THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

Behind him, the door from the galley to the main deck constantly opened and closed as men spilled out, shouting and gesticulating, herded out by their bosun to await orders. But their rising staccato foreign exclamations were not providing the placebo of human companionship he so desperately needed right now to chase away the bitter chill of death. He hunched his shoulders against it, his hot head pressing much too hard into the unforgiving metal of the rail.

  The door banged once more and with his head still bowed, Matthew felt a body position itself close to his. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and looked up. Esther was hugging herself against the cool night breeze, her back against the rail, eyes scanning the growing number of alarmed faces that were gathering on the deck.

  “Why do they want us out here?”

  Matthew blinked at her. The part of him that still retained a sliver of vanity was both embarrassed by being caught with the threads of mucus-bound vomit adhering to his shirt, and also curiously riled by her use of “they” that excluded him as a senior officer.

  He wasn’t part of this herd.

  A few minutes ago he’d been a constituent of that grim, superior delegation, standing over the skinned and eviscerated horror that spilled out of the freezer and into their nightmares, trying desperately to decide what to do.

  They were merchant seamen, for Christ’s sake. Not military. There simply wasn’t anything in the handbook that prepared a crew like this for their junior cook being skinned alive and having his heart ripped out.

  He’d only come outside to be sick, not through drink for a change, and for some reason he wanted her to know that. Matthew straightened up and looked at her anxious, frowning profile. “We’re searching the cabins,” he said, over-emphasizing the “we”.

  She nodded, not meeting his gaze. “Uh-huh? For what exactly?”

  Her tone was crisp, unfriendly, nervous. Despite knowing what this young girl had just gone through, Cotton found he had little compassion to spare, and that her clipped tone merely irritated him further.

  “Someone didn’t bring back their coffee mug.”

  Esther turned to look at him, and her eyes froze him. They were as hard as coal, but somewhere deep behind their cool, contemptuous appraisal of him he could read a menu of sadness and fear. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and softened his voice as he turned his gaze back out into the black ocean.

  “Blood.”

  Esther was silent for a moment, and then she began to speak quietly and steadily to herself as though she were a coroner dictating over an autopsy. Matthew wiped at some vomit stains as casually as he could manage, and watched her with caution. She was wired, it was plain, and he couldn’t blame her.

  “But there were no blood trails around the corpse at all. Nothing. The floor was clean. Completely clean. How could a murderer kill, skin and split apart a body without leaving a trail like an explosion in an abattoir? How? Unless the boy was killed elsewhere and deposited in the freezer. But even then, there would be trails, signs, some kinds of disturbance, and of course the actual site of the killing wouldn’t take long to find on a vessel this size…”

  “Esther.” Matthew’s voice was gentle now.

  She kept going. “… but, importantly, how would it be possible to covertly move such an atrocity from one part of the ship to another when there are always other people around…?”

  “Esther!”

  “… and even if you could, how could you…”

  He put out a hand and laid it on her arm. It stopped the torrent of her talking abruptly. “Enough.”

  She surprised him and laid her own freezing hand on top of his, turning her face to him, the smooth skin contorted into lines of something approximating grief. “He brought me my dinner.”

  Matthew nodded. “Yeah.”

  Esther Mulholland scanned his face rapidly, aggressively, searching for a fight. She blinked twice, then bent her head to her chest and began to cry. As he ringed her shoulder with an awkward arm, Matthew Cotton wished he could join her in her weeping.

  But now that his nausea had passed his attention was focused on only one thing. The long partially-lit corridor of metal that ran alongside holds one to nine.

  The funny thing was, he could tell there was something wrong before he even opened the door. Maybe that was how mothers felt with a cot death. They knew the baby was there in the crib when they crept up in the morning, dressing-gown just tied, cup of coffee in fist, maternal smile twitching and ready to catch the returned gummy grin of their most beloved possession. But before they even looked in, they knew there was something missing. Something important. The breath. The life.

  And that was exactly it. Pasqual knew before the door swung back that his baby, the radio room, the beating heart of the ship, was not breathing.

  No lights spangled the grey metal panel fronts. No crackle or hum of electrical life came from the industrial punched-hole speakers. And the air that he took for granted was always full of a million potential voices, music, information, just waiting to be filtered through his radio, was as still as the grave.

  Pasqual wiped his upper lip with a finger and put his hands on his hips. He had been the first one despatched by the captain after the discovery of the horror that they would not let him near enough to see, his duty to send out an immediate distress call, and it was partly a sense of that responsibility that stalled his panic.

  If it was an electrical fault, which it most probably was, then there was back-up. And that was exactly what he was going to get on top of right now. Problem, action, problem solved. Nothing to worry about.

  He walked more confidently into his little twelve-by-eighteen-foot world, rolled out his worn chair from under the console and sat down.

  He flicked a couple of switches just to confirm there was no life in the equipment, and then pushed back to access the panel behind the main medium-wave radio-telephone containing the back-up controls.

  His hand brushed the top of the scarred wooden desk and something tiny and metallic skittered to the floor.

  Pasqual blinked down at a small screw that pirouetted on the linoleum like a child’s top, then turned away to continue his task. He stopped, then slowly looked down again.

  His gaze rested on the slowing screw then transferred itself to the panel above the desk. The main control panel had eight screws holding it in place. Now it had eight holes.

  Pasqual put out his hands and rested his fingers on the grey metal. He pulled the panel gently and the large rectangle of steel shifted forward, catching slightly on the left side as it always did when he had to remove it for maintenance.

  It took him a moment or two to register what he was looking at when the panel finally came away and rested face-down on the desk, but when it did, it was not quite so easy to stifle his previously-contained fear.

  Whoever had opened Pasqual’s precious equipment and removed its guts had done so with considerable skill and knowledge. There was barely anything left, and nothing that was usable. He knew before he checked that the rest of the room’s equipment would be the same, and while he contemplated that, he placed the metal panel in front of him and rested his hands on the desk, wishing that he had heeded the captain’s orders for everyone to move around the ship only in twos or more.

  The thought of the journey back to his superior officers was not making his stomach churn because of what they might say about a ship stranded with no means of communication.

  It was making his hair prickle and his sweat bead, because whoever had murdered the boy might also have murdered Pasqual’s radio in order to stop anyone shouting for help; and unless the murderer had come like a spirit from the sea, he was still on board, and his job was not yet finished.

  Felix Chadin stood at the door of the cabin while his two assistants entered. Ronaldo’s living space had been largely unaffected by Fen’s recent occupancy, its Spartan interior more or less the way it had been since Port Arthur, and it was clear the moment the bosun swung open the door that it was also not
the scene of the great carnage for which they searched.

  Chadin was weary of this task already, and nervous of its failure. The captain had been obliged to order it, but his logical mind told him that no murderer would leave a trail of gore where he slept, and Felix was already searching for alternative courses of action while he dutifully carried out this one.

  “Clean,” shrugged the ABS scouring the outer cabin, while the one in the toilet shouted an echo from the tiny cubicle. The men were as perplexed as their bosun. They were frightened and confused and detective-work had most certainly not been part of their scanty training for life at sea.

  Felix nodded and inclined his head to the next cabin down the alleyway, and they skulked past him to obey, casting anxious glances left and right as they went.

  The bosun tightened his grip on the handle to shut the door and then stopped. On the fold-down table was the shoebox that Fen had so jealously guarded on arrival, and Felix’s eye fell on it with interest.

  True, no one had been guilty of blood-thirsty work in this room, and it was therefore not his place to use the search as an excuse to invade privacy, but the sight of the box pricked a compulsive curiosity in him.

  He stepped into the cabin and with one quick backward glance lifted the tattered cardboard lid and looked inside.

  It was empty. Guiltily, Felix Chadin replaced it and sighed.

  He was tilting at windmills now. There were still eight more cabins to search, more corners and crannies of the ship to poke into until they could truly say that nothing had been found, and quite frankly in the dire circumstances he wasn’t sure whether a find or a blank would be more comforting. Another look at the grey-green cardboard carton that proclaimed that it had once contained sandals from a factory outlet store in Galveston, made him embarrassed at his abuse of power. What had he imagined could possibly be in a shoebox that would help them understand the nightmare that had engulfed this ship? With his shoulders set in a position that would take a stress-managing masseur a couple of weeks to put right, he turned and left the room.

  As he went, the usual contents of Fen’s box lay sightlessly facing the bosun’s retreating shoes, from the shadows beneath its owner’s bunk.

  Dawn was a long way off. Lloyd Skinner stroked a finger over the white, yellow and blue Admiralty chart, number 4608, Guayaquil to Valparaiso, and let his radio officer whine breathlessly about their perilous situation. From the other hard foam couch, Matthew Cotton and Renato Lhoon watched silently, Renato sitting forward, hands clasped over his knees, Cotton lying back, hands holding either side of his neck as though it were leaking.

  “No back-up. Not even no back-up. They take everything. I don’t know how we…”

  The captain interrupted this high-pitched monologue with a question to Lhoon: “The body, Renato. Where is it now?”

  Pasqual looked as though he might cry. Lhoon cleared his throat, embarrassed for his colleague. “In the freezer. We shifted it back and closed the door.”

  “And the crew?”

  “Re-assembled in the crew mess hall. Waiting for Felix to brief them. Third mate Ernesto Sevilla is on watch on the bridge.”

  “Alone?”

  Renato shook his head.

  “Got a greaser for company.”

  Lloyd Skinner said nothing for a moment, then stood up and walked to a darkened port hole, hands in pockets as he stared out into the black night. Lhoon and Cotton bristled with tension while Pasqual made tiny involuntary noises from the back of his throat. They were men trying to keep it together, trying to stay professional and calm in the face of a situation that their deeper instincts suggested might be better served by running and screaming.

  But if he was aware of these primed bombs of fear and uncertainty that were wrestling with their fight-or-flight instincts while perched on his unpleasant furniture, then the captain hid it well. When he spoke it was as though the other men were not present.

  “Well, I guess we got two choices. We either run for port without a radio or we stay here and wait for the company’s ship to reach us.”

  Cotton spoke and the surprise of an interjection from him made the captain look round from his ruminations, which had been directed at the black glass.

  “There’s a company ship coming?”

  Skinner regarded him with interest. “Why do you imagine we’re hove to… First Officer?”

  Cotton sat forward, ignoring the barbed question and the overlong pause before his title, and responded only by wringing more blood from an already-white hand. Skinner continued, apparently unsatisfied by Cotton’s lack of response.

  “I assumed you realized that our straying from the usual shipping path had a point.”

  “Point being?” said Matthew without any retaliation in his voice.

  “Meeting them at the co-ordinates they requested.”

  While the radio officer echoed Cotton’s physical anxiety by nervously mashing a clump of trouser material in his fist, Renato looked from Cotton to Skinner, his feeling of exclusion overcoming his fear to prickle him like a nettle. He cleared his throat. “When is the ship to make contact, Captain?”

  Skinner looked pointlessly at his watch. The answer was in his head, not on his wrist. “0500. Just under five hours from now.”

  Renato nodded. He wiped sweat from his upper lip and looked down at the chart on the low table. Then he pointed weakly to the coastline. “We could head for Chicama?”

  The captain raised an eyebrow. “Without VHF? And what kind of assistance do you think we might get at an ass-end of nowhere port like that?”

  Lhoon looked down.

  He knew that if they met the sister company ship, a ship that unlike the Lysicrates had the lifelines of radio and satellite communications, plus a fellow crew that would be comforting in its sheer numbers, things would get a whole lot better. There would be a helicopter from the mainland before you could say boo, and the relief of having events handed over to the proper law enforcing authorities. But that would mean five hours. That was a long time.

  Cotton was looking at the chart now. He waved at it vaguely. “If we routed back into the shipping lane on the way to a port, we could use the Aldis lamp to signal another ship.” The captain raised an eyebrow again. It made Cotton frown as he continued. “It’s all we’ve got.”

  Skinner looked a little more kindly at his first officer. “You know as well as I do, Matthew, there’s no guarantee there’s anyone out there right now. We change course without a radio and the company ship’ll never find us.”

  When Matthew spoke, his voice had a direction, a resolve, that was clearly unfamiliar to the other occupants of the cabin, demonstrated by the way each one turned to look at him as he spoke. “We should sail for shore.”

  Skinner remained standing. “You seem very sure.”

  Cotton bent his head to the floor and clasped his hands over the back of his neck. “The boy had his skin removed. Then he was gutted and there’s no sign of his heart. You reckon whatever did that to a man is going to let the rest of us just go about our business for five hours?”

  There was a glimmer of surprise on the captain’s face. “What… ever?”

  Cotton looked up. “Huh?”

  “You said what, rather than who.”

  Matthew looked from the captain to the faces of the other two men who were studying him. His palms grew clammy and he licked dry lips that had been denied their usual lubrication for at least three or four hours. Although it was Skinner’s last observation that had rekindled his sweat, he chose to ignore it. “I’m just not sure how safe we are, that’s all.”

  Skinner’s face hardened back into inscrutability. “I think you’ll find that’s my responsibility.”

  Matthew let out a short mirthless laugh. “Jesus, Captain. You saw what was left of Salvo.”

  The use of the boy’s name made Renato swallow and look at the floor.

  “Believe this, Matthew. All of you. We’ll find and contain the killer in a matter of hours.
This is a ship at sea. There is nowhere to hide.”

  Matthew nodded, and kept nodding as he replied softly. “Guess that goes for us too.”

  10

  The mess room was not large and there were too many people squeezed into it, so some of the men stood on chairs to see the bosun as he spoke. It had the effect of a raked football stadium, and it gave Esther the opportunity to study every face in detail as they listened intently to the man talking briskly to them in their native tongue.

  One of these faces was the face of a psychotic murderer. That was important to keep at the forefront of her thoughts. Important, because reminding herself of it could keep her alive. She swept them with her gaze, stopping only when one of the rapt expressions twitched, or movement caught her eye as a hand was raised to a face or a head turned. Some of the faces being rubbed at by anxious hands were terribly young.

  A whole line of gangly boys, ABSS she presumed, stood at the back, their brown eyes lit with terror. And some were much older; the engine-room men, whose faces were inexplicably lined with grime as though this were a steam-driven vessel instead of diesel.

  But which amongst them could have taken a knife and sliced at that beautiful boy like a butcher? From where she sat, they were nothing more than a group of hard-working, under-educated, frightened men. But there was danger in the oversight of the obvious, and she narrowed her concentration as the bosun continued.

  Felix Chadin sounded as though he were barking, but the men were hanging on every word, leaving Esther stranded in her linguistic ignorance. But as he spoke she realized her gaze had rested on one face.

  It was a face of a man in his early thirties, and what had snagged her subconscious searchlight was not his expression, or the set of his features, but merely the focus of his attention.

  All eyes were locked on Chadin’s earnest face, but though the man’s was turned to the bosun, his eyes were looking at something else. Only occasionally, and only for a fraction of a second, but Esther caught it once and watched for the shift of concentration again.