by Kai Meyer
That thought occupied Rosa’s mind until they entered the next large, undivided carriage. This one smelled so strongly of blood that she stopped, rooted to the spot, even before she saw the bodies. Only when the woman urged her to keep going did she see what the Harpies had done.
Eight passengers had fallen victim to the Malandras. They lay jammed between seats, or with their distorted bodies lying over the backs of the rows. The conductor lay dead on the floor of the central aisle. Window panes, walls, even the ceiling were lavishly splashed with red.
Three Harpies had been wreaking havoc here. They lay, shot dead, among the other bodies, distinguishable from them only by the fact that they were naked. The blood-bath was a taste of what the Hungry Man had in mind for all Arcadians: a return to the customs of their ancestors, killing for killing’s sake, to satisfy the hunting instincts of beasts of prey.
“Why this, now?” asked Alessandro, lowering his voice, as three more armed figures appeared. Two of them wore black ski masks, and Rosa had the impression that there was something wrong with the shape of their heads.
“You ask why?” the old woman repeated, scornfully. “Because the Hungry Man is back. Because his followers—and by now that means most of the Arcadians out there, more and more of them every day—are coming out of hiding. No more camouflage, no appearance of humanity. Even the mask of Cosa Nostra isn’t enough for them anymore. You two knew that, didn’t you? But there’s a difference between hearing something and seeing it with your own eyes.”
Rosa swung angrily around to face the woman—and realized, at close quarters and in the emergency lighting, that she had been wrong. What she had taken for the folds and wrinkles of old age were something else.
The woman’s face was roughened, covered with countless little warts and pustules. The skin of a toad, thought Rosa suddenly, but then she realized what in fact it was: the skin of a human being fixed at an early stage of metamorphosis. Changing into a reptile. The tiny raised bumps on it were not warts, but the first sign of scales that had not fully developed.
The woman was a Lamia.
Or had been before she—
“You’re hybrids,” said Alessandro.
The woman’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Naturally we apologize for our unattractive appearance.”
“What’s your name?” asked Rosa.
“Mirella.”
“Alcantara?”
The woman smiled. “Not all Lamias are Alcantaras. You’re not as unique as you think.”
By now Rosa had heard quite enough from her, but she bit back any retort, and followed the hybrids, holding her breath through the carriage full of corpses. They had to climb over the dead conductor. Their shoes left reddish-brown tracks on any part of the floor that was not yet covered in blood.
In the narrow junction with the next carriage, one of the outside doors had been wrenched open by force. She and Alessandro jumped out into the tunnel, breathing in deeply. The stink inside the train wafted out with them, clinging to their hair and their clothing.
A narrow path ran between the wall of the tunnel and the train. Light shone down on them. When Rosa looked up, she saw figures who, although they appeared human, were crawling over the vaulted ceiling of the tunnel on all fours, lighting up the scene with handheld flashlights.
Mirella, her companion, and two other men took Rosa and Alessandro between them, and urged them on. There was a lot of noise at the end of the tunnel. Rosa exchanged a glance with Alessandro. She was ready to shift shape at once if he showed any sign of doing the same. But he looked as baffled as she did.
“Come on, keep going!” The hybrid made them walk on. “We don’t have all night.”
They all sped up, the flashlight-holders under the roof running headlong like strange beetles. Another figure jumped out of the carriage in front. The engineer was probably dead, and this hybrid must have switched on the emergency power supply.
“What about the injured passengers?” asked Alessandro.
“As soon as we’re on our way, we’ll call the police and the ambulance.” Mirella sounded as if she didn’t want to go into such questions in detail. “There’ll be no signal for the passengers’ cell phones here in the mountain, so no one will know what happened yet.”
“There are people in there losing a lot of blood,” said Rosa indignantly.
The woman glanced at her impatiently. “Then we don’t want to waste any more time talking.”
The end of the tunnel lay a hundred and fifty yards ahead. There, too, lights were moving around. The loud sound of rotors penetrated the stone roof. At least one helicopter had landed outside, maybe several.
The train was behind them, and now Rosa saw that hybrids were also running along the other side of the tracks. Their distorted shadows scurried along the tunnel wall. Yet more masks, yet more wrong dimensions under long coats and Windbreakers. One of the hybrids ran on hands and feet, but had an assault rifle strapped to his back.
Rosa still couldn’t estimate Mirella’s age, but she assumed that contrary to first impressions, the hybrid was not over forty. She had no eyelids. Her movements showed that she was used to physical strain.
“What do you want with us?” asked Rosa.
Mirella licked her lips with a forked tongue. A man beside Rosa pulled his ski mask off. His face was so hairy that his eyes could hardly be seen, raven black amid his dark fur. He had a slight hump, and looked as if he would drop down at any moment and run like a dog.
“You’re expected,” said Mirella.
This whole operation, all the equipment, plus a helicopter or two—it must have cost huge sums of money. A few hybrids working on their own could hardly have gone to such expense.
Alessandro looked at the helicopters. “TABULA?”
The man with the furry face bared his craggy teeth in a gesture of hatred, showing the jaws of a predator.
Rosa shook her head. “Thanassis,” she whispered, reaching for Alessandro’s hand as they ran. “I think they’re taking us to the Stabat Mater.”
THE STABAT MATER
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW about the ship?” asked Mirella, shouting above the noise of the helicopter engines.
Rosa looked away from the window and the pastel colors of dawn breaking over the open Mediterranean. Alessandro was still holding her hand, and had been for hours. His calm appearance was deceptive; he was tense, and seemed determined. A burning, cat-like glint kept appearing in his eyes.
“Not much,” she told the hybrid. “The Stabat Mater was the flagship of Evangelos Thanassis’s fleet of cruise ships. He’s a Greek shipowner, one of the richest men in the world, probably has a hand in hundreds of other businesses. He withdrew from public life years ago, and most people don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”
She could guess at a smile on Mirella’s pock-marked face. “Not bad for someone who’s notable mainly for her lack of interest in such matters for seventeen years of her life.”
Piqued, Rosa scrutinized the woman. “Maybe I ought to be asking the questions. You seem to be very well informed.”
“About you? Only the bare essentials.” She’s lying, thought Rosa. The hybrid could probably have listed more details about both her and Alessandro than she could herself.
“Why a ship?” asked Alessandro. “Why doesn’t Thanassis live on an island? Or in a villa behind electric fences?”
“He lived like that for long enough,” said Mirella, “and he’s left it behind. Freedom isn’t knowing that you can do or not do what you like. Freedom means actually doing it. Evangelos Thanassis has loved the sea all his life—and in the end it became his refuge.”
“And yours?” Rosa looked from Mirella to the other hybrids on board the chopper, seven men and women who had taken part in the attack on the Harpies. The rest were flying in a second helicopter a hundred yards behind them.
Mirella nodded. Her thin hair clung to her scalp, which made the places where the wrinkled skin on her head showed even more c
onspicuous.
There were four rows of seats in the helicopter, divided by an aisle down the center. Alessandro was sitting by the window, with Rosa beside him. Mirella sat on the other side of the aisle, next to a man whose face was human, but who had gill slits in his throat, bluish flaps of skin that could be seen above the upturned collar of his jacket. So that was how the people working for Thanassis had managed to salvage the statues from the seabed without diving equipment.
The man with the furry face, half Hunding, half human, was crouching on the floor between the rows of seats. Obviously his naturally stooped attitude made normal sitting uncomfortable for him. He was surreptitiously casting brief glances at Rosa.
The hybrids in the back rows of seats wore billowing shirts with hoods over their heads. Rosa avoided turning to look at them. Those were the figures who had been crawling along the roof of the tunnel. With every movement they made, rough scraping and clicking sounds could be heard under their clothing. Parts of them had hard shells.
One of them said something to Mirella now and then, in a language that Rosa didn’t know. Even the hybrid asked him several times to repeat himself before she could answer him. The man next to him communicated only in whistling and humming sounds.
The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling them that they were about to come in over the Stabat Mater.
Alessandro leaned close to her ear. “Whatever happens, I’ll look after you.”
“Ditto.”
He managed a grin that, for a moment, made him appear as boyish as at their first meeting. She wanted to kiss him, but felt the glances of the hybrids resting on them, and made do with a firm squeeze of his hand.
They flew in a slight arc, and saw the gigantic white ocean vessel at an angle below them.
Rosa had read up on the vast ship after it snapped up the statues from under their noses. The Stabat Mater was one of the largest ships sailing the seas, built to take four thousand passengers. Her white hull was more than a thousand feet long, almost five times the size of a Boeing 747. A dozen decks loomed over the surface of the water. As they came in closer, she saw several open-air swimming pools and superstructures with a futuristic look to them.
In the middle of the top deck, a huge light-shaft yawned open under a glass roof, allowing a glance down into the ship. It was like the interior of a shopping mall several floors deep, surrounded by glass balustrades. Plants grew at the bottom of the shaft, once, perhaps, a little park at the heart of the Stabat Mater, now a rampant jungle.
In contrast to ordinary cruise ships, there were no sun loungers anywhere on board, no bars, no pavilions. The empty upper deck was about as cozy as an aircraft carrier, a wide empty space with a handful of figures lost on it, looking up at the helicopters.
“How many of you live on this ship?” asked Rosa.
“A few hundred,” said Mirella tersely.
Alessandro looked inquiringly at Rosa, but she only shrugged her shoulders and said nothing until the helicopter came down on one of the marked landing pads.
They were led from the platform down a flight of steps, white like everything here, but grimier than it had seemed from above. Dust, water, and salt had accumulated in nooks and crannies. The steps themselves were dirty. Looking more closely, Rosa saw the prints of bare feet with abnormally long toes.
The stairway ended on another platform, several yards above what had once been the sun deck. A tall young woman stood alone at the ship’s rail, with her back turned to them, looking out at the Mediterranean. Her hair, black as a raven’s wing, was piled up at the back of her head and secured with long pins. She wore a tightly tied, red velvet basque bodice, and a wide, black hooped skirt under it. The hem of the skirt was trimmed with lace and fell to the floor.
Rosa recognized her by her clothing even before she turned around to them. The skirt rotated, and the lace border rustled over the steel deck.
“Danai,” Rosa whispered to Alessandro, without taking her eyes off the young woman. “Thanassis’s daughter.”
Mirella, who had accompanied them along with the dog-man and the two hybrids in hooded shirts, nodded to the woman. Then she and the men took several steps back. Rosa and Alessandro stayed where they were.
“Hello,” said Danai Thanassis, almost shyly. She might have been in her midtwenties; she had high cheekbones, a small mouth painted blood-red with lipstick, and ears that lay close to her head. Her most striking feature, however, was her eyes, very pretty and unnaturally large. There had been something ethereal about her when Rosa first saw her, dancing in the Dream Room nightclub in New York. And even now, without music, dry ice, and black light, she looked somehow unearthly. Alessandro seemed to feel it, too. He was staring at her as if hypnotized.
“I’m Danai.” She linked her fingers on the stiff curve of her hooped skirt. “Welcome aboard the Stabat Mater.” Putting her head slightly on one side, she scrutinized Rosa. “I know you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure I do.”
Rosa stroked back untidy strands of blond hair from the corner of her mouth. With her hair pinned up, Danai, in contrast, posed so perfectly in front of the panoramic view of the Mediterranean that she might have been part of a wall mural.
“Your people helped us,” said Alessandro. “Thank you.”
Danai’s delicate smile widened.
Rosa took a step forward, leaving only an arm’s length between her and the Greek girl. The dog-man growled behind her. “Listen,” she said, “we didn’t really want to come on this expedition. So tell us what we’re doing here.”
“My father would like to talk to you.” Her gaze rested on Alessandro. “Both of you. He has a proposition for you.”
“What kind of proposition?”
“He’ll tell you that himself. I’m only the welcome committee.”
“And I already feel at home.”
Danai beamed. “That’s nice.”
Alessandro touched Rosa’s arm. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
She stared at him. “You really are curious about this damn ship!”
“Aren’t you?”
Not in the least, she was going to say, but Danai circled them with a hovering movement and got her response in first. “I’ll show you around a little if you like.”
One of the men opened a double door in the interior of the ship, just wide enough for Danai’s hooped skirt. As she went ahead of them, her upper body remained perfectly still; she seemed to be gliding along like a clockwork doll on wheels. At the same time, something moved beneath her skirt, kicking against the fabric all around the inside of its hem. It gradually dawned on Rosa what that movement reminded her of. Spider’s legs.
“She’s an Arachnid,” Alessandro whispered to her. “At least, half an Arachnid.”
He took her hand as they entered the interior of the Stabat Mater. An animal stench wafted up from the depths of the ship, a mixture of monkey house and dog kennel.
Danai went down a corridor lined with doors beyond which, according to the inscriptions on them, there had once been seminar rooms. The wooden panels were scratched, and in other places claws had scraped the paint off the walls. The carpet, too, was dirty and threadbare.
The corridor widened out, ending in a foyer with four silver elevator doors and access to a stairway.
“We’ll have to go down to Deck Four,” said Danai. “My father recently moved there.”
Alessandro was about to press the button of one of the elevators, but like a flash Danai was beside him, snatching his hand away from it.
“Better not,” she said. “The elevators are out of order now, and the shafts are inhabited. It’s better if what’s in them doesn’t pick up your scent.”
Only now did Rosa see that one of the elevator doors bulged out, as if something had beaten against it from the inside. Danai moved over to a flight of stairs with scratched brass banisters. Everything here looked dilapidated, and much of it intentionally damag
ed.
Sounds came up from the depths of the stairway. Roaring and squealing, mingled with human voices. Somewhere in the midst of this chaos, someone was singing an operatic aria.
Rosa shook her head. “Why, for heaven’s sake, do you want us to go down there?”
Danai gave her a challenging smile. “Do you want to find out more about your family? And TABULA?”
The dog-man let out a short, harsh bark. In the background, the exoskeleton shell-cases of the insect hybrids rattled under their hooded shirts.
“Come on,” said Alessandro.
She reluctantly started down the stairs with him. “Didn’t you have to read Animal Farm in school?”
“The one with the talking pig in it?”
“That was Babe.”
Danai laughed softly. “Or Lord of the Flies.”
“I liked The Island of Dr. Moreau,” said Mirella. “Particularly the ending.”
Beyond the wall, something began going berserk in the elevator shaft.
HYBRIDS
THEY REACHED THE BOTTOM of the stairs and turned into a corridor teeming with hybrids. Many of them were standing around in passages, as if to lure the unwary into their cabins and devour them there. Others trotted around with their heads bowed, seeming not to know what to do with themselves. When a quarrel broke out close to them, Mirella let out a whistle and signaled to the dog-man. He flung himself between the combatants, throwing one of them against the wall and the other through an open doorway.
“Thanassis,” he hissed, in such a threatening tone that it gave even Rosa goose bumps.
The brawlers, and several others too, looked nervously around, saw Danai, lowered their heads respectfully, and waited like that until the group had passed.
“I’m sorry,” said Danai, “that you have to see this part of the ship first. There are others.”
“Are they all better?” asked Rosa.