THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  “What… did… you… see?” She pointed at her eyes, then at him.

  The international language of mime seemed to get through this time. Raul’s mouth turned down into a tight half-crescent as he pressed back against the pipe, hugging himself. He began to babble in Filipino, whimpering and crying, his hands shooting out occasionally to sketch something incomprehensible in the air.

  She watched with narrowed eyes, but could make little sense of anything he was trying to convey, and as Raul continued his hysterical charade, he became so increasingly distressed that Esther put out a hand to his arm, patted it and hushed him into repose again.

  Her head was aching. It must have been the foul air she had been breathing below, but a pain that had its roots in the base of her skull was growing from being dull and background to something sharper and more insistent. She put a hand to the back of her neck and rubbed.

  Esther looked out to sea and sighed, thinking about what to do next, and then glanced back at Raul. Raul Nestor. Raul Nestor from Batangas, a town south of Manila. Raul Nestor who wanted to own a motocross bike and win competitions. Who fantasized about Cameron Diaz and the slightly plump daughter of the sugar factory foreman where his father worked. Who had a genetic liver disease he didn’t yet know about, that wouldn’t make itself felt until he was in his thirties.

  Esther Mulholland blinked at him and knew all this. She caught her breath and looked away again, feeling her heart beating at twice its normal rate. It was an illusion, of course. For some peculiar reason, her head was making stuff up. How could she know things like that simply by looking at the boy? She breathed deeper, calmed herself and looked back. It was just a boy huddled on a deck, trying to tell her what had frightened him. For a moment or two, she joined him in his anxiety. Esther didn’t like being out of control, and whatever made her temporarily hallucinate about the boy’s private life was most definitely not being driven by her. But there was an explanation for everything. She was tired. The last six hours had been tough.

  She rubbed her eyes and scrutinized the boy’s face. This wasn’t getting her anywhere. But it was essential she found out who or what had frightened him, and how long ago. After all, it must have been something pretty bad to shake up a cool nineteen-year-old like Raul. She stood up, walked a few paces to the rail, and ran through her options. And while Esther Mulholland’s mind laid them out before her, it was probably too busy to make her ask herself how she knew that Raul Nestor was nineteen.

  Renato Lhoon had not been pleased when his first officer entered the engine room leading the crew who had been deployed to the holds. Matthew Cotton was looking uncharacteristically in charge when he arrived, and that was not what Renato had expected or indeed desired. However, it was a look that seemed fuelled by some inner turmoil rather than by maturity or a renewed sense of responsibility. He watched Cotton carefully as he stormed in and started glancing about quickly. There were now twenty men in the room, and they milled around the vast metal gallery looking for places to sit, or stood in small groups smoking and talking in low voices. Cotton, however, was counting heads, ticking off crew members on his fingers as he mouthed their names silently. Renato walked slowly over to join him.

  “Counting crew present, or just remembering who owes you a drink?”

  Cotton kept his eyes forward, ignoring the barb, and continued calculating for a moment. He stopped, his brow furrowed and then spoke much too quickly, Renato’s theory about this being a man who was far from being at peace starting to seem self-evident.

  “Who are we missing?”

  Renato scanned the room but made no reply.

  Cotton turned to look at him. “I said, who are we missing, Second Officer Lhoon?”

  There was no mistaking the deliberate authority in Matthew Cotton’s voice, or the emphasis he gave to the word “second”. An internal spring in the dark portion of Renato Lhoon’s heart wound a notch tighter. He returned Cotton’s stare with a placid and inscrutable face. “Radio Officer and Cadet Libuano. Fen Sahg, somewhat obviously, Raul Nestor, who if Pasco and Gonzales’ story is to believed, may not be joining us at all. That just leaves the captain and… your lady passenger.”

  Matthew glanced over at the oiler and the OS, once again ignoring the jagged emphasis on Renato’s last two words. “What happened?” His voice held dread.

  Renato gestured over at the two men. “Nestor went out alone. They heard screams. Then Sahg appears from the direction of the screaming, covered in blood and crazy as a coot.”

  Cotton mashed his mouth with a hand. “Fuck.”

  Now that Cotton was deep in thought, Renato took the opportunity to examine his face. He wanted to watch how it changed as he spoke. “The captain’s rounding up Pasqual and Libuano. Where’s the girl?”

  Cotton’s face did not change. His brow remained furrowed, his hand remained over his mouth. “I don’t know,” he replied distractedly and completely truthfully.

  Renato clucked in annoyance, though it was unclear whether it was because Cotton had been irresponsible again, or because the theory he’d been hatching about an unprofessional romance between his drunken superior and the passenger seemed to be wrong. He turned away in irritation. “Everyone in twos, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So who let her slip away?”

  Matthew shrugged, still deep in thought.

  Renato sighed and tucked a loose corner of his shirt into his pants with the pompous manner of a petty official dressing for office. “Then let’s hope she joins us soon.”

  Matthew was thinking the same. And more besides. She would have finished her dubious chore by now, for sure. So where was she? He needed to talk to her about the tape, more to stop himself going mad than because he believed what he’d heard on it. A momentary flitting of fright passed over him as he suddenly feared for her safety, rather than for her discovery in an act of theft. The same feeling of dread he’d felt when he’d listened to the muffled recording of the words the Inca boy had been saying to an oblivious Esther.

  He took in air sharply through his nostrils for a second, trying to compose himself, but the words came back as clearly as though the tape were being played right now in public.

  “I know who you are… I know all things… I have been chosen… you live in a shiny box… a trailer. Your father drinks too much. You broke a bone in your foot when you were six. Fell over a trailer gas canister running from men who wen going to do something bad to your friend’s mother. Your father was too drunk to notice you were in pain and you limped for weeks, the foot crippling, your blood growing septic. The trailer owner’s wife saved you… took you to hospital. It made you take care of your body after that. You love your body now… you treat it like a gift… But it will be our gift. Our gift to him.”

  Matthew wiped at his brow.

  “Then we need to find her. We’ll both go.”

  Renato raised an eyebrow, crossed his arms and shook his head, daring Cotton to contradict him. “No way. We’re in an emergency situation here. I’m not leaving the men short of officers just to find one crazy passenger.”

  Cotton nodded slowly, scrutinizing Renato for the first time. “Fine. If she turns up, don’t let her go again.” He walked to the engine room door.

  “Never sail with women,” spat Lhoon as Cotton passed him.

  “Pain in the ass.”

  It was a good impression of someone who was merely irritated by the inconvenience of the task that Cotton was carrying out, but it was far from true. Even though Reno Lhoon found his superior officer’s company repugnant, given the circumstances, it was not for that reason at all that he was very glad not to be accompanying him.

  Skinner’s wristwatch told him the inescapable truth, the same way it had less than five minutes ago, when he’d looked at it last. Time was not on his side. The fact that Fen Sahg had become psychotic did not surprise Skinner, but then the capacity for man to turn to beast had never surprised him.

  What had taken him aback
was that he hadn’t spotted it coming, and that oversight, more than the deeds the man had committed, was eating away at Skinner as he walked towards the door of the radio room. He should have contained the problem himself, dealt with it when he’d had the chance. Now things were almost out of control, and Lloyd Skinner didn’t like anything being out of his control. Despite his ire, Skinner’s face was a mask of composure when he opened the cabin door and entered, and only the most intimate observer would have argued that it failed to remain so when his gaze fell immediately on a familiar piece of equipment. Pasqual Sanquiloa looked up excitedly from his task and waved the handset at him as Captain Skinner closed the door behind him quietly.

  “Saved, captain. A portable VHF!” he laughed delightedly.

  Skinner nodded, flicking his eyes quickly to the deck cadet as he surveyed the rest of the cabin. “And where did this appear from?” he asked casually as though loss of radio contact at sea had been nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

  “The girl passenger. She found it.” He turned to the sullen cadet and threw him a question in Filipino. “Where’d she say she found it?”

  Gaspar Libuano shrugged back. He didn’t speak much English and hadn’t understood anything the American girl had said at all. He looked from the radio officer to the captain and repeated the shrug.

  Skinner rubbed his chin then casually put his hands in his pockets. “Any contact yet?”

  Pasqual shook his head. “Nothing yet.” He looked up at the captain with a huge grin. “I’ve only just started. Give me time.”

  Lloyd Skinner made an upward nod and returned a wide grin as he pulled the handgun from his pocket, turned his head towards the cadet and shot him through the head. Before Gaspar Libuano’s legs had time to buckle beneath his body, Skinner turned the gun on a wide-eyed Pasqual, and put the second bullet between his eyes. Captain Skinner watched the lifeless body of his radio officer fall backwards against the radio bench, his hips catching the edge of the metal, making Pasqual Sanquiloa’s torso fold neatly over his thighs before slithering to the floor. The fixed grin left Skinner’s face as he replaced the gun in his pocket, picked up the VHF, and left.

  16

  The bolts on the manhole cover were stiff, but a tap from the monkey wrench loosened them sufficiently to let them turn the rest of the way by hand. Esther unscrewed the last one, then stopped and stood back a step.

  There was no point in asking herself what she was doing. That was self-evident. But why she was doing it was a question that was suspended in dark syrup, somewhere in her head that was temporarily unavailable for examination. She wiped the sweat from her brow and lifted the top off the cover. The smell from the hold below hit her hard, making her reel back in disgust.

  But there was a feeling of a job completed, and she knelt down for a moment to let her racing heart calm. She closed her eyes, and with reluctance was forced to admit to herself that she was not well. She could hardly breathe and her temperature was soaring. She concentrated for a moment, clenching her fists, and to her relief the moment passed. The ocean breeze played at her brow and cooled the sweat, and she sucked in a lungful of air and stood up.

  Esther blinked into the halogen lights of the deck, trying to remember what she had been about to do. Cotton. That was it. She had to go to Cotton and tell him what she knew about the captain. The gun. Where was the gun? She stared around desperately. There it was, where she had put it, on the edge of hold number two where she stood. She snatched it up, horrified that she had let it part from her company.

  She swung the gun over her shoulder and felt her heart start to race again. Three and a half miles beneath her feet, at the bottom of the Milne Edward Trench, she could feel the immensity of the water pressure, sense the movement of the strange sea creatures that lived there in the inky dark, unseen, and as yet undiscovered by man.

  Esther groaned and put a hand to her brow again. What was happening to her? She was hallucinating. She must be. How could she feel the sea bed below her, and know what lay concealed there? She crouched down, closed her eyes and pressed knuckles to her temples, concentrating hard to empty her mind of these bizarre delusions, but the world was still light beneath her tightly-screwed eyelids. Not light in the way that closed eyes lifted to the sun will still admit some opaque pink illumination. It was lit with a conflagration of random, unstoppable knowledge, a visual and mental cacophony of images and senses that blinded her yet made her see at the same time. Esther crumpled, falling forward, forehead to the deck, her palms splayed out before her as though praying to Mecca. And as she remained panting for breath in that position, the intimate knowledge of the unholy thing that was moving stealthily on the ship, was of no more importance in her white-hot mind than any of the million other things she was being forced to know.

  In his whole time at sea, Matthew had only ever been on a completely empty ship once, a tub he had captained that was about to be broken for scrap. Even then, there had probably been workmen on the hull he’d been unaware of. But like now, the effect of walking through an entirely deserted accommodation block had been the same. It was unsettling. The high metal tower that housed the crew was large, but its vertical configuration meant that corridors were short, the staircase was tight, and the cabins barnacled together. On a busy ship this arrangement was comforting. On top of the constant engine thrum, this huddled-together warren of humanity meant that there were nearly always the sounds of footsteps or voices drifting from around a corner.

  The air was full of cooking smells from the galley, and the incessant ambient noise of radios being played in cabins or muffled laughter from a card game, made the ship live and breathe.

  But when the Lysicrates was devoid of its inhabitants, this cosy ergonomic architecture became labyrinthine. For Matthew Cotton, as he walked quietly and slowly along the brightly-lit corridor of B-deck, the anticipation of encountering a colleague around a blind corner had been replaced by something considerably less pleasant. It was the deep, gnawing fear of encountering something inhuman, something indescribable that he had ached to consign only to his nightmares ever since he had glimpsed its swift and baffling outline. But Esther was not in the engine room, and while he still believed that the thing he had seen was not the stuff of dreams, Esther had to be found. It made sense that if the captain had gone to collect Pasqual and his cadet then they would be in the radio room, and that was where Matthew was headed. The line of cabins before the radio room were quiet, and he listened as he approached for the comfort of voices from within. It was silent. Matthew sighed, already running through his next course of action as he pushed open Pasqual’s familiar door.

  The measurement of time and its passing may be regarded as an exact science, but to the human mind it is entirely subjective. Matthew looked at, and tried to make sense of, the scene in the cabin for what seemed to him like an age. He would have sworn it was a slow motion turn of the head that guided his gaze away from the violently-twisted face of Gaspar Libuano, the black-red hole in the dead man’s forehead resembling a henna decoration on an Indian wedding guest, to take in the equally awkward posture of Pasqual’s corpse folded on the floor. All Matthew Cotton could hear was the beat of his heart and the rushing passage of his own blood in his ears, a noise more invasive and insistent than the idling turbines that throbbed below the floor.

  Slowly, he stepped back in horror, and even more slowly, carefully and methodically scanned the room for the source of the slaughter before turning, leaving the cabin, and falling back against the corridor wall to regain his breath.

  At least that was how Matthew Cotton perceived it. In reality the Lysicrates’ first officer was in the cabin for no more than a few seconds before he stumbled out, his hand clamped to his mouth. But time caught up with Matthew as he leant panting against the metal wall. He had barely blinked away his tears of shock before his mind had compared and contrasted the dead men in the radio room with those who had been eviscerated, to wonder why they had not died by the same metho
d, and whether they had died by the same hand.

  A gun. Who had a gun?

  Matthew Cotton took his hand from his face and looked both ways along the corridor. “Esther,” he breathed.

  He stepped forward, glanced once into the oblong frame of the door that housed this new nightmare, and ran for the stairs.

  Resting his hands on top of the shoebox, his fingers toyed with dice he could feel but not see, pushing them between his knuckles and catching them in his palm. The men’s voices, far away on the other side of the door, were distant and muffled, but amplified by the chamber of metal that towered above him. Occasionally Fen would glance up blindly in the blackness towards the source of the noise and frown. Then he would bend his head further towards his knees like a sulking child and ruminate on how much he hated the men who were talking and moving about in the warmth and light of the engine room. As he blinked in the inky black, for just a moment part of him wondered why.

  They were his colleagues. He laughed with them, ate with them, drank with them, shared stories and experiences, and he had never, until now, been excluded or shunned by them. But as fast as the thought began to sow regret in his heart, the emotion was overwhelmed by the delicious knowledge of the master he now served. The one who demanded his complete loyalty, and in return gave Fen glimpses of the passion and ecstasy that the dark powers were capable of bestowing on the faithful.

  The crew of the Lysicrates and their pathetic mortal pursuits were of little consequence in comparison. No matter. Soon every last one of them would be dead, and only Fen would be alive, and alive in a way that although he could barely comprehend it intellectually, he understood fully with his heart.

  There was only one more sacrifice to make. The most important one. The girl. Another cloud passed over Fen. He was jealous. She had been chosen so long ago compared to the brevity of his service. If only he could have been chosen, but then Fen was no virgin. Fen had no claim to the kind of purity either of body and soul that the girl seemingly had. Inherent goodness. That was what the darkness needed as fuel for its fire, and Fen was flawed too deeply to be absorbed into that divine entity as the final, vital part of its new self. It had been in the midst of one of his too-rarely-granted moments of knowingness, that Fen had unwillingly seen into the girl. Her purity was not one of conventional religious piety. It was a deeper, less superficial good, a simplicity of spirit that would be overlooked by any human eye searching for an incorruptible goodness. She was moulded so irreversibly with a desire to do the right thing, to help and heal, to defend and protect, and above all, to love and forgive. It was that which must be adulterated to finish this, but Fen longed for it to be him.