by Mark Morris
“This is it, Kamala,” he said. He took a final puff from the oxygen canister and readied other items from his bag. “You ready?”
Of all his faiths, his sister was the one Samir believed in most of all. Reciting her name was as much a part of any of his rituals as any sacred text or practised gesture. She looked after him still, just as he cared for her in carrying her with him. She—
From the dark ahead, the opened room, came the tiny scrape of furtive movement. As if a sandal had trodden rust underfoot.
“Abesh?”
But Abesh would be behind him, would be back at the boat by now, and the boy had been barefoot.
From the dark again, another sound. Someone panting, like the breaths between hard sobs. Or the noise someone might make as they suffocated.
Whimpering.
And from over there, a muttering he couldn’t make out. A trailing of words he couldn’t quite hear, quick but quiet, like a desperate prayer or the hasty promises someone made when in trouble.
Samir set his torch down on the floor, leant it within the loop of his bag’s strap, opened both arms to all he heard, and spoke so they might hear him.
He told them about his sister. He told them she liked ice cream and the way birds flew in patterns and how she hated to be called Kami. He told them about how she died too, and how she was forever with him.
This was how he always started.
A standing shape came into the corridor, rolling in from behind a door frame as if detaching itself from the wall there. It was a man. He had a shredded face. His skin was hanging in thin wet ribbons from his brow, cheeks, and from his jowls where the front of his throat was open. Lower, and Samir saw the chest was open too.
“My name is Samir Zakir Hamid,” he told him, and his voice wavered. He could see the broken bones of an exposed ribcage protruding from the man. He nudged his torch so the grisly sight was illuminated clearly and saw amongst those bloody bones rows of metal struts curving from the flesh. Rusted bars, like railings or corroded pipes.
From deep below, beneath his feet, a wallowing groan swallowed its own echo in rising through the decks. It engulfed Samir, heavy but brief, and faded like some distant whale song.
The sudden stench of charred meat announced a second presence. Emerging from further away, clambering up from the floor as if it had knelt there all this time, a red-black man scorched featureless of all but wet glistening limbs and a blackened nub where a face used to be. It took faltering steps towards Samir, guiding itself by bumping into one wall and then the other as it stumbled forward.
“You don’t have to—”
And now there, from between the legs of the first, came another. Drawing itself across the floor with torn arms. A man whose torso marked the end of his body, save for what trailed out of it. He reached for Samir with the hand that wasn’t pulling him forward, the left, then the right, in some tortured dry-swimming crawl.
Samir looked back the way he had come and saw more shadows than had been there before. He nudged the torch with his foot and saw others of those who’d perished here. Brought them into life by seeing them. They had changed, forced into new shapes by what had killed them and wearing scars that disfigured them beyond any Chittagong tattoo, each carrying some aspect of the ship. This one rusted where it should have rotted. This one with struts like splints, another with rivets where eyes should be, or a gaping porthole for a face.
Their stories were mingling. All who died here found their identities bound together and bound to the ship.
Samir talked about each of the men who had died on this ship, knowing those who approached were some of those same men. And as corrupted as they had been, as disfigured and reduced, they recognised something of themselves in what Samir said. He had a notebook filled with what their families had told him, and he had photographs too, but he relied on his memory, speaking in a rush not because he was afraid—though he was—but as a sort of litany, a tribute given not to appease but to convince. I can keep you alive, his stories said. I will remember you, and you can live on in me. Not here, in this rusting hulk of cold metal. In the flesh and blood of me, where my own spirit is anchored. Where my sister lives. And Christ. And Allah. Ninety-nine gods, and more. Replace this vessel with me. Let me carry you.
“Nasir?”
The nearest dark passenger of the Karen May made a guttural sound, a thick growl that bubbled from a throat choked with water. It reached for Samir with hands black and slick with oil.
“Your name is Nasir. You fell and you drowned.”
He saw it happen in more detail than he had been told, saw it more vividly than was contained in any written report. He saw how quickly and quietly the man plummeted, and how he landed across a beam as yet untaken. Saw him fold over it, heard the crack of spine and the way his feet kicked against metal as he flipped around it, and fell. Saw him face down in the filthy water, drowning in the ship’s black dregs.
The man pulled a fistful of Samir’s shirt, yanking buttons from their threads and tearing one half of the garment almost entirely free. It exposed the crucifix he wore. The blue peacock eye of a nazar boncuğu amulet. The scriptures he’d tattooed across his chest. Whether from one or the sum total of all, Nasir recoiled vampire-like, though perhaps it was simply the momentum of his violence as he staggered back with a wet handful of Samir’s clothing.
“Your name is Nasir, and you lived with your mother, Rokeya, and your father, Abdul, who is too old for physical work but loved to hear about yours. Your mother told me. She remembers your life well.”
What had once been a man came again at Samir, pushed him hard to the wall and went in quick to meet him and—
Was gone.
“And which one are you?” Samir said to the next. “Did you fall, did you explode, did you burn or bleed? Because I remember all of you, now. I wasn’t there when you died, but I’ve heard how you lived and I’m here now; I can take you away with me when I go.”
There was a sharp, high grinding whine of metal from somewhere within the ship. Sheet metal torn and folded. A deep wailing came up from the bowels of the vessel as a foul-smelling wind. A fetid stench, channelled to Samir through empty chambers and corridors stripped down to metal bones. It passed over him like breath, sour and dank. With the buffeting of his clothes, the tousling of his hair, some of those Samir had come to see collapsed back into the steel that had taken them. One fell, and burst into red flakes of rust that were dispersed by that same air. Another staggered into a wall, then a second wall, ricocheting in frantic spinning turmoil before falling against a space where a wall only used to be and tumbling into a dark that swallowed him whole. The ship would regurgitate him when it needed, unless…
“There’s more to remember you by than how you died,” Samir told those who gathered to him, moths to his flame of hope. “There are others who remember you better than this.”
The crowd was dispersing and growing and dispersing, all in flux. Some were taken by shadows, others birthed by them, but there were those who flared, consumed suddenly not by fire but some bright burning light.
“Yes,” said Samir. Memories and ghosts. Each so easily became the other.
Still, many remained. Those whose families Samir could not find or would not speak to him. Those who had no one but those they worked with, who knew them now only as ghost stories.
“Tell me who you were,” Samir said. “Before this place.”
One by one, they came to him. They held him tight in desperation, pulling him hard to support their listing forms as they breathed their stories into his ear. They smelled of rust and oil and mud, burnt flesh, blood, and the bilge of old flooded compartments. Their words fluttered like scraps of wind-blown tarpaulin, and with the last whispered one, so did they.
Samir, exhausted, lowered himself to sit when they were done. His breath came in thin bursts, like he’d run some long race, so he took another full blast from the mask and canister he’d brought with him. Then he began unpacking other
items from his bag.
He wasn’t finished.
Some had called the Karen May haunted, and others had called it cursed, when in fact it was merely dying and trying not to. The Karen May had slowed her own demise by creating a new identity. Rather than suffer an undignified death at foreign hands on a dirty shore, she would make others suffer, and she would live.
“You’ve sailed every ocean,” Samir said, fumbling at the clasps in his bag, “sailed all of them so often to know there is only really one. We give it different names. The Atlantic. The Pacific. The Bay of Bengal. We recognise the strength that comes with a name. The containment.”
Samir grabbed handfuls of paper and cast them about the floor in front of him. Maps and charts and travel records.
“You are the Karen May, and you have known the power of the sea.”
He spread rolls of paper and weighted them at the corners with piles of salt, lined the edges with it to hold them. It was used in many rituals, but this was the first time he’d used it to represent the sea. He cast photographs of the Karen May upon them, none of the ones he’d taken, nor those from the ship-breaking office, but pictures of her in harbour, at sea, loaded with crew, with passengers, containers. He splashed water over them, anointed them as if with something holy but using the sea he’d brought in with him in his water bottle. There was an article from a newspaper he read aloud before adding it to the pile, an itinerary, a manifest of documents and statistics and records that he shared, though he mentioned nothing of money or of costs, said nothing of profits. He did not reduce her to that.
Her. Like all ships, she had been given a name and personified. Given life. Why would she not be bitter about seeing it end?
These ocean-going giants were never meant to be broken. They had withstood the world’s most ferocious conditions, crossing oceans that rose like mountains and dropped like valleys, burdened with cargo or passengers and taking them safely to wherever they needed to go. And now they sank only in mud, with the sea behind them. Sliced into sections and repurposed, more savaged than salvaged, and all they’d ever done before was forgotten.
The Karen May was not a graveyard, haunted by those who had died within her. She was a corpse, haunting the shore and doing all she could to be remembered. That was the problem. She was a ghost, existing only for as long as it took to decompose but no one willing to take her apart anymore. Or existing only for as long as she was remembered, but being remembered wrong. Every life she took became a new story and built her anew, created a cursed or haunted ship none would dare venture aboard, prolonging her own destruction by building her into something terrifying.
“We are each of us vessels in the same turbulent sea.”
Samir thought of all people did to stave off their gradual collapse into irrelevance and insignificance. Whenever Samir’s faith faltered, he found another to cling to. And another. That was their beauty, that was their strength. Surely it didn’t matter to God?
The salt piles shifted in a gentle trembling. The papers moved askew and some were picked up in a new breeze. The torch fell from where it nestled in the bag strap and began to roll, turning half-circles this way and that and jittering with the new vibrations that were passing through the ship.
Samir stood. He clutched at the nearest support.
The lost engine, and all the ghost machinery of the vessel, was making itself heard for a final time. From somewhere distant came the sound of water churning. For a brief moment Samir wondered if it was his turn to be taken and was glad there were few to remember him. Then the ship listed and Samir staggered with it. He clutched at a frame where a hatch used to be and his legs kicked out into open air as the vessel suddenly slumped violently to one side. Pieces of it fell. Lots of them. A thunderous succession of crashes, metal clattering on metal. Samir felt a wash of heat, and for a moment shadows were cast into dancing shapes by some blooming flare of orange somewhere distant in the ship’s belly.
The echo of whatever blast that had been faded like a sigh.
Samir found his feet again, though the floor he stood on now was angled and it groaned as if the weight of him was too much to bear.
Samir scooped up his torch and ran.
He’d done it. What he hadn’t expected, though, was the quick disintegration of the ship once it had let go. Now metal buckled beneath his feet and he stomped boot prints into each panel as he fled. Each step of the stairs bowed in the middle as he climbed, the last few giving way entirely under him just as he set foot on the next. He stumbled onto the deck and rolled, got back to his feet. The entire ship was leaning, as if pitched in some slow violent sea, and Samir was disorientated. His torch still worked but he might as well have been in darkness; he did not recognise where he was. Until there, on the ground, a spent match. This was the way Abesh had come. And there—another. He followed them quickly, found more stairs, and hauled himself up as parts of them crashed away beneath him.
He burst out of the ship’s confines into the free fresh air of its uppermost deck and saw they were being swept out in a rush to sea. Pulled from the shore that no longer held them, water washing in and around them as the land receded, receded—
Samir threw himself overboard. For a moment he held a graceful dive, like he’d seen the boys doing at dusk, and he panicked, recognising how he had been tricked. He had been expelled, jettisoned like spray from a cresting whale, and he had a moment to worry that he had flung himself from a great height towards mud flats that would smack him dead. But there was tide enough to catch him after all, and though it was so shallow that he felt the seabed in his kick to resurface, it held him safe.
Beside him, looming huge where it had always been, was the mud-mired steel-picked wreck of the Karen May, hollow and unhallowed. Sullen and spiteful, and silent now, but for the quiet hush of the shallows around it, and the bumping of the boat in which Abesh had brought them, still tethered to its hull and empty of all but shadows.
THE MIGRANTS
Tim Lucas
It was an unusual hour for anyone unbidden to be knocking at my door. Night had fallen and the porch light was off, extending no further invitations. I couldn’t see through the slats of the blinds who was out there and felt some hesitation about turning the light on, but inside my house the lights were burning brightly, so my caller could certainly see me. I illuminated my porch and did not recognize with the middle-aged male face looking back at me with its hat-in-hand expression.
I could tell at once that he wasn’t a salesman. There was something kindly and enquiring about his countenance that eased any concerns I might have had about undoing the locks.
“Good evening,” he said in a voice ripe with character. “You don’t know me, but I live a block over, on Angora Path.” He half-turned and pointed across my street to the second house on the left. “Over there, behind the Sturdivants.”
I could see no house behind the Sturdivants, only trees, but this was not to say there might not be a house there, somewhere beyond them.
I was already calculating, in the back of my mind, the possibilities awaiting me behind this obliquely neighbourly approach. This fellow had mentioned the name of a family, the Sturdivants, but in the more than thirty years that Cosima and I had lived on Locust Lane, I had never known them as anything more than a whisper of rumour, a passing blur. Of course, we kept to ourselves, by and large, though we had always been friendly with our immediate neighbours, those on either side of us, and responsive to their needs when required. In all the time we had lived here, we had seen the ramshackle house two doors down and across run down, refurbished, sold and run down again several times before the Sturdivants involved themselves in its trading of hands. But where was all this leading?
“Excuse me,” I said, closing the storm door and—in the same movement—sliding the upper window down to permit continued conversation. “I’m sorry,” I explained, “but we have a cat that likes to dart out.”
“No offence taken. That’s quite all right.”
“Was a package of ours delivered to you by accident?” I asked, hazarding a guess. “The delivery people are always doing that. I’m afraid the only time I ever get over to Angora Path is when I have someone else’s mail under my arm.”
“Well, as you see, I don’t,” my visitor said, showing his arms upraised and empty-handed. “I’ve actually come to you about another matter. It’s about…” He lowered his voice. “It’s concerning someone in the neighbourhood.”
“The drummer? I know what you mean. We can hear him clear over here when he’s practising. I can’t imagine the hell it must be for you, living right next to him.”
“No, no, that’s not what this is about.”
“All right then”—I hurried him along as politely as I could—“what is this about?”
“I don’t mean… to disturb you,” he said, showing sensitivity to my feelings and pausing every few words to weigh and squeeze those next to be spoken, “but there are… some things in place… for which we all must… assume some responsibility. It’s simply the way things work. We only involve people when they absolutely need to be and… well, now… you need to be.”
What the—? “I’m listening.”
“There is a neighbour of ours… a certain neighbour who requires, shall we say, a nightly escort.”
“An escort.”
“I assure you,” he pressed, detecting a hard coloration of suspicion in my tone, “this is nothing sinister nor unwholesome. But it is,” he continued, after a slow peer over each shoulder, “hush-hush. A kind of privilege, you might say. All that I mean is precisely what I said.” He leaned closer to the door and lowered his voice. “We have a special neighbour, who keeps a very low profile. This neighbour moves around a lot and needs to be accompanied when the time comes for them to move… from place to place. It’s as simple as that, really. It may sound strange, but the fact is, each and every night, this neighbour packs up all their belongings in a single suitcase and moves house. And we of the neighbourhood have inherited this arrangement that this business is always conducted on our watch, under our protection.”
