by Jase Kovacs
And I remember sinking into the blue, wanting to die and I have never felt so far from that moment in my life. Because, now, here, right at this moment where everything is conspiring to kill me, a dozen monsters shrieking and leaping, snatching at my heels and battering me like a cat's toy, a possessed child foaming at the mouth as he saws at my lifeline, and below me, urging his minions on, some creature from Hell, a monster never before seen, a being living to annihilate my soul, I scream defiantly, no they will not have me I will live and I will live long enough to end this horror.
In that last second before Blong's knife severs the rope, I vow, I promise, I swear:
I will be the one who will purge this evil from the Earth.
I think of all the men and women who have died to become his slaves, the sailors, the fishermen, the scavengers that were Blong's family, the Indonesian Marines, the cruisers in the rally shirts, I will avenge all of them. I will be the vessel of retribution. I will kill the Captain. Destroy him for what he has done to them.
And what he did to me.
And that thought passes me in the last instant, when the last strands of multibraid, sawn through by Blong's blade, snap. My hand coming down, not on the rope which has parted, not onto the empty air that is expanding in the hole that was my rope.
No, my hand doesn't go for the rope. Blong's black eyes widen in triumph, his hatred for me flaring as the rope fails. And then his anger bursts as my hand comes down on his wrist. I grab him, using the last of the momentum built in my climb to get him good and tight around his wrist. My weight yanking him down, making him fall and pinning him against the deck.
He screeches as the metal cuts into his arm and the part of me that suffers, that can ignore that this is a child dominated by an great and ancient evil, thinks good, I hope that hurts you little bastard. Hurts you like I do, like everything in my world hurts, my back my palms my arms and neck and shoulders, my body one red map of agony. He screeches and I scream right back at him as I bring my left hand, my poor burned hand, up and grab a huge fistful of his matted, knotted, dreadlocked hair.
They spring, they leap up at me but I am too high, I am past them now. The Captain roars, the whole hold echoing with his rage but I am past them now, I have grabbed the boy, Blong is my anchor and I haul myself up his body. His hand opens and the knife falls. He snaps at me, trying to bite me but I have an elbow over the deck's edge now, hard steel scraping and cutting into my underarm, so what, whatever, more pain is good.
I let go of his wrist, my arm is out of the hole, my head is out and suddenly I am breaking fresh afternoon air. A stiff breeze ripping from the south. I can't help myself, I take a moment to smell, the thrashing boy pinned against the deck, biting at me like a beast, the clean glorious air fills my lungs. It is like a burst of atomic fire, energy flooding though me and I push down and, just like that, I am out. I thud down on the deck, it's so damn hot against my shoulders and I laugh a mad sobbing gasp as I twist and scrabble clear of the hole.
Clear of the boy who comes at me. Crawling on his hands and knees like a rabid beast, his bloody teeth glistening in the afternoon sun, his eyes dark and hateful. I back peddle as fast as I can but he comes faster. I swing my rifle up and clout him across the cheek with the barrel. His head whips to the side. He pauses, turns back slowly to look at me. His eyes are tiny abyssal chasms. And he hisses like an enraged cat and keeps coming.
I get my feet under me and rise, bring my rifle up in an underarm swing, like a club. The gun reversed, the barrel in my hands, swinging it like a batsman driving a ball high in to the sky.
I catch him under the chin. The stock connects with a noise like a falling coconut hitting the beach and his head snaps back. He staggers back. His arms pinwheeling as he totters and—
I see it happening in slow motion.
— he steps back as he brings his head down. His black eyes suddenly clear. White iris. Clouded and confused. He shakes his head, his mind reeling and then he looks up, as he fights to regain his balance, focusing on me, seeing me clearly, as if for the first time.
As if he's just woken from a dream.
A terrible, terrible dream.
He looks into my eyes. I see the little boy I found living in filth, hiding his stuffed toy from me, grossed out by naked women.
And I can see what is about to happen. The hole, looming behind him. The tail of my rope dangling, the end puffed up like a dandelion.
He spins his arms as he fights for balance.
I'm diving. I don't even think about it. I'm diving for him, my hands outstretched.
He reaches for me, his mouth opening in a wordless plea.
His foot comes down on nothing.
My fingers brush his hand. They close.
On nothing.
He goes back. The distance between us opening.
Into the hole.
Into the hold.
And gone.
Filling the space behind him, on the other side of the hole, is Katie. Standing on the deck. Her feet spread. Her hands on her hips. Firm.
She doesn't need to say anything.
I run.
Chapter 19
The sun draws me. I don't go in a straight line back to the stern, where the downhaul is still secured to the ship's prop. The straight line back would take me down the starboard side of the ship, which lies in shadow. Instead I run towards the light, to the western side of the ship. Port. The sun two hands above the horizon, but almost behind the ridge of the island. The light rich like honey.
A thought strikes me: the dinghy. The dinghy must still be there, right? Could Blong have climbed down the rope, untied my painter and let it drift away? I was down in that hold all day, in that monster's thrall. A hunt for gaskets taking me further than I ever thought possible. Hours of time for him to mess things up for me. The Captain can plan, a devious monster to be sure, that was a neat trick with the stuck hatch wheel and the no-stairs. Would he have cut out my escape?
Hell, Blong didn't even need go down the rope. Just sit on the stern rail and drop rocks down until one of them strikes my Dad's handmade dinghy, punches through the timber, sinks it straight to the bottom.
Unwelcome thoughts. One way to find out. I sprint across the deck. It tilts slightly upwards. The ship lists to starboard. I remember vomiting down in the hold and watching glazed as it trickled downslope. The ship shifting on rocks. Grinding in big storms, waves pummelling it. How long will it be here? Before its smashed to pieces. Heavy seas at the end of the season. The props bent with the initial impact. How long has this ship been here? Blong said: we crashed when I was little. Five years? Seven? More? His story has more holes than the bottom of the ship.
My back and arms and hands are one web of pain. But my legs, they feel fine. Incredibly, unbelievably, they feel good. It's good to run. To sprint. My rifle bouncing, the barrel rapping against my thighs. I leap over pipes and deckfittings, hurdle a rusting cart piled with LPG cylinders. Skid around the corner, careen off the base of a crane, the ship's railing ahead of me and the bright beautiful glorious sun baking my face. I open my arms wide, as if I could embrace the sun, proclaiming I am a creature of the light, I am the yang to the monsters yin, I am life, they are death and they shall not have me this day.
Whatever, Earth mother, says Katie. Let's get off this fucking ship before we embrace the universe, okay?
This day that is barely two hours from ending. The sun a couple of hands above the horizon. Falling over the crest of the island, about to plunge this ship into shadows.
I'm running so fast that I overshoot the turn. I slam into the ship's railing, the metal bar hitting me in the belly, and I double over it, laughing, this is a fun game.
Katie snaps, for god's sake get it together. You can laugh like a loon when we're off this godforsaken wreck.
I'm bent over the railing, staring down its side. Down a line of iron rungs, a ladder running down the side of the ship, guiding my eyes like an arrow into the water below, a shel
tered bay that is formed between the ship's port side and the close shore of the island. A little cove maybe a hundred metres across, calm water protected from the south easterly trade wind and the swell. Smooth water that is almost transparent as the sun dips below the island's spine.
COME ON yells Katie but I don't move.
I'm looking down onto the deck of another ship.
It's wood, clinker built, a Malaysian fishing boat. Blue hull, black deck. An open hold, gaping like a toothless gum. Maybe twelve metres long. Its deck shimmers and I realise it's sitting on the bottom, sunken, the smooth sea here in this sheltered cove as clear as glass. The wheelhouse nicking the surface.
There is another shape next to it and I squint as I try to make it out. It comes to me, like the focus of a pair of binoculars snapping clearly as you turn the wheel, I realise: another boat. A yacht in fact, the long twin hulls of a catamaran. Its mast gone but I can see the helm stations at the end of each hull and I recognise it, it's a Catana 47, those stupid exposed helms, who could mistake those? I can even make out the long blue decals that decorate the hull, big splashes of water that spell out a name. A cold shock fills me. I know this boat. It's Wet Dream. Stan and Stacy, retired Aussie couple, they used to come up on the morning net, HF 12456 what is their boat doing here, what could this—
The white haired marys. In ripped and stained blue polo shirts. SAIL MALAYSIA 2017. The woman leaping at me as I crossed from Hold Two, white hair, monster eyes, shot her in the face, bullets punching her ticket good. Felt good about my clean, smoothly executed double tap blowing the back of her head out. Oh my god.
Stacy.
Oh my god.
The afternoon sun sinks, a golden ball falling away from this world. It passes behind an outcrop of rock that comes out the hillside like a duck's bill and then dips below it, the angle of its light changing, bizarrely moving down instead of up, like a theatre spotlight ignoring the stage manager's directions, and it lights up the rest of the bay and I can see the whole bottom, the whole cove, the shimmering glare of the afternoon sun on the surface parting like rising curtains.
The cove is full of sunken ships.
Yachts and fishing boats and outrigger canoes. The grey hull of warship, a white and red flag painted below the bridge, over the words: KORPS MARINIR. Indonesian Marines. Pinisis and bankas and tramp steamers and even a river ferry. A dozen boats. Their hulls shoved and stacked together. Sunken, rusting on the bottom of the shallow bay. Coral crusting them, some new, some old, some hulls little more than black curves that suggest a ship, some shockingly recent, all of them sunken and tilted and lying dead on the sea floor. I haven't seen this many ships in years.
It's a graveyard.
Commit our bodies to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.
I shove off the rail, push myself away. Not now, not now, no time to think, don't consider the implications, don't wonder what brought all these vessels here, how could they all have found this mystery island that graces no chart.
The call, I say, the call. He calls them and we come. Flies to honey, fish to the lure.
We are the Black Harvest.
I run down the port gantry, past the superstructure. Every doorway a potential trap, waiting for a mary to burst out like a spider springing from its burrow. But here, I still have the afternoon sun, it was the right decision to come this way. I catch a glimpse of movement as I pass a door. A scrape, a hiss. They're in there, cowering in the shadows. Thin lips curling, tasting my blood and pain and fear as I run. Powerless to strike. As long as I stay out of the shadows.
Turning at the end of the walkway, I slip. My feet skid on something, birdshit, you wouldn't believe it, I fall, slamming down hard on the deck, hard enough to make my head ring. For a split second I lie there. The deck is cool here. Shaded from the late afternoon sun. It's so nice. I can hear the cawing of seabirds. They are rising in a cloud from the ship. Each one knowing what the coming of night portends.
The ship is about to become a hunting ground. The decks free to those who roam in the dark.
That's enough to get me up. The rope is still where I left it. Tied off with a round turn and two half hitches to the top of the rail. I tug on it, it's secure, no one has tampered with it. I grasp the line and throw my leg over the rail, straddling it like a fence. I look down. Ten metres to the dinghy. It takes me a second to register it, so shocked I am that it's still there. My tender, my dinghy, bobbing patiently on the waves, bumping against the prop.
I twist the rope around my forearm, get a coil around my calf so I can control my descent. Go down hand over hand, slowly so the rope doesn't burn me. I am ready and I look up and a mary stands there, in the doorway, the first door I cleared this morning. It curls its lips, the ranks of its teeth white jagged pain. Its brow knots with frustration and hunger but it can't come out yet, can't cross the metres that separate us. There is still too much light.
Then it whips its arm around and flings something at me. A metal chair whangs into the railing, missing my head by inches, spins off into the air and falls with a splash below. The creature screeches, enraged by my escape, not caring if it feeds or not, only wanting to kill.
I let go of the railing and down the rope I go.
Only minutes later I am away. Had to leave the downhaul halyard, no way to release it. Rowing hard. My back crying every time I bend to my task. The oar handles rubbing red arcs of fire every time I dip and stroke. My heart hammering, the pain dulling my senses, my mind finally free to let go and take a rest as my body performs its duty. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Every beat of the oars taking me away from that hell ship.
Until the sea darkens and the golden afternoon shifts and is gone. The sun, at long last, has fallen beyond the island, beyond the curve of the far horizon. This day is done. I am in the middle of the bay, my god, can I yet think I am safe?
No, don't think about it. Row, just row.
But I can't help it. I look up. I want to take a last look at that ship before night comes, before I am back on Voodoo, my home, surrounded by hundreds of metres of water. Safe. The wind blows hard from the south and the tide is beginning its ebb. The waves are short and choppy and slop over into the dinghy, but I don't care. I just row and then as the light fades I look up.
And I stop. Utterly shocked.
My arms stop. My hands stop. My back stops.
My heart stops.
They line the rails.
The back of the ship. The starboard side. The fading light bright enough to see them, yet not enough to hurt them. They stand, side by side, watching me row away. Still and calm. Dozens of them. A hundred? More. They have come from every dark space in the ship.
I consider: I went into the main holds. How many did I see in there?
How many more slept elsewhere? In the engine room, in the crawl spaces and the shipping containers and ducts and empty tanks and crew quarters.
More than I can count.
How many ships were in the bottom of the cove? How many souls came to this vessel, hoping for treasure, finding only doom?
They line the railings and the stairs. Like an honour guard of sailors presenting their vessel for an admiral's inspection. Ranks of them. Up on the bridge and the roof and the bow and the stern, on the walkways and the gantries. Black creatures, perching like crows. A murder of crows. A ragged murder. Like the seabirds that use the ship in daylight hours to watch for fish, to watch for their prey.
They all stand as utterly still and as utterly silent as statues.
All watching me.
All watching me row away.
Watching me escape.
Escape? Don't count those chickens, girl, Katie says.
I bend my back and I row on, my little dinghy against the tide.
Chapter 20
It is full dark by the time I get back to Voodoo. The wind has been building steadily. The ebb tide growing in strength. Wind against tide mea
ns waves. The bay a surging confused mess of short pitched waves, slopping over the dinghy's bow. I have to stop twice to bail. The salt stinging my palms. Wish I wore gloves today. Got to sort something out there.
Voodoo is pitching madly by the time I get back. Her bow and stern plunging up and down in the night. Venus blazing in the west for now. Soon to go. A thin ceiling of cloud thickening. Blanketing the stars. No moon until after midnight.
I row around to Voodoo's stern, line up and drive myself in with three hard strokes, final bursts of energy. The dinghy smacks against the stern swim platform and I dive, grab hold. The chop plunges the boat up and down and the stainless rail slips under my fingers. I lean forward, the painter in my left hand. Get it around the platform's chain supports, a single turn enough to secure the dinghy and I fall back.
I'm home. Utterly spent. But home.
Drag myself out of the dinghy. Crawling. Stand on the platform. Soaking wet. My rifle covered in salt water. I'll have to do a full clean tonight. Before sleep. Every single piece needs to be oiled. More supplies to expend. Price of doing business.
I climb up into the cockpit. Have I mentioned that Voodoo is a centre cockpit cutter rigged sloop? Now you know. A Young 43, built in New Zealand, if that means anything to you. Switch the night lights on, red LEDs to keep my nightvision. Had a full days charge of solar so I've got power at least. But that's not my problem.
My problem is: how do I get out of here?
I don't like this wind. Probably ten knots now, building, be fifteen or twenty by midnight, but it's right in my teeth, coming from the south east the way it does, those steady true trade winds. Not ideal. Voodoo can sail maybe forty, forty five degrees off the wind. Pretty good. I can get closer if I don't mind going slower but that isn't the issue. The ebb tide is going out, one knot, two? But will I be able to sail out past the headland? Can I weather the rocky arms of the bay? That's the question.
