THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  The cool of the evening now. The warm air drifting in through the stone aperture of the window. The smell of these forbidden quarters is overpowering. Is it the smell of sex or death? To him it is life. Cloying, perfumed, dangerous, charged like the air before thunder.

  No Handmaiden of the Sun can be looked at by any human, not even the high priest. Their extraordinary, childlike beauty can only be held as distant memory by the families who had been so honoured to have their daughters chosen, since these most highly-respected fifteen-year-old virgins now belong solely to the Sun God. Their quarters are nothing less than a fortification, though in truth such precautions are unnecessary. No man would dare try and pass through their door. Such violation would incur a penalty too terrible to contemplate.

  But then since his return, he is no ordinary man. What ordinary man would have these girls licking at him like dogs as he lies on their finely-woven woollen mats and chews on the dream-making root he took from the jungle? What ordinary man would have these spoiled, bored bitches writhing and begging beneath his body, unsure whether they want more pleasure or pain? The rules of this Sun God are not for a man who has no need of gods. There are, after all, no rules for a man who is a god.

  A cold dawn. So very cold. They believe that the sight of the handmaidens’ torture and death will be a fitting appetizer to the pain he is to endure. His head is bound fast to a pole, his eyelids propped open with splinters, but it takes at least a thousand beats of the heart before his body and his smile betray that he is not experiencing distress and remorse, but excitement.

  They rip his genitals from their root with the hot pliers that work gold. The gaping red-black hole between his legs oozes a thick trail of gore as he is dragged up the stone of the temple steps. The task is to stay conscious, to try and call what he can from the dark to save himself. But the pain is too much. His skin is flayed on the granite as they pull him slowly up towards the altar, and as he falls in and out of consciousness the part of his mind that needs to be clear is occupied with the agony of his body.

  Dogs are barking. People are roaring and shouting abuse. Children scream and bawl. The silence that would normally surround the dawn of a sacrifice is rent by the fury of the crowd, but as his body is pulled up the last step to the altar an inner quiet takes hold of him. The pain has passed that line of intensity where the mind can no longer register it. There is a numbness, a stillness, an acceptance of death that is curiously soothing to his torn flesh. And with it comes a clarity of understanding that is born directly from the disciplines of both his old religion and his new. As the blade pierces the skin of his abdomen, he turns his head to catch the smells that waft up the heights of the temple from the squalid village that huddles in its shadow.

  There is no ceremony in his execution. It is revenge, hatred and jealously that makes the Sun God’s priests tear at his body, makes them hungry to pull out his heart. And since there is no magic in it, he is not granted the knowing state of grace that their younger, purer sacrifices enjoy in their last hours. The state that makes the young and the beautiful long to be chosen. But while his heart still beats there is a secret, more powerful ceremony taking place in his soul. His incantations are silent but spoken with the mind. How can they know that his liturgy is already taking place, since the blood and the pain, the hatred and the pleasure of killing are already present? All he needs is the filth to mix with his blood.

  The dark tendrils of thought he sends out see what is to happen and he hisses with pleasure, even as the blade opens his torso to the first rays of the rising sun. The gutters are already trickling with his blood.

  All he must do is stay alive long enough until his precious body fluids mix with the shit and the piss, with the decomposing stew of dead rats and rotting vegetables, with the babies’ vomit and the women’s stinking menstrual rags, discarded as they are in the sewers that swallow up the blood from the temple. He makes silent incantations as the waste products of these scum that call themselves human await the first touch of his blood. The blade is under his ribcage now. They snap the bones off, making him jerk with a new agony, but the trickle of blood is gathering momentum and he is still alive. It is only yards from the first pool of decay and effluent that lies in the sewer at the base of the temple’s blood gutter.

  It happens at the same time, as though his ritual decreed it. Cuzna inserts his thin brown fingers beneath the heart and as slowly as he can, to maximize the suffering rips it from the ragged, gory chest cavity. And as the last artery tears, the first trickle of blood joins with the stagnant grey pool of sewage, marbling its oily surface with a roseate vein. His back arches, and he lets out a cry that thunders in the air and fills the hearts of those who hear it with an unnameable terror. It is not the agonizing cry of a frightened, dying man. It is the triumphant bellow of a warrior, and it hisses to a silence as his body, minus its heart, collapses lifeless back onto the cold stone.

  Esther let out a wailing cry as her body slammed back against the wall, her hands groping at the air as she tried to recover her senses. Her body was slick with sweat, her heart pounded in her ears, and her temperature raged. She whimpered, panting, as she tried to calm herself, staring around desperately to assure herself she was really here, on this ship, in a real place, a real situation, a place where things made sense. Except they didn’t. She was soaked with sweat and terrified of her own visions.

  She leant forward and let the contents of her stomach spew out. The floor beside the pool of hot vomit felt cool against her forehead, and she stayed there, pressing the skin against the white painted metal for a long time.

  It was strange that the time passed in that position was not calculable to someone who knew everything, but it was true. After the violence of her sickness, it could have been minutes, hours or days to her, but when Esther finally raised her hot head slowly and carefully from the floor, she was faced with two unpleasant facts. The first was that her body was not just soaking with sweat, but that the heat between her legs was due to a wetness she had only ever experienced in the fevered fantasies of adolescent desire. What kind of sickness had gripped her that would make her so aroused by visions of death and torture? But that was far from the worst of it. The other rude awakening was standing a only few feet away from her, and even without the unwanted power of an all-seeing eye, Esther would have taken little time to know that it meant trouble.

  “You look a hide worse for wear Miss Mulholland,” said Lloyd Skinner quietly, the gun in his hand trained steadily and confidently at its target.

  17

  “Jesus and all the fucking saints.”

  After Felix Chadin’s whimpered profanity, there was nothing but a profound silence. All the men were still looking towards the metal door that led to the cofferdams. They waited, breath withheld, and then it came again. The scream was bestial in its intensity, in the way it conveyed a wordless horror of being trapped, terrified, and insane with agony. But what made it unbearable to the assembled group of men being forced to listen, was not just the way the echo of the metal cathedral that contained the horror was magnifying the volume, but the fact that the scream was most definitely human.

  Renato Lhoon had moved a step closer to the closed door. He stood poised on one foot like a dancer, his body frozen with horror and indecision.

  “Do something, for fuck’s sake.” It was a thought spoken out loud by a lowly deck cadet to the second officer of the ship, but the men were agitated, their fear cancelling out their hierarchical reticence to challenge an officer’s decision-making. Lhoon looked at their faces, clenched and unclenched his fists, then moved to the door.

  The catches that held the metal barrier in place were loose enough to be unbolted by hand, and he managed two until a new and more desperate series of screams stopped him momentarily. The noise stopped and then a moment later resumed, this time as barely audible groans. Whatever was happening to the suffering creature beyond the door was either ceasing or the perpetrator of its pain had succeeded in i
ts task.

  It took Renato only a few more seconds to open the rest of the catches, and he stood up straight to face the frightened men at his back.

  “Gonzales. Get the flashlight.”

  He paused as the man ran to comply with the order, looking around with a poorly-masked air of helplessness that did not suit a man in charge. Sohn Haro, who had already anticipated what that searching gaze was hoping to find, stepped forward and put a heavy long-handled spanner into Renato’s hand.

  “This is all we’ve got.”

  Renato looked down at the inadequate weapon and then back up at his men. “Felix, you stay with the men and get ready for anything. Jose, Vincent and Roberto: you come with me. Stay at my back.”

  The three young men exchanged glances, then moved forward reluctantly as Gonzales returned and handed the flashlight to Lhoon.

  The silent, dark cave of the cofferdams offered no clue as to the origin of the screams as the four men entered the blackness, and the overpowering stench of the trash in the holds made two of the four retch immediately they crossed the threshold.

  Hand over his nose and shining the beam of light forward, Renato called out. “Hello!”

  His voice echoed and returned to him without answer. The light revealed nothing but diamonds of water glinting in the beam as they fell from the high ceiling, and the low metal ribs that crossed the floor every twenty feet prevented a clear view of what might be lying ahead of them. They had no choice but to move further into the blackness. Slowly they walked along the wet floor, stepping carefully over the first rib, the cadets glancing nervously back at the rectangle of light they left. Far down the darkened cloisters of steel, a distant sound made them stop. It was a rustling noise, the noise a big animal might make behind a barrel in a barn.

  Renato held up his hand as though preventing a rush forward, though in truth it was a rush backwards that was more likely. They listened, but no sound came. The second officer stepped forward a few paces, gingerly lifting his leg over the next metal rib, and since his gaze was directed forward into the blackness, eyes wide and unseeing, it took a moment to comprehend what his shoe was making contact with when he placed his foot down on the other side.

  There was not much left of Fen Sahg. The flashlight picked out the few bones that could be seen, split and broken into shards, and what flesh had been left in the pile adhered to those pitiful remains.

  Two blood-soaked strips of rag were the only reminders of the humanity of the gory pile that lay tucked up behind the metal girder. Renato drew his breath in quickly and leapt back. “Get back to the engine room.”

  The men behind, confused by his action, his order and the thin, reedy quality to his voice, didn’t move.

  Renato turned. The beam of light turned with him, sweeping the floor and illuminating for a second a foot that was clogged with blood and cartilage all the way to the ankle.

  “Now!”

  They ran, stumbling, gasping and falling in the wet.

  It took so little time to reach the light and heat of the engine room, yet to all four men it seemed like running a marathon. Renato could feel the weight of the darkness between his shoulderblades as he scrambled back along the narrow metal corridor, and as he gained the safety of the light he turned quickly and glanced back into its depths before falling out into the room full of waiting men. The darkness looked back at him from its charged rectangle of black and he slammed the door shut on it with a grunt.

  Renato Lhoon slumped down against the wall and lowered his head to his knees, fighting for both breath and calm. The semi-circle of faces that surrounded him waited until he regained enough of both to look up and address them. Lhoon wiped his mouth and blinked up at them. “There’s nothing we could do. We need to go and get the captain.”

  There was silence, but Becko glanced across at Felix Chadin and Sohn. It was a strange response to his suggestion.

  “What?” asked Renato, looking at the men’s faces.

  Sohn Haro spoke quietly and without panic, but Renato knew the engineer well enough to know that furrow of the brow. “All the doors are locked. The elevator’s switched off.”

  Renato clenched his fists in suppressed rage. “Well, fucking unlock them then.”

  Sohn kept his gaze on his first officer’s face. “From the outside.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Matthew Cotton’s Filipino was good but Raul Nestor was still staring at him as though he were talking Chinese Mandarin. Matthew bit back his impatience and resolved to try again with a little more tact. The boy was clearly traumatized and he wasn’t helping by barking questions at him. He leant forward to put a hand on Raul’s arm. The boy’s body jerked away from the intended touch and he whimpered.

  “Okay, okay.” Matthew held up his hands in placatory surrender. He glanced around the deserted deck as the boy hugged himself, still analysing the horror he’d uncovered in the radio room. The same thought kept coming back to him, regardless of how ludicrous the implication was that accompanied it. The men had been shot. Esther went to get the only gun on the ship.

  “It’s made from garbage.”

  Matthew turned back to the boy who had spoken the words in a whisper.

  “What?”

  Raul was looking up at him with wide conspiratorial eyes. “From garbage. It’s only half a man. No. No that’s not right. No, it’s not even half a man. It’s…”

  Matthew looked at him closely, holding his gaze encouragingly, but the corners of Raul’s mouth were already starting to turn down, his eyes beginning to dart from side to side as if searching for the monster, and worse, his precious words were drying up. Matthew put a gentle hand beneath the boy’s chin to lift his face, and this time his touch wasn’t resisted. “It’s okay, Raul. You’re safe now. You can tell me. Listen: it’s safe.”

  Raul gulped back a sob and looked back at Matthew. “It’s not half a man because… because…”

  “Shhh. It’s okay. Slowly now. You can tell me.”

  “It’s made from garbage and… people.”

  Matthew blinked. “People?”

  Raul nodded fiercely. “Bits. All stuck together. Bits of garbage and bits of people.”

  Cotton nodded sagely as if he knew exactly what Raul meant. “And Esther. Sorry. The girl passenger. Did she see it too?”

  Raul shook his head. He looked scared and angry at the same time. “She’s with it. She let it out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Raul beckoned for Matthew to come closer as if the huge empty deck was full of listening ears.

  “I heard her talking. I understand a little English. She passed out. Right here. Was lying on the deck saying all kinds of stuff. Even about my mother.”

  Raul was obviously pretty far gone. His eyes were bulging and his words were spoken breathily, but Matthew listened patiently hoping this stream of nonsense would stop long enough for the boy to tell him where Esther had gone.

  “Yeah?”

  Raul nodded rapidly. “And she called it a name. Said it was in the hold. Hold number two.” He giggled, a horrible sniggering sound that was made worse as he put his hand to his mouth like a child. “She was rubbing her own tits when she spoke about it. Got them out of her T-shirt and everything.”

  Matthew had had enough. He nodded politely then slowly stood up. Raul grabbed his hand and pulled at him, the giggles abruptly silenced and replaced by the down-turned mouth again.

  “Don’t leave me. Where can I go? It’s out.”

  Matthew adopted a calm and fatherly voice. He had no time to deal with this deck cadet’s mental condition. Raul was alive. That was good enough for now. They could get him help for his shock when the other ship arrived, but right now he had to get away and find Esther. Taking the boy down to the safety of the engine room would also take time he didn’t have.

  “Everything will be okay now, Raul. I’m going to help, do you understand me? You just stay right here and don’t move.”

  The boy was
starting to sob again. “But it’s out. I smelled it go. I smelled it.” He pointed vaguely to hold number two.

  Matthew sighed despite himself. “The hatches are closed, Raul. Nothing can get out.”

  Raul was shaking his head and crying. “She opened the manhole.”

  Matthew looked at the boy and then across at the hold. Leaving Raul sobbing into his chest, he turned and walked slowly across the deck to the edge of the hatch. The cover of the manhole was lying at an angle against the edge of a metal pipe, rendering the circular black hole open to the night air, emitting a stench that was almost unbearable. The rim of the hole was sticky and red-brown, and leading from it a familiar trail ran behind the holds behind Raul, glinting in the lights until it disappeared in the shadows of the derricks.

  Raul Nestor sobbed for a few more minutes, hugging himself as tight as he could against a breeze that chilled him, then wiped his eyes and looked up. Matthew Cotton was not standing over the manhole any more. The first officer had gone. It was the second time that night he’d been left alone by someone he’d thought could help him out of this nightmare. With a numb but insistent realization, Raul Nestor accepted that no one would help him now. No one, in fact, could help any of them. The thing he’d run from was coming for them all. Raul stood up on shaky legs. He thought of its smell, the way the poorly-joined pieces of flesh had glistened with blood and sticky, clear fluid. He thought of how powerful it had looked, how quickly and easily it had moved under its frame of muscle, metal and bone. And he thought about how it would feel when the substance that made up its vile body would touch him, how it would crush him and tear him and bring about the inevitable death he had only escaped so temporarily.

  Raul Nestor walked to the edge of the deck and looked out into the night. He gripped the taff rail with both hands and with one smooth, athletic movement hauled himself up and over it. The Pacific Ocean below registered nothing more than a small and insignificant splash, before the freezing currents that swirled up from three and a half miles beneath the Lysicrates curled around the nineteen-year-old boy’s thrashing body and silenced the panic of his grunts.