suddenly found himself most disposed to confide in was this complete stranger of a girl. It had made him realize how unutterably lonely he was, that his time on board had collected colleagues, but no friends. Now, for a reason that he could not entirely define, not even the obvious one of sexual attraction, he felt he had someone who was really looking at him when she spoke, really listening to him when he did. But the relief he felt was mostly short term and not entirely complete, since Matthew Cotton was not looking for a soul mate.

  All he wanted right now was someone else who believed there was something not human, not animal, stalking the crew on this boat. Esther’s theory merely concerned the religious folly and brutality of humans. His was insane, and she was giving him no opportunity to introduce it.

  “Run it past me again.”

  She looked at him sharply for a moment, then sighed. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  He shook his head, and watched her soften.

  “Okay.” She put the Dictaphone down and held her hand up to tick points off her fingers like a teacher. It was an attractive gesture, and for a brief moment he found himself examining the feminine architecture of Esther Mulholland in a way that was neither helpful nor relevant to their situation. The moment passed as quickly as it came, and he braced himself to hear her enthusiastic student bu
llshit one more time.

  “The boy was killed precisely in the manner of an Inca sacrifice. I mean, to the absolute last detail. They used to take out the heart still beating, and the skin was removed carefully in one piece so it could be worn by the priest.”

  She fumbled in her pile of books and thrust a picture of a squat stone statue in front of Matthew.

  “There. You see? He’s wearing the sacrificed victim’s skin, tied at the back with leather strips. They believed it gave them great power.”

  Matthew glanced briefly at the picture and back up at Esther. “So guess we just need to find the guy on board who’s swabbing the decks with Salvo’s skin strapped on like a barbecue apron. Shouldn’t take long.”

  She ignored him, and looked down at the picture of the statue, stabbing at it as she continued. “Know what bothers me? These were people who were a lot like us. Modern Americans, I mean. I’m not talking about a bunch of ancient savages who would run screaming from gunpowder. They were practical, inventive, resourceful, pragmatic. They had one of the wealthiest and most successful civilizations in world history. They were governed by a feudal system but the workers were never slave peasants. Work was conscripted from able-bodied young men in a thing called Mit’a service and that’s how the rulers could build such incredible temples and irrigation systems and cities. These were intelligent people, who understood the movements of the planets and the stars, whose medicine was advanced, and whose social ideals and political templates are still systems we recognize today.”

  Matthew was staring at her. “What has this to do with anything?”

  She stared back, then spoke hesitantly. “I don’t think people like that, a society like that, would continue to carry out something as barbaric as child human sacrifice for century upon century… unless…”

  “Unless what?” Matthew was losing patience.

  Esther lowered the book and looked straight at him. “Unless it worked.”

  Matthew said nothing. Esther looked down at the book again avoiding his eyes. “The sacrifice could be male or female, but they were always young, beautiful virgins, chosen from a favoured family who considered it a great honour to have one of their children taken for the gods. It ensured a place in heaven for them all.”

  “Aw, come on, Esther…”

  “Salvo was a virgin.”

  He looked at her quizzically. She held his gaze. Matthew Cotton put his hands on his hips and gave a low whistle. It was impossible to disguise the contempt in his voice.

  “Well, well. You’ve been real busy for such a short voyage.”

  Esther snapped the book shut. “Don’t be so fucking ridiculous.”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow and waited. She hadn’t answered the unspoken question. Esther looked bashful, but not for the reason Matthew thought.

  “He told me, okay?”

  “He told you?” Cotton snorted. “So in between asking if you wanted tomato or spinach soup, the sixteen-year-old assistant cook just decided to tell you he was a virgin, the way he obviously would to a paying female passenger who has officer status in the junior crew’s eyes.”

  Esther stayed silent for a moment, then chewed at the corner of her lip before speaking. “Can I tell you something crazy?” Esther looked pleading now.

  “You’ll have to work hard to make it crazier than that.”

  She studied Matthew Cotton’s face for a moment, trying to decide whether it was a face she could trust. The internal jury delivered their verdict and she sat down heavily and let her arms fall across her knees.

  “One of the reasons the sacrifice victims didn’t protest, resist, even run away—or at least this is what their families believed—was that when they were chosen they were delivered into a state of grace by the gods. A state of mind that made them all-knowing until the time of their death.”

  Matthew absorbed this for a moment, unsure of where it was leading, then inclined his head cheerfully. “Yeah, well guess it beats offering them a set of steak-knives.”

  She looked up at him, and the lost expression in her eyes made him regret his sarcasm.

  “He came to my cabin with food. Probably only an hour or so before he died. He knew stuff, like really private stuff. Stuff that’s impossible for anyone else in the world to know.”

  “Like what?” To his surprise, Matthew found that he very much wanted to know those things too.

  She waved the question away with a hand. “That’s not important. What’s important was the fact that he couldn’t possibly have known those things about me. Not now. Not ever.”

  Cotton watched her eyes for a moment, trying to read them, then stepped forward and sat down beside her. She picked up the Dictaphone again as if it was a talisman, and asked the question to the tiny machine rather than to Matthew’s face.

  “So how do we explain it?”

  Matthew shrugged, awkward now. “Maybe you mistook what he said. His English wasn’t great.”

  She looked round at him, annoyed. “Yeah, right.”

  He looked away. “I don’t know what you’re saying here, Esther.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Me neither.”

  There was weariness in Matthew Cotton’s voice when he finally replied. “Someone skinned and eviscerated a sack-load of rats. Someone murdered a sixteen-year-old boy. Someone ripped the radio out, a crime that’s almost worse than killing a human being when you’re at sea. Someone tried to kill me by locking me in the freezer. On a ship where the main excitement usually amounts to seagulls mating on the derrick cables, those facts are plenty weird enough.”

  Esther detected something strange in Matthew’s delivery. She looked closely at him though he avoided her eyes. “But that’s not all, is it? Something else has happened. That’s why you wanted to talk.”

  Matthew clasped his hands in front of him. As a pair they looked like two baseball fans leaning forward in the cheap seats to view a home run.

  They sat like that, in quiet, unhappy contemplation for a time, Esther waiting, sensing that to speak out of turn might dissuade him from whatever it was she instinctively knew he was aching to tell her, until Matthew broke the silence.

  “I saw something.”

  She looked at him and said nothing, sensing it had taken a measure of struggle for him to say it. So she waited some more. It took a while. He clasped and unclasped his hands until he felt like speaking again.

  “Something strange. Hideous. Almost human, but not. I don’t know. It moved real fast. Seemed to me it came out of the trash in the holds.”

  Esther blinked at him.

  Part of her wanted to laugh, but a close examination of that response would have revealed it could more correctly be attributed to controlled hysteria rather than comedy. Instead, she cleared her throat and slowly held up her Dictaphone. “You speak Spanish, don’t you? I think we gathered that.” He stared at her, and she nodded down at the slim black rectangle. “I’m only halfway through. My Spanish is pretty basic, academic rather than colloquial. But if you can understand a rougher tongue than the plummy-mouthed guy on my home teaching cassette then you need to hear this. All of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to know exactly what he’s saying.”

  “What’s this got to do with what I just told you?”

  Esther blinked down at the Dictaphone. “I reckon we might both be crazy.”

  They hadn’t noticed him going, and having witnessed the grim determination of their faces as they went to work on the holds, Fen knew they wouldn’t notice his absence at all. That was good. So much to do. So little time.

  The accommodation block was quiet now, the majority of the crew having joined the others on deck for the search. But there were still voices coming from the mess rooms when he passed the end of the corridor, and so caution had to be observed.

  He moved quietly down the stairs to the sleeping quarters, checked there was silence from the two adjoining cabins, then quickly opened the door to his cabin and slipped in. Fen close
d the door behind him and leant back against its cool surface with a sigh. He was alone again at last.

  A smile played across Fen Sahg’s lips as he thought about how well he was carrying out his tasks. He was so far along the enlightened path that he no longer had any need of the Saanti dice to speak with the one who came. He needed only to concentrate his mind on that portion of his heart that was already won, and the voice would speak to him, tell him the truth, instruct him on the necessary liturgy to bring about that which they both wanted so badly.

  He longed for those moments when the voice kindled that ache of nameless pleasure, which he knew would be increased a thousandfold when all that had to be done had been completed. In fact it was tempting now he was alone again, after so many hours of enforced company, to call on that private voice and let himself slide into the oblivion and ecstasy of perfect truth. But there was no time. He had to collect, and he had to do it quickly before the men on the deck became alerted to what must surely by now lie below.

  He pulled himself up, moved quickly to the bunk and pulled out the shoebox. He clutched it close to his breast and fingered the lid. It was tempting to open it and let his eyes feast on the contents, but he feared that too regular an audience, however appreciative, might be unwelcome. He would go and carry out his next task and then perhaps the one who came would talk with him again. He hurried from the cabin and took the stairs down to the engine room two at a time.