by Chanel Smith
We’d guessed right when it came to the location of Captain Norris stateroom. Even so, I was shocked when I held up my cell phone to a placard beside a doorway and saw Captain’s Quarters engraved on it. What startled me more, however, was when I softly rattled the door handle and felt it turn freely under my touch. I held a finger up to my lips, turned the handle the rest of the way and walked in with Ellen tagging along behind me.
“I’m back here on the balcony, Dawson,” Captain Norris called out. “What do you have to report?”
I hesitated a moment. It was obvious that he expected a crew member to report to him and that was the reason he’d left the door unlocked. Without power, they’d had to go to a messenger system. The fact that he was expecting someone meant that Ellen and I needed to get a move on. We had until whoever it was arrived to make our case.
I looked at Ellen and held up my crossed fingers by my phone’s light before turning and following the dim light to where I’d heard the voice. Hearing the sound and assuming it was his messenger, Captain Norris continued talking. “It’s gotten bloody cold. Highly unusual for summertime in the South Pacific, don’t you think? I’ve been warming my hands over this old lantern to keep them warm. Never thought I’d actually use the old thing. I was lucky to have… how did you get in here?”
He rose to his feet as he asked the question.
“Please, Captain, just give us a moment of your time,” I said.
“I’ll give you a moment to march back out of here before I call security,” he snapped, and then realized that there was no com line to contact security. “I’m expecting one of my officers at any moment.”
“We only need a moment,” Ellen broke in. “I think I know what has happened to the ship.”
Captain Norris started chuckling. “I bloody hope so. We’ve had people combing every inch of this vessel trying to figure it out and haven’t come up with a clue yet. Though I doubt you have the answer that we’re searching for, I wouldn’t mind hearing your theory before I have you locked up.”
“I believe that a paranormal presence has taken over the ship and pulled it into an inter-dimensional vortex,” Ellen began.
“Listen, Mr. and Mrs. Drew,” he laughed. “You seem like a delightful couple and Mr. Drew can sure spin a great yarn, but there’s no point in bothering me with such rubbish.”
“It’s not rubbish, Captain,” I argued. “Have you noticed the dip in temperature? When Ellen and I are investigating paranormal activities, one of the most accurate instruments that we have for detecting a paranormal presence is a thermometer. We are already seeing a significant drop in temperature and it’s only going to get worse.”
“Just to humor you and play along,” Captain Norris responded, “how much worse?”
“Ice,” I responded.
“Ice? In the South Pacific?” His laughter came into full force at that point.
“The passengers and crew of this ship are in grave danger unless you allow us to do what we do best,” Ellen asserted. “This ship’s energy is being sucked up by this presence and power will not be restored until we get rid of it. In the meantime, feeding the passengers and crew is going to be extremely difficult and people are going to begin to freeze to death…”
“Do you think that I don’t already know the logistical problems that we face without power?” he bellowed. “We’ve got problems that go well beyond a power outage, Mrs. Drew. We have no communication between crew members, we have no communication with the outside world to have someone come and help us out. To top it all off, for some bloody reason, those bloody helos aren’t doing a bloody thing to help us out.”
He waved toward the dark sky and for the first time, I noticed the lights and the sound of the helicopter circling around above the ship. I’d been so focused on the captain and Ellen that it simply hadn’t registered with me.
“They can’t see us,” Ellen mused, mostly to herself and then she said it louder. “They can’t see us.”
“They can’t see us?” Captain Norris asked. He laughed again, but it had a derisive tone to it. “I’ve been thinking that the entire night, but I never really believed it. How the bloody hell can they not see a 50,000-ton boat that’s three lengths of an American football field? Don’t tell me it’s because we’re in some inter-dimensional vortex.”
He was in the middle of his tirade when his messenger came in. Dawson had a puzzled look on his face and had his hand on his sidearm as he approached. “What’s going on here? How did you two get in here? Are you okay, Captain?”
“Ah, Dawson, this is Mr. and Mrs. Drew. They were just explaining to me that all of our problems are because of a paranormal presence that has sucked our boat into an inter-dimensional vortex. But they were just leaving.”
“But Captain,” Ellen started in again. “We have to…”
Captain Norris interrupted her. “Mrs. Drew, you and your husband can leave now, willingly or be escorted to lockup. It’s your choice.”
“Come on, Ellen,” I said, taking her by the elbow and leading her back through the stateroom.
“You’ll be calling us to come help you in a little while, Captain,” Ellen called out over her shoulder.
“Not bloody likely,” he laughed and then spoke in an authoritative tone. “Dawson, make certain that Mr. and Mrs. Drew make it back to areas that they are authorized to be in and then return with your report. Also, make certain that we get this bloody vessel secure!”
Chapter Twelve
Aboard the Eucalyptus, early Tuesday morning
“What do we do now?” Ellen said, wrapping a blanket around herself and plopping into one of the deck chairs on the balcony back in our cabin with her feet tucked under her to keep them warm.
“Beats me,” I replied. “We gave it a shot and it didn’t work out.”
“But we can’t just give up,” she objected.
“Who said that we’re giving up?” I replied. “He reacted exactly like we thought that he would, but we have a small victory, don’t we?”
“What victory?”
“Well, the way I see it, when they run out of reasons why everything is shut down, he’s going to have to consider listening to us.”
“Stubborn old bastard,” she muttered. “He seemed so nice and polite at dinner.”
“Well, things haven’t gone his way since dinner. He’s responsible for a lot of people and, right now, he isn’t able to do anything to live up to that responsibility. He was a good deal more amiable with us than he had to be, given the circumstances. He could have had us locked up.”
“If he’s looking for answers, then he ought to consider all the viable options. Ours ought to be considered too.”
“From your perspective, sure. Consider his perspective. From his perspective, as someone who doesn’t believe in paranormal cause and effect, what you’re presenting to him is just…” I wanted to steer away from saying nuts again, so I hesitated.
“Nuts?” Ellen inserted for me.
“Unsubstantial,” I said, steering clear of the insinuation that my wife and her gift were nuts.
“Unsubstantial?” she laughed. “That was a good one, Mon. Face it. To the scientific world, what we do is nuts. You said it yourself plenty of times when we first met.”
“That was before I understood a lot of things; before you taught me about this stuff.”
“Before you saw and experienced things with yourself.”
“Exactly! How long did it take me to really come around? You’re expecting Captain Norris to come around in a few hours.”
Ellen formed her lips into a tight, straight line. “He’ll come around pretty bloody quick.”
If the truth be known, whenever Ellen did that with her lips, I was kind of afraid of her. She didn’t get that way often, but when she did, she had gotten serious.
“Let’s just relax, try to stay warm and…”
“Mon, what is that?” she interrupted me.
“What’s what, Babe?” I asked,
following the direction of her extended finger.
There were lights above the surface of the water out on the distant horizon. Though I couldn’t make out what they were, I assumed that they were probably the lights of a ship. After all, we were at sea and that was the logical explanation. “It’s gotta be a ship, right? Maybe the captain was wrong, maybe the helo could see us and they radioed a ship to come to our location.”
“I’ll agree with you that the captain is wrong,” she replied, but didn’t go any further.
“You think it’s something other than a ship?” I asked, not really wanting to have a discussion about a UFO. I’d gotten to the point where I was okay with believing in the paranormal, but it was stretching it to start believing in the extraterrestrial.
“No,” she said with a sigh. “It’s a ship, but it’s not coming to help us, because neither it nor anyone else can see us.”
I was struggling with the whole inter-dimensional vortex idea. Sure, I’d passed through the veil into that spiritual dimension that exists between the living and the dead, but Ellen had inserted me there and I’d had contact to keep me connected to the outside world. The idea of a 50,000-ton cruise ship somehow doing the same thing was a little tough for me to fathom.
“Okay, so help me out,” I said. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“We’re going to be invited back to speak to Captain Norris again and this time, he’s going to believe us,” she grinned.
“I love your optimism, but you’re going to have to give me more…”
“Substance?” she giggled.
“Sure,” I grinned. “I like substance.”
“That ship has been sent out here to look for us. When the captain and his crew see that the ship doesn’t come to us, then he’s going to have to conclude that I’m right and that we cannot be seen.”
“A lot of wishful thinking in there, but I supposed it could happen that way.”
“Pull up a chair and get comfortable, Mon. We might as well enjoy the night sky and watch that ship come in.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” I replied. “It’s going to take that ship a very long time to get here. How about we open the curtains, snuggle up in bed and wait on it from there?”
“Are you getting cold, sweetheart?” she teased. “But we’re it’s summer in the South Pacific, that’s impossible.”
Women have always had a way of making anything a man says come back to haunt him later and I was married to an expert in that particular art. I started to pull a deck chair up beside her and change the subject, but, of course, my mind had gone blank just when I needed it most.
“You can probably fit under here with me,” she grinned, holding the blanket open and looking up at me with those devilish eyes.
Deciding that it was better to just go along, I slipped onto the deck chair beside her and snuggled up under the blanket.
“Now tell me this, Mr. Drew,” she giggled after a few minutes. “Haven’t I taken you on some of the wildest adventures of your life?”
“I doubt anyone could match them,” I agreed.
“Would you have ever believed that we’d be on a cruise in the South Pacific gazing up at the stars in the night sky and snuggling under a blanket because we were freezing?”
“That certainly wasn’t even a glimmer on my list of possibilities.”
“And yet, here we are,” she laughed. “So much for possibilities and substance, huh?”
She was ruthless once she got her teeth into something. I’d rebelled against that sort of thing initially, but I’d long since learned that there wasn’t really any point in it. Ellen was making sure that I understood that she was right and didn’t want me to forget it. Again, I decided to just go along.
“You have been and still are the most exciting and fascinating woman that I ever had the possibility of meeting,” I cooed, snuggling in closer and pressing my lips to hers.
Chapter Thirteen
Bridge of the Eucalyptus, early Tuesday morning
In spite of the fact that he didn’t believe in the paranormal presence that the Drews had presented as the reason for the ship’s circumstance, Captain Norris couldn’t help thinking about it. No other explanation had been any better. “Might as well believe in a ghost,” he muttered softly as he looked out over the dark water and hunched his shoulders under the heavy wool blanket that had remained in his sea chest since he’d retired from the RAN.
“Captain,” Dawson announced as he came into his cabin. “There is a vessel on the horizon to port.”
“Speed and bearing?” he asked automatically, not even considering that they were without any instrumentation and that he was no longer commanding a frigate.
“Pardon, Captain?” Dawson asked.
“Nothing, Dawson,” he chuckled. “Old habit. How far out is it?”
“The lookout just picked it up on the horizon,” Dawson replied.
“Good, turn on the signal light… Bloody hell!” He had no signal lights. He had no means of sending any sort of signal. Radio communication hadn’t worked since he’d been called away from the ballroom shortly after midnight. From that point on, for all he knew, they’d gone dead in the water and were just sitting there drifting along on the waves of the sea. He’d had no way to control the vessel, no instrumentation and no means of doing any of the things that would bring them out of the situation they’d found themselves in. Now, with a vessel nearby, they couldn’t even signal. If they were truly dead in the water, then he needed to get more than 2,000 passengers and crew evacuated from the vessel. If he could signal the ship…
“Locate four points on the vessel from bow to stern on the port side and build a bonfire on each one of them. Make damned sure that you’re near a readily available water hydrant and keep those fires monitored at all times,” Captain Norris ordered.
“Bonfires, sir, on a cruise ship?” Dawson looked at him like he’d gone completely daft.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Norris responded.
“But you’re talking about building fires on a boat, Captain!”
“Can you think of any other means of sending out a signal to that vessel? If you can, then please tell me now or get moving on those bonfires. Send Billings in. We need to start putting together a plan to evacuate the ship if necessary.”
Dawson hesitated a moment, trying to come up with a better answer. Not having one, he turned on his heel and started out of the captain’s quarters.
Purposely starting a fire on a boat was never a good idea, but he had to make contact with the vessel on the horizon. The helo hadn’t seemed to have seen them, though he’d watched its search light penetrating through the darkness directly toward his ship. Were those two nut jobs right? “You better not start thinking that way, Ben,” he told himself under his breath.
“You wanted to see me, Captain?” Billings said coming into the captain’s quarters.
He didn’t like the foot traffic in his quarters, but without any form of communication on board, it was the only way that he could command the ship. He rose as Billings came to him. “Yes, I want you to accompany them back up to the bridge. We have sighted a vessel to port and it is my hope that the fleet is coming to our aid. We need to start putting together an evacuation plan. I’ll instruct you on the available space for each of the vessels in the fleet and we’ll prepare a contingent of passengers for each one.”
“Yes, sir,” Billings replied.
Captain Norris could tell that his officer was a little bit confused by what was expected of him, but they needed to be ahead of the game instead of behind it. “Don’t worry, I’ve got charts and plenty of knowledge of the fleet’s ships. You just have to figure out the best way to evacuate for each vessel.”
“How will we know what order the vessels will be arriving, sir?”
“We won’t, but I’ll know each one by its running lights before it gets in close and you’ll have plenty of time to make the fit, understand?”
With his charts spread out on the chart table on the bridge and a large copy of the ship’s deck plan, Captain Norris went to work with Billings, helping him to organize the evacuation. He was busy at that task when he was called to observe the coming vessel through the binoculars.
“Sub hunter,” he said after a few minutes. “Figures that Ellington would send it out first. If they think we’ve sunk, they’ll need his sonar. See if you can get some sort of distance and speed estimate on him.” It was probably useless to ask for it. Most of his crew was trained in the electronic age and had little knowledge of how to calculate without their electronic gadgets.
“He’s heading directly for us, so those bonfires must have worked,” Norris grinned. “Let’s go ahead and start letting them die out, but don’t put them all the way out. Our friend will need them as markers.”
“Aye, Captain.” A messenger hustled out of the room.
Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before he was pulled away from working with Billings once more. “Four hundred yards out and coming fast, Captain. Shouldn’t he be dialing in his speed if he’s going to come alongside us?” the officer asked.
“He’s coming way too fast; could be he’s not getting a good estimate on our distance because of the dim light of the fires. Should have kept them burning bright. No matter, if the skipper’s any good, he’ll start to ease up. Billings, let’s get your first crew together and get them briefed on starting to move people off this boat.”
“Aye, Captain,” Billings responded.
“Captain, the vessel does not seem to be slowing and we are calculating a full speed collision near mid-ship,” the panicked voice of the first officer announced.
“Damn!” Captain Norris snapped. I shouldn’t have dimmed those fires. He was about to call out the order to sound collision, but realized that there was nothing that they could do to prepare the passengers and crew for the coming impact.
“God save us,” he whispered as he stepped up to the large portside window of the bridge and watched the sub hunter growing larger by the second and bearing down upon them. He braced for impact and waited. Nothing. There was no crunching of steel, no buckling of beams, no explosions or fires. Nothing.