Dark Delicacies II: Fear; More Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Unknown

  I don’t think I doubted for an instant that we’d hit that wretched iceberg.

  Only a human could have missed it that long. It towered above the ship, for Heaven’s sake, glistening but dark: it was almost clear ice, as I’d seen, not the powdery white of ice that’s been exposed to the air. I understand (again, from Simon, who wasted not a moment after I finally reached London again in telling me, I told you so) that when the upper sides of icebergs melt sufficiently to alter their balance they sometimes flip over, exposing faces that are far less reflective, especially on a moonless night. Even so…

  I clung for a moment to the stair-rail, listening. The lights still blazed brightly, and after the first long, grinding jar there was no further shaking. But as I stretched my senses out—out and down, to the decks below me—I could hear the dim confusion of men’s voices, the clatter of frenzied activity.

  And the pounding roar of water shooting into the ship as if forced from a fire-hose.

  I thought, Damn it, if it floods the first-class luggage hold I’m sunk. I blush to say that was the very expression that formed itself in my mind, though at the time I thought only in terms of my lightproof double trunk and the two handsome windows in my stateroom. I had no idea what the White Star Line procedure was for keeping track of passengers and luggage on a disabled ship until another vessel could come alongside to take everyone off, but there was no guarantee that any of that would happen until after daylight.

  On the other hand, I thought, depending on how much confusion there was, it would now be very easy to dispose of Miss Paxton without anyone being the wiser.

  Trunk first.

  First-class luggage was on G Deck, at the bow. The gangways were sufficiently wide to get the trunk up at least as far as the C Deck cargo well. I was striding forward along a corridor still largely deserted—crewmembers sleep whenever they can, the lazy bastards—when the heavy beat of the engines ceased.

  Silence and utter stillness, for the first time since we’d lain at Queenstown, filled the ship, seeming louder than any thunder.

  I wasn’t the only one to find the silence more disturbing than impact with thousands of tons of ice. Doors began opening along the corridor, men and women—most of them young and all of them tousled from sleep—emerged. “What is it?” “Why’re we stopped?”

  “Hit an iceberg,” I said. I pulled a roll of banknotes from the pocket of my tuxedo jacket, and added, “I’ll need assistance getting my trunk from the first-class hold. It contains papers that I cannot risk having soaked.” I could have carried the trunk by myself, of course, but if seen doing so I could kiss good-by any chance of remaining unnoticed, unquestioned, or uninvestigated for the rest of the trip.

  “I’m sorry, Lord Sandridge.” Fourth Officer Boxhall appeared behind me, uniformed and worried-looking. “We may need the crew to stand by and help with the mailroom, if the water comes up onto the Orlop Deck. If you’ll return to your stateroom, I’ll have a man come there the moment we know one can be spared. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be much damage, but we should know more within half an hour.”

  I could have told him there was water pouring into what sounded like several of the watertight compartments down below, but reasoned he’d have the truth very shortly. One of the stewardesses was looking closely at me, a thick-chinned, fair-haired Yorkshire girl whom I’d seen more than once in conversation with Miss Paxton. She moved off swiftly down the corridor, slipping between the growing gaggles of crewmen. So much for any hope of waiting in my stateroom.

  Still, I thought, midnight was only ten minutes off. If there were crewmen hauling sacks of mail out of the way of floodwaters in the first-class cargo hold, I’d be able to divert their attention from me while I rescued the trunk myself.

  Or killed Miss Paxton.

  And by long before sunrise, I reflected as I strode toward the stair, I’d know whether I was going on another vessel, or staying hidden in some sun-proof, locked nook on the Titanic while repairs were effected. With any luck I’d be able to get an immigrant or two in the confusion as well.

  Miss Paxton would be up on ? Deck, headed for my stateroom. On C Deck some of the Swedes and Armenians from steerage were still laughing and playing with chunks of the ice that had been scraped off the iceberg. On the ? Deck promenade a few people were prowling about, dressed in their coats and their thickest sweaters; a young man in evening-clothes showed me a piece of ice, then dropped it in his highball: “Saw the thing go past. Bloody amazing!”

  “You don’t think there’s been any damage to the ship?” asked an elderly lady, doddering by on the arm of her superannuated spouse.

  “Good Lord, no. God himself couldn’t sink this ship.”

  Simon would have crossed himself, vampire or no.

  If I ever find myself in a similar situation again—God forbid!—I will do so, too.

  By this time I realized—and the UnDead are more sensitive to such matters than the living—that the deck under my feet was just slightly out of true. With all that water in the compartments below that didn’t surprise or upset me. I climbed to the Marconi shack on the Boat Deck—the room where the telegraphers sat pecking frantically at their electric keys. “We’ve sent word to the Californian, but she hasn’t replied,” said one of the young men, when I asked. “Probably turned off his set and went to bed. Bastard nearly blew my ears off earlier tonight, when I was trying to deal with the passenger messages. The Carpathian’s about sixty miles south of us. She’ll be here in four or five hours, to take the passengers off.”

  Four hours would put its arrival in darkness, I reflected as I made my way toward my own stateroom and what I hoped would be a rendezvous with my pursuer. Five hours, at dawn.

  Which meant that the moment Miss Paxton was safely out of the way I would have to get that trunk, one way or another. And be where I could get into it come first light. Never, I vowed, would I travel again if I could help it: it was just one damn complication after another.

  I could scent Miss Paxton’s dusting-powder as I entered the corridor leading to my stateroom. The scent was strong, but she was nowhere in sight. In the other cabins I heard the murmur of voices—a woman complained about having to go out on deck in the cold, which was prodigious—but there was certainly neither panic nor concern. I took a few steps along the corridor, listening, sniffing.

  She was in my stateroom.

  Of course. She’d got the maid to let her in.

  This would be easier than I’d thought.

  I closed my eyes as midnight moved into the icy heavens overhead. Reached out my mind to hers, where she waited in the comfortable darkness of my room. Laid on her mind, one by one, the fragile veils of sleep.

  Gently, gently… I’d done this to her before, back in London, and had to be all the more subtle because she knew what it felt like, and would resist if she recognized the sensations again. But she was tired from prowling the ship by night in quest of a clear shot at me, by day in search of my trunk. I could feel her slipping into dream. I murmured to her in the voice of the River Cher, beside which she and her idiot brother Lionel had played as children; whispered to her as the breeze had whispered among the willow-leaves on its bank.

  Sleep… sleep… you’re home and safe. Your parents are watching over you, no harm can come to you….

  One has only about ten minutes, at the very outside, at those turning-hours of noon and midnight, when the positions of earth and stars (as Simon has explained it to me) are strong enough to counterbalance the terrible influence of the tides. It was excruciating, keeping still, concentrating my thoughts on those of the young woman in my stateroom. Feeling those seconds of power tick away, calculating how many I’d need to stride down the hall, open the door, and bury my fangs in her neck…

  An image I had to keep stringently from my thoughts while my mind whispered to hers. Sleep—rest—you’ll sleep much easier if you take off those itchy heavy silver chains around your neck. It’s safe to do so—you’re safe�
�� They’re so heavy and annoying…

  I felt her fumble sleepily with her collar-buttons (why do women persist in wearing garments that button up the back?). Saw her in the eyes of my heart, head pillowed on velvety hair half-unbound on the leather of the armchair. Fingers groping clumsily at her throat… Sleep—

  The catch was large, solid, and complicated. Bugger. She must have chosen it so, knowing it wasn’t easy to undo in half-sleep or trance. Damn, how many minutes—how many seconds—left…?

  Gentle, gentle, Lionel is asking for the necklaces. You have to take them off to give them to him—

  I heard her whisper in her heart, Lionel, and tears trickled down her face. In her dreams she saw her brother, plump and fatuous as he’d been in life, holding out his hand to her. Got to have silver to wear to my wedding, old girl. Not legal if the groom’s not wearing silver. New rules.

  She let the revolver slide from her fingers, brought up both hands. The catch gave, silver links sliding down her breasts. Seconds left, but enough—

  I strode forward down the corridor and that God-cursed, miserable, miniaturized hair-farm of an American matron’s Pekingese threw itself out of the door of a nearby stateroom and fastened his teeth in my ankle. The teeth of such a creature would hardly imperil a soggy toast-point, much less a vampire in full pursuit of undefended prey, but the UnDead are as likely as any other subject of Lord Gravity to trip if their feet come in contact with a ten-pound hairball mid-stride. I went sprawling, and although I caught myself as a cat does, with preternatural speed, the damage was done. The Peke braced his tiny feet and let out a salvo of barks, his mistress appeared in the stateroom door just as I was readying a kick that would have caved in the little abortion’s skull, and shrieked at me, “How dare you, sir! Come to mummy, Sun!”

  And the next second Miss Paxton, collar unbuttoned, hair tumbling over her shoulders, and gun in hand, was in the door of my stateroom, taking aim at a distance of six feet…

  And midnight was over.

  I fled. Mrs. Harper (I think that was her name), straightening up with her struggling hellhound in her arms, effectively blocked the corridor for the instant that it took me to get out of the line of fire, and I pelted down the staircase, into the nearest corridor, with Miss Paxton like a silent fury at my heels.

  There were people in the corridors now, my fellow-passengers in every imaginable variation of pajamas, sweaters, coats, bathrobes, and life jackets, all of them carping about having to go out on the boat decks, and all of them impeding Miss Paxton from taking aim at me—and me from getting far enough ahead to lose her. I strode, dodged, slithered bow-ward along the ? Deck corridor, making for the cargo well that would give me swift access to the bowels of the ship. The lights were still on, but if they went out—as I thought they must, with the holds flooding—she would surely be mine.

  The deck was definitely sloped underfoot when I reached “Scotland Road” on D Deck again, now milling with crewmen. At the head of the spiral stair going down to E and F, I stopped short with a jolt of sickened shock. Beneath me a pit of green water churned, eerily illuminated by the lights that still burned on the levels below.

  That water looked awfully high.

  The gun cracked behind me, and I spun; there were still crewmen in the corridor, but none were between me and the emergency ladder from which Miss Paxton had just emerged, and not a single one attempted to stop her. I don’t think the mad bitch would have cared if they had. Maybe her tales of my perfidy had spread widely among the crew: maybe they had a better idea of what was going on below our feet than the passengers or I did. The fact remained that she had a gun and a clear shot, and I knew that even a glancing wound from it could prove fatal. I hadn’t drunk the blood of thousands of grimy peasants, factory workers, prostitutes, and street-urchins over the course of fourteen decades to let myself be put out of the way by an enraged middle-class virago.

  I did the only thing possible.

  As she fired I fell against the rail, tipped over it, and dropped straight down into that seething jade-green seawater hell.

  It was every bit as cold as I’d been led to expect.

  My mind seemed to fracture, to go numb. I screamed, and my mouth and lungs flooded with water—it’s a damn good thing I’d quit breathing many years previously. I remember staring up through the green water and seeing Alexandra Paxton looking down at me, gun still in her hand.

  I was conscious, but I felt my ability to act at all—to summon my limbs to obey my disoriented mind—bleeding out of me like gore from a severed femoral artery. I couldn’t move until she left, until she was convinced that I was dead, and she seemed to stand there—gloating, I expect, the miserable cow!—forever.

  Then she spit at me, and turned away.

  It took what felt like minutes of slow, clumsy thrashing before I could thrust myself to the door into what I think was F Deck. My fingers were like cricket bats, and I don’t know how long I spent simply trying to get the door open. My brain was like a cricket bat, too, trying to fish a single wet noodle of orientation—where the hell was the stairway up to E Deck?—from the swirling maelstrom of horror, shock, terrifying weakness, and nightmare panic.

  And I knew with blinding certainty that, watertight compartments be damned, the ship was going down.

  Voices, impossibly distant, came to me from all parts of the ship.

  Voices that said, “She’s sinking by the head.”

  Voices that said, “You must get in the boat, Mary. I shall follow later.”

  Voices that said, “Get back there, you. Women and children first.”

  Nearer, feet thudded amid a frightened yammering of Swedish, Gaelic, Arabic, Japanese: third-class passengers trying to find their way up the maze of stairways to the decks above. Crewmen shouted at them to go back, to stay in their cabins, they’d be called when it was time for them to get in the lifeboats. But I’d gone to sea, God help me, as a living man all those years ago, and I knew jolly well how many people could fit into a boat the size of the mere sixteen that were in Titanic’s davits.

  I had to get up to the decks before they started letting those foreign swine take up boat space that I’d paid for with my first-class ticket. And I had to get there before the foreign swine realized that there wasn’t going to be enough room for them in the boats, and took matters out of the crew’s hands and into their own dirty paws.

  The struggle was literally Hellish: I refer specifically to the Fifth Circle of Dante’s Hell, where the Sullen bubble in eternal stasis in the mud beneath the waters of the River Styx. I can only assume that the Styx is warmer than the Atlantic Ocean in mid-April. Water at a temperature of thirty degrees has exactly the same effect on the UnDead as it would on the living, only, of course, more prolonged, since the living wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes even were breathing not an issue. Beyond the paralyzing cold, there was the sheer hammering disorientation of ocean water—living water—itself. For long periods I became simply immobilized, my brain shrieking, fighting to make a hand move, a foot thrust against the metal walls that hemmed me in; it was like trying to remain awake in the final extremities of exhaustion. I’d come out of it, twist and thrash and wrench myself to push along a foot or so, then sink back into an inactivity I couldn’t break no matter how frantically I tried.

  Those periods got longer, the moments of clumsy, horrified lucidity shorter and shorter. And around me I could feel the walls, the hull, the decking tilting, tilting, as the weight of the water in the bow doubled and quadrupled and quintupled, and I hung there helpless, aware of the sheer, horrifying depth of the ocean below.

  I wonder why I didn’t go mad. Not with fear that I would die when that final hideous tipping-point was at last reached and the ship began her lightless plunge to the bottom: with the appalling certainty that I would not and could not.

  Ever.

  Whether because the water conducted sound, or for some other cause, as I spastically, intermittently, agonizingly crept and push
ed my way toward the stairways and survival, I was completely aware of everything that was passing on the decks above. Even above the cheerful ragtime being pumped out by the ship’s band, I could hear with nightmarish clarity every conversation, every footfall, every creak of the tackle as the crew loaded up the lifeboats and lowered them to the surface of the sea far below. The ships’ officers kept saying, “Women and children first,” and the women and children—brainless cretins!—kept finding reasons to remain on the main vessel where it was warm. A number of men got into those early boats unchallenged, since there were so many women who weren’t interested: I learned later one of them was sent off with only twelve people in it. The miserable Mrs. Harper got off accompanied not only by her husband but by her wretched Pekingese.

  But around me the walls changed their angle, with what to me seemed to be fearful speed, until even those first-class idiots on deck (I use the term advisedly) realized there was something greatly wrong. By the time I dragged myself at last, shaking and dripping, up a maintenance ladder onto D Deck, and stumbled toward an unguarded crew ladder to go above, the bow of the ship was underwater and all but four of the boats were gone.

  I won’t go into a detailed description of the behavior of the some two thousand men and women in competition for the approximately one hundred and sixty available passes out of the jaws of death. Anyone who has lived for close to two centuries in a major city like London has had ample occasion to view the behavior of mobs, and the passengers of the Titanic actually acquitted themselves fairly mildly, all things considered. Yes, the crew members had to form a cordon around one boat and threaten to shoot any non-lady who tried to board; yes, the men did rush another of the boats (I was too far back in the mob to get on, damn those other selfish bastards to Hell).

  Astonishingly, the lights remained on, and the band continued to play, giving an eerie disjointedness to the scene, but somehow, I think, keeping everyone just on the human side of total panic. God knows what it would have been like in darkness, with no sound but the groaning of the ship’s overstrained armature readying itself to snap. I had long since given up any thought of getting my trunk to safety, or of Alexandra Paxton. I learned much later she’d gone straight from shooting me (as she thought) to the Boat Deck, and had gotten off fairly early in the proceedings. She returned to England and lived, I regret to say, happily ever after.