THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  Until now. Now, as she gazed on the naked form of the most beautiful man she had ever seen, she realized that it had been for this moment that she had been waiting. She had already forgotten his name, but his eyes glowed with a recognition that needed no such mortal formalities.

  He stood around six feet tall, and his smooth, brown face was as angular as if sculpted from bronze. Dark eyes stared at her from beneath a wide, curving brow, and his long, thick, shining, black hair was tied back with a golden clasp at the base of his powerful neck.

  He took a step forward and Esther let her hungry eyes roam over his body. She had looked at pictures of such bodies in her teens in a porn magazine a gay friend used to steal from a store downtown. But even if the physique of the man before her resembled those perfect, wide-shouldered, huge-cocked creatures, there was a purity, a delicate fluidity, to the lines of his body that made such comparisons almost blasphemous.

  Esther could barely breathe. Her desire was overwhelming as she stepped towards him. He smelled of spices, incense, the thin, subtle, woody odour that wafts in a forest clearing after a campfire.

  To give herself to this man was not entrapment. It was liberation. She was already part of him. She knew what he had been through, had seen his life, understood the triumph in his heart. Only one tiny voice in her own soul protested that she should not proceed. It told her to listen to the things she knew, the special things that this intoxicating state of grace was telling her. But the blessed silence that had descended on that racket of unwanted knowledge since she’d entered the cabin was like having pain relieved. That, and the combination of her desire, smothered and silenced the protest.

  He spoke.

  “These are the words you will pray as I take you. Say them.”

  She watched his sensual mouth make shapes, his tongue move as he formed strange and alien sounds. Esther listened and repeated them. Her skin prickled and the sweat on her body dripped as she spoke. They were not words her human understanding could decipher. They were grunts and hisses, guttural rasps and whispers, and although their sound was ugly and disturbing, the passion they aroused in her made her almost unable to speak at all.

  As he watched her mouth as she made the best approximation of the sounds she was able, she could see that his desire was as fierce as her own. As she spoke the last syllable, Esther removed her clothes and unbidden lay on the cold metal bench of the radio room, her knees open and hanging over the edge.

  There should be ceremony, she thought as he came to her.

  But there was none. There was just the act itself, and the grunted, delirious repetition of the words he’d taught her as he took Esther Mulholland without resistance.

  “Get in.”

  Renato had already pulled out the safety pins and undone the two cleats to release the lifeboat that sat on the starboard side of the accommodation block, but Skinner was glancing around anxiously as he waited to pull the lever that would let the davits fall down and swing the boat over the side. It was perhaps anxiety that had made the captain bark the order, but whatever the reason, it grated on his new first officer. There were already a number of things that were making him reluctant to follow any more orders before he had time to think. But the captain was pushing along this venture with a haste that did not seem logical to Renato. Even the choice of the starboard lifeboat was peculiar when the fishing boat was lying off the port side and the wind suggested to any seaman that the port lifeboat would be a more obvious choice. And the celerity of Skinner’s actions was perplexing. After all, there seemed to Renato to be no immediate danger. Whoever had massacred Fen in the cofferdams was still locked in there. There was no way out. Now that Fen was cleared and the rest of the crew accounted for as either dead or alive, he felt a certain amount of relief that the culprit could only be a stowaway. Renato himself had made sure that door was sealed: the bastard could die in there for all he cared. Cotton was in the engine room under the protection of the crew, and only a drugged girl—who could do little harm without a weapon—was at large. So what was the hurry? What the hell had a Peruvian fishing boat to do with Sonstar’s commercial plans for the Lysicrates and her cargo or in hailing help for her crew?

  But the question that burned at the front of Renato’s mind was what the girl had said about Skinner. Since her casual reference to the existence and purpose of some aluminium flight case, Renato could not get it out of his mind. What mines? Which ship to be sunk? He had tried everything he could think of to find a rational explanation for Esther’s intimacy with his own domestic secrets, and he could find none. Why would her mind-reading party-trick be confined to him? Renato Lhoon was forced to make an admission to himself. He was afraid. Everything they were doing made no sense. He had no clear explanation at all about what was going on. He cleared his throat and avoided Skinner’s eyes by looking casually out to the dark sea.

  “I’m nervous leaving the Lysicrates with the girl still loose. Can’t the skipper of the fishing boat board us instead?”

  Skinner examined Renato carefully. He was already bored with this charade, longing to end it quickly, but now was no time to lose his cool. It was never time to lose your cool when there was still risk. History had taught him that. He sighed. “I got my orders, Renato, and all I can think about is doing this quickly, finding out what the hell is going on, then getting back on board and getting my men home safely.” He paused for effect. “Right now, they’re all that matters.”

  Renato turned back from his pretended interest in the ocean and looked at his captain. There had been such sad sincerity in Skinner’s voice, such a note of lonely regret at his obvious disbelief that he felt a sudden hot stab of shame. He revered this man. He had admired him, had longed to be noticed by him for years. Now, because of an inexplicable incident involving a woman he didn’t know, and the drunken exploits of a man he knew only too well, he was doubting his captain. Now was the time he should be trusting him. Now was the time when his career could really be in the balance. He had to bury those doubts and do as he was told.

  Renato nodded in agreement then put his hands over the edge of the big fibreglass boat and pulled himself in. Skinner handed him the radio but not the gun, pulled the hydraulic handle and the davits shuddered into life, lifting the boat from the deck. All the time Skinner scanned the deck as though he expected company. Renato moved into the boat to make checks that were second nature to a man who’d been at sea most of his adult life. He lifted the panel in the middle of the boat to expose the small diesel engine, and made sure it was primed. He wiped a hand over his nose, moved across to where the first-aid and survival kit were stowed, crouched and busied himself with his silent inventory.

  The davits clanked to a stop, fully extended, so that the boat hung out over the side of the Lysicrates.

  Skinner was looking up at the chains supporting the boat, which was fortunate for Renato Lhoon. Because at that moment, the expression on the new first officer’s face was no longer one of trust and obedience that was temporarily keeping him alive. It was a face that registered horror and despair, and most importantly, naked fear. But for now it was concealed and that was good. Renato would have to work hard to think before he stood up again and faced the man with the gun.

  For now though, he stayed perfectly still and simply stared at what he had found tucked in neatly beside the first-aid box. An aluminium flight-case with a set of battered dog-tags clipped neatly around the handle.

  The physical pain of the penetration was a sensation secondary to the white-hot explosion of the lock imprisoning Esther’s mind. With her eyes closed in ecstasy, she felt him enter her, felt the bursting of that membrane more precious to him than it was to her, and the thin trickle of blood down her thigh. Her body arched back and she hissed in pleasure and release. The solid bank of insistent, feverish knowledge had gone. There was just her body, and the deep, satisfying ache of their act.

  Since the moment she had entered the cabin there had been no Esther Mulholland. There had sim
ply been desire, and the desire had grown darker as she had approached him and invited him to touch her. Before he had even penetrated her, she had been aching for pain as well as pleasure. She had wanted to feel what he had felt when he had been violated, and when his fingernail, sharp as a blade, had traced a teasing arc beneath her left breast, she’d longed to press it deeper, make it cut her, rip her.

  But now, this second, her virginity was gone and with it the killing burden of her overloaded brain. She threw her head back even further and luxuriated in a long inhalation of air.

  And then Esther Mulholland gagged.

  Her body jerked as she gagged again and coughed. Her nose and mouth filled with a stench more foul than she had ever endured. Bile rose in her throat. She twisted under the flesh skewer that held her down in order to release the vomit that was filling her mouth.

  Esther groaned as she retched. Her streaming eyes came open. Her head was twisted sideways, away from her lover. As she blinked away tears, her focus returned. She was looking at a deck cadet. Or more correctly, the corpse of a deck cadet. She had never been introduced to him but Esther accessed somewhere in a strange, dream-like part of her memory the fact that he was called Gaspar Libuano, that he was twenty-one years old, and that Skinner had shot him. But this truth was not the crammed, bulldozing fever of knowledge that she had been suffering before this release. It was a simple, uncluttered memory of a fact she had learned during that madness.

  Everything had stopped moving, gone still. The man inside her was still. The stinking, fetid air in the room was still. And most importantly, Esther’s heart had stopped as she struggled to figure out where she was and why she could remember something that she hadn’t known in the first place. More urgently, what the hell was happening to her? Slowly, her head turned back to face the only other living creature in the room. The one that was inside her.

  The noise that came from her was too deep to be a scream and too high to be a bellow. It was a vocal eruption of terror and revulsion that was beyond the control of the human being that emitted it.

  The thing that was still joined to her towered over her body, its blistered, suppurating face wearing a leer like a slash in a carcass.

  Esther thrashed, howling and screaming in a frenzy of primeval terror, bursting blood vessels in her throat. A stabbing in her chest held her firm. She looked down. A metal claw growing from a disfigured, half-fleshed hand was pressed against her heart.

  The creature spoke, but this time even if her screams had allowed her to hear the words, Esther Mulholland would not have been able to understand them. They were no more than a series of rasping, phlegm-filled grunts, words that came from no language a human being ever could or should speak. But though the vocabulary was unknown, the meaning of the sounds was clear. The monstrous creation was mocking her.

  Esther’s eyes, crazed with terror, fell on the part of them that was still joined.

  The pieces of flesh, skin and cartilage that hung together and had entered her body were so clearly not alive, so clearly harvested from dead men that at that moment Esther thought she would go mad.

  The black, beady slits of hatred that were its eyes closed in pleasure as it pressed the shard of metal through her breast with a small and skilful twist.

  The next moment was one of such confusion that she had no mental tool to understand it. All was insanity. All was death and terror. But as she watched, her mouth still open and expelling her screams, half of the creature’s head was sliced away. She watched as a clean, rectangular blade arced over the top of the matted, fur-patched skull, and descended through it, removing everything from halfway through the left eye down to the collarbone. Even in her catatonic state of terror there was fascination in the revelation that the skull had contained more than one brain. Bits of the grey matter that had been assembled in the borrowed skull fell away as it reared back with a screech, pulling its metal and flesh weapons free of Esther. The slime of the liberated brains caught on the fur and hair protruding from its torso and slithered downwards as it clawed at its own body, and fell screaming to the floor.

  Matthew Cotton had not aimed Becko’s meat-cleaver as well as he might, but it would do. For now. Esther leapt up, adrenalin all but replacing her blood, her face deranged with animal fright. Cotton grabbed her wrist and hauled her from the bench, dragging her to the door as she gagged and vomited once more down her bloodied, half-naked body.

  They were gone before it could raise its half-head, leaving it writhing in a black-brown fluid that pooled around it like an oil slick. And as it thrashed and floundered, its pain and fury was witnessed only by the dead eyes of two corpses, in the room where men came to make calls to shore and tell their wives they loved them.

  Sohn Haro wondered how long it would be before the other men knew what he knew. None had tried to leave the engine room, but when they did he was wondering how he would be able to contain their panic. He glanced across at Felix Chadin and noticed that even the fearsome bosun had let his authoritarian demeanour slip. He looked as scared and confused as his men. It had been a long time since Cotton had disappeared through the door to the cofferdams. Sohn knew how much time he would have with that air cylinder if he really had tried to find a way out through the holds. It was already way past that time. If Cotton was dead then what was to become of them?

  He got up from the bench he’d been sitting on and walked to the open door of the cofferdams. What was in there? Fen Sahg lay in there, unattended, left like a fallen animal. No man should be left like that, he thought. He wondered what would become of his body and those of all the men in his care, when they lay in the deep, dark, cold ocean. Was Matthew Cotton incarcerated in some broken section of the holds? There was no answer to be had from the echoing tunnel of black before him. The answer was in his soul. Cotton had not found a way out. Why should he have? He was, after all, nothing much more than a pleasant but hopeless drunk. Sohn’s short-lived belief in the man who had never showed the slightest hint of leadership in all their years of friendship, died in his heart.

  The men in the engine room were still talking. Their voices reverberated around the huge room and the sound of their humanity plus the heartbeat of his idling engine soothed Sohn for a moment. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the dark doorway to nowhere.

  The noise changed gradually, before he noticed it. Men were talking more animatedly. There seemed to be a fuss of some kind. Wearily, Sohn straightened up and looked round. Standing at the top of the metal stairs, on this side of the open door to the outside world, was the hopeless drunk, the man with no leadership.

  Matthew Cotton’s face and body were cut and torn, his clothes splattered with dark blood. His eyes searched the men’s shocked faces and found Sohn’s. There was no reason to smile and neither man did, but the rebirth of hope was lighting the engineer’s face even more effectively.

  “We have to get out of here,” said Cotton. “Right now.”

  “Put it down.” The captain’s voice was steady.

  Renato’s, when he replied, was not. “What is this? What the fuck is going on?” He held up the flight-case as best he could. It was very heavy and the lifeboat was still swinging gently on the davits.

  Even though Skinner was on deck and his officer was over the side on the boat, their faces were almost exactly level with one another. Skinner looked deep into Renato Lhoon’s eyes.

  “Just put it down. Carefully.”

  Renato shook his head like a child. He was close to tears. “No. I won’t put it down, Captain. What’s in it? Why should I be so fucking careful?”

  Lloyd Skinner slowly raised the AK47 from his hip to his shoulder and pointed it at Lhoon. He flicked off the safety-catch with a considerable flourish. “Because if you don’t put it down, you’ll die.”

  Renato screwed up his face in misery and fear, but his grip remained tight on the case. “I’m going to die anyway. You’re going to kill me. Just like she said.”

  Skinner said nothing.
His gaze was unwavering.

  Renato lowered the case and hugged it to his body. He sat down heavily on the raised fibreglass bench that ran athwart the boat, and a whimper escaped his throat. He wiped at his nose and glared at the captain, real fury jockeying for space in his eyes with fear. “Why me? What have I done? Huh? Have I ever let you down? Ever fucking betrayed you?” He bent his head and shook it over his chest, the case held tighter to him than before as though it were a thing of comfort.

  Skinner was doing some mental calculations. Renato was going to have to be executed now, there was no question of taking him to the fishing boat. But he had to get him to drop the case. One stray shot into that irreplaceable container and the last tattered remains of Skinner’s plans were nothing more than straw in the wind. The smell from the holds was not helping matters, making him feel mildly nauseated as the night breeze carried the stench to him in warm, loathsome wafts. His patience was thinning. “No, Renato. You’ve never betrayed me. That wouldn’t be possible. That would require intelligence, analysis, a mental prowess capable of operating at a level slightly above helping you decide which underwear is clean.”

  Renato looked up with hatred in his eyes. “Why Cotton, then?”

  Skinner’s voice was flat and sarcastic. “Because he’s such a talented, sober, responsible, indispensable first officer.”

  “You’re an evil shit.”

  “Just put the case down.”

  Renato stared at Skinner with defiance, shuffled his bottom to the back of the boat and propped himself up on the edge of the stern. If he fell backwards now, he would fall into the sea and so would the case. “Come and get it.”