The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  Kennedy said, “Doc, take his feet. Morgan and I can support his shoulders.”

  “No.” Lightholler struggled weakly in their grip.

  Kennedy repositioned himself, grabbing his armpits.

  “No,” Lightholler protested weakly. “You’re not burying me in the desert with Martin.” He looked up, pleading with Kennedy. His eyes searched for Doc. “Please.”

  Doc eyed the readout. The screen beyond showed rolling dunes, crowned by the now terrible aspect of Red Rock itself. He said, “Ninety seconds.”

  Lightholler reached out to touch Malcolm’s arm. His fluttering fingers were ice. “It’s okay,” he told her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  Kennedy lurched with Lightholler in his arms, making for the hatch.

  Lightholler’s hand fell away from her. His voice was a sigh. “It’s 1911. No one can help me here. Go.”

  “Sixty seconds.”

  Kennedy’s face was a contorted knot.

  “Get my ship to safe harbour, Joseph.”

  “He doesn’t want to be here,” Doc said. “He doesn’t want to rest here.”

  Kennedy turned to Morgan. “You heard the man. Help Doc with Martin.”

  Morgan reached out, touching Lightholler’s arm.

  Lightholler’s face rippled a weak smile.

  Doc mumbled something under his breath. Lightholler nodded back feebly. Then Doc helped Morgan shift Shine’s body out of the hatch.

  Kennedy leaned close now. “I can carry you. Across the fucking desert if needs be.”

  “There’s a cigarette in my pocket. Pop it in my mouth and get the fuck out of here.”

  Kennedy fumbled with the flap before retrieving the cigarette. He slipped it between Lightholler’s pale lips and lit the tip.

  Lightholler drew a shallow breath. He smiled and looked up at Kennedy. “You still here?”

  Kennedy ran a hand over the stubble of Lightholler’s head. “God speed you, John.”

  Lightholler nodded, still smiling.

  Kennedy drew Patricia to the hatch’s mouth. Hands reached up from below, guiding her down to the soft sand. They all stood up, staring at the murky underbelly of the carapace. Kennedy landed on the ground beside them. Soft plates of fused sand cracked beneath his feet.

  The hatch closed. Doc was leading them away, back from the machine’s struts.

  Something gathered beneath the carapace. The struts became translucent. It floated on a cushion of swirling sand as all around them a sudden wind rose. Licks of ruby-tinged flame danced beneath the machine. Vapours, twining where the struts had stood, were tangible moments of time laid bare. He was sure of it. Kennedy took a step towards the machine.

  The roaring gust climaxed in a great implosion, as if nature itself sought recompense for this outrageous intrusion. Then the carapace was gone.

  Her hand reached out and found his. He returned her gentle squeeze. No one said a word.

  VIII

  March 11, 1911

  Red Rock, Nevada

  They buried Shine beside Gershon’s fresh grave.

  They made camp on the far side of the rock, well away from the burial site. Wells’ footprints, at least three days old by Kennedy’s reckoning, were a faint trace that died two miles out of the camp, where they’d struck stone.

  The sun was waning beyond distant purple-topped hills.

  Morgan laid out the meal. There were slices of cold meat, crumbling rolls of bread and a container of vegetables. He reached for the container, removed the tomatoes and started to slice them. He cored out the stem and applied the blade to the centre, dividing the tomato first before working from the edges. He bit his lower lip. A cool breeze swept the sands.

  “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.”

  “I keep wishing I would,” Doc replied.

  “Hell of a thing.” Morgan grabbed another tomato. He fashioned a windbreak, using the container, to keep the sand off the slices.

  Doc said, “I couldn’t hold the carapace in place.”

  “You got us here.”

  “We missed Wells.”

  “We’ll take him on the boat.”

  “Without Lightholler?”

  “We might find him before then,” Morgan offered. “She doesn’t sail for a year.”

  “Without Shine? Needle in a fucking haystack.”

  “We have the journal. We know where he goes.”

  “He hasn’t written yet. What if things play out differently?” Doc was staring beyond the rock.

  “That’s not you buried out there,” Morgan said softly.

  “I know.”

  “And maybe Martin gets another chance in this world.”

  “Or maybe he ain’t born at all.” Doc caught Morgan’s expression. “Who knows?”

  “Hell of a thing.”

  IX

  “Do you prefer sunrise or sunset?”

  Kennedy held the middle distance in his vacant eyes. He mightn’t have heard her.

  They sat closer now, almost touching. A chill had taken the air, seeming to issue from the desert floor below them rather than the darkening skies above.

  After a while he said, “You’ve asked me that before, Patricia.”

  “I know. I remember. Things change.”

  “What did Tecumseh say to you? Why did you decide to come?”

  She recalled the medicine man’s pronouncement. Your sense of being here before will fade.

  “Everyone saw something different in that thing,” she replied. “You knew that, didn’t you.”

  Kennedy nodded.

  “Tecumseh told me that for some reason, I’d shared the same experience as some of the ghost dancers.”

  “Does that bother you?” His question was distant but not indifferent.

  “Not for the reasons you might have suspected.”

  His smile flitted across his face, like it had business elsewhere.

  “This is your last chance,” she said. She realised she might have been talking about any number of things.

  “I know that.” His reply suggested a similar understanding, but she was pretty sure he was missing the point.

  “Joseph, you’ve done this before. You’ve ... been here before.”

  “Down this road? I’m tired, Patricia, so very tired.”

  “You’ve sat here before.”

  He turned to her now, his face wounded beyond any physical injury.

  “Sometimes Lightholler is with you, sometimes it’s Hardas. Once, I think, Tecumseh. That’s what he told me anyway.”

  He was staring.

  “This is my first time. You always left me back there.”

  “How many times?” His words were breathed rather than uttered. “How many times have I done this?”

  “You can’t measure something like this. It’s too big.” She grappled with the concepts. “Our world, our reality, has swung round and round in this loop, back and forth, bouncing between you and Wells. He sends it skewing off kilter, you make it right again, and then he bounces on back. Over and over and over. He’s not the problem, Joseph, you both are, and Tecumseh believes that reality won’t tolerate another joyride.”

  “But you’re here now,” he said. He spoke like a child.

  “I’m the messenger.” She reached out to touch his cold face.

  He kept still, letting her hand complete the caress.

  “Is it because I forget everything?” he asked. “Like Wells? Is that why I get it wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll keep a journal myself. I won’t forget any of them. Martin, John, David.” His look was intense. A fire had returned to those damaged eyes.

  She said nothing.

  “I like this part of the day,” he said after a time. “The sky changing colour with each passing moment. It’s all just fluid. Look up, look away, look up again and it’s a whole new world.”

  She brought her lips to his and imparted a soft kiss. He looked confused. She ran a hand through the thick knots
of his hair and said, “That’s a sunset, Joseph.”

  DEATH BY WATER

  I

  April 10, 1912, 1300 hours

  RMS Titanic, out of Southampton

  “Patricia will be alright, Joseph. It’ll only be a couple of weeks.”

  “I know,” Kennedy replied. “I’ve booked return passage from New York. We plan on staying in London for a while when this is over.”

  London was grey, cold and dirty. More like the squalid descendant of the city Morgan had known, rather than its ancestor. He nodded in what he hoped was a heartening manner.

  Kennedy was no longer paying attention anyway. He was already out of his chair and pacing. Passing the porthole, he tossed an appraising glance at the white froth of the Channel’s waters. Three hours would bring them to Cherbourg. They’d make Queenstown by tomorrow morning. After that, it was all open seas and it looked like he was already counting the hours.

  “That was Wells, wasn’t it?” Doc said. He’d removed his necktie and collar and wore his shirt open, but still looked ill at ease. He squirmed in his chair, finding no comfort in its plush grandeur.

  Kennedy said, “I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “He walked straight past us.”

  “What did you want me to do, Dean?” Kennedy asked. “Shove him overboard?”

  They’d taken to abandoning the titles and ranks they’d been so familiar with. Morgan was still coming to grips with the false intimacy that step entailed. Standing idly by as Wells had boarded ship had been a good deal more difficult. A year’s interaction with this era had affected them all.

  Their non-intervention pact, designed to avoid causing the smallest ripple in their contact with the world, had left them handicapped. Diminished. Left to each other’s company, they’d managed to retain strong memories of the world they’d left behind, but the price had been their friendships. Too many secrets had been shared, too much darkness revealed. Their closeness had conceived something worse than the contempt of familiarity. Looking into each other, they’d found themselves.

  Morgan was still able to feel some sympathy for the man who’d brought him here. Poor Joseph. He gave Patricia and Kennedy two months at the most. After that, they’d be at each other’s throats.

  “My gut told me to stab him there and then,” Doc said.

  “That’s why we’re listening to our heads,” Kennedy said. “Whatever happens out here happens at sea. Whatever happens only takes place after we’re sure Wells hasn’t already acted.”

  “You may be comfortable with this, Joseph,” Doc replied, “but I’m having a hard time playing it by ear. He’s not on any passenger list.”

  “He isn’t the only voyager travelling under an assumed name.”

  Lightholler’s absence had left a greater void than Morgan could have imagined. Without him there’d be no storming of the bridge. No attempt to subvert the Titanic’s course, nor deal with the actions of her senior crew. Their best course had confined them to locating Wells before he boarded ship.

  They’d failed.

  His trail ran cold in Nevada. The manuscript, more preoccupied with the order of his thoughts than the details of his journey, was of little use. They’d spent weeks scouring the frontier towns, their investigation stymied by the closed faces of a people wary of strangers asking too many questions.

  In New York, they’d checked the hotels from Times Square to the Bowery. Combed the beaches from Brooklyn to the Jersey shore. They held vigil at Coney Island on the day Wells had devoted to memorialising Gershon and he’d passed them unseen, a ghost moving through the new century.

  Morgan thought out loud. “It’s like he knew we were here. Like he was expecting us. From the time he arrived at the pier, he made sure there were people around him.”

  “Cagey fuck,” Doc said. His task of winning Wells over was going to be a Herculean effort. He’d exchanged his Hippocratic oath for one of vengeance, taking Kennedy’s vitriol to new heights.

  “Can you blame him?” Kennedy asked.

  Doc’s scowl was his reply.

  “He’s in first or second class,” Kennedy continued. “We know he never signed on as crew, that he ingratiated himself with the ship’s elite, and that he had the freedom of the ship. We’ll find him. We brace him right after we leave Queenstown.”

  He looked over at Morgan. “You’re being quiet.”

  Morgan said, “I’m thinking.”

  II

  April 10, 1912, 1640 hours

  RMS Titanic, Cherbourg

  Kennedy stood on the forecastle. The Nomadic and Traffic, two purpose-built White Star tenders, had completed their exchange. Twenty-two passengers had made the ship their cross-channel ferry. Many more had come aboard.

  The tenders bobbed below, toys at the Titanic’s hem. He followed the pale luminescence of their wash to the darkened Normandy coast. The fortifications of Cherbourg were glittering gems set in ebony.

  Couples roamed the deck, savouring a first night at sea. He watched them. The women in their gloves and long coats. Their hats trailing long scarfs, wrapped close against the cold. Their faces concealed, harem-like, from his curious eyes.

  Patricia would be back at the hotel by now. Would she be sitting by the fire, reading? Perhaps by the window, looking out past the gaslights at this night?

  Would she forgive him?

  Up until the last minute she’d insisted on sailing with them, going so far as to purchase her own ticket. The arguments she’d offered were all sound and delivered with her usual flair for reason. He’d evaded each one of them, saying, ‘You were never here, Patricia. You told me so yourself. Stay in London. Be safe.’ Her farewell kiss had been a chill waft against his cheek, far colder than the breeze that now played upon the deck. Her face, lifted up to his, had borne the thinnest scar.

  Their physical wounds had mostly healed. They needed no journals. The permanent lines that etched their bodies were the caustic reminders of crueller days. Hardas was dead. Shine was dead. Lightholler was lost to them.

  A man entered the deck alone. He wore a hat over thick black hair. His skin was unusually pale, even for this climate. He wore no gloves. Kennedy nodded to him without knowing why. Wells nodded back, a cursory, veiled gesture.

  What seeds had the doctor already planted?

  Kill him now and dispose of the body. Would the disaster be staunched?

  Leave the body to be found. The cruise would almost certainly be delayed, but what repercussions might follow?

  There was an abrupt whirring, the clank of metal links against metal. He started at the unexpected sound. Spun suddenly, looking for the telltale tongues of flame erupting from a Dragon tank.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Just the windlass, friend. Just the anchor being drawn.”

  For the shortest moment he believed that everything had been illusion. A last boon, granted by his dying brain in the desert. He turned with the greatest relief.

  Wells said, “Are you alright?”

  Kennedy nodded.

  “First time out, huh?”

  The man was only inches away from him. The deck, quite empty now. Kennedy nodded.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  Bells pealed from the bridge, ordering steam, and three sharp whistles issued from above.

  Wells was already walking away. Two crewmen, crossing past one of the capstans, momentarily obscured Kennedy’s view. By the time they’d passed, he was lost to sight.

  Kennedy, astonished, reconsidered his options.

  III

  “So, how does it compare?”

  Doc’s question, coolly delivered, reflected the methodical mind at work. It allowed no space for the opulence of their environs.

  Morgan had led him on a brief tour. They’d explored the first-class reception and saloon; the smoking room, panelled in finest mahogany and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They visited the lounge where they discovered a realm of green velvet and polished oak. Desiring no food, they’d bypass
ed the restaurant to end up in the reading room. A marble fireplace, unlit, took up the far wall. Deep soft chairs nestled in the old rose hue of the rich carpet.

  Morgan said, “The truth of it is that this seems less real.”

  “They used the same materials on Lightholler’s boat, though, didn’t they?”

  “Except for the lower decks.”

  Doc let out a hollow laugh.

  A curtained window looked out to sea. They might have been in any parlour save for the view of dark ocean set against darker skies. The Titanic ploughed her course with steady grace.

  Morgan continued. “I had a right to be on that ship.”

  “You paid passage for this one,” Doc replied.

  “I’m not saying that I’m not supposed to be here. Just that I don’t belong.”

  Doc’s smile was rapier thin and just as deadly. “When was the last time you felt like you belonged anywhere?”

  Why don’t you go ahead and tell him?

  Morgan ignored the voice. A year in the company of Hardas’s spectre had made him no more comfortable with the phenomenon. So strange that while he could no longer picture the commander’s face, his voice still rang true. Hardas wouldn’t be cooling his heels in any reading room. He’d have his hands around the good doctor’s neck right about now.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Morgan’s grin broadened and he said, “I just can’t believe we’re here.”

  Doc nodded slowly.

  “We don’t need to kill him, you know,” Morgan added, after a while.

  “I know that.” Doc’s reply was even. “Thing is, you didn’t need to see it, night after night. Month after month.”

  “That wasn’t you. You’ve said so yourself often enough. That wasn’t your grave.”

  “Saying is one thing, Darren. Believing is very much another. I don’t care to see another death, not anyone’s, but I care less to see this old dame go under, or the world that follows.”

  There was a movement at the doorway. Two couples in evening wear swept into the room. The women took seats at a table by one of the windows, and immediately drew writing implements out of a cloth carryall. The men, positioning themselves by a vase, fell into a conversation. They looked too amicable for Morgan’s liking.