THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  If only she could stop sweating. If only she could reach the AK47. The captain couldn’t either. It was too near her hand. He would pick it up once he’d killed her. That was the safe thing to do. The pragmatic thought squeezed itself in between the knowledge that there were weevils in the sack of grain in the galley that Becko had bought cheap in Callao and that eight tiny adjustments would make Rudolph Diesel’s famous engine one hundred percent efficient. Esther struggled with the snowplough but the load was too much to push away. Skinner was talking, but the concentration it took to hear his words, to clear her head to all but the immediate danger, was immense.

  “… were you doing in my cabin?”

  Esther gasped for breath, the sting of vomit still burning her mouth. “I went to get the gun.”

  Skinner’s eyes did not leave his target once, even though the gun that could do considerably more damage than the one he held in his hand was still feet away from them both and very prominent in his peripheral vision.

  “And Cotton?”

  Cotton. His wife was called Heather. His daughter was called Molly. The AK47 is exactly four feet six and quarter inches from her grasp. The floor it’s resting on has a screw lodged between the supporting girders that is weakening the structure. A man called Ho Lung dropped it when it was being built.

  “I don’t know where Cotton is.” She wiped uselessly at her soaking face.

  “But he knows what you found.”

  If you can’t fight this, thought Esther in a tiny space her sane mind found for a fraction of a second, then use it. She looked up at Skinner and focused on him. “You killed a man. A man called Mendez. Shot him at point blank range.”

  Skinner’s face remained impassive but his eyes shone with something feral and dangerous. It was working.

  Esther’s mind filled with images of Skinner. The difficulty now was controlling them, sifting them for knowledge that was useful. She spoke in grunts and gasps, her eyes closed. “You had a dog when you were seven called Ernie. You’re mildly allergic to dark chocolate. It gives you migraines. You planted bombs on the Eurydice to sink it at sea. It was all planned from Hong Kong. The company gave you a quarter of the insurance money. Three million dollars. You’ve spent some on a ranch in Mexico. But you think you need more. You never understood why Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a classic. You think it’s the self-indulgent ramblings of a pathetic mummy’s boy. It’s bothered you all your adult life. The ranch has windchimes on the back porch. They make you think of your childhood. You think you’re getting seven million for this job, for sinking the Lysicrates, since you’ll be officially dead. But the man from the company on the fishing boat a mile away is called Charles Lee. He’s planning to kill you when the Lysicrates goes down and you try to climb aboard. He’s going to shoot you while you’re in the life raft. There’s a can floating off the side of the fishing boat with some tomato puree in it. The incendiary devices for sinking this ship are on the wall of the cofferdams. The radio detonator is in an aluminium attaché case. Charles Lee likes British football and has a tiny fracture in his pelvis. His wife is the daughter of a Chinese judge… no stop. Stop.” She gasped, concentrating again. “The company are paying him a million dollars for the job. We’re above the Milne Edwards trench because no one will be able to investigate the wreck at that depth. Kelly, the woman you have sex with in Mexico, has aborted the baby you made. It was a boy.” Esther groaned with the strain.

  Skinner’s voice was hushed, reverent with a terrified awe. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Esther blinked through screwed up eyes, gasping for breath after her effort. “The Chosen One. First handmaiden to be consumed by the Dark Sun.” She spoke the words without thinking them first, and when they left her mouth she looked up at Skinner with almost as much fear as he was regarding her.

  They regarded each other in silent horror, each privately digesting the impact of the words she’d been spewing out. If evidence was necessary to reveal how deeply Skinner was disturbed by Esther’s soliloquy, then he provided it at that moment. In an uncharacteristic moment of unguardedness, Lloyd Skinner looked away.

  With an effort that she dug from the very depth of her strength Esther leapt forward, lashed out, caught his leg and brought the captain down. He made no noise except a gasp, but his strength was daunting while they wrestled for control of the gun that was still loosely in his hand, though the fact that his wrist was held by Esther’s sweaty grasp made it impossible to use.

  “Drop it. Both of you.”

  The struggling couple looked up though Esther already knew who was holding the AK47 in his inexpert hands, had known he was approaching, knew what was in his pockets and in his heart. From his undignified position on the corridor floor, Skinner quickly assessed the threat from First Officer Matthew Cotton. The safety-catch was off the gun. One stupid tug on that sensitive trigger and Cotton would blow them away without even having to try. Skinner let go the handgun and sat up. Esther put out her hand to retrieve it but Matthew barked at her.

  “Leave it.”

  “Matthew…”

  “Leave it and stand up, both of you.”

  The gun stayed on the floor. Skinner and his troublesome passenger stood up slowly, both of them fixing Cotton with glares, but for very different reasons.

  “Matthew, be careful. You don’t know how to use that. The safety-catch is off.” Esther struggled to stop saying all the things she knew about the gun, about Matthew, about the Peruvian fishermen on the nearby boat who were planning what they would spend their share of the company money on, but in fact were also going to be killed by Charles Lee. She struggled some more, pushing the crap from her mind.

  Matthew looked from face to face. His voice was broken with emotion. “They’re dead. Shot. Through the fucking head. Now why would anyone shoot two innocent men? Huh? Why would anyone do a fucking insane, evil piece of shit like that?”

  Skinner’s eyes were steady, fixed on Cotton. “Look at her, Matthew. She’s gone crazy. I found her running from the radio room. It’s drugs. She didn’t tell you, did she? That’s what she’s been doing in South America. Look at her. Look at her, for Christ’s sake.”

  Esther was shaking and sweating with the effort of trying to keep the wall of excess information at bay.

  She opened her mouth to warn Cotton, but the only thought that came to mind concerned the body of Raul Nestor which had been carried nearly seven miles away already by the strong undercurrents. A shoal of fish were cautiously investigating it as it tumbled slowly in the cold water. She closed her mouth and eyes and tried again.

  Skinner put out pleading hands. “She’s carrying a load of heroin for the Mafia. It’s seriously organized. I caught her using a VHF radio she had hidden along with that weapon. There’s a fishing boat a mile away that’s due to pick her and the stuff up. Pasqual must have got in the way of their plan. But we’re in luck. I reckon she’s been sampling the produce. Overdosed and gone crazy. Give me the gun. I know how to use it.”

  Esther’s eyes snapped open. Suddenly her mind was very clear indeed. “He’s coming,” she breathed, looking around with an expression of love and wonder. He’s coming, she thought. He can smell me. He can hear me thinking. Another thought nudged her from the place that was still Esther and only Esther. She knew how to turn off those thoughts that he could hear so clearly. She was special. Not like the others. More like him. But why would she want to do that? She wanted him. She wanted him very badly. She kept her thoughts open and loud.

  Skinner’s eyes remained fixed on Cotton, never wavering, even as the smell in the corridor increased. Matthew was staring at Esther, the barrel of the AK47 waving around erratically as he shifted the weight from one foot to another.

  “Who’s coming?” His voice was still emotional, but there was a knowing fear in it that Skinner picked up on and didn’t like.

  Esther looked across at Matthew, her face in repose for the first time since she had been discovered on the floor by Skinn
er. “He Who Remakes The World.”

  A tick at the side of Skinner’s eye twitched into life, and in the face of this madness he licked at dry lips and concentrated on keeping his voice low and calm. “She’s out of it, Matthew. Give me the gun and let’s deal with her before she goes crazy again. Enough people have died.”

  Matthew Cotton ignored his captain. He stared in despair at Esther’s peaceful face. “Esther. Who killed those two men?”

  Esther’s hands had gone to her breasts. She began to stroke herself with subtle but slow sensuous movements. “Am I beautiful enough, do you think?”

  Matthew Cotton groaned at the profound insanity that had overwhelmed the determined, decent and practical features of the friend he had parted from less than an hour ago. His face contorted with grief and he wrestled his emotions to stop tears from welling.

  But even had he given free rein to those tears, they could have easily been interpreted as a response to the stench that was now filling the corridor so thickly it was making it hard to breathe.

  Matthew’s eyes darted around in search of the invisible threat, but this brief inattention to his targets was not sufficiently total to make Skinner think of tackling something as volatile as the Russian semi-automatic. The captain made no move. He would wait. Timing was everything in the fine art of staying alive.

  Matthew looked quickly to both ends of the corridor, deciding that the stairwell and elevator offered a better escape than the route to the other cabins. He gestured with the gun, a motion that made Skinner draw in a sharp breath.

  “Move. To the stairs. Quickly.”

  The captain, eyeing the handgun still lying on the floor, turned and did as he was told, Esther doing so equally obediently but with considerably less purpose in her step.

  It was only a few yards to the end of the corridor where the ceiling opened up from the claustrophobia of the line of cabins. Skinner reached the landing first and halted to await instructions.

  Matthew Cotton had no idea what he was planning to do. His captain was no murderer. Lloyd Skinner had been his saviour. Despite the malaise that was affecting her it was hard to believe that Esther Mulholland could really have taken that gun and felled his two crewmates with such cold-blooded intent. But people were still dying on this ship. Raul’s equally mad testimony had frightened him, and finding the manhole opened as the deck hand had said had dented his trust in Esther. Something he couldn’t explain made his flesh creep and his heart fall when he gave it head-time, and here he was training a lethal weapon on his companions’ backs as he marched them away in search of an escape from nothing worse than a bad smell from the holds. He stopped when they all reached the door of the elevator and tried to gather his fevered thoughts.

  He’d felt Esther and Skinner watching him as he bit a lip and thought about the next move. If he had been Esther, trained to watch and wait, trained her whole life to notice the small things people did that spoke of the bigger things they were about to do, then perhaps he would have been quicker to act. He would have noticed that two of the four eyes that regarded him were gradually drifting from his face to look at something else.

  But by the time Matthew Cotton had noticed that Esther was looking at the ceiling above their heads, and that a drip of something sticky and red-brown was trickling down the white-painted wall of the stair well it was almost too late.

  It dropped like a stone onto the floor between him and his prisoners, and although there was no more than a split second, a fraction of a heartbeat, in which to look into its face, Matthew felt that he had gazed on that horror for most of his life. Black eyes that seemed like the eyes of a blood-thirsty crowd rather than an individual bored into his soul. A patchwork of a face, hideous in its mess of flesh and seeping putrescent sores, housed a grin that was too wide, had too many sharpened teeth, shattered bone-pieces and metallic glints in it to be considered being called part of a mouth.

  The pressure required to pull the trigger of the AK47 was infinitesimal. Even as the gun exploded into its maniacal, juddering delivery of bullets, Matthew was already regretting having trained such a monstrously violent and efficient weapon at two of his friends. The stinking, diseased blood that splattered from so close a target blinded him for a moment, but even in those unseeing, gasping, gagging moments, he found his way somehow to Esther’s hand, grabbed her reluctant body to him and was pushing her through the open door to the main deck, the gun still firing behind him as he ran forward.

  He ran and pushed as far as he could go, stumbling along the sides of the deck until he reached the last hold before the bow. Only then, in the shadow of the hatch cover, did he stop and look at the woman he had propelled from death to the night air. Like him, she was covered in a cocktail of sticky brown blood, effluent and bullet-torn bits of long-dead flesh. But unlike him, Esther Mulholland was crying. He put out a shaking arm to comfort her.

  She pushed it away angrily, gasping in a sob. “You bastard.”

  Still mad, he wanted to believe. Still sweating. Still shaking. Still no idea what was going on. But Matthew Cotton knew he was mistaken. Of the two of them it was he who was the more ignorant, and as he looked at her contorted face the part of him that housed his intuition and instinct nudged him to pay attention to that fact that when she spoke to him it was with a malice he had not imagined her capable of.

  “You fucking stupid prick.”

  Matthew opened his mouth to reply but there was nothing to say. Esther looked away from him with contempt, her eyes softening when they were no longer focused on her human saviour’s face.

  “He needs me.”

  18

  Skinner held the small gun to his chest. His nails dug into the palms of the other hand as hard as he could push them. It wasn’t enough. He wanted to feel something physical, something to ground him in reality, but it would take more than an insignificant, self-inflicted pain to clear his head of the things he had just witnessed. With his back firmly against the locked door of his cabin, he panted through gritted teeth and struggled to regain the composure he prided himself on mastering, no matter what the circumstances.

  Everything in Lloyd Skinner’s world had just changed. He was a man who fed hungrily on information, who acted on knowledge he gathered secretly and constantly when the attention of others around him was elsewhere. It had kept him alive, but more than that, the power it gave him by always being alert, always watching and planning, always being quietly in control of every situation, was what he lived for. There was nothing else. There was no love in Lloyd Skinner’s life. People could not be sufficiently trusted to love. Nor was there anything material he desired. The girl was only half right: he had plenty of money. The seven million this job was to have paid was important merely because he could get it rather than because he needed it.

  But the memory of all those impossible revelations the girl had unveiled and the nightmarish sight of that monstrous creature were the two things that could not be logically stored, processed or understood by any of the many mental mechanisms Skinner had at his disposal. Unless he could come to terms with them both, they threatened to unhinge him.

  He let his tense body slide down the door until he was on his haunches, and with an effort closed his eyes and forced himself to see the thing again. He had only seen its back as it had dropped from God knows where in between them. But even that had been bad enough. The matted hair or fur or whatever it was that covered its patchwork skull had been moving with parasites. But the worst thing, the thing that had made him want to scream even now, was that the skin that was tied around its uneven torso, skin that was bruised and purple, looked as though it had been recently flayed from a human body. He had been staring in horror at the neat knots that held the hellish apparel in place when Cotton had let the AK47 go. Skinner was no stranger to what his beautifully-maintained and cherished weapon could do to solid flesh and bone, in fact he had never stopped being fascinated by it. But the eruption of rotten material, stinking flesh and pus that had explode
d over him from the beast, was too much to bear. It was still covering the front of his shirt and the tops of his trousers, and although its stench was urging him to vomit with every intake of breath, he was still too shaken to touch it as he would have to in order to remove his clothes.

  The single factor that was keeping him sane was that Skinner’s instinct for survival had not deserted him when he’d needed it. Despite the bewildering horror of the situation by the stairs, the animal in him had seen the moment of escape and taken it. Instinct had made him run back up the corridor, grab the forgotten handgun on the floor and run. And here he was. Alive. What else mattered?

  His eyes opened and a new sense of resolve started to form. So, as Shakespeare had suggested, there were indeed more things in heaven and on earth than were dreamt of in Lloyd Skinner’s philosophy, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be put to work on his behalf. The girl had frightened him with her supernatural knowledge, but now he was regaining his calm he realized that having heard it was nothing short of a miracle. He now knew things that could not have been known by any mortal man. He was in control again. But he had to get off this ship. Everything had gone wrong, and there was nothing left of the previous plan that made sense.

  Now, there simply had to be a new one. He knew, of course, that the company would try and have him killed. How could someone with as much dangerous knowledge be allowed to live?

  He had, of course, planned to clear the fishing boat of all its occupants and contact the company later from a safe and secret location when it was time to transfer the money. He had expected resistance, but now he knew the specifics and that knowledge was outstandingly powerful. If she was right about everything else then she was right about this too. But Skinner had only the pathetically inadequate handgun at his disposal. It would be hard to win against the opposition he suspected the fishing boat contained. That had to be rectified. He was, of course, going ahead with the sinking of the Lysicrates, but even when he got his AK47 back, how could he survive going aboard the fishing boat when there was a marksman waiting for him with the advantage of height and cover?