by Muriel Gray
The freezer door frame filled with the bulk of a million nightmares, the darkness of its form blotting out the white strip-lit room beyond. There was no light in the freezer since Cotton had cut the power all those hours ago. It was dark, wet, dripping and foul. It moved a step into the huge metal box, and then Esther’s heart moved into her throat. A sound came from it that was the very belch of hell. It sounded like ancient gas escaping from a burst and rotten carcass. It was laughing. Triumphant. The human figure that huddled against the very back of the freezer had tried to make itself tiny, wedged as it was behind two huge sides of beef that had been taken from the row hanging down the centre of the freezer. The arms, wrapped in a sweatshirt, covered its head like an illustration for the brace position on an airline safety card, and it was staying very still. The creature that laughed could smell the death-smell from the huddled figure, and it understood immediately what she had done to conceal herself so expertly, to mask her scent. It lowered its body, maggots falling from the furred portion of its back as it crouched, and moved slowly towards the object of its desire, towards the last beating heart that would fuel its black ambition.
Its massive misshapen shoulders brushed the hanks of rotting meat as it moved, sending them swinging gently on their hooks like the chimes of a glockenspiel.
It would remake the world. It would remake it as it wished, calling to its bosom all the legions of darkness it knew were waiting for its dominance. It pulled itself up to its full height, flexed its claw fingers and widened its gaping jaws into a crescent of slavering hatred.
“Fucking whore bitch,” it gurgled through phlegm and bile in a guttural language that its subject would never understand, although the meaning could not easily be misinterpreted.
There may be seconds, or fractions of seconds, between apparently seamless events that can never be calculated, although their presence is not just important but crucial. In this instance, although the next minute seemed to Esther to contain one single event, it was in fact subject to a number of things that parted into just such tiny, immeasurable divisions.
The first thud of the mines exploding in sequence from hold number one rocked the entire interior of the freezer, and as it shook and trembled, Matthew Cotton called out in alarm from the doorway to the storeroom.
“Esther!”
As the creature turned, Matthew’s call was returned by Esther with a wail of despair and anger. But not from the back of the freezer. There could be no human reply from there because there was no human to utter it. Only the body of Salvo Acambra lay huddled behind two sides of meat, dressed in a sweatshirt and pants. The cry came from considerably further back, near the open door of the freezer.
“Noooooo!”
Esther dropped down from the meat-hook that had concealed her, the one that had been going to be her saviour, that was now no longer of any use since Matthew had blown her plan. And then she let go of everything the AK47 had to offer. She aimed first for its genitals before bringing the gun up to its head, watching wide-eyed, her teeth gritted, as its penis splattered into mush as the bullets burst its body apart. As it juddered maniacally under the hail of lead, screeching like a hundred stuck pigs, the ship heaved and lurched, tipping the floor beneath her.
Esther turned and scrambled for the door, the gun still firing behind her. It moved faster than a snake striking. Esther screamed in agony as the claws tore at the naked flesh of her leg, the gun firing directly into its skull. Cotton’s hands grabbed her wrist and pulled, hauling her through the door as she left behind a strip of leg flesh the size and length of a neck tie.
She fell across the threshold of the freezer, firing randomly into the freezer and as she collapsed onto the rapidly-sloping floor, the creature’s upper body, torn beyond recognition, dervished through it after her, screaming and bellowing in pain.
She had nothing left. Her hand loosened on the gun. Cotton pulled her to her feet, and with his hand around hers squeezed the last life out of the Russian automatic. The force of the bullets made the monster jerk back in an explosion of blood, and with the only thing they had left, the combined weight of their two bodies, they swung the huge metal door back and slammed the lock in place. The door dented into a hideous relief as the nightmare on the inside beat against it.
Matthew grabbed Esther. She was bleeding profusely, the bone on her leg visible where the flesh had been torn from it. Already the floor in the storeroom was at an angle that made running a challenge, but he dragged her out and into the galley corridor as the Lysicrates creaked and groaned in its death throes.
Getting the door open to the deck was almost more than Cotton could manage, but he wedged it with a fire extinguisher and dragged the barely-conscious girl through like a rag doll.
The fear that hit Matthew Cotton as they gained the main deck was different from the nauseating terror he had been conquering below. This was the real and palpable fear of every seaman. It caught his throat and made him heady with a whole new injection of adrenalin. The entire bow of the ship was already underwater, the white foam of waves breaking over the top of the hatch covers.
He fastened his arm under Esther’s and stumbled for the stern. The life-raft was there. Her head was floppy on her chest but she was taking her weight, staggering along beside him. Even so, their progress along a tilting deck towards their only escape was an Everest expedition to a man out of condition. His feet slipped constantly, making them both stumble, and the lurching and creaking of the breaking ship made his guts churn. A sudden judder made them fall heavily against the rail and Esther gasped in pain as her leg-wound made contact with the metal.
“Shhh,” he calmed her without conviction as he scooped her up. “We can make it. We’re there. We really are.”
Twelve more metres of tortuous, angled clambering and Matthew arrived at the inner rail of the stern that separated them from the life-raft capsule. He laid Esther gently against the rail, her body wedged against the metal supports to stop her rolling down the slope of the deck, then leapt over and got busy. It took a man who had once been a captain only seconds to launch it, and as he watched it catapult out from the deck and onto the ocean below that was further away than it should ever be, he found himself making one last internal prayer. Its rubber roof bobbed about fifty feet below. It was a long way down.
Matthew wiped his hand across his face then turned, climbed over the rail and lifted Esther gently over to the very edge of the ship.
Esther looked up, her eyes opaque with pain. “We fucking got it, didn’t we?”
He nodded. He looked at this revolting spectacle, this woman encrusted in filth and excrement, caked with the juices of the dead, and he bent his head and held her face to his shoulder.
“Yeah.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then looking up with a resolve that shone behind tears, moved them both to the gap in the rail, held her in front of him, his arms beneath her armpits, his hands locked around the front of her chest. Then, with a huge intake of breath, Captain Matthew Cotton jumped.
The darkness that swallowed up the sea when the last halogens of the Lysicrates dipped and died beneath the foam of the Pacific was useful in some ways. It concealed the tears that were running down Sohn Haro’s face, and the wide-eyed terror in the eyes of the men, who had now focused their attention on the pin-prick lights of the container ship Vulcan that was sailing full power ahead towards them.
It also hid the face of the man who lay on the roof of the tiny rubber life-raft, a naked, bleeding, filth-encrusted girl held tightly beneath him to conserve her failing warmth, as he stared up at the cold white stars and willed her to live.
The dark could be healing. It could hide and soothe and soften the edges of truths too abrasive to stand in the cold white light of day.
But three and a half miles below the two tiny vessels that carried the last surviving crew of the MV Lysicrates, was a darkness that neither soothed nor comforted.
It was a darkness in which the very notion of
light was crushed before it ever reached such depths, in which the cold was a solid entity, apart and different from ice, and in which nothing that ever fell there could ever hope to return.
But enveloped now in its crushing embrace was a darkness and a cold that was even deeper than the sea could conjure. And it would wait.
It had, after all, forever.