THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  Skinner sighed through his nose, his mouth closed in a tight line. He cocked his head to one side. “I’m interested to know how you imagine you’re going to stay alive, Renato.”

  Renato held his gaze. “By keeping hold of this, you bastard.”

  “And when I simply come aboard, take the case and then shoot you through the head?”

  “You come aboard and I’ll drop it over the side.”

  “After which, of course, I’m free to splatter what little brain you have over the lifeboat at my leisure.”

  Renato blinked at him.

  Skinner almost smiled. “Oh dear, dear. The reasoning powers of the incurably stupid don’t extend much past the present, do they?”

  Renato’s mouth twitched, turned down and he stifled a sob. He bent his head to the case, his forehead touching the handle, and began to pray loudly in Filipino.

  Skinner was irritated. The position the fool had unwittingly adopted was just about the most effective he could have chosen to foil any chance of Skinner getting a clean shot. He waited, thinking. Clearly Renato would be doing the same, although whatever he came up with would doubtless be pathetic. The smell from the holds was strong enough now to bother Skinner. He stifled a cough.

  Renato looked up suddenly. Skinner studied him. In less than a second it was clear that the best the terrified man could offer was to be no more than a feeble attempt at a vaudeville trick. It started with Renato’s frantic eyes looking straight at him with the hatred it had last registered. Then, as Skinner watched with some amusement, Renato’s eyes began tracking an imaginary moving object behind the captain, his face melting into an expression of dread that even Skinner had to admit was impressive. Renato’s eyes were wide with terror and his mouth hung open, a thread of drool descending slowly from his lower lip to his chest. A deep, shaking sob made a groan creak from Renato’s gaping mouth, as one trembling hand came slowly up to point at the imaginary foe at his back.

  Skinner couldn’t help himself. He shook his head and laughed. “You dumb fuck.”

  The imaginary thing that Renato had been tracking bit through the back of Skinner’s skull, severing his spine and windpipe just below the jawline. The AK47, which had still been gripped hard in his fist, burst into life. Four of the wildly-sprayed bullets caught Renato in the shoulder, sending him and the precious case flying sideways into the boat and onto the floor.

  Skinner’s body twitched as the creature’s powerful arms held it in place, the front of the captain’s face still intact and twisted into a grotesque silent scream.

  He Who Remakes The World fed hungrily on the man’s living flesh, tearing at it and cramming it into the enormous mouth with the claw that was not busy tearing at the next morsel. Already the gash that Cotton had made had begun to close, but the damage was severe. It would feed well and quickly. And then it would hunt and kill. It needed more than just human flesh to heal its wounds. It needed to be whole, to be powerful, to be fully risen again. It needed that whore’s heart.

  The sweatshirt, pants and sandals were almost exactly the right size for her, which said a lot about Filipino men and American women. Cotton had grabbed them from the first cabin they had passed, and Esther had let herself be dressed meekly, offering up her arms like a child as he pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and holding her face up to his as he wiped a wet cloth across her hot, sweat-streaked cheeks. The clothes felt good. Warm, clean, soft and comforting. She hugged herself in the corridor outside the engine room where only a few yards away on the other side of the door, Cotton was gathering the men. Esther crouched down with her back against the wall, reluctant to enter the large room and face the crew.

  Right now, she was simply trying to remember who she was. Not in the crazy sense, not in the way in which amnesia denies a person access to their own name. She was trying to remember who that girl was, the one who used to be strong, driven, morally-assured and invincible. She had been damaged. She didn’t feel the same any more. But this loss of identity was not a blanking-out process, not an attempt to forget the demented nightmare that she had just starred in. There should be no confusion concerning her role in that. She had been violated by hell itself, and she had escaped. The confusion was to do with shame, and it was a shame so profound that she was writhing in discomfort as she forced herself to articulate it internally. Esther Mulholland faced up to the truth that a deep, dirty, dark part of her still recalled and responded to a desire for the man that had been created in her mind. She was sane, she was bred tough, and she would recover from the horror of the thing that she had woken to face and broken free from. Recovering from the corruption of her own appetite would take longer.

  She knew the truth. It had been an illusion, of course, but she knew for certain that the man she had ached for had really existed. That face, that body, that low animal lust had once been as real as she was now.

  But what kind of buried sexuality did she possess that she found his lascivious evil and perverted hunger so attractive? That was not a part of the girl she knew as Esther Mulholland. But then again, maybe it was. She made a decision that it must be buried again, because remembering the sex was still too pleasurable, and the combination of that plus the horrific memory of what had been really happening, could lead only to insanity.

  She lifted her head and breathed deeply. The ache between her legs was getting in the way of her thinking. It was stirring the wrong emotions. Because there were two things that she was focusing on, things that could temporarily blot out the nightmare and bring back the girl she was, and she didn’t want them interrupted. The first was the student in her, her craving for knowledge. With a struggle she pulled herself back to her college studies. Esther had read with fascination and scepticism about the state of grace allegedly bestowed on sacrificial victims, pondering as she had plodded through translations of unreliable Spanish accounts of the victims’ revelations on what primitive, hallucinatory drug the unfortunate youngsters must have been forced to take. But now she knew the truth. Incredibly she had been there, survived it, and more wondrous than anything else, she could remember if not all, then a great deal of what had been revealed to her. Some of it was useless. She had no wish to remember the childhood details of the Lysicrates’ crew. But some of the other things… it was nothing short of a miracle. It was hard not to wonder if such events had occurred before, if some victims in the same state had escaped the knife and lived to put their remembered knowledge to some use. She concentrated hard on this, the dark nightmare of what had just happened to her trying to win through and distract her. But with effort she dragged her tortured mind back to the shiny light of revelation. She closed her eyes and thought not of nightmares that could command flesh, but of the baffling line drawings at Nazca that only make sense when seen from several thousand feet in the air, the accuracy of the Inca astronomical interpretations, and their impossibly finely-masoned stones. It worked. She was excited. Thrilled. Even though what she had learned was going to be taken more seriously by a shrink than by a professor of anthropology, she knew truths that no other living human being shared. That would always be hers, and it was one of the most amazing things that had ever happened to her.

  But the second thing that was keeping the night at bay was even stronger. It was an emotion that she always conquered, always denied, recognizing its destructive force as well as its temptations. It had been growing and gathering momentum as she sat and thought, and this time she was not blocking it.

  It was hatred.

  She opened her eyes and looked up as Matthew came back through the doorway. Matthew was not surprised to read the darkness in Esther’s face, but what alarmed him was the urgent, predatory undertow of that expression. He would not care to be the one who had incited it. He put out a hand and offered it to her, and the softness of the fingers that wrapped so gently around his own was a million miles away from the black intent so visible in her eyes.

  The noise. If he lived, although that seemed unlikely, he would never be ab
le to get that noise out of his head. Renato lay as still as he could, almost blinded by the searing agony in his arm, and listened to the crunching and wet chewing noises that animals made when they fed. He had heard that noise before as a child. His uncle, who had kept pigs in an undersized pen in his yard, had once thrown them a dead cat. Despite his revulsion, the ten-year-old Renato had stood and watched the ugly, stinking beasts consume the mangled corpse, listened to the crunching of the cat’s bones and the wet slurping the pigs made as they chewed. Now he was bearing the same noise. He clutched his ruined arm, concentrating hard on controlling the urge to vomit or pant for breath, and considered his options. The thing he had just seen, the thing that was still there, that he was listening to, should not exist. Such demons were impossible. But then since the Lysicrates had sailed from Callao everything in Renato Lhoon’s world had changed. Nothing was as it should be, and now he was going to die. The question was, should he wait and die as Skinner had done, or take the opportunity and the very last of his strength to push himself overboard? He knew that in his condition, his shoulder torn apart with ragged bullet-holes, half his upper body paralysed with pain, and wounds bleeding profusely, the fall alone would probably kill him. And if not, the dark, cold currents of the ocean below would soon finish it.

  Renato’s eyes screwed up tight and tears squeezed from under the lids. He didn’t want to die. He started to pray again, but the prayers died in his heart. The God he worshipped was not a god who created such abominations. His God was an ordered tool, conjured up and used to ease the burden of sin, or to fill the abyss of human ignorance with repetitive, meaningless chanting and liturgy. Such a god was of little use in the face of the inexplicable terror that chewed its way through human flesh on the other side of his flimsy fibreglass shield.

  He tried to draw a full breath but a combination of the fear of discovery and the foulness of the air prevented him. Renato gulped a shallow mouthful of air and realized at that moment he would be unable to take his own life. Such a course was not open to him. Everything in him wanted to live and the only course of action on offer was to wait and see how long that would be allowed.

  He pulled up his good arm, pressing the shoulder against one ear and curving the arm over the top of his head to cover the other ear with his hand. It blocked the sound. Like a frightened child, with eyes and ears closed to the world that was too real and too bizarre to deal with, Renato lay very still and waited for death in his home-made silence.

  As the line of men and one woman filed up the stairs of the accommodation block, the silence was unnatural and unsettling. Matthew had cautioned them to keep quiet but without telling them why, and they walked behind him like frightened schoolchildren, the only noise being the shuffle and clicking of their shoes on the sticky metal floor. At Cotton’s request Sohn Haro and Felix Chadin, as the most senior crew members, walked at the rear, and as they climbed the stairs Sohn thought about his first officer and what he had just endured to get them this far. There was so much more to all this than Cotton was telling them. But something in Sohn had calmed since Cotton’s return, and it was not simply the obvious relief of their escape. It was the feeling that someone he trusted utterly was back in charge.

  He lifted his face to the stairwell where the stench of the trash was increasing as the men climbed, and decided that it was good to have a man like Cotton back again from wherever he’d been these last few years. It was good to have a man you would follow anywhere.

  It seemed an age. The breeze rocked the boat as gently as a cradle as the blood oozed slowly from his wounds. Renato took in air in shallow snorts, the quietest he could manage, and listened to the blood rushing in his padded ears. The boat shuddered and swung with a new weight. Renato did not need to look up to know it had been boarded. There was little point in his silence now, and with eyes still closed Renato Lhoon let out a howl of terror, pain and abandonment that liquefied his heart. When the first touch to his arm came he jerked and scrambled as though electrocuted, and only the slow realization that the touch was like the grip of a human hand made him cease his struggling, open his eyes and face his fate.

  Renato was staring into the face of Parren Sionosa, who was making cooing noises and patting a calming motion in the air with his free hand. Behind him were the stony, shocked faces of two more crew members. Renato gulped and gasped for a moment and then, open-mouthed and wild-eyed, he began to cry.

  No one had touched the guns that lay amongst the bloody remains of Captain Lloyd Daniel Skinner. Only Esther stood looking impassively at the gore that was spread around the deck, her gaze unflinching as she took in the ragged body parts that still adhered to clothing, and the shattered bones that had been snapped unevenly like wet twigs. The handgun lay blood-soaked in the middle of the mess where it had dropped from Skinner’s pocket, and the AK47 had spun off to the edge of the deck, still flecked with the strips of skin that had been torn from Skinner’s trigger finger.

  While men attended to Renato’s wounds as best they could, Cotton continued his hurried evacuation of the rest of the shocked and terrified crew into the lifeboat. Apart from himself and Esther there were eighteen souls left alive on the Lysicrates. Since the lifeboat took thirty-six there was blessedly no need to launch the other. But even a tub like the Lysicrates had more life-saving space than it could ever use. Apart from the port-side lifeboat, there was an emergency life-raft at the stern, a small capsule that could be launched explosively in one movement and inflated on contact with the water. In theory they were in good shape for getting off this nightmare. In practice, Matthew Cotton wondered where in the whole world they could go to be safe now that hell had opened its gates.

  Several of the younger crew were crying with fear and Sohn and Chadin did their best in conquering their own terror in order to calm them. Manuel, the third engineer, was the last to be herded on board the swinging boat and Cotton turned to put a hand out for Esther.

  She was still staring into the mire.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” he said softly.

  Esther looked up as if from a dream. “Go where?”

  “Just get in the boat, Esther.”

  His voice was gentle, full of kindness and sympathy, but his body language betrayed a frustration that was nearing breaking point.

  Esther looked at the men on the boat and then back to the bloody mess on the deck. “And you think you’ll be safe from it just because you’re on a different vessel?”

  “Yes,” lied Cotton, moving closer to her so that the men couldn’t hear their exchange.

  She shook her head. “It’ll hunt us all down.”

  Cotton glanced back at the boat. No one, thank God, was listening. The men were all in their private hells. “How? We just leave this boat and then blow the fucking thing out the water.”

  Esther smiled sardonically. “Sure. It’ll just stay right here while we do that.”

  “You’re saying this bastard can swim?”

  “I’m telling you that not only can it swim, if it wanted to it could drop three miles to the ocean floor, walk along the fucking sea bed and meet us in Callao.”

  Matthew scanned her to see if she was serious. She was.

  “I’ve been in its head, Matthew.”

  “We can get to shore. Get help.”

  Esther looked at him and her eyes told him that the girl that had boarded this ship had aged a lifetime. “You saw it, Matthew. You know I’m right.”

  He nodded. “I’ve no choice. I need to try and save these men.”

  “I have a choice.”

  Cotton put his hands on her upper arms. He felt the hardness of her muscles beneath his fingers. “Esther. You need time to recover.”

  Her eyes hardened. He removed his hands. Esther held his gaze though her own was softening a little. “No. You need to listen to me now, Matthew, and you need to listen carefully.”

  He said nothing and she nodded as she took his silence to be one of complicity.

  “The combination
on the flight-case that you’ll find on the boat is 4014. It’s on the dog-tags. It’s part of Mendez’s serial number. When you open the case you’ll see two small metal panels and a key in a pocket between them. When you need to detonate you pull the aerial out to its full extent, put the key in the hole above the right-hand panel. Turn it clockwise until you hear a click, then press both black buttons on the panel simultaneously. A light will come on and start flashing red. It gives you thirty seconds to abort, which it does automatically unless you proceed. Press both buttons again simultaneously any time within the thirty seconds to detonate. If you miss the chance within the thirty seconds you have to remove the key and start again.” She looked at his crumpled face. “It’s simple. It’s not a particularly modern device. It’s just what he was comfortable with. But you need to be no more than one mile away for the radio signal to be fully reliable.”

  Matthew’s mouth was dry. He croaked, a catch in his voice. “You still know impossible things.”

  She shook her head. “No. I just remember some of the impossible things I knew.”

  Matthew’s gaze was hungry, and Esther knew exactly where that hunger lay. She looked down before he could ask her to tell him things she had no wish to know, no business to remember. Instinctively he understood her reaction, and clearing his throat he took a moment, fought back his tears and regained his composure. “Why tell me this? You can detonate Skinner’s mines as well as I can once we set sail.”

  She looked back up. “I’m not coming.”

  “The fuck you’re not.”

  It was Esther’s turn to take Matthew by the arms. But her grip was not for his comfort. It verged on the painful. “Listen, Matthew. You just said it. You said you’ve got no choice. You have to try and save these men’s lives. If I come with you, that thing is not going to stop until we’re all dead. We can’t kill it. We can’t outrun it. You’ve seen that.”