The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  And what about his shipmates? If he takes the lifeboat, their hopes of survival will be seriously reduced. But it wasn’t Jónas who killed the engine! Why should he accept the conditions that others have put him in? Why should he think about the survival of men who haven’t given a moment’s thought to his survival? Why should he, seriously injured as he was, be worried about his fully fit shipmates?

  Those idiots have dug themselves a grave that Jónas has no desire to lie in.

  And how does he know they don’t plan to leave him alone on the ship? How does he know they haven’t already abandoned this drifting heap of iron? How does he know he isn’t the only soul aboard this godless ghost ship?

  No, that was too frightful to be true!

  Or was it?

  ‘Hello!’ shouts Jónas, sitting up in the bed. ‘Is anybody awake? Hello! HELLO!’

  I don’t believe this! Have they really …

  Jónas gasps when the alarm bells start up.

  What’s going on? Is there a fire? Is the ship sinking? Is …

  ‘Help! Help! ÁSI! SOMEBODY!’ shouts Jónas, throwing the doona off . ‘DON’T FORGET ME! DON’T FORGET …’

  Jónas shouts himself hoarse and then it dawns on him. Nobody will come to help him, whether he yells or not.

  Nobody.

  ‘They’re going to let me die here,’ Jónas wails, wiping the sweat from his ruddy forehead as he moves his right leg carefully out of the bed.

  He has to get up to the boat deck! He has to get in the boat with them!

  He has to …

  ‘No sudden moves!’ shouts Methúsalem Sigurðsson as he opens the door and steps into the bridge.

  The captain clenches his hands on the shotgun, looks to the right and slowly straightens up.

  ‘Stay still!’ commands Methúsalem, aiming at the captain from his waist. He steps into the bridge and checks that there are just the two of them.

  ‘Methúsalem!’ shouts the captain. ‘Don’t turn your back to the door! They’re on their way up.’ He beckons the first mate over to him, where he stands in the middle of the bridge, his back to the controls and the broken windows.

  ‘They don’t matter. Now it’s just you and me!’ yells Methúsalem, grinning with the pleasure of power.

  ‘METHÚSALEM! BEHIND YOU!’

  ‘No such tricks, old man,’ Methúsalem growls, wiping the grin off his face as he grasps the rifle more firmly.

  ‘METHÚSALEM!’ shouts the captain again, as he lifts the shotgun and aims it in the direction of the first mate, who pulls the trigger of the rifle without hesitation.

  Bam!

  00:02:30

  The bells are ringing throughout the ship. Guðmundur Berndsen glances at his watch as he sinks down, with his back to the wall and his shotgun in his arms, and sits on the floor in the middle of the mess, right under the red fire-alarm box.

  ‘Easy now. You’ve got to keep calm,’ the captain tells himself and takes a deep breath. Then he leans on the shotgun and stands up. He mustn’t let down his guard. He has to be prepared for everything. These devils might appear in the bridge at any moment!

  When great danger is imminent, life suddenly becomes so very valuable but, at the same time, as delicate as a baby bird in a snowstorm. All you can do in such a situation is to blindly trust in the unlikely, while simultaneously closing your eyes to the obvious, and thus meet your fate armed only with absurdity.

  Guðmundur takes a few steps across to the starboard side of the ship and looks out the door leading to the bridge wing. Green light shines over the black waters, while up in the darkly clouded sky, the red globe flares.

  ‘No sudden moves!’ shouts Methúsalem Sigurðsson as he steps into the bridge.

  The captain clenches his hands around the shotgun, looks to the right and slowly straightens up. The bells are making so much noise that a herd of rhinos could have run into the bridge without his having been aware of it.

  The door! Of course he should have watched the door. Goddammit! What if it had been the pirates and not …

  ‘Stay still!’ shouts Methúsalem and aims from his waist at the captain.

  ‘Methúsalem! Don’t turn your back to the door! They’re on their way up!’ shouts the captain, and he beckons the first mate to come over to him.

  ‘They don’t matter. Now it’s just you and me!’ Methúsalem grins coldly with an insane gleam in his infected eyes.

  Is he joking?

  ‘METHÚSALEM! BEHIND YOU!’ shouts the captain as a black shadow appears in the doorway behind the first mate.

  ‘No such tricks, old man!’ Methúsalem Sigurðsson wipes the grin off his face and grasps the rifle more firmly.

  ‘METHÚSALEM!’ the captain cries again as he lifts up the shotgun and aims it in the direction of the first mate, who pulls the trigger of the rifle without hesitation.

  Bam!

  The shot streaks by the captain’s left ear. Guðmundur blinks and hardly notices that blood is beginning to run down his neck. The only thing he sees is the look of astonishment on Methúsalem’s face as the pirate grapples him from behind and a sharp knife cuts his throat from below his left ear quickly down to his right collarbone.

  Blood gushes in rhythmic pulses into the air and down to the first mate’s chest. Methúsalem collapses helplessly onto his knees and then right on his face. The pirate sheathes his knife in an instant, waves the machine gun around, puts his index finger on the trigger and finishes off the few rounds of shot left in the vertical chamber.

  Ratata–

  Click, click, click.

  The captain is faster. He takes one step to the side as he aims the shotgun, and as the bullets from the machine gun slam into the ship’s controls. he takes a firm grip on the trigger and shoots the intruder straight in his staring face.

  00:02:30

  He’s standing on a curved balcony looking over a brightly lit assembly room the size of a ship’s hold. If this hall has a name it must be ‘The Golden Gallery’. The walls are covered with golden squares from floor to ceiling. In front of the squares are smaller squares and, between them, lights that flicker on the smooth gold like fire in a dream. From the ceiling hang cylindrical chandeliers the size of ships’ funnels, made up of crystal threads. The chandeliers are two-layered, the inner cylinders reaching below the outer ones. Inside them shines a light that refracts, creating thousands of lights that give the impression of stars in the sky or diamonds in water.

  In the distance is the sound of old-fashioned jazz, though there is no band to be seen.

  He walks down the broad, curved staircase to the assembly room. As he steps out on the polished wooden floor he sees a similar staircase on the port side. Above him is the balcony, but there’s no-one there now.

  He walks through the middle of the room. There are formally decked tables to each side. First he passes tables set for two and four but then he comes to long tables for eight, sixteen and thirty-two. There are white tablecloths and heavy silver cutlery, linen napkins in silver napkin rings, handpainted porcelain dishes and cut-crystal glasses arranged on them.

  Very good, he thinks, as though he is responsible for it all, that things are exactly as he requested, that nothing in the assembly room disappoints the guests or upsets them.

  Off and on the room seems to fill with the sound of chatter, light laughter and the clink of glasses, then he turns around and looks at first one table then another. But the moment he looks over his shoulder the voices are silenced and the clinking of glasses dies out between the echoing walls.

  Or was it the screech of metal and rattling of chains?

  At the front of the assembly room is a cognac lounge. Heavy leather chairs around uncovered circular tables of dark wood, a thick carpet on the floor and the aroma of cigar smoke, although no-one is smoking. He walks up a broad staircase leading to a doorway with heavy wooden double doors opening into the bright room.

  Beyond the door is another room: a vast, stinking space – dark, c
old and empty. At first he can see nothing – it’s as if the bottomless dark absorbs the light – but little by little pictures appear in the darkness, like large fish that stick their colourless bodies up out of black water.

  He sees eyes that are dark pits, gaping mouths and skin stretched like a rubber sheet over fleshless bones, and the people are singing a song as lifeless as the whining of wind in a half-open window. They stretch thin arms up in the air and all those emaciated arms turn into a leafless forest of arms in the bottom of the hold; the song changes into drawn-out lustful moans; these living pictures of the dead are fucking each other down in the deep, and their nightmarish faces – which had, at first, run together into one terrible mask of hunger – have now become fitful distortions of the face of his daughter, who thrashes about and fucks herself in a rotting stew of cold flesh that engenders flesh and –

  He hears a heavy thud, turns and sees a man lying face down in the middle of the Golden Gallery. It’s Stoker. He is dressed in evening clothes and beardless, his hair newly trimmed. His fingers twitch and he blinks his eyes. His head is open and a thick bloody soup oozes from the rug and into the opening that little by little closes again – Daddy!

  He feels cold fingers pull at his clothes. He loses his balance and falls backwards, down into the darkness. He stretches out his arm and manages to grasp the brass doorknobs on the two doors with both hands but he isn’t able to lift himself up; he can’t keep his balance on the edge of the abyss. His arms grow longer and longer, he holds onto the brass knobs and closes the double door like a trapdoor behind him. The slit contracts, the light dims, he tumbles into the dark void.

  He falls into the plinth course; he hears heavy metal pulled aside, hinges screeching, and a moment before he lands on the hard metal floor someone calls.

  SATAN!

  00:03:03

  The noise of the bells is maddening …

  With his right hand, Jónas takes hold of the railing on the right-hand side of the stairs that lead up to B-deck and then the boat deck. He takes a deep breath and tries to control his trembling muscles, then he bends his right leg a little before he hops up to the next step.

  He is wearing nothing but a white nightshirt; he is trembling with weakness and suffering torments of pain. Sweat pours off him and the bandages on his left ankle and left wrist are swelling from the rhythmic beating of his arteries; his left side itches all over and his broken limbs send a continuous message of distress. The fingers of his left hand hold the four aluminium sheets of paracetamol-codeine in a deathlike grip. One sheet falls onto the step below him and two steps above another sheet drops from his numb fingers. Only two sheets left, and one is beginning to slide …

  One step, then another, and another …

  He has to be able to do this!

  When he finally makes it to the top of the boat deck stair he can hardly stand. The fingers of his left hand are holding weakly to the final aluminium sheet, snot and blood run from his nose, and his gums, skin and eyes all itch.

  ‘Further, further,’ Jónas cajoles himself, hops to the side and leans his left shoulder against the wall at the top of the stairs. Just rest a little, one second, only to …

  Ási and Rúnar’s cabins are wide open and they are lying inside on their backs in their own blood. Shot to pieces. Stone dead.

  ‘What’s going …’ Jónas says and blinks. The paralysing din of the bells wreathes this horrific scene in an aura of unreality, but after staring at the corpses of his shipmates for a few second, the second mate realises that this is stark reality.

  The men on the ship are being killed.

  ‘Good God!’ cries Jónas. He hops one short step forwards towards the bosun’s cabin, but when he hears someone running up the stairs, he hops with all his strength over to the door leading out to the platform at the back of the wheelhouse, on the port side.

  There he pushes his back against the door and holds his breath, while a man dressed all in black with a machine gun strapped over his shoulder studies the corpses of Jónas’s shipmates for just an instant before running up to D-deck.

  Who …? Is everyone dead?

  Jónas takes hold of the doorknob with his right hand, opens the door and hops out under the open sky. He grabs the railing with his right hand and hops backwards along the iron floor.

  Above him the emergency flare sways slowly down, like a dwarf sun setting.

  When he reaches the lifeboat he has to hop up two more steps – first up to the raised platform back of the boat and then up to the boat’s stern, which points forty-five degrees up into the rose-red night sky.

  His sweat-soaked nightshirt is stuck to his clammy skin, a cold wind blows up his bare legs and his right leg has gone numb from the hard, cold steel.

  When Jónas finally reaches the stern of the lifeboat he realises that the fingers of his left hand are not holding anything. The last sheet of painkillers is gone.

  No!

  He opens the door aft on the boat by turning two handles up, then he lifts up a heavy door with his other hand while he struggles to keep his balance on one foot. This is all so difficult that he mostly just wants to give up, to sit down and cry, but since he’s got this far, he has to go the whole way. He has to!

  The door falls to the side and the open boat lies before him. If Jónas should lose his balance and fall in through the door, he’d fall all the way to the bow, the boat slants at such an angle.

  But Jónas makes it through the door, manages to close it after him and climb up to sit in the helmsman’s seat, which is higher than all the other seats in the boat and is the only seat of the eighteen that faces forwards and not backwards. On top of the boat is a raised section with four windows, two facing forwards and one to each side. The first mate fastens the five-point safety belt, turns the current onto the controls and starts moving a long rod back and forth.

  With every movement of the rod the boat lifts up a few millimetres and slowly a short iron hook comes loose from a thick joist on the bottom of the boat. When the joist has risen above the hook the boat is free, and then it drops down off the davits and straight into the sea, which spurts dozens of metres in all directions.

  The blow is so heavy that Jónas B Jónasson loses consciousness.

  00:02:33

  ‘SATAN!’ shouts Stoker as soon as he manages to open the forecastle.

  ‘Huh? What?’ says Satan and his fumbling hands reach for nothing as he suddenly wakes from a deep nightmarish sleep. ‘Who’s …’

  Where is he? Who’s shouting? What …

  Satan opens his eyes and sees the black shadow of a man lit by red light, framed by a doorway with rounded corners. He smells metal, tar and paint thinner; he is being lifted up and down, tossed about in a narrow and uncomfortable space; he hears the sea knocking against the steel, the wind moaning and the low squeal from the heater; his forearm stings from the needle prick and he can feel how the lock on the chain pushes into the small of his back …

  The ship!

  ‘Leave me alone, man,’ says Satan. He leans his head back on the folded burlap. ‘Don’t wake me until we’ve got to Suriname. Is that clear?’

  ‘GET UP, YOU!’ Stoker screams, jumping over the sill. Then he lowers his hoarse voice to say, ‘The ship is dead in the water and we’ve got pirates on board.’

  ‘What!?’ says Satan and opens his eyes lazily. ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘The ship is dead!’

  ‘You said pirates, you idiot.’ Satan snaps his fingers as he sits up in the plinth course.

  ‘Yes, and they’ve come aboard!’ says Stoker stepping from foot to foot like a little boy who needs to wee. ‘Their ship is alongside and shoots a machine gun at the slightest provocation!’

  ‘It’s about time something happened on board this tub,’ says Satan, climbing out of the plinth course. When he stands up the chain around his middle pulls taut. ‘If there is one thing this boring crew needs, it is precisely entertainment from elsewhere. For some reaso
n I didn’t fit the bill, but pirates with machine guns are something everybody can enjoy. Right?’

  ‘I’m not kidding, man!’ Stoker points with a shaking finger out the open door, where the pirates’ inflatable can just be seen in the water by the weather deck, halfway between the forecastle and the wheelhouse. ‘I heard shots earlier on! They’ll kill us all if —’

  ‘I never said that I don’t believe you,’ says Satan, shutting Stoker up with the palm of his right hand. ‘Did you bring the key?’

  ‘The key?’ asks Stoker as Satan removes his hand.

  ‘Yeah, the key!

  ‘Oh shit, man!’ Stoker stares at the chain. ‘Who has the key?’

  ‘The long, ugly one,’ says Satan. He fishes a cigarette packet and lighter out of his left trouser pocket. ‘White, dumb and badly dressed.’

  ‘Methúsalem! Of course. Shit! Hold on.’ Stoker grabs the pocket of his cotton trousers. ‘I think –’

  ‘What are you doing, man?’ asks Satan and lights his cigarette.

  ‘Here it is!’ says Stoker, grinning broadly as he feels something hard in his right pocket, then he turns his pocket inside out and grabs the key before it falls to the floor.

  ‘Clever boy!’ Satan lifts up his arms and turns around, holding a lit cigarette in one hand and the pack and lighter in the other.

  ‘Okay, here we go!’ Stoker sticks the key in the lock and turns it clockwise, so the lock pops open and the chain rattles onto the iron floor.

  ‘Excellent!’ says Satan and blows smoke out his nose as he sticks the cigarette packet and the lighter in his right trousers pocket.

  ‘Now what?’ asks Stoker, grabbing the iron column in the middle of the forecastle to keep from falling down.

  ‘Do what I do.’ Satan sticks the cigarette in his mouth, then tears the net off the paint cans at the front of the plinth course and screws the lids off a five-litre can of thinner. ‘Find more of these thinner cans and hand them to me.’

  ‘Okay,’ murmurs Stoker and drops to his knees by the plinth course as Satan goes over to the door and tosses the cans in the direction of the pirates’ inflatable.