The impact of the implosion spawned had a shock wave that hurtled David end over end, and as David righted himself, he saw a number of eerily preserved tumbling in ragdoll fashion across the floor, tossed out of the shadows by the shockwave. A normal-appearing dead man in the water was enough to shock a man, even black-water divers working for police departments, but these hundred-year-old perfectly preserved mannequins in the dead zone, flesh turned to a kind of Jell-O, their clothes like sheets— moving with the eddies. These ghosts of Titanic proved even more disturbing as parts of them stretched out to David as if drawn to the only living being in the water now.
These were bodies that had lain hidden behind cars and in the shadowy reaches of the cargo hold. Some of these grim figures still sported hair and nails. One in particular cascaded into him as a drunk might stumble from a bar—this one without shoes.
It was as if the dead wanted both of them to join them here for eternity.
Almost perfect in their preserved bodies, the disturbed dead now seemed everywhere. Bodies preserved due to the pressures and containment within the once sealed cargo hold sported intact exaggerated features, their mouths open like so many banshees. Men, women, and children staring out of glassy eyes that made them appear as grisly wax figures. Their equally preserved period clothing only added to the surreal nature of this place.
David pushed away the growing number of bodies that came at him, or rather the exit behind him—each one more surreal than the one before it, and all of them like so many mannequins in appearance. He thought of what he, Jacob, and Scorpio had just accomplished, for no one had visited or seen these people for a hundred years. These were first class passengers aboard Titanic who sought refuge not in drink or music or prayer but in their latest acquisition. Those who, in a last ditch hope to die rich, David imagined, wanted to cross over with their most valued possessions firmly in hand—their motorcars.
Captain Forbes was shouting for David to report what had happened. He’d moments before been saying something about the hydraulic tools and jacks available to the divers just outside now as they’d moved the work-station just outside the hull where they believed the two men had located the autos. “Welding tools to cut large enough holes into Titanic’s side to remove each vehicle one by one,” the captain was saying at the moment of Mendenhall’s terrible passing.
“He’s dead!” shouted David in return. “Jacob’s dead—imploded! Killed by one of those damnable cars! Check my feed! I saw the whole bloody thing.”
In point of fact, David realized that miniscule pieces of Mendenhall floated before his eyes as he spoke. Topside, the cheers and laughter had long since subsided as no doubt someone upstairs had a clue as to what’d just happened—Entebbe, no doubt as he could see that Mendenhall was registering a zero across the board made up of red, green, and blue lights. Entebbe now pronounced the time of death.
“Damn it!” David shouted. “There’s nothing left of Jacob; nothing to even bring up! He’s been reduced to nothing, I tell you!”
In David’s ear via the com-link, Forbes, too was screaming Mendenhall’s name. David wondered how many of the other divers could hear this, and he wondered most if Kelly was hearing this. He only now realized that nothing black or sinister had come spewing forth out of the implosion, further proof that Jacob was never the thing Kelly hunted—and this left Lou Swigart.
“David, David! Step back! Get out of there. Nothing more you can do there now.” It was mix of Entebbe’s concerned voice and Captain Forbes’ orders coming over his com-link. “Locate Swigart and Kelly, David. Do it now.”
They knew how horrible it was to watch a man implode before one’s eyes, and they had witnessed it via David’s camera lens via replay. It’d happened so fast and unexpectedly that no one, even those monitoring had seen precisely what had caused the implosion.
David turned to leave, feeling terribly alone inside Titanic at this moment, and he thought of the last time he’d broken bread with Mendenhall, late the other evening in the galley. Jacob had gotten excited then when the subject had turned to the lost Renaults and other motorcars aboard Titanic. He heard Jacob’s voice in his head as he made his way from what was now Mendenhall’s eternity.
“Of course, we must find them!” Jacob had said. “Think of the salvage dividends for those perfectly preserved vintage babies!”
“That’s the big question—what kind of condition are the cars in after a hundred years under such pressure?” Will had asked.
“They may be the size of matchbox cars by now!” David agreed.
“You’ll all be singing a different tune when we get the first one aboard,” Jacob had replied.
“Think we can crank one of ’em up?” Will said, laughing.
“Laugh and make jokes, Bowman,” Mendenhall then said, his eyes turning morose. He had brought a book with him, and he shoved it to Will. Bowman passed the open pages around—shots of cars from that era, one after another. Jacob then said, “If the cars remained sealed or even in one of those dead zones where nothing can live, you know like the areas where they’ve found 2000-year-old wooden boats intact? Then why not these cars?”
“Yeah sure… your cars and not so much as a tinge of rust on ’em,” Will Bowman continued to tease.
“As the ship plunged, the seals to any air-tight compartments would have compressed and leaked, Jacob,” David said now, “a true dead zone might exist but it’s a big if because of all the elements that would have to converge.”
“But suppose the door held. It is a monster of a door.”
“It must’ve been like a battering ram hitting the door, the impact when she hit bottom,” David said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.”
“But we don’t know; the door may’ve just been torn from its track, perhaps warping but still intact, which would mean—”
“Which means you’ve given this a hell of a lot of thought,” said David, and at the time it’d made him even more suspicious that Mendenhall was Kelly and Declan’s creature, and that the man cared not a whit about the autos but was in fact brooding and surmising about his—or its—spawn, those damnable eggs also dead for certain if not in a dead zone where they might lie dormant.
“If the door’s blown, Jacob, it’s left the compartment open to wood-eating and rusticle-forming organisms—even microscopic organisms—which if in this area—” but his words fell on deaf ears as Jacob talked over him.
“A true dead zone. An absolute rarity—on the way down, the water coming in is full of organisms not suited for life at two and a half miles down… so they die off before they can do much damage.”
Now David knew that even with the seals imploding when Titanic took her dive, that the door hadn’t blown. That through some quirk of fate it’d managed remain on its track, although warped. This explained why the family of four in the one auto still had fleshy faces with eyes intact, looking like so many zombies. No organisms could get at them. Furthermore, to add to the trauma of seeing Jacob implode before him, David feared the same fate, and perhaps an even more sinister fate awaited Kelly if Lou was indeed being controlled by the monster.
David realized only now that his entire body was shaking like a leaf in the wind, so traumatized had he been on seeing Jacob die as he had. At the same time, he worked to force himself toward his next destination—the freezer unit down here somewhere, and hopefully to locate, as Captain Forbes had ordered, the two remaining dive partners he had left alive.
David must find Kelly, now. He swam as fast as he could, leaving all thought of any treasures in his wake. As he did so, he muttered, “Damn you, Mendenhall! Why couldn’t you have been patient! They had a hydraulic jack down here for us already! Right tool for the right job!”
But David was talking to himself; Jacob and his impatience, obliterated now along with his humanity, appeared all too human. Besides, if Jacob had been controlled by the creature, he would not have gone crazy over a cargo hold of shiny antiques, and so Kel
ly was alone with the monster somewhere inside this ship that seemed bent on killing them all, what with Lou and Kelly cut off, missing, and Jacob dead.
Meanwhile, David felt as if all the pressure around him was about to turn his head and body into so small a piece of remains as to fill a sandwich baggy. He felt horribly alone now inside Titanic. He gave a thought to the divers at the aft section of the derelict ship. There were freezer compartments there, too. In the original design of the ship, there had only been freezer holds at the aft section and not here below the stokers’ and crew’s berths; some 860 crew from maids to firemen lived on board. Below their quarters at the very bottom were the huge cargo holds—as with the automobiles. The final design placed additional freezer compartments for perishable supplies below at both ends of Titanic, the freezers ironically separated along her hull by successive stores of coal working boilers, and reciprocating engines, turbine engines, and below all this at the keel line, three shaft tunnels for the propellers and rudder.
He and Kelly might well have landed on the wrong part of Titanic; it could be that the creature and its eggs were in the aft section’s smaller freezer compartments, and if so, they’d been wrong about Swigart and of course, now it was clear that Mendenhall was entirely too human to have been the monster. The creature would not have gotten itself killed over a stash of motorcars, no matter the make, model, or vintage.
David tried desperately to raise Kelly, so wanting to hear her voice; he shouted for Forbes to locate her even as he wondered now about Gambio, Bowman, Fiske, and Jens. Might one of them be the creature incognito with plans of getting to the bow section on a second dive, tomorrow?
David called up to those on the surface, “Tell me I’m not the only one left down here alive, Captain!”
“No… no, you’re not alone. Swigart’s vital signs are still giving us a reading—weak but something.”
“What about Kelly?”
“Unsure what’s going on there, but her vital signs went dead with her com-link. We suspect it’s only technical difficulties, magnetic interference. We’re doing all we can to get her back online.”
“Well damn it, Forbes! Do it! She’s in danger every second you don’t have her in your sights! What about the others at the aft section?”
“There’s been no drama with them, Ingles; drama seems to follow you!” Forbes did not sound happy to have David blast him with demands, and he was understandably upset. Now he had three deaths to explain to authorities whenever they got back to Woods Hole.
“I did all in my power to get Jacob to pay heed to his surroundings; the man got himself killed. I don’t own that one.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“The hell you weren’t.”
“You’re breaking up, Ingles… only getting static. Check your equipment.”
“Is it the depths, the equipment, what?”
Everything went silent again. David, spinning about in the water, looked around on all sides of himself. He had become somewhat disoriented and for good reason. It was not every day you saw a man implode before your eyes or were showered with corpses. Aside from his stomach-wrenching worry over Kelly, David kept coming back to the fact that there was not enough left of Jacob Mendenhall to fill a pocket, or to hold a ceremony over.
THIRTY ONE
The old man named Farley, confused and exhausted from running about Titanic and hiding now for another day and night asked, “All right, Varmint and me, we’ve done everything you blokes’ve asked, and gone ’long with every ‘whattaya-think’s-best-notion’ you fellas’ve had,and it’s got us all nowhere except starvin’ it has. Now I got a right to know. Just who is it you’re chasin’ anyway?”
“A dead man.” Ransom replied it in deadpan.
“Oh… sure… I see… uh-huh…” Farley scratched at his beard and then released Varmint who took off like a shot. Back of them, they heard men stomping down the stairwell. They raced past huge cylinders and boilers the size of buildings.
“Looks like casks of beer for a giant,” observed Thomas. “And it’s making me thirsty.”
“Hotter’n hell down here,” commented Farley. “Varmint don’t like it.”
They rushed on past giant pistons and shafts that put them in awe given the sheer size of these machines, and next they passed one room where stokers and firemen struggled with flames within, heat and black smoke like a malevolent force trying to escape. They could feel the heat, and trying to keep up with Varmint, they were all sweating profusely when they came to a halt in back of the dog who’d begun barking and alerting on a huge door as it might in the field when hunting quail.
They all stared at a door marked FREEZER UNIT – Authorized Personnel Only.
Alastair snatched the door wide. The four men and the dog looked in on a large open area with freezer units along the walls; stacked to the ceiling were frozen perishables, breads, sausages, whole gutted frozen chickens, pheasants, ducks, rabbits, turkeys, geese, and inside a deep freeze compartment beef and swine carcasses dangling from meat hooks. “A man could live in here if it weren’t so damn cold,” muttered Farley, his teeth chattering. “Look at all this?”
“Supplies enough to feed the thousands on board for the trip to New York,” said Ransom, picking about the items, wondering what could the dog’s nose have possibly picked up here.
At the center of the room stood a fixed, huge chopping block the size of a grand piano. Along another wall was a metal table—or rather an elongated sink the size of a trough with a tabletop board for butchering as well.
Everything is big on the Titanic, Ransom thought as he looked about the room. “The dog can’t be right. Nothing here. Besides, no way he can sniff out anything that’s frozen.”
“Hold on,” said Declan, opening one of the freezer doors, finding nothing inside other than hanging beef, venison, and hogs on hooks.
Thomas pulled open a second freezer door. Still more frozen goods—geese, chickens, lamb shanks, pork, as well as huge cases of ice cream and frozen pies. “Nothing here,” he added.
Regardless of the cold, Varmint had gone about the large entry room sniffing and scratching, and Farley, disregarding the others and their pronouncements shadowed his dog, now scratching at some locker against one wall—locked with a padlock. Ransom banged at the lock with his cane, saying, “Need a damn gun.”
“I’ll have a go at it with my pig sticker,” said Farley, indicating the lock. “I’ve a knack for such things.”
“Here,” said Ransom. “You may need these.” He handed Farley his burglar’s tools wrapped in a leather wallet.
Farley stared at the tools laid out before him, his eyes dazzling. “They’re… lovely… just lovely,” he said.
“You get that lock open, and they’re yours,” promised Ransom.
“Oh… I’ll get ’er open, Constable.”
Again they heard the stamp of feet and shouting—their pursuers. The sounds reverberated out in the closed corridor. Ransom went to the door to slam it closed and lock it from the inside when Lightoller met him there, Declan’s journal in hand, shouting, “I believe you! I’m here to help!”
Ransom looked beyond Charles Lightoller to see Murdoch leading a group of strong-armed men of the black gang variety coming straight for them. “Get inside here!” He pulled Lightoller into the freezer entry room and slammed the door closed. Then he sent the wheel lock spiraling and when he heard the tumbler snap, he rammed his cane into the wheel to hold it locked against the outside.
Murdoch’s shouting and banging was muffled, but the rage and anger was unmistakably palpable, despite the impenetrable metal door.
Lightoller held the journal up to Declan and Thomas. “This is… this is so unfortunate.” Lightoller was hardly older than the interns, and he was obviously shaken at having come to the conclusion that these strangers to him had indeed a case, a horrible one at that. “I will do all I can to help you convince the captain of just how dire our circumstances are.”
Just then Farley shouted, “Eureka!” and he threw the padlock across the room, the sound of it rattling off the metal floor. Elated, the old man tore open the locker, gasped and fell backward, his dog barking and going to him.
Ransom and the others approached the huge footlocker to see not only Davenport but two other bodies stacked below him. Three corpses! One undoubtedly Burnsey, another Davenport, but to whom did the third corpse belong?
“My god,” said Lightoller. “It’s Davenport, Burnsey, and-and Dr. O’Laughlin!”
“Guess he believes us now,” muttered Thomas with a little shake of the head.
“Whoever the bloody carrier is now,” began Ransom, “it’s certainly worked its way up the social ladder, now hasn’t it?”
“What are ye talking about?” asked Farley.
Lightoller parroted the question.
Ransom pointed to the dead. “It starts with a lowly member of your black gang, a stoker… works its way up to an officer—an influential ship’s surgeon, no less.”
“Yeah, not just any officer—your medical officer,” said Declan. “Second only to your captain.”
“What’re you saying?” Lightoller shrugged.
Ransom threw up his hands. “No doubt this thing has learned about hierarchy in human society, so now it’s become interested in rising to the level of your captain—the man in charge!”
“We can’t let that happen!”
“We must open these bodies up,” Declan said, going to a stash of hanging utensils and huge carving knives. “Thomas, we’ll have to make do with what is at hand. They took my scalpel when they arrested us, and I’ve not seen it since. It would be useless for bone at any rate. We’ll have to do more than simply crack open the chests of each victim.”
Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Page 40
