King Kong

by Christopher Golden

  Baxter thrust a suitcase at him, presuming that anyone on board the rusty tramp was subservient to the star. “Be a champion and lend us a hand.”

  Jack ignored him, instead looking out of the porthole, face etched with desperation. Through the same port, Preston could see that the ship was in motion, the dock sliding by the window.

  “Oh, Christ!” Jack snapped.

  He doubled back the way he’d come, bolting away as fast as his feet would carry him.

  Baxter stared after him, equal parts irked and amused.

  “Excellent,” the actor said dryly.

  Preston gave Baxter a look that said he shared the actor’s dismay and puzzlement, then the two of them continued deeper into the ship. He felt he might collapse under the weight of the man’s baggage, but made no complaint. Instead, he kept up the steady flow of inane conversation and acclaim, hoping to dull the effect of the moment when Baxter saw the cabin where he’d be staying for weeks.

  It didn’t help. When Preston opened the door, Baxter wrinkled his nose in distaste and even took half a step back, as though he might retreat. Of course, it was more the smell than the cabin’s appearance.

  “I know, that’s not a nice smell, is it?” he said. He put the bags down quickly, hoping to make good his retreat. “I’m sure it’ll disperse in a day or two. Did I ever mention how much I love your work, Mr. Baxter? I’m really quite a big fan. I’ve seen every one of your pictures, even the silent ones.”

  Baxter gave him a sour look. “I haven’t made any silent ones.”

  Preston had made it out to the hall, and the actor closed the door in his face.

  No, that hadn’t gone well at all.

  The interior of the ship was nothing short of a labyrinth. When Jack finally extricated himself from it, he practically hurled himself out onto the deck of the Venture and ran for the rail.

  Where he froze.

  The Venture had already left the dock.

  Seven feet away. Then eight. He had to jump, it was the only way. Jack felt his muscles tense as he contemplated it. Nine feet.

  “I keep telling you, Jack, there’s no money in theater. You’re much better off sticking with film.”

  He hadn’t even heard Denham approach, but he should have smelled the man’s pipe. Jack stared at the widening gulf between the ship and the dock, and knew that he had missed his chance to get off. He was going along on this voyage, an indentured servant to his good friend, Carl, with only the clothes on his back and the food of his imagination.

  Denham stepped up beside him, one hand on the rail. He wasn’t looking at Jack, though. The playwright shifted enough to see that Denham was watching two cars pull quickly up to the dock, passengers quickly disgorging as though they’d intended to be aboard the ship and only just missed it. The first was a police car. The second carried several men in suits, one of whom Jack was almost certain was Mr. Zelman, Carl’s chief investor.

  Something was going on back there on the dock. None of those men looked very happy. Yet there was something in Carl’s face, an odd serenity, that was far more interesting to Jack than the arrival of the police.

  “I don’t do it for the money, Carl. I happen to love the theater.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Exasperated, Jack shot him a look, but Denham just casually tapped his pipe out on the ship’s rail.

  “If you loved it,” Carl said, nodding sagely, “you would have jumped.”

  Jack sighed and shook his head, despondent, the result of his hesitation really settling in on him now. “I don’t have to share with you, do I?” He managed a smile. “I draw the line at sleeping with the director.”

  5

  THE VENTURE STEAMED AWAY from the docks, and for a time Jack could not tear his gaze away from the panorama of Manhattan at night. The lights of the city made it seem a wild kind of Shangri-la, a magical city like those in some of the pulp magazines he’d glanced through. Back there, among those lights, was an entire life he was abruptly and unexpectedly leaving behind. The rehearsal for his new play was going to go on without him. He ought to have been furious, and he was…truly.

  But a part of him was anything but angry. Against his will, he was being spirited away on an adventure to a part of the world most men could barely imagine. As a writer, an observer of the human condition, how could he resist?

  Jack smiled to himself. You can’t resist, Mr. Driscoll. You’ve been conscripted.

  Carl had gone off for a while, but just as Jack began to wonder where he was supposed to sleep on this rusty tub, and how he was going to survive the trip, the director returned with one of the crewmen in tow. Denham introduced him as Choy, apparently from China, though when the director said so, the sailor made no effort to confirm the fact. Carl simply announced that Choy would take him to his quarters, and that he would catch up with Jack soon. With a final urging to get to work on the script, the director had disappeared into the labyrinth of the ship’s interior, and Jack was left to follow Choy.

  The sailor would have been a font of information if he could have slowed down long enough to explain half of what he said. Apparently the captain was a gent named Englehorn, and there was a sailor named Lumpy who might or might not have been the cook. This Lumpy was a friend of Choy’s, and Choy tended to quote Lumpy as though he had all the wisdom of millennia of seafaring men at his disposal. The man spoke with a thick Chinese accent, but it was the speed and erratic nature of his monologues that confused Jack.

  They stopped in some kind of storage area to pick up blankets for Jack, and Choy extolled the virtues of those particular blankets, though to Jack they looked not merely ordinary, but threadbare. Choy, however, insisted they were the softest, warmest blankets on Earth, tempered, as they had been, by years at sea. The sea, according to Choy, made men hard, but made blankets baby soft.

  He’d actually said “baby soft,” though it was a phrase Jack had only ever read in magazine advertisements.

  The sailor was pleasant and enthusiastic company, and though Jack had come to accept his fate, it was due to Choy that his good humor had begun to return. In the midst of their traversal of the ship, however, he had somehow missed a vital part of the chatter coming from his erstwhile Asian companion’s lips.

  There was no cabin for Jack. The actors had them, yes. And the director of course. The captain and first mate. Most of the crew bunked together in large rooms. But nobody had counted on having the writer on board.

  Jack was still trying to figure out where he was supposed to sleep when Choy led him deeper into the ship, down a long narrow stairwell, and toward the cargo hold.

  “This room very comfortable. Plenty dim light. Fresh straw,” Choy said, pleasantly.

  Jack inhaled and nearly choked on the pungent, musty, animal stink that came from the dark room. Choy searched around the inside of a hatch, looking for a switch. When he found it, light flooded the place.

  They weren’t just near the cargo hold…they were in it. The air was thick and close and the dingy hold was strewn with straw, some of it still bound in bales. All around the hold there were empty animal cages. Jack felt his stomach twist with the stench and he forced himself to breathe through his mouth. He stared at the place in disbelief.

  “What’d you keep down here?”

  “Lion, tiger, hippo…you name it!” Choy proudly said.

  Jack examined the nearest cage, then kicked at some of the straw. “Who do you sell them to? Zoos?”

  Choy shrugged. “Zoos? Sure, why not?”

  Jack started further into the hold and the sailor’s benevolent expression turned to one of alarm. Choy reached out an arm to point at the floor beneath Jack’s feet.

  “Careful! Camel have bad accident on floor. Stain unremovable.”

  With the sick feeling in his stomach giving another twist, Jack looked down to find he was standing in a dark, viscous puddle of some unidentifiable gunk. He scowled.

  “Yeah, zoos…circus,” Choy went on. “Skipper get
big money for rare animal. He do you real good price on rhite whino.”

  “Choy!” a none-too-friendly voice called, echoing in the hold.

  The sailor’s eyes went wide and he adopted a too-innocent expression as he turned to face the man who entered the hold. Just from the man’s bearing and Choy’s response to his arrival, Jack presumed this was the “skipper,” Captain Englehorn. The man had a sternness of appearance and a bearing of command that was unrivaled in Jack’s experience.

  “My apologies for not being able to offer you a cabin,” Captain Englehorn said, his mannerism the antithesis of what Jack was expecting. “Have you found an enclosure to your taste?”

  Jack almost laughed at the question. The absurdity of it was enough to push his life all the way from drama to farce. They were animal cages. How could any one of them be to his taste?

  And yet the truth, hard as it was to take, was that there was nowhere else. He was stuck on this ship, and they had nowhere else for him to bunk. It was dry, at least, down in the hold, and few would bother him. It would be simple enough to write down here, and Carl’s assistant had said there was an old typewriter Jack could use. For a fee, no less.

  As a struggling playwright, Jack had slept in dingy rooms before. But never anything like this.

  Englehorn surveyed a couple of the larger cages. “What are you, Mr. Driscoll? A lion or a chimpanzee?”

  Jack opened the door of the nearest cage that was large enough to sleep in. “Hey, I’ll sleep anywhere. This looks like me.”

  Choy nodded pleasantly. “Yes, warthog very happy there.”

  Warthog. Jack smiled and took the blankets from Choy, then went to a different cage. He pulled open the cage door and then jumped back in alarm as the jerking of the cage toppled a precariously balanced wooden crate. It thumped to the floor of the hold, and out rolled a large bottle with a medical symbol painted on the side.

  Choy leaped away from it as though it might bite him. The bottle was rolling toward the sailor. Coolly, Captain Englehorn trapped it beneath his foot, ceasing its roll.

  “I told you to lock it up,” Englehorn said to Choy, his gaze dark.

  “Sorry, Skipper!” Choy replied, and Jack was sure he sounded scared. “Lumpy said…”

  “Lumpy doesn’t give the orders. What are you trying to do? Put the whole ship to sleep? Get it out of here!”

  Englehorn picked up the bottle and handed it to the nervous Choy. Only then could Jack read what was written on the side of the bottle.

  Chloroform.

  Despite assurances to the contrary, Ann’s cabin had not been ready when she had come on board. Preston had learned this from a sailor and, despite his obvious frustration, had been polite and diplomatic. Ann was impressed by the director’s assistant…until he’d left her in the mess room by herself to wait. The business of setting sail had gone on around her and she had fidgeted for what seemed like an eternity before he finally returned.

  Now, at last, Preston showed her to her stateroom. But the moment he opened the door for her, the stench from within made her wince and turn her nose away.

  “I know. That’s not a pleasant smell, is it?” Preston said. He nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure it’ll disperse in a day or two. It’s really very comfortable.”

  Ann wrinkled her nose and grimaced, but before she could voice her doubt, he went on. Preston gestured around the room. “Your closet,” he said. “Maureen’s costumes—”

  He was interruptd by a knock at the door and then Denham stepped into the room wearing a magnanimous grin and holding a bottle of Johnny Walker scotch in one hand. With a flourish, as though this was the height of largesse, he thrust the bottle into Ann’s hands.

  “We can’t have our leading lady deprived of the necessities of life,” the director declared. Then he turned to Preston. “Do me a favor. Run a bottle down to Jack. It’ll fend off his migraine.”

  Ann looked dubiously at the bottle, bemused by Denham’s air of grandeur. She almost missed the significance of his words.

  “They’re still trying to find a place for him to sleep,” Preston replied.

  Confused, Ann looked from Preston to Denham.

  “Mr. Driscoll…?” she began.

  “You told him my typewriter is available for hire?” Denham asked.

  “Yes.” Preston nodded. “He didn’t take it well.”

  “He’s on board?” Ann pressed.

  Both men turned to look at her, as if they’d momentarily forgotten they were standing in her stateroom.

  Denham once again adopted his magnanimous air. “Jack had his heart set on coming. Call me a softie; I couldn’t say no.”

  Jack Driscoll. On board this ship. Suddenly Ann was more nervous than she had been since the first time she set foot on stage.

  It had certainly been the longest and strangest day of Ann Darrow’s life. Now she stood on the deck of the Venture, gazing at the Statue of Liberty and the lights of New York City as the ship slowly left behind the world she had known. Denham’s enthusiasm and wild passion for this endeavor had carried her this far, overcoming her doubts and hesitations. Now that it was all really happening, she could not help feeling that she had shed the old Ann Darrow, husked away the life that had become a diminishing downward spiral of hard luck, and that she was now somehow free.

  Whatever lay ahead, Ann yearned for it.

  Plus, the thought of eventually meeting the Jack Driscoll excited her beyond words.

  Silently, she said good-bye to the beautiful nighttime vista of Manhattan…even more beautiful because she was saying good-bye.

  Beside her stood a member of Englehorn’s crew, a gruff, odd-looking man whom everyone called Lumpy, and who was, apparently, the cook. He held a clipboard in his hand and in a Cockney accent had been asking her a series of questions, though she still hadn’t worked out their purpose.

  “Have you ever been seriously stricken with a contagious disease?”

  Ann watched the Statue of Liberty shrink, silhouetted against the night. “No.”

  “Are you subject to fits?”

  She glanced at him. “No.”

  “Do you have body lice?”

  “Body lice!” she cried, horrified.

  The odd sailor gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Nope.” Then he studied his clipboard again. “Are you married?”

  “Excuse me?” Ann said, reaching to try to get a look at his checklist.

  Lumpy pulled it away and studied her closely. “Are you mentally ill?”

  “I’m starting to wonder,” she said. “I thought you were the cook.”

  “Correct, Madam. I am the cook, veterinarian, dentist, barber, and chief medical officer.” He thrust the clipboard and pencil out to her. “Stick your moniker here.”

  Ann signed the form.

  “Now,” Lumpy said, apparently satisfied, “what can I get you for dinner?”

  She found that for the moment she’d lost her appetite.

  During her second morning on shipboard, Ann decided she wasn’t going to let Carl Denham define her role aboard the Venture. The previous day he had come by her cabin twice, first in the morning and then in the evening. During his first visit he’d been at pains to let her know that sailors sometimes had superstitions about having women on board a ship, and that she might find them a little wary around her. On the second, he’d come by to share his enthusiasm about a scene he and Jack Driscoll had worked out that day.

  Overall, the message she had gotten from Denham was that she ought to be quiet, keep to herself, and try not to interact with the crew until it came time to shoot the film.

  The man just didn’t know Ann at all.

  Though she had wandered the deck for a time and of course gone to the mess to eat, she’d spent most of the first day trying to clean up her cabin as much as possible. After all, she was going to have to live in that cramped, smelly space for who knew how long.

  Today, though, she was going to try to meet as many of the sailors as sh
e could. Though some of the crewmen had given her doubtful looks, a smile and a wave had cleared their faces like a strong wind blowing storm clouds out to sea. These were rough men, and Ann knew she had to be careful, but she came from the theater, from vaudeville. She’d been around rough men all her life, and she knew that their gruff demeanor and often poor manners did not mean they weren’t good men. The people on board the Venture, both the sailors and Denham’s cast and crew, were going to be her family for weeks to come. For better or worse she wanted to know them.

  Now, though, she had to rush. Ann wasn’t sure how long Lumpy served breakfast, and she wanted to get there before he stopped. Most people, she knew, would not have been so anxious to sample whatever gruel he was dishing out that day, but she had eaten in enough soup kitchens and flophouses, and Lumpy’s cooking was no worse.

  Ann flung off a tatty old dressing gown and hurried over to the battered suitcase that contained all of her worldly belongings. Denham had taken her to her place by taxi before they went to the docks, and she’d just had time to throw a few things into the case. The couple of dresses she’d left behind were so threadbare as to be unwearable. Nothing else in the rooming house had belonged to her.

  She pulled a dress from the suitcase and held it up against herself, checking her reflection in the mirror. Ann scowled. The dress was dowdy and ugly, and frayed at the hem. Awful. Looking at it made her wonder just how terrible the clothes were that she’d left behind, if she’d thought this one good enough to bring along.

  Why are you so concerned? she thought. The sailors aren’t going to care if you have a nice dress.

  But the sailors weren’t the only men on board. Jack Driscoll was here, too. How many times, reading his words, had she wondered what it would be like to meet him?

  She flung the dress away and snatched up the next one, modeling for herself in the mirror. This second one was equally hideous. Frustrated, she let it drop. But as she turned back toward her suitcase again, she remembered the closet where they had stored her costumes for the film.