Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror

by Dixon, Lorne; Cato, Nick

  “This is Felix Lane.” Bennie pointed with a thumb. “He’s not very friendly. Not in a bad mood or nothing. He’s always like this. Probably born with a frown.”

  Priscilla’s lips curled into a polite smile.

  “Felix, would you like to know our guests’ names?” Bennie asked, turning his pointing thumb back toward the group.

  Felix huffed, turned his attention back to the wrench in his hand, and said, “No, not particularly.”

  Bennie clapped his hands together. “Thought that would be the answer. He’s not much of a conversationalist and even less of a neighbor, but Felix can fix just about anything that you can pour oil into.”

  Dara stirred in Brigham’s arms, pointing with her good arm to a storage loft behind Felix. Squinting, Priscilla could barely make out the shape of a large cat as it pranced down a thin, flat metal beam. As it came into a shaft of light, she noticed intricate markings on the black and orange tortoiseshell, a copper halo around its right ear.

  “That’s Old Scratch. Been aboard longer than anyone but the captain.” Bennie pursed his lips and made a swishing sound. Old Scratch glanced in his direction and, purring, rubbed up against the arm of a fork-shaped pylon. “She don’t get close to no one, except Captain Hilliard, and even then it’s only when she feels like it.”

  “A nuisance,” Felix grumbled.

  Bennie waved a hand. “She don’t bother nothing.”

  With a quick snap of his wrist, Felix flung the wrench out of his hand. It clanged against the pylon, missing the cat by an inch, and caused the pipes in the loft to shift. The cat scrambled out of the loft, leaping onto the floor, just out of Felix’s grasp. His hands snatched out, trying to grab her, but Old Scratch darted by him, through Priscilla’s legs, and out into the hall.

  “That wasn’t nice,” Priscilla said tersely, latching her hands on her hips.

  Felix snorted—or it might have been a short laugh, she couldn’t be certain. He waved at the air as he reached for the fallen wrench.

  “He’s not often nice, Miss.” Bennie turned and herded them back out the door. “We should be going before he gets it in his empty head to toss his tools at us, too.”

  Dara squirmed in Brigham’s arms until he lowered her to the floor. She ran after Old Scratch, the cat teasing her by keeping a few feet ahead, a wide smile on her face that—for once—had nothing to do with sugar. The adults followed at a distance but kept their eyes on the little girl as they spoke.

  “When will we meet the captain?” Priscilla asked.

  Bennie shrugged. “He’ll be on the bridge until long after we set sail. He’s a big man, if you know the type. Not easy for him to get around a ship like this, all the steep stairwells and narrow doorways.”

  Mason pointed to the ceiling. “That’s up top?”

  “In the superstructure,” he said.

  “Final calculations, plotting the course?” Brigham said.

  Bennie laughed. “Or finishing a bottle.”

  Old Scratch slinked through the gap in a cracked-open pair of double doors. Dara paused, glanced back over her shoulders, and stared at Brigham with wide eyes. Brigham cast a questioning look at Bennie. Bennie nodded. Brigham winked. Dara pulled the doors open and rushed inside after the cat.

  “Nothing much she can hurt herself on in there,” Bennie said. “That’s just the main hold, where you’ll find your cargo.”

  Your cargo: the words cut through Priscilla’s skin like a million razors. The heat which had grown almost uncomfortable as they descended through the ship dissipated and a vibrant chill ran through her. Panic shattered her thoughts into jagged little fragments of gruesome ideas and frantic warnings. She rushed past the others, spun through the doors, and slid into the hold. She called, “DARA—”

  Like the lower halls, the hold was lit by bulbs dangling from wires, but here a layer of gray dust covered them, the same as it covered everything else, resulting in a muddy, muted light. Dust particles, upset by Priscilla’s rush inside, swirled up like miniature sandstorms. Dara stood in the center of the room and turned toward Priscilla’s voice with a look of alarm on her face. Priscilla ran to her, waving through the debris in the air and covering her nose.

  Dara took a quick step back as she approached, her eyes wide, and Priscilla realized that she’d scared the child. It was too easy to forget that Dara had only met Brigham, Mason, and her the day before and had no reason to trust any of them. Keena and Tamir’s deaths were reflected in her frightened eyes, as was the pain of her fractured arm. Bending down, Priscilla swept her arms around the girl and whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I was just worried … you might get lost. We don’t know our way around the ship yet, do we?”

  Dara’s expression softened and she shook her head. Pointing up, she said, “She knows boat.”

  Following her finger, Priscilla watched Old Scratch leap from one crate to the next, landing with limber paws on the very edge and performing a remarkable balancing act by walking its length. Priscilla straightened up, brushed herself off, and addressed the cat. “Now, Miss Scratch, I cannot have you leading Dara all around this boat at whim. Just where do you intend to lead her? What if she should fall behind? Would you come back for her, or would you just leave her behind, alone in the dark?”

  Dara giggled. The cat swished its tail as if it knew it was the butt of the joke. Jumping again, it bounced down onto a much lower crate, took a step, and then froze.

  There were bloodstains under its paws.

  Priscilla scooped Dara off the floor and took two quick steps away from the crate. Even without the dockworker’s blood streaked across the wooden planks, she could have recognized the box. Outwardly it resembled any of the shipping containers—and two in particular were identical in size and shape—but this crate had seared its presence into her at a deeper level, one not dependent on sight or touch. She felt the vibrations under her feet again and remembered Bennie’s words—We’re standing on a giant furnace and the coal inside its belly sometimes’ll explode like popcorn—but now they felt hollow and false. The vibrations radiated out from the crate as if it was reaching out with a million invisible fingers and tapping along the deck floors.

  Old Scratch leaned down, sniffed at the gap where two boards met, and bolted off, leaping onto the floor, hissing, and skittering into the darkness between crates. As Priscilla carried Dara out into the hall she could hear the cat’s growl, rising and falling with the strength of the vibrations.

  Handing Dara off to Brigham, she kicked the hold doors closed behind her and stared into Mason’s eyes. It was plain he knew what she was feeling, and for a second she thought he might reach out to comfort her, but if he had moved it was only the tiniest of motions. Something had changed. She closed her eyes. It was Buddy that was weighing on his mind, of course, more so than a haunted box in a dark room.

  Dara’s face darkened as her eyes met the door latch. “How will Old Scrat get out?”

  Old Scrat, that was how she pronounced it, without the final chhh. Brigham smiled. No one corrected her.

  “Oh,” Bennie reassured her, “that mangy pussycat has tunnels to crawl through all over this ship. Passes through decks like they were slices of Swiss cheese. Don’t worry, kiddy, she’ll do fine getting out of the hold.”

  And that sent another tremor through Priscilla, because if a cat could climb out of the hold through some duct or pipe work, then anything else locked inside could find its way out, too.

  Chapter 10

  Sitting at the dining hall table, Priscilla watched her spoon clatter off her napkin and down the floor. Bennie and Buddy lifted their soup bowls to prevent them from spilling and motioned for her to follow suit. A loud rumble echoed throughout the ship. Sitting on Brigham’s lap and sharing his soup, Dara’s eyes grew wide as they followed the spoon on its mad tapdance.

  “That’s the sound of our voyage getting underway,” Bennie said once the sound died down and the shaking leveled off. “The newer diesel freighters do
n’t make a sound, I hear, they just lift up their anchors and sail right off.”

  The stew was delicious, if a little too spicy for her preference, filling her growling stomach with rich brown broth, flat wheat noodles, shredded bits of salted pork, and celery moons. Retrieving her spoon and wiping it off on her napkin, she pointed it down the table toward Eli and said, “Compliments to the chef. I think Mr. Campbell could learn a thing from you.”

  “The chef.” Eli laughed, a loud and deep, galloping sound like a department store Santa Claus. With that, the entire table erupted into laughter. Even Felix chuckled for a moment before returning his attention to his stew bowl.

  “Sorry, ma’am, you just don’t know,” Eli said once his laughter ended. “I started cooking in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1928, got me out of double-duty on the chain gangs. Wasn’t real fond of working out in the sun with a man on a horse holding a shotgun over my head, so I learned to cook and served fourteen-hundred convicts every day. Had to work with very little, even less than here aboard the Limpkin: flour so hard you had to break off a corner and grind it down; meat already starting to give off a sour whiff; wheat you wouldn’t force on a lame horse. Taught myself how to make do with what I had. Never was called a chef, but I guess while I was there they never did stop calling for me to get behind the grill.”

  Priscilla studied Eli’s face but couldn’t see the mark of a criminal. She wanted to ask why he’d been put away but remembered Bennie’s warning that these men had gone to sea for anonymity. Taking another sip of broth, her gaze roamed across the table to Buddy. Already finished with his meal, he was staring at her with one of his tiny, subtle grins, so nearly invisible that most would never see it. They’d been apart for the better part of a month. She didn’t need any kind of psychic ability to know the types of thoughts that were running through his head.

  And then there was Mason, quietly sipping from his spoon at the end of the table, head down. He’d joined Eli in reciting grace before the meal—had been the only one to do so—and the expression on his face hadn’t changed since that prayer: solemn to the point of contrite. Across the long table, he said to Eli, “Had a few months in Portlaoise a few years back. We didn’t have a cook. A meal was a strip of hard soda bread and a mouthful of water. Keeps the men weak, y’see, docile for the English guards.”

  Buddy cast a disapproving glare down the table at Mason. Priscilla could see he was overreacting: the mens’ emotions hadn’t been stirred. It appeared as though mentioning prison time did not violate the gag rule Bennie had mentioned against digging into the crew’s past.

  “Did a stretch of eighteen pages at Terminal Island,” Bennie said, rolling back a sleeve to reveal a small Indian ink tattoo, a crude caricature of a dog dragging a ball and chain.

  “Pages?” Priscilla asked.

  “Months,” he said. “A year is called a book.”

  Dropping his spoon into his bowl, Felix mumbled, “Pages, books—Leavenworth wasn’t no book for me. Was a whole set of encyclopedias. Lost a decade inside a concrete box.”

  Pushing away their empty bowl with two fingers, Brigham ruffled Dara’s hair and asked her, “All done? Are you ready to go on with our adventure and explore the rest of the ship?”

  She responded with a vigorous nod and leaped off his lap. Brigham pushed the chair away from the table and stood up. He issued a quick, appreciative salute to Eli and turned to go.

  “Wait,” Fleix shouted.

  Brigham half-turned. “Yeah?”

  “What’s that in your back pocket?” Felix pointed.

  Patting himself down, Brigham squeezed the paperback out and held it up at an angle. “Met a young soldier at a mobile station and traded books, that’s all it is.”

  Felix’s eyes didn’t leave the book’s cover. “There’s a small library aboard, not really even, just a bookshelf with a dozen and a half old books. I’ve read them all a hundred times over. Any chance I could borrow that one from you?”

  Brigham glanced down at Dara. She crossed her arms.

  “I dunno, Mr. Lane,” he said. “I’m not much in the habit of doling out my possessions to men who hurl shop tools at kitty-cats. Maybe if we see that you’ve taken to treating the pussycat with a degree of respect, then I could consider the loan.”

  Brigham took Dara’s hand and they retreated out the door. The muscles in Felix’s face tightened as his complexion reddened. In a rage, he sent his stew bowl flying across the table and over the edge. It crashed to the floor.

  “I should take the captain his dinner,” Bennie said, standing.

  “No,” Felix said, rising from his own chair and kicking it away. “I’ll do it. The captain and I have things to discuss, in any case.”

  Eli waddled over to the kitchen and prepared a large bowl for the captain. Placing it on a tray, he added a slice of toast, a spoon and napkin, and covered it with a lid. Before he could return it to the table, Felix rushed over and snatched it out of his hands. The angry mechanic stormed out of the dining hall.

  “Will he really bring it to the captain?” Priscilla asked. “Or was that his way of getting a second portion?”

  “Oh, he will,” Bennie assured her. “Felix and the captain don’t have much in common; Hilliard’s a tolerant man, kind to the core, observant and wise. But they share a liquid bond, as they say. It’s not hard to be friendly over a bottle of cognac or whiskey. And the only liquor allowed aboard is locked away in the captain’s quarters.”

  Aware of Buddy’s watchful eyes from across the table, she finished off her stew, dabbed the corners of her mouth with the faded white cloth napkin, and set her spoon down beside her bowl. For a moment she sat there, awkward and unsure how to proceed, then thought, What are you doing, waiting to ask permission to leave the table? She resented those occasional moments of pointless hesitation, a shadow of her childhood fears still trailing behind her like a long wedding dress train, making her feel foolish and naïve. Just get up and go, she told herself, don’t even say a word to anyone.

  “Excuse me,” she said—hated herself for it—as she stood up and brushed the breadcrumbs off her lap. “I think I’ll lie down for a while before I start my inventory.”

  There was a chorus of murmurs as she turned and headed to the doorway, indistinct words that might have been “Good night,” or “See you later,” but all merged together like rumbles of distant thunder.

  She headed down the hallway with a full stomach and jangling nerves, and flung herself down the first stairwell. Each rung of the metal grate stairwell met her feet with an electric shudder—the vibration that Bennie assured her was the engines. She felt it tug at her heels as she descended, try to trip her up and send her falling, but she kept her balance and made her way safely to the landing. The hallway that met her was darker now, the overhead bulbs still burning bright but penetrating the shadows less, a run of glowing orbs floating over an inky channel.

  Priscilla quickened her steps as she passed underneath the first bulb. It buzzed like an infuriated insect. She could feel heat radiate down and found herself wondering how safe the wiring could possibly be on an old ship like this one. Did ships burn down on their long journeys? Was that common? She didn’t know. But her heartbeat thumped heavier each time she passed underneath a bulb.

  She spun in place. Had she heard something in the hallway behind her? Staring back, the stairwell landing was lost in shadows. Disorientation flooded through her as she realized the view back was identical to forward, as if she hadn’t turned around at all but was still facing the same dangling bulbs and dark hallway.

  It’s an old ship, she told herself, they make noise. It sounded like the excuses her father made for the sounds in her childhood closet, or under her bed, or outside her window: “It’s an old house and old houses settle.”

  Turning again, she hurried down the hallway, turned once more, and bounced down the next stairwell, not pausing long enough on the stairs to feel the vibrations. A wave of heat pushed past her a
s she exited the stairwell. Her feet tapped against the metal floor as she rushed down the hallway. The buzzing incandescent bulbs swung lower here, moving with the ship as she ran underneath, imagining each one exploding and showering her with glass.

  Farther down the hallway a number of the bulbs had burned out, leaving dark gaps in her path. Placing one palm flat against the wall, she slowed her pace, sending the tips of her shoes out as feelers before committing to each step. Her hand slid across the sandpapery wall and over the contours of doorframes, all the while feeling the vibration of the engine tingle against her skin. The engine, she told herself, Bennie’s right, it’s just the engine, not—

  “Pretty.”

  The gruff voice came from the darkness. That was all she could tell. It might have come from ahead of her just as easily as behind. The hallway’s metallic echo acted as an insane ventriloquist, the voice repeating itself all around her, from every possible direction.

  She stopped and swung her body around, head turning, eyes squinting to try to make out any shape hiding in the dark. She saw nothing.

  “Told you. Saw her come down earlier.”

  This second voice swirled around her, echoing and distorting, syllables meshing together into new sounds, all the while becoming more threatening and laden with malicious intent. A cackle of laughter cut down the hallway, as loud as a buzzsaw and just as chaotic, practically a living thing as it passed her like an arrant breeze.

  “WHO ARE YOU?” she yelled.

  The first voice responded in an unsuccessful attempt to mimic hers by raising its low pitch. “WHO ARE YOU?”

  WHOAREYOU?—WHOAREYOU?—WHOAREYOU?

  Pulling her hand off the wall, she drew both arms to her chest and crossed them, clutching herself at the elbows. She felt trapped, unable to decide where to run, unsure where she could find safety.

  “Who are you?” another voice asked, close by her ear. She leaped forward. It was Tamir’s voice. Whomever else might be in the hallway, she knew she needed to escape this place right that moment. She sprinted forward, her feet clattering on the metal floor, shadows and light bending in her eyes as she lost focus and hurled herself along—