THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  Renato hesitated. “Tell me, then, that she wasn’t right about other stuff.”

  Skinner kept his eyes soft though his heart was made of granite. “She wasn’t right. She’s out of her head.”

  Renato looked at him for a beat, then nodded and moved across the floor to join him. Skinner gestured for him to go first and Renato looked askingly at him again. The captain answered the unasked question. “I need to cover us both. In case.”

  Renato said nothing, but walked on. Skinner let him go then picked up the VHF radio and placed its carrying strap over his shoulder. Renato looked at him. “Shouldn’t we leave that here in case the crew need it?”

  Skinner was stone. “You think it’s good seamanship to be at sea in the lifeboat without communication?”

  Renato said nothing, but moved to the door.

  Skinner watched the back of Renato’s head as he exited, then followed him. The man who followed was a man who for the first time in years was thinking about his parents. Lloyd Skinner was remembering his mother’s tight-lipped refusal to listen to him as she sat on her cheap brown sofa, the television remote in her hand, changing the channels all the time as he spoke, as he tried to find some words to describe his war to her, his face streaming with the last tears he ever shed. He remembered the round, grey face of his father poking from the kitchen doorway, hiding in there with a beer, hoping that the atmosphere would change sufficiently that he could come back in, sit down and get on with his bovine life in front of the TV. The TV that in the sixties never showed the pictures of what their son had been through. Of what he had become. Of what it had done to them all. And he remembered the ring.

  The one she’d thrown weakly at him seven years later from her hospital bed, gasping from under her oxygen mask that if he wasn’t some kind of a faggot why didn’t he go out and marry a nice girl? The same ring he’d thrown to the strange, fat African fishes off the coast of Nigeria.

  Like everything else on board the run-down, beat-up piece of scrap metal that was the Lysicrates, the fire-fighting apparatus was not exactly state-of-the-art. But as he moved slowly through the dark, dank tunnel of the cofferdams, Matthew Cotton could not stop himself touching the mask and cylinder that hung on his back on the webbing harness, as though they were an enchanted sword and shield.

  The dripping, echoing vault was like a dreamscape in the beam of the flashlight. Darkness that seemed interminable stretched before him, but Matthew walked as quickly as the physical restrictions would allow. There was no time for fear, even when his journey took him over the hideous remains of Fen Sahg, a dark ugly mess that Cotton kept the flashlight off as he stepped over it with haste. He carried on quickly with a shudder. A sweep of the beam as he passed along the high sides of the hull revealed that each hold wall had its own neat steel cylinder attached to it. He had to admire the captain’s thoroughness. It didn’t take a genius to work out that a hole blown in every hold simultaneously would take this ship to the bottom in minutes. Particularly given the kind of cargo being carried. Matthew couldn’t think of a better cargo to absorb water quickly than uncompacted trash. How could Matthew have thought that the captain’s acceptance of such a volatile and illegal cargo had been misguided or haphazard? It had been meticulously planned.

  There was no point in Matthew trying to remove or defuse these devices. He knew nothing about explosives. The best he could do was to get out of here and stop the person who did from detonating them. If anything, though, Skinner had done him a favour.

  It made it easier to count the holds by their marker mines as he progressed towards the bow. If Matthew thought that it would be hard to find hold two and its split side, then he needn’t have worried. Already by hold four the smell in the confined space was enough to tempt him to put on the foul-smelling rubber mask that would exclude it. But no. There was at most fifteen minutes of air in the cylinder, and God knew if he could get through what he had to face in that time. He took a breath through his mouth and closed off the breathing through his nose to stop himself being sick.

  A few more yards and he was there. He swung the beam up the wall and there about nine feet above his head was what he’d been looking for. A ragged gash in the side of the hold wall caused by nothing more sinister than rust had been widened by God knew what into a roughly oval opening around two feet by four feet wide. On the floor beneath was a pile of stinking, putrescent trash that had fallen from the hold’s wound, and as he looked up, smaller bits of unidentifiable matter were continuing to fall at random. It simply looked like a gash in a garbage bag. It looked impenetrable, disgusting, solid. But worse. It was nine feet up a smooth metal wall.

  Matthew stood looking up at the hell-hole for a moment, then stepped back and stretched out his arms. He could easily touch both sides of the cofferdams at once. That meant that if he could wedge himself against one wall with his shoulders he could push himself up like a climber in a chimney. For a moment he shuddered at what he might encounter in that hole full of seeping mush, but there was no choice. Well, there was. But the Matthew Cotton that might have quietly welcomed death was gone. Esther had given him back Heather and Molly. He could think about them again. Most importantly, he could think of his darling Molly and not skewer himself on that spit of uncertainty as to whether the most beautiful girl in the world had died at her father’s whispered agreement to a consultant, and a shaky signature on a consent form. If he was going to die now, it would be trying to save the woman who had given him back his past. He owed Esther that. It would be trying to save all those men back in that room who had no idea yet what Skinner had in mind for them. He looked up at the hole once more then, since he would have no hand free to do so once he had pulled himself into that hole, he tied the flashlight handle to his shoulder strap, slipped the mask over his head, tightened it and began to breathe sweet air.

  The push up the wall was good in theory but an ordeal in practice. Legs that had once been strong and athletic had lost their tone an age ago when drinking replaced running as Matthew Cotton’s favourite sport, and as he forced his body up, snagging his sweating back on shards of rough iron, part of him wondered if he would make it. He stopped, trying to keep his breathing shallow, not to use up too much air, and then with one more push, he was level with the bottom of the hole.

  There was nothing about it that suggested an entry point. Matthew imagined the weight of several hundreds of tonnes of trash pressing down on this one point and his stomach flipped. But the monstrous thing had come and gone through here. He was sure of that. And even if that thing was more powerful and more agile, it was only slightly bigger than him. He had to trust that it could be done.

  Cotton took a deep suck of air and with one swift movement, before he had any more time to think, grabbed the ragged metal edge of the hole and swung his legs up and into the mush of trash. A small avalanche of material tumbled over his head, slapping him wetly and adhering to his body as he tried to contain his panic and stay still until it subsided. It stopped and, with his arms aching with the strain, Cotton pushed and corkscrewed his feet deeper into the solid pile. He found enough purchase behind the lip of the opening to wedge his legs, let them take his weight and relieve the pressure on his arms, and he used the moment to stop and take stock. The task seemed ridiculous. How could a human being burrow its way through such an impossible obstacle? He was mad. He closed his eyes for a moment, a tangible fear threatening to choke him.

  Death was everywhere on this ship. It was potentially and immediately ahead of him, a grotesque, ugly, crushing, choking death of the kind that had taken Thomas Inlatta. But it was also waiting back in the engine room, offering a choice between being mown down like trapped rats by Russian hardware, or being left to drown as the Lysicrates dived for the bottom. Matthew Cotton gritted his teeth and an anger started to burn in his breast. It was anger that had lain dormant for years and the release of it made him cry out with fury. He kicked at the garbage with a strength he didn’t know he possessed and with a primal
scream that came from the depth of his lungs his foot lashed out at the solid lump and broke through into a space.

  Matthew stopped and panted. He moved the leg around, pushing it further into the hole. It still touched nothing. A frenzied scrabbling with one hand ripped at the garbage and within a minute he had exposed a hole big enough to get his shoulders through.

  Matthew stopped and breathed normally, then, manipulating the flashlight on his shoulder with difficulty, he pointed the beam into the blackness of the hole. There seemed to be a tunnel off to the left, but it had an end. Whether that was because it merely stopped or because it then cornered and climbed again, Matthew couldn’t be sure. But he had already made up his mind. He pulled his foot clear carefully to avoid any more falling debris and, wedging his knee against the metal edge of the gash in the hold, pushed himself up and into the macabre tunnel.

  It was a surreal experience being inside the rubber mask. Two round circles of glass were his windows on the scene around him, and the sound of his own breathing in this confined space was almost deafening. The tunnel was of an irregular shape but it was big enough that his shoulders could fit in and allow him to move forward without rubbing the sides. It was a gradient that climbed in shallow incline and then steepened, but at the moment it was not too troublesome to crawl in. The main difficulty was keeping his head. The sides of this fragile and repulsive environment were crusted, oozing and pocked with things he recoiled from as his hand pressed on them. But the end he had picked out was approaching and he concentrated on navigating his way safely. It was taking all his force of will not to think of the weight and nature of the material that was piled above him, of what would happen if this frail ceiling loosened and collapsed. To give such a horror head-time would make him scream with claustrophobia. He had to think of this repugnant tunnel as a routine and secure way to the surface, keep that thought to the fore and try to save his air. Matthew shuffled forward a few more feet to where the light hit an end to the passage and stopped. It was not the end. He turned over to put the weight on one shoulder and shone the light up what was almost a vertical chimney.

  His heart sank. Already he was completely disorientated. The tunnel had been climbing and he thought it was heading for the bow, but he couldn’t be sure. Could he climb up this nightmare vent without falling and bringing the whole thing down? Where the fuck would it take him? He knew the manhole led from the Australian ladder on the starboard side of the hold. But what if it just led to the surface and he was trapped beneath the huge metal plate of the hatch covers, unable to find his way to the ladder at the edge that would lead to the manhole?

  Matthew licked his dry lips and craned his head back the way he’d come. It had been solid enough to take his weight and the disturbance of his movements. He had to trust that the vertical ascent would be the same. For one horrible moment he let in the unthinkable. What if the creature that made this route decided to use it again? After all, he had no idea where it was. That was too much to bear: he closed his eyes, took another sweet breath, pulled himself up and started to climb.

  The footholds were not hard to find. He could either gently move his foot from side to side until it pushed into the putrescence, or perch a toe on the edges and corners of the various hard objects that protruded from the wall, hoping that they would take his weight. The worst was the handholds. When he was in luck his hand would make contact with something relatively dry. But more often his fingers would close around something with the texture of soap left too long in water, a cold slime that oozed between his fingers and ran beneath his shirt and down his arm.

  Matthew grunted with the effort but despite the desire to stop and rest, the only way to survive it was to keep going. Two pieces of metal, like the ends of copper pipes, stuck out prominently in the beam of light to his left and he pushed up towards them to see if they could be stood on. The pipes were jutting from an open cavity in the wall, exposed by having been dug around in the way a ribcage is explored by vultures. But from where he was perched a foot or two below the hole, Matthew thought it did not have quite the same quality as the passage he was ascending. It looked more ragged, as though something smaller had made the gap. He slowly pushed up, lifted his head level with it and turned the beam in. There was a beat while he registered what he was looking at, and then the moving black-brown shiny mound of fur swarmed at him, pouring over his head and shoulders before tumbling into the dark void below as the rats fled their nest in panic. Matthew screamed, the sound inside the mask being amplified a thousandfold, and let go his hold on the side of the wall. The other hand instinctively reached out and flailed for something to save him, coming to rest on something solid in the mouth of the hole. He turned to it with wild eyes. Matthew Cotton was holding the half-eaten remains of a human arm.

  He threw the horror from him, gagged and retched and fought back the vomit back, scrambling wildly up the chimney of waste like an ape stabbed by a spear.

  Matthew was gasping and gagging, and his hands, lacking all caution now, tore at the wall’s surface, causing great falls of trash that battered on his head like hail. He could no longer see where he was going, but the encounter with that nightmare-creature’s larder had nearly finished him off. A frenzy of horror, claustrophobia and terror had overtaken him, and when Matthew’s hands made contact with the solid roof of trash, his wits were nearly gone. There was no connecting tunnel. He was at the top with nowhere to go.

  Matthew panted like a dog, an involuntary whimpering coming from the back of his throat. He stopped his mental and physical thrashing, and tried to calm himself and work out what to do.

  It would be folly to try to punch a hole in the ceiling. He had no idea how near the surface he was. If he was not near then there was still the very real possibility of bringing the whole thing down. Matthew’s eyes darted from side to side in the half-moon beam of light that illuminated the foul, irregular shapes of his prison walls. Where was he? In the centre of the hold? To the port or starboard? He closed his eyes to think and took in a deep suck of air. His lungs failed to fill. There was no air left in the cylinder.

  Matthew Cotton opened his eyes and faced the fact that he was about to die. It wasn’t true, he decided in that split second that seemed to last for ever, that your life flashed before you. His childhood was not revisited, nor his high school years, his apprenticeship at sea, or any of the mess of the stuff that made Matthew Cotton who he was.

  Instead, for one blissful, fleeting, honeyed moment, he was sitting quietly, propped up in bed at home on a Sunday morning. Heather was drinking tea beside him reading a paper and between them Molly lay in the crook of his arm watching cartoons on the TV at the foot of their bed, laughing at the antics of a pig that was driving a car too fast. The sun was slanting in through the bedroom window and striking Molly’s hair. He gazed at its shine, smelling the woolly smell that hot, clean hair makes, and feeling the shuddering of her little body as she giggled and squirmed. Her chubby finger pointed at the screen.

  “The pig’s going to crash into the pumpkin stall!”

  Matthew was laughing. He could keep on laughing, stay in bed with Heather and Molly if he just gave in. Why didn’t he?

  He breathed the smell of her hair again. It didn’t smell like hair any more. It smelled bad. It smelled like rotten dead things, like excrement and maggot-riddled meat, like the effluent running from an abattoir. Matthew opened his eyes. He ripped off the suffocating mask and his lungs were suddenly full of burning, acrid gas. His hands scrambled in the trash to his right and he pulled frantically at the viscous mess. Skin tore from his fingers, his nails snapping back to the quick, and the sharp points of things he couldn’t see ripped deep gashes up his arm. And then his fist hit hard metal. Lungs burning, tears streaming from his eyes, he pulled at the wall of trash with the last strength he had. It gave no more resistance. There was no more trash. His hand had reached a rung of the Australian ladder.

  He gripped the round iron bar and pulled his body towards it.
His leg snagged on something and he ripped it free, leaving a bit of his flesh with it. The madly-swinging flashlight beam revealed that enough room had been excavated to the side of the ladder to allow him to climb.

  Almost passing out, Matthew Cotton gripped the ladder and climbed with the speed of an acrobat.

  Five rungs later his hand hit the riveted edge of the manhole cover. His arm went out to the lip. It was open. With his vision going, his head swimming and his chest on fire, he made one last effort and jack-knifed his body up and through the hole.

  Cotton’s head burst from the top of the small round aperture in the deck. He pulled his upper body into the night air, his mouth gaping like a beached fish. Still half in the manhole, he slumped forward and spewed up the hot bile from his stomach.

  His eyes were red and streaming, his flesh was torn and bleeding, and his body burned inside from his navel to his throat. He felt he was going to die. But Matthew Cotton was not going to die. Not yet. Matthew Cotton was alive.

  Heather and Molly would have to wait.

  20

  It made sense now. Perfect sense. There had always been a part of Esther that wondered why she had never wanted to have a man become part of her, enter her, take her, consume her. There had been plenty who had wanted to. But she was not interested in the casual, squalid affairs the men of her trailer-park life offered. In her mind the sex act had become synonymous with entrapment. She had watched her few girlfriends fall pregnant, ending up tied to some deadbeat who gave them a couple more kids before leaving for something better. Sex in her young life had boiled down simply to that act of abandonment, and Esther Mulholland was never going to be abandoned. She was always in control. One day, she knew, the act of sex would be a joyously liberating and intoxicating experience and nothing about it would tie or bind her to the life she had struggled free from. In that sure and certain knowledge, her abstinence had felt like no more than a minor discipline; no more taxing than eating properly or exercising. If she felt like it, she masturbated when she was horny, and made sure she never fell in love. It wasn’t nearly as hard as the combined forces of Hollywood and women’s magazines might suggest. Esther was not screwed up about her body, her sexuality or her virginity in any way at all. It was simply no big deal.