by Muriel Gray
Matthew looked at Esther for support but her eyes told him she was as stranded as he was. “For safety. It’s important.”
Skinner sighed and looked at his watch, and unlike Esther, made little attempt to mask his irritation in the presence of what he now clearly regarded were two fools. “Several things are going to happen in the next three hours in the name of safety, First Officer Cotton. The first is that I am going to allow the crew, who you may have noticed are now almost paralysed by fear, a little more time to debate amongst themselves whether they will pursue their fruitless task of trying to find a dead man in an impenetrable cargo, and then I will ask Chadin to gather the entire crew in the engine room. The next will be that a selected band will hunt down Fen Sahg, restrain him and bring him to the engine room to join us, where we will handcuff the psychotic animal safely to a rail, and wait there until our sister-ship arrives to put us out of the misery of this mess of a voyage. Since I’m about to put this plan into action for the safety of everyone on board, and since the weather is set fair, with little chance of the holds flooding, don’t you think a delay in keeping at least four men up on deck to close all the hatches would be rather a waste of everyone’s time?”
Matthew saw his chance.
“We don’t know the weather will stay fine. The weather fax is non-operational.”
Skinner looked at Matthew with rising irritation, but still, Esther noted, laced with an undercurrent of interest in his motives. “How long have you been at sea?”
“Long enough to know it’s insane to take risks with the ocean.”
The captain put a finger to his mouth and tapped thoughtfully at the pink skin of his lower lip. “You never fail to surprise me, Matthew.”
He looked at Cotton for what seemed an unnaturally long time, examining him with as little self-consciousness as though he were a witness eyeballing a police line-up from behind the safe invisibility of a two-way mirror.
“Perhaps,” he continued with no recognizable emotion in either his face or voice that Esther could place, “you could do with a stiff drink.”
Esther glanced at Matthew, who remained staring at the captain, his countenance unchanged. The captain returned the gaze until he broke the connection out of what looked like boredom. As if waking from a reverie, Skinner glanced back down to the deck, then briefly at his watch again.
“Put it like this. I’m getting everyone off that deck and down below in the next half hour. If you want to personally go along nine hatches and close them, be my guest, but I must insist you join us in the engine room immediately you finish. I need to know where everybody on this ship is. Everybody.”
Esther was looking at the captain with impassive eyes, but her body language was displaying impatience. “The guns?”
He looked back at her as if she had just entered the room and he was seeing her for the first time. “I hardly think guns will be necessary in apprehending a five-foot-four, slightly-built man, when we have twenty-seven other men available for that purpose.”
“Twenty-six,” said Esther quietly but forcefully. She nodded in the direction of the deck.
“Salvo.”
Skinner ignored her corrective accountancy and his voice took on that patronizing lecturing quality that never failed to make Esther Mulholland clench a fist.
“Anyone can carry out acts of great brutality on an unsuspecting victim. When the pursuers are forewarned and outnumber the murderer, one tends to find that the individual who was previously thought to be dangerous is rendered nothing more than a frightened, scuttling beast.”
Esther was as unimpressed as she was riled. “There’s nothing more dangerous than something cornered and frightened.”
Lloyd Skinner pressed his lips together, took a long look at Esther then drew a lungful of air in through his nose and sighed.
Esther watched his eyes as he regarded her, and she found the subtle change that flitted across them as he spoke uncomfortably enigmatic. She didn’t like not being able to read people, and there was no doubt that Lloyd Skinner’s internal code was hard to break.
“You imagine that as captain of this ship, I’m going to break open the weapon locker and hand a gun to a hysterical teenage girl passenger? You think that would indicate sound judgement?”
Esther kept her eyes on his, and worked hard to make sure her gaze didn’t falter. “In six months’ time, Captain Skinner, I’ll be a fully enlisted member of the US military. My job will be to be fight for my country.”
Something twitched at the edge of Lloyd Skinner’s mouth and for one crazy moment Esther thought he was about to cry. Instead, his mouth cracked into an involuntary smile that split his craggy face in two. But it was a mirthless smile.
“I’m sure we’ll all sleep safer in our beds.”
He turned away from them to look out of the bridge window, leaning forward on the sill as if his annoying visitors had departed, and for what seemed like an age, no one said anything.
“Captain?” ventured Esther with as gentle a tone as she could manage.
“Miss Mulholland,” he said, facing away from her.
Esther waited. It had not been a reply, she sensed, but the start of a sentence. Lloyd Skinner turned around, and unless she was very much mistaken, the impassive, distracted, distant man she had been observing over the last two days had been replaced with somebody quite different. Just how different she wasn’t sure, although the parts of her that automatically calculated risk and acted accordingly were already taking readings and sending them off to the lab. All she could say for sure was that she didn’t like the look that was gathering in the man’s eyes.
It was anything but distracted, a million miles away from being indifferent. In fact Lloyd Skinner had the distinct look of a predator.
“You…” he continued in a low and controlled voice that was silky and smooth but contained an aftertaste of something exceedingly bitter, “… are starting to get on my tits.”
Raul Nestor’s body and mind had returned to a close approximation of the animal it had evolved from nearly three million years ago. There was no higher thought going on, no mature and civilized responses to the immediate threat. Instead, his entire being was running on the thin, primeval fuel of adrenalin that controlled his flesh and its flight.
He had half-stumbled, half-sprinted along the metal-floored corridor that led away from Fen’s cabin, gasping for breath as the spit dried in his mouth.
But even before he reached the elevator at the end, his peripheral vision had informed him that something was pursuing him along the pitted and pipe-veined corridor of E-deck. Something that stank. Something that moved in a horribly fast and agile way. The same something, he knew, he’d just seen in Fen’s cabin in a scene that defied explanation to the sane mind.
Raul’s darting eyes scanned the only possible escape route ahead, the end of the corridor that led to the stairs and the elevator. The outer door of the elevator was shut as always, but the thin rectangular glass window of the inner door that revealed itself to those who were familiar with the appliance informed him that the car was on this floor. In the fractions of seconds that all this information was being absorbed and processed, the boy’s instincts rather than his reasoning powers weighed up his options, and decided that a pursuit either up or down the narrow metal staircase between decks would not be a chase in his favour. The elevator. He would make a dash for it. Whether the two metal doors that were between the empty car and the rest of the world would offer any kind of sanctuary was still to be tested, but at the moment it was the only bolt-hole Raul could see. He lunged the last fifteen feet and grabbed onto the brass handle of the outer door. Behind him came the noise of his hunter, a noise that was a baffling combination of scrabbling claws, the slurping of mud and the rustle of something hideous.
Its proximity made him haul desperately at the handle, trying to foil the spring that was trying to do what it was designed to, namely slowing and controlling the speed at which the door opened and closed
.
Raul Nestor was panting and crying like a child as the barrier to his imagined safety swung back, and let him tear at the lever that operated the side-opening concertina gate of the inner door. His fingers groped and clawed, until the handle gave way and granted him the ability to pull the sliding barrier back.
He was inside with the concertina gate slammed closed, before the full horror of elevator design became apparent. Through the small rectangle of cloudy wire-chequered glass set into the centre of the metal gate, he could for the first time see his foe full on. It was only eight or nine feet away, seemingly unhurried and slowing up as it approached, almost as if it knew its prey was already caught, and the reason that Raul could see it so well was that the outer door was still open. He whimpered, a string of drool hanging from the corner of his down-turned mouth, and stabbed at the buttons on the wall panel. The elevator remained static. Without the hand of a human to force its painfully slow passage from the outside, the outer door would take its time to shut, swinging lethargically on its tight spring until the metal plate at the bottom made contact with the corresponding one of the inner door. The passenger inside the car was powerless to hurry the process, since as in most double-doored elevators, opening the inner gate with the outer still ajar interrupted the safety sequence. Faced with what was outside, Raul’s intellectual decisions would never have over-ruled his primeval responses and allowed him to do anything that would remove a barrier, however flimsy, between himself and the bad, bad thing that was now unfolding itself in the corridor. Instead, he pinned himself to the back of the tiny box, and screamed, as he waited for the destiny that only the hinges and springs of the outer door would determine.
With the unhurried pace of a ballet dancer lowering a raised arm to bow, the door followed its excruciating arc towards the metal contacts that would make the elevator move. And within that arc there came two different opportunities to observe what stood outside in the corridor. The first was, as Raul had already witnessed, the view from the dirty window in the gate. It had afforded him the muddied but distinct picture of a thing that was the size of a man, but enlarged in volume by being encrusted and seemingly encased in a confusion of matter that was disgusting beyond the obscene. Although he saw it for only seconds, Raul took in details of mottled, purple dead flesh pulled tight around a misshapen framework of bloodied bone, of rusty tin, of matted fur, yellowed teeth and an unidentifiable black, dripping mash. But as the door closed, the horror was momentarily obscured from view as it swung through the part of the curve that blocked the window. Raul’s screams were still pumping from his throat as he waited for the last ten inches of open door to be closed. It slowed even further as it neared its terminus, then with a tiny noise that was nevertheless sufficiently significant to make itself heard to Raul above his own screaming, it shut with a click. He pounded at the panel of buttons on the wall with a fist, and the car lurched as it started to move. His screams now mutated into a whimpering from the back of his throat as he turned his head back to the yellowed grime of the window, now double-glazed with the matching glass rectangle of the outer door. Two eyes were staring at him. The face, if the obscene mosaic of matter could be called a face, was pressed up against the glass, looking in. In the seconds in which Raul looked into those glittering black orbs, he read an intelligent malice, depthless cruelty and contempt, and worse still, an ancient knowingness that atrophied his heart and stilled the whimper in his throat. And then, like a miracle, the elevator slowly slid the hellish picture downwards into the darkness, and replaced it with the bland moving image of the elevator shaft’s metal wall.
Felix Chadin rose from the kneeling position he had been adopting for the last ten minutes, and winced at the cramp that it had inflicted on his legs. He stretched his calf muscles and glanced down at the chief engineer. When Sohn had first stumbled onto the deck under his hellish burden he had been as far from okay as it was possible to get. Chadin looked at him now and was relieved to see he had recovered. Chadin shot a look across at Renato, and signalled that he wanted to talk to him away from the frightened huddle. They walked to the bottom of the silent derrick.
“We should sail for port.”
Renato Lhoon looked away from Chadin’s earnest insistent face and directed his eyes at his shoes. “The captain’s made his decision, Felix. The company ship’s only hours away.”
“How do we know that? We don’t have a fucking radio.”
“I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”
Chadin indicated the heap further up the deck, where Chelito Baylan and the body of the unknown girl lay together under a tarpaulin that had been hastily thrown over their remains.
“Yeah? Like this is part of knowing what you’re doing?”
Renato said nothing. He knew there was no port near enough to bolt to, but he too had been unconsciously calculating how long it would take them to sail back to Callao and how they would attract attention with only an Aldis lamp and hollering, to get a pilot boat to guide them safely in. But loyalty was to be the thing.
Loyalty was the thing that would make the difference to his less than satisfactory life. Loyalty would win him promotion by the next voyage. He’d sworn to himself that it would. Renato set his face into a mask of impassive authority and looked at the bosun.
“He’s got it under control. I’m going to check on the rest of the crew, then talk to the captain. Best thing you can do is keep these men calm.”
Both Renato and Chadin looked across the deck at the nervous huddle of shocked humanity, and instinctively knew that when they recovered their senses from the latest atrocity that it would take some considerable effort to keep these men from doing whatever they believed individually would save their own skins. Chadin had never witnessed a mutiny before, even when he’d sailed with a drunken captain who’d smashed a tanker into an East African pier, killing two luckless fishermen in a tethered boat. That had been bad, but this time he felt the undercurrent of something worse than the mere rising insubordination of the lower ranks challenging the authority of the higher. He felt the feral tang of self-preservation. And not just from his men. Felix Chadin knew somewhere deep inside, that if it came to the point at which he might never see his wife and children again, he himself would abandon any formality of rank, duty or service and do anything it took to make sure he stepped off this ship alive.
Chadin looked back at his first officer and Renato read the thought that had flitted so briefly behind the man’s dark eyes.
“It’s what you’re paid for, bosun.”
Chadin nodded. “And the captain is paid to bring back the same number of men he sailed with.”
Renato Lhoon wiped a hand over his hot brow, wishing the warm night breeze was a little cooler. “I’ll be back. Tell the men we’re gathering together with the captain in the engine room.”
He walked away towards the accommodation block and didn’t even stop when Chadin called out.
“And if the ship doesn’t come?”
The bosun watched his superior officer’s impassive back retreat and then slowly turned towards the men. Every eye was on him, because every ear had heard the question, and almost every heart was wondering the same.
“What the fuck?”
Edgar’s hand, which had been in the process of carrying more coffee to his lips, halted in mid-air at his companion’s half-whispered question. The scream that had pierced the silence of E-deck had been of a quality that neither Erol nor Edgar had ever heard, nor would care to again. It was definitely human, but it conveyed a terror that ripped the soul and froze the heart.
Edgar Pasco looked with wide, frightened eyes across at his friend and slowly lowered the cup to the table.
“Shit.”
Neither man moved. They knew to whom the screams must have belonged. It was an unspoken understanding that they communicated with their eyes, but fear rooted them to their seats until it started again, more distant this time, but if anything even fiercer in its intensity. It continued u
nabated as the sound moved away from them, until it became muted but still audible.
“What’ll we do?”
Erol’s voice had a tremor in it that indicated he was not far from tears. Edgar stood up, his eyes wide and fixed on the open doorway that had brought the nightmare sound to them.
“We’ll have to go to him.”
Erol looked up at him helplessly, then scanned the room as though searching for a rack of grenades in a mess room containing nothing more than trestle tables and coffee machines.
“And do what?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
Erol glanced across at the open serving hatch that joined the room to the galley. He pointed weakly. “We could get knives?”
Edgar regarded his companion with contempt, annoyed at how quickly he had become a snivelling girl, then walked to the hatch and climbed through. He re-emerged a moment later, and clambered back through the hatch clutching a cleaver. It did not escape Erol’s notice that he had chosen to climb through the serving hatch instead of walking out of the door and into the galley the conventional way, and the demonstration of Edgar’s fear gave him a boost that at least allowed him to stand up on shaking legs.
They moved cautiously towards the door and peered out into the corridor. It was silent now, but the smell that had caused Raul to leave to investigate it was overpowering.
“Jesus,” coughed Edgar. He slammed a sweating palm over his nose and mouth.
Erol gagged back a rising knot of vomit and steadied himself against the wall, and both men stayed still for a moment until Edgar pulled at his reluctant companion’s shirt and moved towards the T-junction at the end of the corridor. There was no more screaming, but somehow its absence made the tension worse. Senses that both men wished could be dulled against the onslaught of vile stench were heightened in anticipation of the dreadful noise starting again, and they held their breath against both violations as they approached the corner of the mess room’s corridor. Edgar stopped abruptly, as from his right a soft noise broke the silence. Erol hung back as the cleaver in Edgar’s hand rose to his shoulder.