The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  Everything about it was familiar—the groove in the metal, the phoney gold lacquer worn away in all the same places—but, turning it over in my fingers, I saw that it was not a ferry token. Its faces had no markings. This must have been what the boy had flashed at me that day, when I had confronted him about the broken window. I felt strangely disapproving of him, then disappointed in myself for not expecting he would lie to me.

  The drafting table seemed out of place, moved in from someone else’s studio. When I connected the desk lamp, it cast a doomy light over the surface: there were handprints on the laminate, pencil marks and skids from an eraser. An array of papers rested on the table’s narrow ledge: finely textured sheets, a heavy gauge, expensive. Apart from the foremost page, which showed a rectangle sketched in freehand, they looked unused. I checked them against the lamplight, hoping I might find the indentations of the boy’s handwriting; but, instead, I saw the fault lines of a picture in the paper, fading through each sheaf.

  I took the graphite stick and rubbed it sidelong over the page with the heaviest depressions. Bit by bit, the faint white furrows left in the graphite began to form an illustration. It was made of four thin panels, about an inch across and several high. Each box contained a line drawing of one man’s face in close-up. They showed his dawning expression: (i) gasping anger; (ii) recognition; (iii) a softening of the brow; (iv) tears.

  Even as a rough negative like this, it was a spectacular drawing: an assembly of simple lines, some feathered, some solid, that seemed to lift the man’s whole character from the blankness. I had seen this exaggerated style somewhere before, but could not think where. There was a darkness to it, an acuteness of detail. The character’s face was ageless and muscular, the sinews of his neck implied through subtle cross-hatching. He looked hewn from a block of lumber—superhuman—but also jaded, fragile. At the bottom of the page were the makings of a signature I could not read: an L, perhaps an N, and a thatch of jagged squiggle.

  I put the drawing to one side and searched the cupboard by the table. There was nothing in it but a pine cone and a pencil sharpener and three red guitar picks. In the boy’s closet, I found his cagoule and a canvas bag half stuffed with clothes: his bee-striped sweatshirt was in there with the rest of his dank laundry. I checked the pockets of all the jeans and discovered only lint. There was a fountain pen and a Roman coin in the boy’s sock drawer, along with a few seashells and Pettifer’s camphor-wood turtle, which I could not resist winding up and letting spin across the floor. It scuttled underneath the chest of drawers; I could not retrieve it. On the bedside table was a paperback of Huckleberry Finn, loaned from the mansion library; it bore the provost’s stamp on the back cover and a strip of dental floss was serving as a bookmark three hundred pages in.

  I checked every recess of the place, from the gap under the bed-frame to the shelf above the roller blinds, and even the boy’s stove (I saw the grate was resting slightly off its latch). There was barely a mote of ash inside and the coke-scuttle below it was almost empty. On the blindside of the fluepipe, though, I noticed Quickman’s lighter. I spent a moment trying to make it flame. It would not even spark—perhaps it never had.

  The bathroom was the only place left to inspect, but I could not bring myself to search it. Instead, I put the boy’s drawing and the trinkets into my satchel and left. The wooden crate that he had sat upon to make his scribblings was still out on the walkway. I rested there awhile, trying to view things from the boy’s perspective. That marshy, weathered lawn. The bare bones of the pomegranate trees. This little patch of ground was such a wondrous place to be in springtime, when oleanders bloomed between the pines and all the fading purples of the sunset seemed brand new, uncharted. It was the best spot to put down a chair and watch the sky for herons. Now the winter had corrupted it.

  I leaned the crate against the wall and headed for my lodging. Even at its borders, the grass was swampy, so I kept to the trail of grit and sawdust Ardak had laid down. It cut a line in the wrong direction—towards the mansion and away from my studio, where it joined the regular footpath. But I could already hear warbles of laughter up ahead, from short-termers on the portico, and the sound of them revolted me.

  So I broke off the path and went straight across the grass. The clay soil underneath was thick and tacky, and I remembered how it cleaved to Fullerton’s skin on his first night. He had dug through it with his hands when he could not find his matches. It had rung against the innards of the oil drum like loose change. And then—

  I stopped.

  I turned so fast I nearly left my shoes behind me in the clay.

  The rusty drum was still standing on the open ground ahead, but tilted now, subsiding. It was skirted by a pool of water that I had to hurdle. My heels went skiing on the other side and I grabbed the can to keep from falling on my face. I tried to heave it up, but the dirt inside had been compacted by the rainfall and it would not budge. It did not even wobble. The only thing to do was scoop the soil out by the fistful, until the can was light enough to tip over.

  I clawed at the dirt, tossing debris over my shoulder.

  When my fingers were too sore to carry on digging, I gave up. I kicked hard at the drum and it shifted in the mud. It was just light enough for me to haul into the trees, ploughing a runnel through the grass behind me.

  Under the pines, the ground was not so wet. I pushed the drum on its side, spilling its contents. Amid the clods of soil there was a soggy mass of colour. A saturated pile of magazines the size of Reader’s Digests. I had to gently excavate them.

  The first one I pulled out was flecked with mud, congealed, but the cover was still glossy underneath, a little oily to the touch. I brushed off the muck from its middle. It was not a magazine at all.

  A shirtless young man with plaited hair snarled back at me, meticulously drawn. His wrists were cuffed with iron shackles and crossed beneath his chin. Thin strings of saliva hung from his blunt teeth like guy-ropes, and, on the crest of his tongue, was a black key small enough to fit a music box.

  It was a comic book.

  The draughtsmanship was faultless and familiar, bearing the same jagged signature as I had noticed on the drawing in the studio. I had to rub away more dirt to see the title clearly. My heart seized at the sight of it.

  It was as though I was staring at my own face in someone else’s family portrait.

  The lettering was designed to look held on by rivets, and the author’s name—the boy’s name?—had been sliced out with a blade. It was a sodden mess of paper, but I felt the oddest kind of intimacy with it. Whoever Fullerton had been, he was contained inside those pages. Not just his talent and his labour, but every last peculiar shape that ever lurked in his imagination. I was overwhelmed by a responsibility to preserve it. This and every other comic in the pile.

  There were footfalls now in the distance, and a tuneful hum. Ender was tramping down the pathway from the mansion, singing quietly: ‘Hey goo-loo, helleh helleh goo-loo . . .’ I could not let him see me.

  I lifted out as many comics from the soil as I could and tucked them in my coat. Three of them. Four. Five. Just when I was running out of room, I found another in the mud. That was all of them. I kicked through the rest of the dirt, levelling it off. And in that scattered mess, a square of burgundy showed through. The boy’s passport was there upon the mulch.

  ‘Kiz goo-loo, helleh helleh goo-loo . . .’

  It was in a decent state, soggy but not ruined. The photo page fell open in my hand. There he was again: the real Fullerton. British citizen. He did not seem any younger in the photo. His lank hair was the same but his face was studded with acne. Surname: scratched out. Given names: scratched out. Date of birth: deep laceration. I dropped him in my satchel and withdrew into the trees.

  Preserving The Ecliptic was a wearying endeavour. Each issue had to be unpicked from its staples, hand-squeezed of moisture with a rubber print-roller on a cotton towel, then hung on a string across my studio. I did not know a simple
r way of doing it. Many of the pages were too damaged to rescue. They stuck and tore as I tried to part them, or bled most of their ink into the towel as I dried them. I lost whole sections to careless mistakes with the roller: too much pressure buckled the paper, shards of grit got caught up in the rubber and shredded several panels, front and back. Issues 2, 4, and 6 were too warped to read, their pictures washed out or occluded. Most of Issue 5 ripped in my hands as I unpicked it. By the time I had finished all this conservation work, I felt sapped of energy. At least a hundred pages hung on the lines above my head, stretched from every corner of my studio. I fell onto my bed, into the deepest sleep I ever earned.

  Daylight brought no change to the foul weather. I rose cold and stiff, and stood drinking weak tea in my thermals until the shower ran hot enough to bathe. The fragrance of damp ground was all about the studio, and the stove-smoke only seemed to worsen it. I had the urge to put on the boy’s striped sweater—it looked so worn and comfortable—but kept to my normal painting clothes instead. Who knew what time it was? I had not heard the breakfast bell or any distant calls to prayer, but I had woken with a queasy sense of urgency.

  Bringing down the boy’s pages from the lines, reassembling the issues, I was overtaken with excitement. The moody covers lured me in. I could not remember the last time I had been so absorbed by someone else’s work.

  I had managed to save just two complete issues—#1 and #3—but most of the front covers were still intact. They were logoed with a kind of origami swan at the top right of the page: CYGNUS COMICS. In each of the cover illustrations, the main character grew a fraction older, shown in various states of distress: submerged in a petrol tank, crawling through an air duct, trapped behind a porthole, clutching sticks of dynamite and other weapons.

  The cover of #1 showed the character in half-light, dangling from a gantry. He was hanging over a vast metallic chasm by the fingers of one hand and it seemed certain he would drop. I was transfixed by the determination in his face, the glint of vengeance in his eyes. I felt just like him: about to plunge into a world of the boy’s making. And I did—I fell. I devoured the whole issue and the next.

  Issue 1 – G Deck

  AT COORDINATES UNKNOWN . . . (They all seemed to open with these words, top left). Inside the dank and rusted chamber of what appears to be a ship, a young man is slumped, unconscious, shackled by the wrists to a steel pillar. A voice fizzes out from a loudspeaker above his head (in spiky word balloons): Passenger announcement! Children on B Deck must be accompanied by their guardians at all times. His eyes slowly creak open, and he seems woozy and disoriented. Repeat: all children on B Deck must be accompanied—He feels a sudden pain in his mouth. A tiny key is lodged underneath his tongue and he spits it out into his hand, unlocks the cuffs. His wrists are chafed and raw.

  The angle widens. He is alone and naked in a room containing two generators, oxidised and derelict. There is a smoky auburn light, a metal locker, and a steel hatchway with a reinforced door. He goes to the locker and removes a leather suitcase containing personal effects: a Bible, a hipflask, a Bowie knife, a wristwatch. Hanging in the locker is a set of blue overalls, streaked with oil. The name-badge on the breast says: IRFAN TOL, 4TH ENGINEER, and stencilled on the back in white is the phrase: DV-ECLIPTIC.

  Cut to a dark corridor. The man finds his way into a cargo hold where hundreds of giant wooden crates are stacked. He crowbars the lids from three of them, discovering a hoard of taxidermy, furniture, paintings, boxes of cigarettes (he pockets several packs) and tins of crabmeat (he stabs one open and drains the juice). The announcements continue on the loudspeakers: This is a notice for all passengers in first-class. The totaliser on the ship’s run will be announced at 11.00 hours on the Promenade Deck Square. The totaliser will be announced at 11.00 hours on the Promenade Deck Square. Thank you. But his watch says it is 3.15 already—a.m. or p.m.? He is not sure.

  The man believes he is alone (he says so aloud, in a word balloon). There is no daylight, just flickering bulbs (a greenish hue to the panels throughout this section) and he climbs the crates to get a view of what is below him, reaching a gantry. His thoughts are shown to us in slanting words: he thinks the ship is moving, but he cannot hear the engines (his words: the powertrain). There are no doors. The space below is dark. The walls are gently leaking. He slips and, dangling from the railing of the gantry (reprise of the cover image here), notices something: a sway of shadows in the hold below. Dropping down onto a crate and leaping to another, he follows the shadow, but it recoils. He loses it.

  Descending to the floor, he side-steps between a maze of crates. At the far end of the hold, there is a line of candelabras, coiled with Christmas lights, that leads into a sort of glade amongst the cargo. He is surprised to find an old woman sitting in an armchair, playing chess with nobody. She holds a finger to her lips and shushes him, moves her queen upon the board. The Christmas lights are wired up to a cable conduit on the wall behind her.

  The woman has made quite a life for herself in the cargo hold, living off the salvage. She is adorned in a fur coat with a collar of mink-heads, and wears so much jewellery that she gives the impression of a Pharaoh on a throne. ‘I knew somebody would come for me,’ she says. ‘I knew it would happen eventually.’ And she offers the man a cup of vinegar. He raises his hipflask and she says, ‘Oh, even better.’ But, as he leans down to pour the liquor into her cup, she points a pistol at him. ‘I’m not going to let you take me,’ she says. ‘I have it too good here.’ There is a tussle—the man lunges forwards; she shoots and misses; he overpowers her. And now holding the pistol at the woman, he forces her back against a crate. All he wants to know, he says, is where he is, and how to get out.

  And so she explains it all to him (in that way that villains do in films, always wanting to reveal the lengths of their true evil). ‘This,’ she tells him, ‘is what they call a dead vessel. You’re on a ship that’s been retired from navigation, sonny. Listen—’ She points to the air. ‘No engine noise. But what’s funny about that is you can feel it moving, can’t you? And you’d be right, because we are. We’re going somewhere all right. So if you want to know where in the world the two of us are standing at this moment, my answer is: anywhere, everywhere. Who the hell can say? You’re on the Ecliptic and there’s no way off it, not that I’ve ever found. So I’d get used to this place, shipmate, if I were you—’ (squinting) ‘—Irfan.’

  ‘That’s not my name,’ he says.

  ‘Your badge says otherwise.’

  ‘Irfan Tol is not my name.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Because I feel it in here.’ (Tapping his heart.)

  He insists that there has to be a way to escape the ship. The woman tells him that the furthest she has ever reached is F Deck, and she has no intention of ever going back there. ‘I’m richer here than I ever was on land,’ she says. ‘Look at this garb. It’s best Russian mink.’ The air between decks, she warns, is poisonous and cannot be breathed. ‘But I can show you a good way to get to F Deck, if you’ll put the gun down.’ In a trunk, she has some breathing apparatus: a deep-sea diving mask attached to an oxygen tank, marked: ST ANA’S HOSPITAL. She leads him to a hatchway, sealed with candlewax. He thanks her, gives her back the pistol. ‘Oh, I think you’re going to need that more than I will,’ she says. ‘Godspeed to you. But don’t ever come back here.’ She lets him go and shuts the door behind him.

  The hatchway opens to a narrow metal stairwell. The climb is sheer and he withers after the first flight, slouching, crumpling. There are more steps than he has ever seen (this thought shown in bold for emphasis). He breaks through the F Deck hatch and collapses, hitting his head. The loudspeaker again: Notice for stewards in cabin class: the purser’s office is now closed. Thank you.

  Issue 3 – E Deck

  AT COORDINATES UNKNOWN . . . A leap ahead in the narrative. Irfan Tol, fourth engineer, is still in his overalls. He is straddling the steel-mesh walls of a baggage lift. He cannot
put his feet down because there is no floor beneath him—it appears to have eroded and there is nothing but a very deep shaft underneath. The lift is going nowhere. His face is knotted and tense. He scrambles to the other side, falling into a room crammed with suitcases (replicas of the one he found in the first issue). Hurriedly, he empties them, gathering provisions: a first aid kit, a torch, a carpetbag, a tape recorder, a bottle of gin. He encounters a trunk with a military emblem, tries to open it with a little key (from Issue 1?) and it comes loose. Inside: sticks of dynamite, a gas mask, and a thermos flask. He opens it and dry ice steams out. Goddamn. Everything is stowed inside the holdall, and he keeps on going, through the next hatch. Now where is he? Behind a pane of window glass, looking down upon a swimming pool. The water is stagnant and brown. He sniffs, getting an acrid stench, so puts the gas mask on.

  Coming down the steps, he treads carefully on the poolside. Flies buzz all around him. The tiles are dabbed with animal excrement. He sees a bootprint in it—not his own—and feels a presence near by. (In slanted letters: Something’s here . . . and then a full page of wide panels showing various aspects of the room, but no people.) Crouching by the diving board, he spots a shape quivering at the bottom of the pool. The water is too rotten to see through (shown as though from the gaze of his steamed-up gas mask). Excrement floats on the surface. Getting up from his haunches, he is startled. What the—? Alsatian dogs are running for him in a pack. He cannot move quickly enough, and they send him toppling into the filthy dark pool with a splash! that takes up half a page.

  (Dark brown colouring to the panels in this section.) Irfan Tol is underwater, gas mask on, carpetbag strapped to him, almost like a parachute. Bubbles rushing upwards. And the deeper he plunges, the more is revealed of what is resting at the bottom of the pool: a junkheap of motorbikes. He notices a child playing amongst the engine parts. A young girl wearing goggles. But, as his buoyancy lifts him back to the surface, he loses her. (Brighter panels here.) The dogs are baying on the poolside. He is gasping for air. Something pulls him under. He is dragged beneath the water again: a slender hand upon his ankle. And down he goes, clambering, towards the rusty motorbikes. He sees the girl’s pale face is staring up at him. She is breathing through a snorkel. Her hair is in a very long braid that whips up from her back. And she pulls him further and further, down past the wheels and handlebars. There is a kind of submarine hatch on the pool-bed. She turns the lever, opens it, and they squirm through. They drop into a dim metal chamber, filling with grungy water. She asks for his help to shut the hatch and they put their shoulders into it. The water stops gushing. They stand there, drenched. He tears off his gas mask. ‘Where are we?’ he asks her. ‘Sewage tanks,’ she says. H Deck, he thinks. Going backwards.