Cryptic Spaces

by Deen Ferrell

  Willoughby threw off the sheets and began digging for some gym shorts. “All right, but NO more singing until you earn the right!” He pulled a t-shirt over his head, grabbed a jacket, and exhaled loudly. “Where’s the court?”

  “Well, it’s just a practice board and net tied to the back of the quarterdeck, but it’ll do.”

  Fifteen minutes later, in the middle of a sound drubbing from James Arthur, Willoughby saw T.K. walk by. She gave him a little wave, calling him over. He handed the ball to Dr. J. “I need to quit for a while.”

  “Quit?” James Arthur panted. “The score is tied 4 to 4! Fans are on their feet! You don’t just walk away!”

  Willoughby sighed, grabbed the ball back from the good doctor, and with a sudden burst of speed, drove to the basket. He pivoted, feigning a shot, then banked the ball in over Dr. J’s outstretched fingers. It snapped cleanly through the net. Dr. J. stared in shock. Willoughby gave him a shrug. “I told you, I needed to quit,” he said. James Arthur finally found his tongue.

  “What do you mean quit? Where are you going? Get back here! You can’t just score some miracle basket, and then trot off like you just won an NBA title or something!”

  Willoughby ignored him. T.K. had stopped by the rail. She looked worried. He walked over. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” She gave him a shy smile, with her eyes dancing, swimming in their sea of soft blue. “You didn’t tell me you’re athletic.” He blushed. “Well, sort of…pretty average. I do have moments, though.”

  “Yeah…I bet you do,” T.K. smiled, more warmly this time.

  “Moments?” James Arthur screeched from the court, still fuming. “Yeah, and that’s all they are! Now get that skinny little backside over here and prove to me you got something!”

  T.K. looked out over the ocean, her look of worry returning. “About our conversation last night,” she began. Willoughby stopped her. “Uh, yeah, about that,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow; “I, uh, I wanted to thank you…and to apologize—”

  “Apologize for what? For calling me beautiful? For deciding not to kiss me?”

  “Well, uh, yes—I mean, no,” Willoughby turned away, sure that his face was about the shade of a ripe tomato. “I mean, you are beautiful. I, uh—was it that obvious? The kissing thing, I mean?”

  T.K. gave a slight chuckle. “Your face telegraphs everything you’re thinking, Willoughby, even before your brain knows it’s thinking it!” She looked back over the ocean, her amused smile slowly fading. She gave a sigh. “That’s not what I came to talk to you about, though.” She turned back to him. “Remember how I told you that I felt like something was wrong, but I didn’t have any specifics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve got them now.” She looked away again, her eyes narrowing.

  “Hey!” James Arthur shouted. “Are you listening, Romeo? We got ourselves a game going on over here. Of course some people might not call it that, being as the score is 87 to 1, but I’ll call it a game.” Willoughby and T.K. ignored him.

  “I haven’t seen the Captain since after the concert last night,” T.K. said. “We always meet for breakfast, but he didn’t show this morning. I tried to contact him. I tried to page him. Nobody has seen him.” She dropped her head to the rail.

  Willoughby frowned. “I’ve been looking for Antonio too. The last time I saw him was just before the concert, talking to the Captain. You think it’s related?”

  T.K. thought a moment, and then lifted her head. “Yeah, I do. Where do you think they could be?”

  Willoughby thought of the time door. He remembered how he wasn’t allowed to get close to it. He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I think we need to find out.”

  T.K. shook her head. “I want to do some more snooping before sounding any alarms. No need to worry a lot of people if the two are just holed up playing chess somewhere. At the same time, I can’t just stand around, waiting.”

  “Yeah…I agree.”

  James Arthur swished another basket from 20 feet away. “See that!” he yelled. “See that one? Now that’s what I’m talking about! Your life-path isn’t looking so good right now, brother!”

  Willoughby gave him a quick hand wave, as if to say, “chill!” He bent his head down toward T.K. “There are still a few places I could check too. I was going to do that anyway.”

  T.K. gave a quick nod. “Okay. Let’s meet back in about an hour.”

  “Be careful,” Willoughby said, touching her arm. “Where should we meet back?”

  “Meet me at the kitchens. I know the head chef. I trust him. We’ll be able to talk there.” T.K. took a slow breath. “You be careful, too, Willoughby,” she said. She leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. She then spun and was off toward the ship’s helm. Willoughby watched her go. Why had she kissed him? He finally turned from the rail, shrugged, and grabbed the jacket he had dropped near the edge of the court. He slipped it on, and gave the doctor a quick smile and a wave. Before he could turn and move toward the lower decks, however, Dr. J had closed the distance between them.

  The doctor swiftly grabbed his arm. “No, you don’t!” He was panting from the quick sprint. “No, no, no. You’re going to tell me before you go anywhere what that was all about.” He adjusted the basketball under his arm. Willoughby fumbled with his jacket zipper.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dr. J gave a toothy grin. “Man, what is it with you? You’ve got girls falling all over you, giving you kava, giving you kisses, and you act like it’s just another day at the office! Come on, tell us the secret sauce that makes those of the female persuasion take note of a scrawny thing like you.”

  Willoughby grinned back. “I guess when you got it, you got it.”

  “Uh-uh. None of that stuff. This is James Arthur you’re talking to. What gives?”

  Willoughby sighed. “Listen, that kiss wasn’t romantic. She’s worried. She can’t find the Captain and something feels, well, odd to her. She’s right. Something is going on. I can’t find Antonio anywhere.”

  James Arthur paused. “Is that your only concern, or is there something else you haven’t told me?”

  “Look, remember when H.S. mentioned that Antonio and I had seen someone watching The Corner Barber? Well, I saw the guy last night—I’m sure of it. He’s on this ship! Every time I try to look around, I’m running into gruff crewmen who seem to be watching my every move. The guy last night was playing with a knife. How could that guy be on the ship?”

  James Arthur dropped his voice. “I’ve noticed plenty, and you and T.K. are right to be concerned. We all are. You don’t get recruited by H.S. by keeping your eyes closed.” Dr. J looked up, and then barked a playful laugh, as if they were having a pleasantly competitive exchange. Still smiling, he lowered his voice even further. “What I don’t understand is why, with all the technology this organization has at its disposal, we haven’t been pulled off this ship. Something must be wrong beyond our little problems here. I didn’t bring you up on deck just for the exercise.”

  Willoughby glanced up, giving Dr. J a bit of a smile. “No, you also brought me up here to kick my butt in basketball.”

  Dr. J grinned wider. “Well, that too, but I do think we should stick together.”

  Willoughby considered the words. He was ready to agree when he noted a scraggly crewman approaching from the stern. The man was huge, black, and staring right at them. What had happened to the neat, white uniformed crewmen he had seen in Boston Harbor? “Maybe that isn’t such a great idea,” he mumbled. “We’re being watched. I promised T.K. I’d check out Antonio’s shop. I’m supposed to meet her at the kitchens in about an hour. She said there’s a place we can talk there.”

  James Arthur bounced the ball a few times, casually glancing behind him. “Alright, but watch your back. I think I’ll go see if I can locate the First Mate. I’ll circle around to the
kitchen in 20 minutes. We’ll compare notes while we wait for T.K.”

  Willoughby gave a quick nod. He made a grab for the ball and then pushed Dr. J away playfully. “Next time I won’t be so forgiving!” he said loudly. He punched the doctor in the arm, turned, and headed down the stairs to the lower decks.

  James Arthur looked after him, bouncing the ball for a few minutes. He shook his head as he shoved the ball back under his arm and walked toward the basket. He drew closer to the rough crewman. The man was not only huge and black, but as James Arthur drew close, he could see that the man’s giant face was scar-riddled. In his right hand, the man carried a bucket filled with wooden pins. They were the kind of pins used to secure the rigging on the ship. Dr. J forced a smile.

  “Morning,” he said, nodding. Why hadn’t he seen this man before? Surely, it would have been hard to hide a crewman that big and ugly. The man grunted as they passed. Two steps later, he heard the bucket clatter to the deck. Dr. J spun to see. Before he was fully turned around, a huge, black arm flung toward him, wrapping around his neck. It tightened as he staggered back. The world began to reel. He tore at the arm. The big thug only laughed. He started mumbling something. Dr. J tried to drive his elbows into the man, but it was like punching a rhino. The man laughed harder, slowly increasing the pressure on James Arthur’s neck. As everything began to dim around him, the jumble of words the man was repeating echoed in Dr. J’s mind; “Hickory, dickory, doc, no man escapes the clock. Except for one, who don’t like sun; Hickory…” Bright sparks burst in Dr. J’s head. His body went limp even as his mind tried to fight. The arm released, letting him slam hard to the deck. The last thing he remembered seeing before his eyes winked out was a black, scarred face, peering at him with white teeth glowing in a half-moon grin. “Dickory… Doc...”

  19

  Cabin Fright

  Willoughby hurried quietly down the stairs. He hadn’t even looked back at James Arthur as he left the deck. There were so many things running through his mind and he was beginning to have a bad feeling about this day. There had been real fear in T.K.’s eyes. Even Dr. J had seemed tense and distracted. Willoughby stopped a moment, listening. He tried to slow the rapid beating of his heart. There is no reason to panic yet, he told himself. He looked down. His hands were trembling and his muscles were constricting, pulling his chest tight, as if a heavy force were squeezing him. This wasn’t adrenaline, like reaching the top of a rollercoaster and waiting for the wild plunge. It wasn’t exciting or fun. It was his first taste of raw fear—real fear. He had at least one friend missing, possibly more. As he reached the next deck down, his sense of dread increased. The ship was too quiet. Where was the crew?

  His initial plan was to go straight to the deck where Antonio’s shop was and nose around until it was time to meet up with James Arthur and T.K. With everything being so quiet, though, he wondered if he should turn around and go back to his cabin. He could wait there and try to figure things out. What had Antonio been arguing with the Captain about last night? Had he gone back to the deck his barber stall was on and found the hidden room that appeared to have no entry point? Why had the brutish crewmen been watching them so diligently? Was the mystery room some sort of base of operations for them? Had they found the symbols of the hidden door? Did they know what these symbols meant?

  Standing still on the landing, he heard something. It had sounded like a scuffle of some kind, and then a muffled cry. He fought an instinct to flee back up the stairs—to race back to James Arthur and tell him what he heard. But what had he heard? He wasn’t sure. Slowly, cautiously, he forced himself forward. The sound had seemed to come from somewhere at the far end of the dim hallway. He passed an empty weight room. This deck was mostly recreation facilities and storage. He made his way almost to the end of the hall when a short, wiry figure stepped into his path. The man was dressed in a white crewman’s uniform. Willoughby had seen him before. He had been the man with the mop who had seemed to be trying to eavesdrop on his conversation with Antonio after the first-night briefing with H.S. Now, however, the man brandished a high-powered machine pistol. Willoughby tried to duck around a corner and run for it, but the man’s gun fired inches from his head. He froze. The man sauntered lazily up, giving a wry chuckle.

  “Not fast enough, are you, city boy? Not near fast enough for Mouse!” The man pushed the barrel of the gun up to Willoughby’s head. He held it there for a long moment. Willoughby stood stock still, thinking, calculating. Now that the moment had come and his life hung in the balance, when the man could pull the trigger or not, he was not aware of a sense of fear or panic. He felt only a detached sense of wonder that this could be it. This could be the end of his life.

  The man moved closer. “Well, you stand like a man—that’s in your favor. Suppose you tell me where you’re sneaking off to, right? Looking for your mates? Or were you running to find something else? Want to fake another morning swim?” The man gave a raspy cough. “Fat chance you’ll find your wet-back friend again. Not now. Not ever.”

  Now Willoughby felt fear—not for himself, not for his situation, but for his friends. The feeling came in a sudden sharp pang. Had they killed Antonio? What had they done with Sydney and Dr. O’Grady? He shut his eyes for a moment, taking a long breath. “What have you done to them?” he said, his voice a little shaky. The man shoved the cold steel of the gun into his temple. Willoughby instinctively slapped it away. The man rammed him painfully against the wall, chuckling as if he were having a great time.

  “Feisty one, ain’t ya?” He slammed Willoughby harder into the wall, stuffing his pistol into the back of his trousers. He pulled off his white, cloth belt, then jerked Willoughby suddenly forward. Willoughby felt the man fling the belt around his back and then cinch it tight just below the chest. The cloth cut into him. The man pulled slowly back, once again brandishing his pistol.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the man said, wiping spittle from his mouth. “I like spunk in a boy, but I ain’t got no time for this. Pity you happen to be BL’s prize. I’d love to teach you manners myself.”

  BL? Who was BL? Mr. B? Were they talking about the man he had seen rip a hole in time? The man he had seen climb into a taxi with a creepy driver and a fare meter that read, 666? Willoughby tried to rack his brain to come up with an alternative, but nothing else seemed to fit, and he already knew that Reese was here. The wiry man gave Willoughby a short kick, spinning him around.

  “Now, you’re going to walk where I tell you to, and if you try to run again, you get a bullet in the leg for your trouble. You understand me? I don’t like repeating my warnings. The next time you step out of line, you’ll have a hole in your leg. You try anything bigger than running and you get a bullet to the brain. As a corpse you ain’t gonna be much good to nobody. Now walk.”

  Willoughby flared his nostrils for a moment, then lifted his chin and began to walk. The man’s breath was hot and he had a stink of alcohol about him. He kicked Willoughby again, prodding him toward the main hallway with the barrel of his gun. Willoughby tried to set a pace that would put some space between himself and the wiry man. His mind was whirling. The man was right—getting himself killed wouldn’t help Antonio, T.K., or anyone. He had to come up with some way to trick the man, some way to get a warning off to the others without the man realizing it. The man spoke up again, wiping his nose with the back of a filthy hand.

  “Now, that girlfriend of yours,” he said in a croak that ended in another spasm of coughs. “She’s a different story. I might let her live a little longer than the rest. She plays right nice on that violin. I might just choose to make some music of my own with her. ”

  Willoughby’s face went red with rage, but he held his tongue. He could not come up with a plan, an idea of how to escape this madman with a gun. Where were those clever ideas the hero always comes up with? Maybe that was the problem—he wasn’t a hero.

  The man coughed again, pushing Willoughby ag
ainst the wall facing the stairwell. They had waited scarcely a minute when a tall man and a beefy man, both dressed in jet black fatigues, dragged a barely-conscious man down the stairs past their landing. “James Arthur!” Willoughby shouted, recognizing the sleek muscular shape of his roommate.

  Dr. J didn’t budge. He was out cold. The men in fatigues ignored the outburst and continued down the stairs, but the man with the gun didn’t. He slapped Willoughby hard in the face. “You speak when I say so, or you die with your mouth open. You understand that, boy?” He pulled a small hand radio out of his pocket and spoke into it. “I got the kid, Gates. I got him by the fourth deck corridor. Advise.”

  A deep voice bellowed back, “Wolfer and I be on our way.”

  Less than five minutes later, the stairs groaned under the weight of the biggest man Willoughby had ever seen. The man stepped onto the landing. He was easily seven feet tall and pushing 300 pounds. He was black from head to toe, his flat, bald head shiny in the dim light. The man with the gun looked over at him. “Hullo, Gates. Look what I brung you.” The huge man pulled himself out of the stairway. He moved closer. His face was the only thing more frightening than his size. It looked like something partly chewed by a meat grinder. The man stood silent for a long moment. The smaller man with the gun fidgeted nervously.

  “It’s the kid. Saves you the trouble of running him down, don’t it? No hide and seek across the decks.”

  The huge man gave a chuckle, his white teeth and eyeballs almost glowing against the deep black of his skin. His voice carried the hint of a Jamaican accent. “Yes, Mouse…Good work for you. I don’t like the games like hide and seek. Go now. You find for me pesky little cabin girl.”

  Willoughby’s eyes flicked up. Pesky cabin girl? That meant T.K. hadn’t been captured yet. The realization gave him a flicker of hope. He wondered if she had made it to the kitchen area and found a good place to hide. He watched the man with the machine pistol head back down the hallway, visually perturbed at the minimal praise from the big man. He coughed again. “The cough will do you no good,” the giant called after the man they called Mouse. “You have failed to gain the entry for us. Now, we be forced to go pushing the plan. Diablos doesn’t like pushing the plan. A cough be no help to you now, I think.”