by Muriel Gray
The chief engineer wiped his damp face with the back of his sleeve and, stepping out into the cavernous room, cast his gaze around the hanging walkways and main deck. Chelito was not in sight. He walked down the central aisle, his footsteps clanking on the metal grid, to where he could see behind the turbines, then stopped, took a breath, and called out.
“Chelito!”
There was no answer above the familiar mechanical heart beat that filled the room. Sohn walked on, more cautiously now, unsure as to why his apprentice wouldn’t answer when called.
“Hey! Chelito!”
There was a small noise, a scuffling and the clang of metal. Sohn turned his head quickly in its direction. It came from behind the turbine closest to the propeller drive shaft. He opened his mouth to call again, and then closed it. If he could hear that sound, then whoever made it could almost certainly hear him.
Sohn was old enough and wise enough to guess there might be danger behind that massive metal tower, but he was standing doing something few other men would have done in similar peril.
He was weighing up the relative merits of dying in agony at home, or being dispatched quickly by a murderer.
The decision took no time.
“Chelito,” he said, very loudly and without fear. “Come out. I can hear you.”
There was a studied silence, and then another scuffle, more urgent this time, as though something was being hurried.
Sohn tightened his fingers into fists and walked forward. There was a wrench lying on the edge of the upper walkway. He glanced at it for a moment and instinctively his hand uncurled and reached for it. The fingers froze a few inches away. No need. He walked on.
The space behind the turbine comprised of a small corner that he knew well. It was one of the untidy areas that he disliked, a perfect den to host a work-shy apprentice or accommodate the detritus of engineering that the lazy couldn’t be bothered putting in order.
This time, however, as he slowly turned the corner to face whatever might be present in its arc of shadow, it was shielding an altogether different tableau.
Since his life had started to be ruled by pain and certain death, many responses had died prematurely in Sohn, fear of personal injury being one of them. But there was still a little part of him that wanted to step back immediately, to run, to scream, even to fall to his knees at the sight before him. Instead, he merely stood and looked, his mouth a right line.
Chelito’s blood had coated every surface for at least a four foot radius. It had clotted and darkened near the edges of the mess, but the thick pool around the remains was still arterial red and oozing. Sohn, staring, was rooted to the spot. He was not staring at the blood. Nor at the skinned nightmare that used to be his boy, or the gaping hole in Chelito’s chest where the blackened tatters of ripped organs glistened. Instead, he was staring into the face of a fellow crew member who knelt in the gore and stared back at him.
If this was the moment that Sohn had hoped for, when swift violence would end his suffering, then he was disappointed. The figure’s eye’s stayed fixed on Sohn’s for a long time, until the lips began to grow a slow smile that widened to a grin.
Then as Sohn watched, Fen Sahg calmly finished what he was doing, stood up and walked away, leaving bloody footprints as he disappeared from the engine room into the night.
“Stop!”
The derrick swung on.
“Stop the fucking crane! Jesus! STOP!”
Three men waved their arms wildly at the crane operator, and the arm halted abruptly, sending the grab into a wild pendulous arc that would take minutes to calm. As the huge metal bucket swung lazily through the night air above hold number two, the assembled crew of the Lysicrates stared up at it, and even given the difficulty of examining a moving object from a distance with any accuracy, there was no mistaking what hung from the lip of the grab.
A human leg, flayed of its skin, which had consequently covered its previously sticky shiny surface with a fur of detritus, dangled casually from the edge of the bucket, as though its unseen owner was lying by a river bank and the watching crew below on the river bed, watching the dipping foot toy with the current.
There was silence as the cable steadied and came to rest, and the operator slowly lowered the grab down onto the main deck. The silence remained as the body that was attached to the leg slithered into view from the casserole of trash that surrounded it. No one could have mistaken it for Thomas Inlatta.
Despite the fact that the chest had been opened crudely, and judging by the ragged and splintered ribs, very quickly, it was still recognizably the body of a woman, naked, not only of clothes, but of skin. Large breasts, fatty and glistening and flayed, hung from the split torso, the unnatural divide between them making the picture even more grotesque.
Several crew members, in the crescent of watchers that surrounded the mess, crossed themselves, but no one moved forward to retrieve the body from its ignoble and shallow grave. Perhaps they would have stood in that silent semi-circle all night, staring and immobile, if the uncharacteristically authoritative voice of Matthew Cotton hadn’t cut into the thick silence.
“It’s going to take time to find out who she is. What matters here is that it’s not Thomas.”
The men looked across at him. Cotton was standing with Esther at the edge of the derrick, his face a puffy and crumpled mask.
“If he’s in there, he can’t possibly have survived this long. We need to close the hold hatches.”
Felix Chadin scanned his men’s faces and then turned back to his first officer. If Cotton’s voice had contained an authority that was normally absent, then Chadin’s contained an insolence that was equally rare.
“Are you crazy? We find an unidentified woman’s murdered body in the holds, and you say we should stop searching and close them?”
Cotton held the smaller man’s gaze. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Are those the captain’s orders?”
“Mine.”
Chadin let a beat of silence stand between them for a moment, before he inclined his head slowly up to the crane operator, and motioned for him to carry on. Cotton took a step forward, then stopped and looked down at the hand that was gripping his arm in restraint. Esther looked up at him, feeling the muscles of his forearm tense as he clenched and unclenched his fist.
“He’s right. You need to talk to the captain.”
There was sense in that. These frightened men were on his side. The side that wanted to stay alive. Why antagonize them? But as Cotton watched the grab begin to swing slowly over the top of hold two, leaving behind its grisly catch on the deck like an angler dumping his fish, the urgency of his mission pressed him. He did need to talk to the captain. He also needed a drink.
But then even men who had been abstainers all their lives would have been tempted to the bottle when, just as the crane got back to work, the stone-faced, blood-soaked figure of Sohn Haro appeared through the door of the accommodation block, and walked slowly towards the numbed watchers. He was a small man, but a lifetime of engineering had made him strong, and the burden he carried in his arms was presenting him with few difficulties. The difficulty lay entirely with the waiting group, whose instinct was to run from the sight of the thing that used to be Chelito Baylan, being cradled in the arms of his boss like a bride carried over the threshold.
13
The coffee had long gone sour, but with no galley crew to service the machine in the mess hall, the three men who remained there had no choice but to keep drinking it. Edgar Pasco, an oiler, was being the most vocal about its nauseating properties, and although his repetitive complaining was irritating his companions, they shared his view sufficiently to overlook it. Besides, they had other things on their minds. There had been no news from the main hold deck, where the search for Thomas Inlatta had been underway for over an hour, and the cadets Raul and Erol were deciding whether their growing discomfort was anxiety or boredom.
As Edgar lifted his cof
fee to his lips and prepared to make yet another comedy face of disgust, Erol took the cue to speak, simply to prevent the inevitable complaint.
“Isn’t someone supposed to come and tell us what’s happening?”
Raul Nestor flicked a coin through his knuckles and shrugged. “Guess if they find him alive we’ll know all about it.”
“Yeah, well you’d think Chadin would want all hands to help out,” Erol replied sulkily. “Don’t see the point of us being down here when almost everyone else is up on deck.”
Edgar put down the coffee cup and wiped his mouth. “Think yourself lucky. Have you smelt that trash? Almost as bad as this coffee.”
Raul crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup into a ball and threw it at the oiler’s head.
Erol was sniffing the air. There had been a faintly bad odour since they were posted down here, but it was as well that they stayed ignorant of its source, namely the powerless freezer in which Salvo Acambra’s corpse, unrefrigerated, was succumbing quickly to the heat of the galley. It was mild enough to get used to. But now, there was a stronger smell. Something much worse.
“Talking of which, can you guys smell that stuff in here?”
With nothing else to do they afforded the question a moment’s attention, and Raul shrugged again. “The smell’s going to get in every time they open the goddamn doors.”
Erol screwed up his face. “Pretty strong for that.”
The other two looked at each other. Erol was right. The smell was bad and getting worse.
“Yeah. Like that’s all we need,” sighed Raul. He shifted in his chair and ran an exasperated hand over the back of his neck. Raul was more agitated than his companions might have imagined. The initial fear that Chadin had ignited in them after Salvo’s murder had dissipated. Raul Nestor was not convinced they were in any danger at all. Sure, someone had done what they had done, but it wasn’t likely to happen again with the whole crew on the alert.
The murderer, Raul surmised, rather than planning his next victim, must be shitting his pants. And anyway the company sister-ship would be here in only a few hours and they would be able to radio for help and let someone else find the killer. Raul wanted to get out of this mess hall and get on with his free time, which had been eaten into by this emergency. He knew exactly what would happen. His watch would roll back round in only five hours and he’d have wasted all his own time by sitting here with these two dolts instead of lying back on his bunk with a beer and some motocross magazines. Raul made up his mind. He stood, and walked to the door.
Edgar raised an eyebrow. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to find which door’s letting in that cargo stench, and shut the damn thing.”
Before either of others could protest, he was out of the door and into the corridor. Erol watched him go, then looked to Edgar. “Shouldn’t one of us go with him?”
“That’d leave one of us alone.”
“So we should both go.”
Edgar inclined his head. “We’re posted in here. Remember the last time you crossed Chadin by disobeying an order?”
Erol did. They exchanged a look and then got back to the business of sitting and waiting.
The smell in the corridor was fearsome, so much so that Raul was forced to put a hand to his mouth as he walked towards the elevator and stairs. When he turned the corner into the corridor that housed the junior crew cabins, it was even worse, but at least the problem presented a solution.
At the end of the corridor the starboard window was wide open, the screw-down bolts on the hinged side having been turned fully and then lifted out. The corridor was open to the night air, or in this case, the fetid stench of rot.
Raul wondered for a moment why the window had been opened like that, and why it had been left so. It was bad seamanship to leave any windows or portholes open, and securing them was second nature to most sailors. He walked to the offending square of glass, his cheap plastic trainers making a tacky noise as they passed over something sticky, and put his head through the opening. A mixture of relief and puzzlement came over him, as the act brought him not the stench he had expected to be wafting from the hold deck, but a sweet reward of salty night air. The window was on the outer hull of the accommodation tower, and he peered down the edge of the metal cliff to the sea sixty or seventy feet away and enjoyed lungfuls of delicious air.
Raul allowed himself a minute more and then stood up again to close the window, reeling from the smell that was still as strong inside the corridor.
Reason suggested to him that perhaps a window or door on the port side might be responsible if the wind was in the right direction, and that would go a little way to explaining the mystery of the smell’s origin seemingly being inside rather than out, although he still wondered about why the window was open. He would close it, and then go and search on the other side of the ship for the offending source.
As Raul bent down to search for the winged screw that had fallen from the bolt hole, a noise made him look up sharply. He stopped, held his breath and listened. There was a voice coming from one of the cabins. He stood up slowly and narrowed his eyes, listening more closely. It was coming from Ronaldo Valdez’s cabin. Actually it was technically Valdez’s and Fen Sahg’s cabin, since the crazy guy had been moved in to invade Ronaldo’s famous privacy, but whoever you attributed the ownership of the cabin to, there was definitely a voice coming from within it. A low voice.
Slowly, Raul crept forward to the cabin door, kept his back close to the wall, and stopped to listen.
The smell here was so bad that he covered his nose and mouth again and kept his breathing shallow. There was silence from the cabin for a few moments and then the voice again. Raul relaxed. It was Fen. He would go in and find out what the crazy oiler was doing, but as he put his hand on the door handle and pressed it down, the wicked part of Raul Nestor paused for a moment before going in to hear what Fen was saying and to whom. It was curious. It sounded as though Fen were talking to an animal, or a small child. His voice was cooing, soothing, if a little deferential.
“There. Look, there. How does that feel? Yes? Yes you can feel that now can’t you?”
Then a high laugh from Fen and he resumed his fussing.
“Can I tighten it? Must I…?”
If Raul had been about to laugh the next sound stopped him. It wasn’t a voice, and yet it was. It made sounds like words, but no words that Raul had ever heard, or indeed would ever care to hear again. A low guttural rasp replied to Fen’s womanly attentions, but one that held so much power behind it, it seemed underlain by thunder. And even though Raul could not understand the strange language the voice spoke, its meaning was quite clear. It was telling Fen to be quiet.
Before he had time to think, Raul let go of the door-handle quickly. It sprang back up to its horizontal plane with a click, and as if the metal of the handle had been a switch, the rumble of thunder that was the voice stopped.
There was a fraction of a second when the stillness of the night was unbroken even by Raul Nestor’s breathing, and then three things happened very fast.
The first was that Fen Sahg’s cabin door slammed open. The second was that Raul Nestor saw what was inside. The third was that Raul Nestor screamed, only just managing to contain the vomit that was rising in his throat, then turned and ran.
“Well now we know who it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to apprehend him.”
Skinner was on the bridge, doing his duty as captain by dispatching his bosun to the cargo deck and taking the watch the moment he’d heard the news about Chelito Baylan. Now he was leaning against the bank of machines rendered useless without their radio, regarding Esther and Matthew with the same calm demeanour as if they were discussing the menu for tomorrow’s lunch.
Esther found her eyes were narrowing, and she opened them wider in a conscious move to avoid the too-obvious display of disapproval. She nodded at the captain and kept her voice soft. “Do we think that Fen’s responsible for the other body in the ho
ld?”
The captain didn’t honour the question with a shrug, but the tone of his reply implied it. “I imagine if one is capable of eviscerating a colleague and ripping out the ship’s radio then one is capable of anything. Who knows how Mr. Sahg chose to spend his shore leave.”
Esther thought she detected a undercurrent of amusement in Skinner’s words and she didn’t like it. She got to the point. “There must be a gun on board for emergencies. We’ll need weapons.”
Lloyd Skinner maintained a steady, unwavering gaze, but one eyebrow rose in an arc of amusement. “We, Miss Mulholland?”
“I can help. I can handle a gun.”
He smiled this time and looked out to the hold deck to the bizarre and grisly scene that stretched in front of them. In the halogen lights the cranes were still, and Sohn Haro sat in a crumpled heap being comforted by a group of men only a few feet away from the twisted and bloody mess of Chelito Baylan’s corpse. But if such a nightmarish tableau was registering on the consciousness of the captain, who, after all, was responsible for ship and crew, both of which were clearly in unthinkable disarray, he didn’t show it.
“Can you indeed?”
His light tone grated. Her voice hardened.
“Yeah. Can you?”
Skinner didn’t take his eyes from the deck, but both Esther and Matthew noted that his jawline tensed as his back teeth ground together for a beat. The silence that the captain left hanging was uncomfortable, and Esther believed he meant it to be so.
She was determined not to be the one to break it. Cotton obviously was not so attuned to the tension, and after wiping at a dry mouth he spoke as though Esther’s question had been rhetorical.
“Before we even try and track down Fen, we have to close the holds.”
Skinner turned to him and examined his face with an uncharacteristic curiosity. “What is this about, Cotton? This obsession with the holds?”