THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  Not trusting a man who sailed a ship and made poor dinner conversation was one thing. Not trusting a man who had the only gun on that ship was quite another. She cursed inwardly and waited until she heard his footsteps die in the echoing stairwell, then slid round the corner and approached his cabin door.

  She was an optimist. Maybe there was more than one weapon. Esther knew that was almost certainly not the case, but she was using it as an excuse to enter his cabin. As of this moment, she had suddenly become rather curious to know as much as she could about the master of the Lysicrates.

  She pulled the handle down, looked left and right, entered and shut the door quickly behind her. Inside, the lights were on.

  Esther looked round the mundane and tidy public living quarters of a man at sea. On his meeting table between the hard, unpleasant sofas, a chart was laid out. A few books had been abandoned on a variety of surfaces and his desk was an undulating landscape of papers and binders. She moved towards the more interesting of the suite’s three rooms. His sleeping quarters. The adjoining door was closed and she opened it cautiously through force of habit. Sonstar’s gift of luxury to its captains was not only a private bedroom off the living area, but a real single bed, instead of the bolted-on bunk the majority of the lower-ranking crew had to contend with. The room was identical to the one she enjoyed as the honoured passenger, but her eye for observation picked out a few differences, the main one being that her bed had a gap beneath it, a space she had immediately utilized by storing in it her pack and any dirty laundry she couldn’t face. Skinner’s bed was boxed in with a plank, considerably reducing his storage space. But at least they shared a bed-making obsession. His, like hers, was made up in military fashion, the sheets tight enough to bounce a dime on. A quick scan located the cabinet that Matthew had described, but before she was going to explore that barren possibility, she wanted to see something, anything that would tell her more about one of the two most dangerous men on board. Fen was the more dangerous, sure, but she wanted to make sure that the gun that could stop him was in the hands of someone who would use it for that purpose, and only that purpose. Who was Skinner? Why did he make her uneasy? Why, more importantly, was she not chasing after him offering to help?

  There was certainly nothing she could see right away that suggested any answers. The bedroom was as officiously tidy as the office.

  Two small, framed photos on a bureau beneath the porthole were the only apparent personal touch, and she stepped forward to look at them. The first was of Skinner himself. He looked younger and fitter, and he was standing on the top of a mountain somewhere, a snow-covered landscape stretching out forever at his back. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a curious satisfaction in his expression that was not particularly pleasant, and though she wouldn’t have risked the trailer on it, Esther guessed that the photo had been taken with a self-timer. The clues were there. One set of footprints leading to where he stood, one rucksack on the ground, a single flask and an apple sitting forlornly in the snow beside the pack.

  The other was more the stuff of lonely men at sea. It was a poor-quality colour picture, an interior. A small boy on a tricycle grinned triumphantly from in front of a Christmas tree, as his new wheels tore at the rug. His face was an oval of pure joy, as he beamed up into the camera, his starfish hands held out from the handlebars imploring to be picked up by the beloved photographer. Esther sat down and held the picture. He was beautiful. Something in her softened as she recognized Lloyd Skinner’s striking features in the boy. So he had a son. He loved someone. That made her feel a whole lot better, though she didn’t know why. She sighed and looked around. There was so little else to see.

  A large clothes locker with louvered doors was built into the wall. Replacing the photo on the bureau, Esther opened it and revealed a neat line of shirts, and a small half-open case containing some folded underwear and T-shirts. A glance back at the photo of the boy made a pang of guilt rise in her gullet. This was intrusion. Lloyd Skinner had done nothing wrong except express his irritation at her. An irritation that if you looked at it in the cold light of day, was not only sensible and proper, but understandable, given their situation. The distant siren of warning that had been sounding in her head when she’d been around him lately was obviously more to do with her than him. She rubbed a hand over tired eyes. Picking up the photo of the little boy again, she held it closer to her face to have one last look before she left this poor man’s privacy intact. She smiled at the boy. It was hard not to. He had such crazy big shorts on that his legs looked scrawny, and his cardigan was so old-fashioned it was outrageously cute. On the mantelpiece behind the tree she could even make out a row of Christmas cards.

  Esther stopped smiling. In the middle was a card with four big numbers. Four big silver numbers celebrating the year 1953. She put the picture back on the bureau beside the other one.

  It was not Lloyd Skinner’s son. It was another picture of Lloyd Skinner.

  She felt a chill that was out of proportion to the discovery that a man at sea should sport only two photos, both of himself, checked the feeling and walked slowly to the gun cabinet. It was, as she suspected, no longer locked. Inside was a weapon’s log-book, a small brown folder that required the user to register the time and date, and explanation of circumstances regarding the removal of the weapon. Skinner hadn’t got around to fulfilling this part of his duty, but she read with mild interest that the last time it had been employed had been a mere caution when a suspicious pirate vessel had come alongside six years ago.

  Perhaps explaining what had happened on the Lysicrates this time would take more than just a few minutes of form-filling. She threw it back with contempt.

  Esther walked to the middle of the cabin and eyed the bed again. The guilt had gone, and in its place were wheels that turned in her head and wouldn’t stop turning until she found out what was bugging her. Right now, it was the bed that was bugging her. Why would the ship’s designers have provided a normal single bed and then screwed a piece of cheap plywood over the legs? Ships were like trailers. You used every bit of space you could find to fold things away, tuck things under and slide things back. It was how she had grown up. She dropped to her knees and had a better look.

  It hadn’t even been done well.

  The wood was held in place by two fat screws at the top corners, and by the look of them the carpenter had had more than a couple of goes at getting them into the drill-holes. She looked at it for a moment, then her hand beat her head to the conclusion they were both coming to: her fingers reached out and twisted the first screw. It turned easily—it was a screw that was used to being taken out and replaced. Esther bit her lip and glanced back at the open door to Skinner’s office. She’d come this far. She might as well continue. She twisted the screw out, then loosened and removed the next one. The wood immediately shifted forward, and it took no effort to slide her fingers under it and pull it away from the bed. She smiled when she saw what was there, although not with satisfaction. Her expression was bitter: she would rather have been wrong. There was a case in the void beneath Skinner’s bed, a large red Samsonite case. Esther rubbed her hands together then grabbed the handle and attempted to pull it out. It was heavy, and although it was an ordinary-looking suitcase, with a combination lock at the handle, a few airline transit stickers adhering to its battered exterior, unless he wore lead diving boots to bed, this sure wasn’t where the good captain stored his pyjamas.

  “What you got in here then, mister?” she breathed.

  The case resisted its full exposure from the safe haven beneath the bed, but one tug with her feet on the edge of the bed pulled it free and she pushed back her hair to look at it. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with her conscience. This was not right. So what if he’d hidden a heavy case beneath his bed? It could be spare parts for his pick-up truck for all she knew. She had no business being here, no business invading his privacy. Esther opened her eyes and looked at it again. Instinct. She had lived her l
ife on it. It had told her to move quickly, told her to run fast, that time when the gang of guys from Mottlefield had started congregating around Sal Norton’s mom’s trailer. It had told her that the guy from the store who had driven her out to the coast in his dad’s car hadn’t been planning to show her the waves. It had told her lots of stuff that had kept her in one piece. Right now it was telling her that this was a case she needed to see inside. If she was wrong she would do the decent thing. She’d explain. She’d apologize. She’d make it up to him. She was going to open it.

  She tried the lock. The combination was set. Barely missing a beat, Esther picked up the fire-axe and smashed it down on the battered red handle. It gave way in the most satisfactory way and with one twist of the mangled plastic she felt the internal metal hinge snick open.

  She lifted the lid like an archaeologist opening a tomb. The contents made her mouth open and her tongue travel slowly from one side of her lower lip to the other.

  Whatever she had been expecting, it had not been this. The case had been skilfully divided into two compartments. The right-hand side, the bigger of the two, was still covered over with a thin, carefully-fashioned, wooden lid. In the open left-hand compartment, however, a shaped bed of foam cradled its treasure.

  Esther Mulholland knew a VHF radio when she saw it, and she was looking at one. It was hooked up to a rechargeable battery, and nestling alongside in their own neat compartment were two spares. She found the on-switch and threw it. The radio crackled into life.

  “You son of a bitch,” she breathed, more baffled than angry.

  Esther switched it off, and frowned down at the treachery in the case, trying to make sense of it. Then, with the cautious delicacy of a surgeon opening a wound, she slid her fingers under the internal wooden lid of the case and opened it.

  She blinked. The same cut-and-shaped foam held another secret, but this time, before her reasoning powers could kick in, Esther’s mind was already automatically running through the specification of what she was looking at. Five point four five calibre, sighting range of a thousand metres, magazine capacity of thirty rounds. Even though the Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifle was disassembled, it would be a poor military student who couldn’t recognize the most popular fighting weapon in the world. She stretched out a hand and touched the dull metal of the muzzle, and her eyes narrowed.

  This was a serious army weapon, not the stuff of fucked-up redneck NRA members, and the chill she’d felt a moment ago returned, right along with its big brother.

  The question was not what in God’s name a captain of a beat-up cargo boat was doing with this kind of military hardware, nor even where he got it, or how he smuggled it on board. The big question was what the fuck was he planning to do with it?

  Esther caught her breath, then dug out the component parts of the Kalashnikov and quickly assembled it, fighting back the respect she felt for how beautifully maintained the weapon was. There were four clips of ammo, and she snapped in one magazine, then took off her sweatshirt, tied it into a sling, stuffed the others into the home-made pouch formed by her hood and tied it round her waist. She dug the radio from its foam, closed the red case and with an effort pushed it back beneath the bed. Then she replaced the wooden panel, returned the screws to their holes and sealed it back up. Slinging the gun over her shoulder with an easy familiarity, she stood up and lifted the VHF.

  Esther Mulholland had no idea yet why Skinner was keeping a working radio secret from his crew, nor what he was going to do with a weapon that could take out the patrons in the first five rows of a theatre without much more effort than a squeeze of a finger. But until she found out, she sure as hell could find a use for them. She had a quick look around the cabin to check her visit would remain secret for as long as possible, then left quickly and quietly.

  Behind her, the room returned to silence. The man and boy stared from their photos, the neat bed remained tight and unruffled, and in the louvered clothes locker on the shelf above the shirt rail, an undisturbed aluminium flight case sat awaiting the return of its owner.

  The rust in the cofferdams of the Lysicrates gave the stale air that was trapped there a sharp metallic tang. As a matter of course it boasted a hint of rancid sea water, a variety of sour smells of dribbled effluent from a hundred different cargoes, and an underlying odour of rat piss and decay. Right now, however, the air was so foul it would have made breathing difficult. Water dripped from the height of the void to puddles on the floor fifty feet below, and each falling drop was celebrated with an echo that kept the memory of its descent alive for many seconds after the event.

  But in the inky black darkness of the narrow steel cloister, an organic shape that adhered to the bulkhead at least twenty feet up was interrupting the line of fall for some of those drips. Tiny globules of brine splashed silently onto matter that was almost blacker than the night that surrounded it, yet the shape was immobile, unmoved by the wetness. But although it was still, the thing that was the shape was thinking, scanning, processing.

  There was a man coming. It knew who he was. It could smell him, smell his flesh, a smell that was easily distinguishable from the dead and decaying, since that undiseased living tissue was an affront to the thing’s senses. It could feel him approaching through the engine room. There were men above. It could feel their fear. It knew where the woman was, and it followed the sensation of her for a moment, feeding on her passion and fear.

  It hung from the bulkhead with its strong grip; sticky, mutated chemicals that seeped from its foul limbs holding it securely against the smooth surface. Since the woman’s new emotions had stirred something in it again, it let the part of its mind that was not on watch sink into a reverie.

  Fingers. It remembered fingers. Possibly the most underestimated part of the body, they received pleasure, or warned of pain. They implored for mercy, or pointed with finality at those who would die. The entity that did not yet have a name, but knew that soon it would have one that would be etched on the dark half of all men’s hearts, stirred slightly in the blackness. A pool of water that had gathered in a hollow of its form spilled suddenly to the soaking floor.

  When the echoing splash of it subsided there was no sound but the distant drip of water falling all along the black corridor to the bow, and the low thrum of the ship’s engines.

  What fingers the entity had reached slowly down to below its torso and searched out what was forming. A satisfaction effused its consciousness and at last it allowed memory to stir. The memory of a man.

  The little bitches. Daughters of the Sun. So pious and haughty in the presence of the high priest. So dirty and scheming in his. Dark, heavily-lashed eyes flashed. Small, white, even teeth were cleaned by pointed pink tongues. Firm, rounded breasts moved beneath woven gold thread, and slim hips that no birthing child would ever push apart made jutting invitations below silken robes. Daughters of God. Inviolable high priestesses of the Golden One. Virgin handmaidens of the life-giver, the Lord Sun. Bitches as it rose. Whores as it set.

  What arts he had learned in the dark forest: how their black-almond eyes lost their innocence and shone with hungry malice when they begged him to speak the unspeakable, to do the unthinkable. How their ignorant, insatiable mouths opened to hear of the squat tribal scum he had been among the scum who’d thought they’d commanded those dark forces, but whose purpose they merely served. It was he who had mastered them and won. A shiver of gratification rippled through the entity as it called up slow tortures and creative deaths. How easily they buckled, the rabble of the forest with their thick brows, gold-pierced flesh and slack-breasted women. They died like animals. The entity held the time-locked pleasure of their screams for a moment like a favoured trinket.

  And now time was of no consequence, neither what had been nor what was to come. Only hate survived the desert of time.

  Everything mankind hated it always cast from itself, little knowing that it was the very act of trying to cleanse itself of the hated, the decaying, the diseased and t
he toxic, that made humanity so vulnerable to those who embraced these fruits and found succour amongst them. But to be in flesh again, to suck on the juices of the dead, and ferment a hatred that had for so long been without substance, was to be savoured.

  It ran a finger over the bloody organ that hung from a knot of cartilage and macerated skin, and if it had had the use of eyelids, they would have closed in ecstasy.

  15

  “So it’s going to be like this.”

  Another voice started to protest. Cotton silenced it with a shout. “Listen, damn you!”