by Adam Nevill
The lifeboats bobbed and the survivors in the water swam for them, called to them. One of the boats, Number Three, stuffed full of human misery and taking on water, tried to rescue more survivors, and when it did it tipped, ejected two of its riders, then righted itself again. A man in nightclothes, and a woman wearing a fur coat, fell out. The coat took on water, grew heavy, and dragged her down. A shark rose up close to the boat with its mouth wide open, its teeth gleaming as if polished by rags. Its eyes rolled back in ecstasy, and then the man was in its jaws. The shark’s teeth snapped together and blood blew wide and into the boat, along with a soft bed slipper. The shark took half of the man down under, the other half of him bobbed, and then another shark drove up from below and bit the other half, carried it down and away into Davy Jones’ Locker.
Those that had swam for it, those remaining near Lifeboat Number Three, were taken by the sharks. The water grew thick with fins and an oily film of blood, the sounds of cries cut short. Then a wave caught Lifeboat Number Three and those still in it, pushed it forward, leaving the other lifeboats and the struggling swimmers near them far behind, bobbing like fishing corks.
There was a great strike of lightning in the distance, splitting what had been a clear sky with an electric crack of fire. When it flashed, those in Lifeboat Number Three saw a great iceberg, a cold but beaconing mass; something solid, waiting in the distance, lying jagged and white against the tumbling sea. Far beyond was an irregular rise of what appeared to be mountains. Out of the formerly clear night sky came a dark cloud, wide and thick as all creation. It sacked the moon. For the occupants in Lifeboat Number Three there was a sensation of being wrapped in black cotton.
The lightning flashed again and everything was bright, and then it was gone, and all was dark and empty again. They rode like that on the waves in the darkness, lighted now and then by bolts of lightning, cold rain driving down from the churning sky. They cupped the water that collected in the bottom of the boat with their hands and drank from it, parched. There was water all about them, water full of salt that would make them choke, sicken, and die, but this water was fresh, and their bodies called for it.
They went through an eternity of jumping sea, darkness, and lightning-torn sky, and then they bumped against the iceberg, and then the boat was pushed back out to sea. Then eternity ended and there was light and the storm passed and the sun peeked shyly over the waters and showed the survivors that there were still fins visible in its wide expanse. The sharks were waiting.
An iceberg was in sight, perhaps the one they had glimpsed before and bounced off of, possibly another, perhaps even the one their great ship had struck. Certainly it was a different view of the ice because to their surprise they could see great ships of times long past pushed onto and into the berg, sometimes completely housed by it, like flies trapped and visible in blue-white amber. Attached to the berg, and somewhat in the distance, they could again see a flat expanse of ice, and that became their destination.
There were six oars in the boat and twelve survivors, eight men and four women. One of the men, a young fellow named Gavin, took charge without asking, called out for rowers, and soon six men held the six oars and cranked them, shoving Lifeboat Number Three toward an icy shore. One of the men, an older gent, collapsed at the oar and a young woman took it and began to row.
A gap in the flat ice was their destination, and they were able to row the boat to that spot and land it as if it were a beach. They climbed out of the boat—except the man who had collapsed—and onto the ice, and with fingers and feet aching from the cold, were able to pull the lifeboat out of the water, at least far enough for everyone to disembark.
The man who remained in the boat couldn’t be roused. By the time they were able to lift him out and onto the ice, he was dead. Ice had formed where his nose had ran, and around the corners of his mouth and eyes. They stretched him out and pulled his arms across his chest.
Gavin said, “We have to leave him here, for now.”
Another man, English, about Gavin’s age, said, “Seems less than appropriate.”
“You can carry him on your back if you like,” said another of the men, middle-aged, an American.
“I suppose not,” said the Englishman. “The women must be our first concern.”
“Looks to me like we’ve come to a state of every man and woman for himself,” said the younger American.
The young woman who had rowed said, “Seems to me it would be wiser if we all stuck together, helped one another. I think, as a woman, I can help the others as much as you.”
“All of you do what you like,” said the younger American. “I’m not bound to anyone.”
Gavin said, “Very well then. Let’s see who wants to stick together.”
A quick poll was taken. Only the young American was not in agreement. “Very well,” the young man said. “I’ll strike out on my own.”
“To where?” said Gavin. “Seems to me that we’ll all end up in the same places.”
“Could be,” said the young American, “but I prefer to bear responsibility for me and no one else.”
“Good luck to you then,” Gavin said. “What’s your name in case we have to say a few words over you, lower you into the water and such?”
“If that’s the case, leave me where I fall,” said the man, “but just for the record, the name is Hardin.”
“First or last?” the woman asked.
“It’ll do for both,” said Hardin, and he started out walking across the ice in the direction of one of the great, frozen ships not encased in an iceberg, but instead pushed up on the ice.
The others watched Hardin for a while. He passed the ship and kept walking. The Englishman who had spoken before said, “He isn’t much of a team player, is he. Very American.”
“I’m American,” Gavin said.
“So you are,” the Englishman said. “No offense. James Carruthers is my name.”
“I’m Amelia Brand,” said the woman who had rowed and suggested they stay together. “Also American.”
An older woman, English, said, “They call me Duchess, but we can introduce ourselves later. Seems to me it would be wise to search out some sort of shelter, and one of the ships appear to be our only possibilities.”
No one else seemed even the least bit interested in talking, or giving their names. They looked defeated and ready to collapse.
“True enough,” Gavin said, and looked out across the ice at the ice-captured ship. Hardin was still visible, but far away. Considering the ice, he was making good time.
Gavin started out. Amelia walked beside him. The others fell in line behind them. Glancing back, Gavin saw the wild water had lifted Lifeboat Number Three off the ice and carried it back out to sea.
They kept walking, and came to the first ship.
After a bit, Amelia said, pointing, “Right there. At the stern. I think we can board it the easiest. We’ll just have to go easy.”
It was a large and ancient ship of dark wood. It looked surprisingly sturdy, and the back end, with its rise of ice against it, appeared to be their way in.
“Might as well,” said Duchess. “In an hour it’s likely we’ll all be dead, and if I can find a way to become only slightly warmer, I’d prefer to die that way.”
The side of the ship was high and there were tatters of sails partly encased in ice like damaged butterfly wings. They made their way up the slope that led to the stern, but it was slick beyond the ability of all but Gavin, Amelia, and the Englishman, Carruthers.
The three of them worked up the slope, finding pocks in the ice they could use to climb. When they made the summit and boarded the ship, they cautiously made for the wheelhouse. The view glass in the wheelhouse was frosted over and the door was jammed with ice, but the three of them leaned up against it and nudged it loose, knocking it back with an explosion of shattering ice and a surprising feeling of warmth, if for no other reason than the wind was blocked by the walls and the glass.
It was short-lived comfort, for in the next moment they saw a body hung up in the wheel. It was a man in a thick coat. His face was not visible, and for a moment it appeared he had been hung there with his back against the wheel, but within an instant they saw that this was not the case. It was the face that was misplaced. His neck was long and twisted, and his head had been wrenched about to face the opposite direction. His legs had collapsed beneath him, but his arms, caught up in the wheel, held him in place. There was a large gap in the top of his head, crusted with frozen blood.
Gavin stood where he could see the man’s face. His mouth was wide open and so were his eyes, and they were glazed with ice; the eyeballs looked like two marbles in the bottom of a glass of water, his top lip was curled back from his teeth, and the teeth looked like stalactites, cracked and broken as they were.
“My god,” said Carruthers.
“How could this happen?” said Amelia. “What could have done this?”
“Let’s consider later,” said Gavin. “It might be best to see if we can get the others up.”
Gavin unfastened the latches on the cabinets and looked inside. Eventually he found a thick coil of rope.
“This should do for starters,” he said.
They pulled the others up. It took some time, and the old woman, Duchess, had the hardest bout with it, but they got her on board with only a slight sprain to her ankle and some problems with her breathing. She heaved the cold air in and out like a bellows. After everyone was aboard the ship they removed the dead body at the wheel, took it out on deck and slipped it over the far side. It was a sad thing to do to what had once been a living human being, but Gavin and the others could see nothing else for it. Leaving it there was demoralizing.
The body was stiff as a hammer and went sliding over the rise of ice like a kid on holiday, making a kind of scratching sound as it glided along. Finally it drifted off the rise and shot out onto the ice and lay there like a sunning seal. Gavin said that later he’d try to get the body out to sea, which seemed more fitting than just leaving it on the cold ice, but he knew as the others did, that it was a lie. He figured, as they all did, that they would soon be dead. Already their wet clothing had turned icy.
In the galley section they found a door had been knocked down, and with enough force to shatter it into several pieces. Not far beyond that they found a man’s body with a large hole in its head, the blood around the wound frozen over so it looked like someone had scooped a chunk out of a ripe tomato with a spoon. The revolver that had killed him was still clutched in his right hand. Obviously the scoop in his head had been made after he had shot himself, but by whom and why?
His body had to go over the side too, but it was becoming so cold, one of their number, a little middle-aged man they later learned was named Cyril, tried to get the gun out of the man’s hand to use on himself, but the weapon was frozen in the dead man’s fist, firm as if it were part of his fingers.
Gavin and Carruthers wrestled Cyril away from the gun that he was trying frantically to tug from the dead man’s hand. They wrestled him to the floor, pulling the dead man along with them, yanking on the gun and taking two of the dead man’s fingers with it, snapping them free like frozen asparagus sprouts.
“Kill me, but get off of me,” Cyril said. “The cold, it’s too much.”
That ended the fight, and when it was done, Gavin and Carruthers were too weak to care anymore. Together, all of the survivors wandered off across the galley and down the steps into the hold below the upper deck. They found blankets there, and clothes, jackets, gloves, scarves, and wool hats. A veritable stockpile of items. They each peeled off and redressed. The women rid themselves of their wet clothes and dried on the blankets and wrapped themselves in them so that they might dress beneath them, though anything to be seen had been seen. Amelia was the only one that didn’t follow that path. She boldly removed her clothes and dried in full view, and then dressed, in full sight of the men who had thrown modestly completely out the window.
Gavin took note of Amelia. What he saw he liked, though beyond that note of admiration, he was too cold for biological consideration, too eager to dress in dry and warmer clothes.
A few minutes later, with all of them dressed in dry clothes and wearing thick, hooded coats taken from the larder, fat gloves on their hands, blankets draped over their shoulders, the world seemed slightly brighter, even if lit up only by a crack of fading sunlight through a split in the roof of the ship. Cyril, who moments before had been ready to shoot himself in the head, seemed happier and more secure. A bit of warmth had lifted everyone’s spirits.
When they were dressed, they went back up the steps and found a storage room off the main section of the galley, and in there they found a man hanging from one of the meat hooks on the wall. A short piece of rope was tied about his neck and he had his hands stuck down through his belt. His head had been broken open like the others, again, most likely after death. He hung like smoked meat. Actual smoked meat dangled on either side of him, and like the man with the gun in his hand, they left him there, but took one of the smoked hogs down and carried it back below where it was warmer. They made it warmer yet by tying ropes across the length of the hold, finding plenty of them about, and from the ropes they dangled thick blankets and made a series of crude tents.
It was much warmer that way, and when Amelia found a small grate stove, they moved it to the side of the ship where there was a crack in the wall, and busted up some odds and ends they found, crates and an old chair, and built a fire. There were plenty of working matches that had been wrapped securely in waxed paper and then stuffed into leather bags, and there was tinder to get a fire started. When it was lit and burning, the smoke rose up through the split in the ceiling, drifted out through the wheelhouse and away. They cut strips of the hanging meat with Gavin’s pocketknife. It was as fresh as the day it had been frozen. They warmed it at the fire and ate like starving wolves. Even with all that had happened to them at sea, the sharks, the cold rain, the dark toss on the waves, the dead bodies, for a moment they were hopeful.
Later, Gavin and Amelia and Carruthers went and dropped the other bodies down the slide of ice and out onto the flat of it. Finished with that disconcerting chore, they returned to the hold and ate more meat.
Amelia, after eating, said to Gavin, “How old do you think this ship is?”
“1800s, I guess. I don’t really know, but that seems right. An old sailing ship that went latitude when it should have went longitude. That’s me trying to be cute. I don’t know one from the other.”
“Nor do I.”
“I suppose it tried to enter an opening in the ice, tried to survive here, but things went wrong.”
“What do you think happened here, besides things went wrong?”
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know. Someone on board must have gone crazy and killed the men we found. As for the other sailors, no idea.”
Gavin and Amelia moved to the far side of the hold and gathered up between two barrels, sitting close together for warmth. They could see the others nearby, in the tents or just outside of them.
“What do you think of our chances?” she said.
“Grim.”
“I think you’re right, but believe it or not, I’m optimistic.”
“Are you now?”
“I am now. We have warmth and food, and maybe we’ll be found. And if not that, maybe we can find a way to leave.”
“That would be a neat trick,” he said. “I have no idea where we are, and I have a feeling that our ship didn’t either. It all looks wrong out there.”
“Wrong?” Amelia said.
“Yeah. I don’t know exactly. Stars and moon, even the sea and the sky. Even in the daylight, it all looks odd.”
“Have you been at sea in a lifeboat before?”
“No,” Gavin said. “I admit I haven’t, and could have gone my whole life without it.”
“Maybe everything looks different when you’re in a small boat
at sea.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But it all seems so odd. The ship was lost before we hit the berg. I overheard a crew member say something about being lost, that the stars weren’t right.”
“You think he meant the constellations?”
“I guess.”
“But what about the navigational equipment? You don’t need stars to guide anymore.”
“Sailors still depend on them, though. I think the equipment went south, and then they tried the stars, and the stars were wrong.”
“Or the sailors were out of practice.”
“Maybe. But even the air tastes funny.”
“When it’s cold, and you’re in an old ship, I think the air would taste funny.”
“You’re right, of course, but it seems so odd.”
Amelia was thinking the same, but unlike Gavin, she wasn’t yet ready to admit it.
They watched as the crack of light in the ship grew darker, then was relighted as the moon rose.
“Sitting and waiting to run out of food doesn’t appeal to me.”
“There’s a lot of food. I saw canned goods as well. The cold has probably preserved them. Water we can manage by melting ice.”
“Still, there’s an end to it. It’s best to find a way to leave, a boat we can manage.”
“It won’t be this one. It’s got splits in the sides. And it’s too damn big.”
“I don’t know how we leave,” Amelia said. “Only that in time, we have to, by boat or by discovery, or by death.”
They slept, and when the morning light came, Amelia awoke. Gavin was gone. Bundled in her navy coat and with a blanket draped over her shoulders, she went exploring and discovered upstairs that the others had heated up the galley stove. It was a big stove, and they were roasting the hanging meat in it. There was a tremendous amount of warmth from the stove. It felt good. The fuel for the fire had been made from coal in a bin in the galley. There was still quite a bit of coal left. That alone was reassuring.