It was an embalming kit from a thousand years ago. The tools were rude, rough, and ugly as the task they were made to perform. The fire was burning low, though there did not seem to be any reason for it. Garret’s hair was beginning to stand on end. He tried to will himself to wake, but he did not. He prayed silently. No one answered.
The old man extracted a long, thin blade from the pouch, gripped it in his arthritically swollen knuckles, and moved for the man’s chest. At that moment, the Hollow Man moved. He did not physically change location, but Garret felt him move across an invisible boundary of some sort. Garret knew what had happened even before the old man cringed with fear.
The Hollow Man had moved from his reality into ours, and the old man had felt him do it. In his sleep, Garret felt a terrible pang of empathy for the old man. Garret’s friends could not feel the presence of the Hollow Man, but this old man could.
He’s just like me, Garret realized. The Hollow Man has him too.
The old man deliberately did not turn, but he bowed his already hunched shoulders and clutched the knife close to his own chest.
The Hollow Man spoke in a language Garret did not know, but the meaning was revealed to his mind.
No, said the Hollow Man. It is not yet your time. I have come for my prize. You will give it to me.
The old man looked so frail and small as he began to shake. He dared to speak, though it was in a frightened whisper. Again, the meaning was clear to Garret, though the words were alien.
“Please master, I beg of you. He is the last of their kind. Hundreds of brave men died to end him. They were our brothers, our sons. Please, have mercy. Let this thing pass from the earth.”
Though Garret had no idea what was happening, he was seized with fear at the old man’s words. Just as he did not know the language but felt its meaning, so also he did not know what was about to happen, but he felt its damnable importance.
No, don’t! Garret tried to say to the old man. Whatever he wants, you can’t give it to him!
The old man heard nothing from Garret, but he cringed again when the Hollow Man said, This is the way it will be. This is fate. I always come for what is mine, Taio. Always.
The old man’s hands were quaking now so badly that he could barely hold the knife. He opened the man’s robes and drew the blade down his abdomen, right across his naval. Blood leaked. It was thick and almost black. It reminded Garret of the creature’s blood.
Stop, please stop, Garret begged him.
Then, in the purest silence, wherein only thoughts and dreams can live, the old man answered him.
I can’t. He has my daughter.
The old man’s hands were so unsteady that the cut he made was jagged. The dead man’s abdominal skin parted, revealing a white band of connective tissue between his abdominal muscles. The old man rested the point of the thin knife at the top of the white band, then begged the Hollow Man.
“Please, is there anything else I can give you? I will go anywhere, I will do anything. There must be something else I can give you.”
The Hollow Man replied, Will you give me your daughter?
The old man drew the knife down, parting the white band in the middle. Intestines surged into the long opening. The old man laid aside the knife, then pushed his old knobby hands deep into the pile of organs. He grunted, straining, and seemed to be struggling with something.
At last he pulled back, drawing an organ into the light. It was green, oblong, and segmented, like an insect’s exoskeleton. Garret flinched away when the organ moved. It was fighting the old man, struggling to escape his grasp. Garret glanced at the dead man’s face. He was pasty and waxy looking, definitely dead.
Grabbing the struggling organ tightly in one hand, the old man seized a short, thick-bladed knife with the other. He drove the knife down into the pile, severing whatever held the organ in place.
It popped free of the dead man with a wet snap. The green, segmented organ convulsed, then lay still in the old man’s slimey hands. The old man dropped the knife and laid the organ across both his palms. He gripped it tightly, thought it was no longer struggling.
“Please, please…” the old man begged, still hunched over the dead body.
The Hollow Man said nothing. He only waited, the coldness of his presence filling the room. Slowly, the old man turned. His face was twisted by pure anguish.
“Master, I beg of you not to do this. Please, let it end here.”
The Hollow Man said nothing, only filled the corner.
At last the old man broke. “Promise me you will not hurt my daughter anymore.”
I will leave her, the Hollow Man said.
Don’t! Garret screamed, overwhelmed by the horror he felt permeating the exchange.
The old man extended the organ, and slowly uncurled his fingers.
Instantly, the Hollow Man vanished, and the organ with him. The old man stood there, his empty hands extended, covered with body fluids. He broke down. Garret was flung away, up through the stone, out of the monastery, into the grey, snow-filled sky.
The next dream began almost immediately, but this time, Garret was in the dream bodily, not only as a watcher. The greyness of the sky cleared away, dropping him into the Appalachian woods in which he’d grown up.
Molly kept calling to him, somewhere in the tree covered slopes, but it was only her voice, disembodied. He combed mile after mile of the Appalachian hills in search of her, while the seasons went from summer to fall to winter in succession around him. The last leaves withered and fell, and just as he found her, the grey ground became covered with snow.
She was kneeling in the leaves, looking away from him. He spotted her from a ways off, and shouted her name as he ran to her, begging her to look his way. She didn’t. As he ran to her, he was forced to watch the pale curve of her neck and the golden curls of her hair become as grey as the ground. She turned to crumbly stone like Lot’s wife.
Then the dream would begin again. And over again. Each time he got closer to her before her warm skin became cold and crystalline, but he could never touch her in time to save her. Though he screamed until his lungs hurt, she never looked his way.
At last, he reached her just before the dream ended, and he saw why she never looked at him. In the leaves at her knees lay a tiny skeleton. Their son, long since dead.
Garret awoke screaming while three people tried to pin him down on the deck. Curtis, Floyd, and Fishy. All of their faces were white as sheets. Curtis’s burly bare chest was flecked with sweat. It wasn’t his, it was Garret’s. The lights were up, and between Nancy’s blast shield and the galley, several dozen men were staring, stupefied, at Garret.
Garret was terrified, filled with hot adrenaline, but he had no idea why. The horrible feelings of the dreams were wrapped around him like cold seaweed, but he couldn’t recall the images that had caused them. Everything he’d dreamed that night was gone from him.
Garret relaxed and lay still on the deck. He shuddered involuntarily, then just tried to breathe. His right side hurt, undoubtedly where he’d landed on the gun after falling out of his hammock. The back of his head hurt too. That was probably from where he’d hit the deck. Someone had ahold of his wrist, but that person wasn’t pinning him down, just holding onto him. It was Theo. If it was possible for a round face to look pinched and thin, his did.
Garret’s sense gradually returned to him, and the first thing he recognized was his friends’ fear. Either they were afraid for him, or afraid of him. He didn’t know which.
One of them was talking to him, trying to get him calmed down. It was Fishy. “Hey Lover Boy, it’s okay. It’s all okay.” Fishy didn’t sound like he believed what he was saying.
“What in blue blazes is going on here?” It was Chief Greely, elbowing his way through the spectators.
Curtis, Fishy, and Floyd turned their heads to see the chief, but none of them let go of Garret. “Garret had a nightmare again, Chief.”
Chief Greely erupted through the circle of onlookers. With him came a blaze of blue and gold uniform and a chiseled, late-twenties face. It was the Executive Officer, Commander Sharpe.
No one said anything, so he must have told them all to be at ease before Garret came to.
“Let him go, boys,” the chief said quietly. They complied and sat back. Only then did Garret notice that Curtis was breathing hard and had a red mark across his jaw. Garret must have struck him. The chief bent down, but instead of grabbing Garret’s wrist and hauling him to his feet as he expected, the Chief laid a hand on Garret’s forehead like his mother used to do when he was sick.
“Can you stand, son?”
Garret wasn’t sure that he could. He felt sick and weak, and the image of his son’s tiny skeleton was so clear that he could smell the scent of old bone. It was a dry smell, like a stack of yellowing paper. Garret’s stomach rolled, and in his mind’s eye he saw Molly’s blue eyes, wet with life, become dry, grey, and begin to crumble again.
Someone was talking to the Chief. Whoever it was had lowered his voice, but Garret heard when he said, “He wouldn’t wake up this time, Chief. We tried everything.”
“Aye sir, I can stand,” Garret at last replied. He sat up and the sickness settled a little deeper into the pit of his stomach. Theo helped him to his feet.
“He’s a Jonah for sure,” someone mumbled in the crowd. “I wish he’d left with the others.”
Garret came to attention, or at least a humiliated approximation of it. By his mere presence, Jonah had been responsible for every calamity that befell his ship. In the end, the ship would have gone down with all hands had the crew not thrown Jonah overboard.
The Chief appraised Garret, then said to Commander Sharpe, “Sorry about that sir, now which of my men are you looking for?”
The XO had a small slip of paper in his hand, but he didn’t refer to it. “Well, I believe I’m looking for him.” He nodded to Garret. “He has the right hammock number.”
Garret wasn’t steadying as quickly as he used to after this sort of thing. Is he talking about me?
“Four-one-seven-four?” the XO was asking him.
Those four numbers were the way the Navy thought of him. They would be branded in Garret’s brain until the day he died. “Aye sir,” Garret said.
There was a pause. “Seaman Third Class Garret Vilner?” the XO confirmed.
“Yes sir.”
“Then come with me.”
The door to the Captain’s cabin slammed behind Garret with a crypt-like boom, leaving him alone with Captain Maxwell. Garret was still sick to his stomach. The walk under bright electric lights and past a knot of cursing seamen, fighting with a cracked steam pipe, hadn’t helped.
Garret hardly noticed the rich surroundings in the cabin. But he did stand at attention. That, at least, his body could do automatically. Captain Maxwell was seated at a small table that looked like a dinner table. He was rebuilding a sextant with smooth, precise motions. The Captain did not look up at him.
“Seaman Vilner?”
“Aye sir.” Garret said. To his own ear, his voice sounded old and rusty. The Captain’s sextant reassembly may have paused for an instant, or it might have been Garret’s imagination.
“They tell me you have scars,” the Captain said bluntly.
Garret cringed. Who the hell told him that? The mere reminder of it made him again aware of the tickling, scratching sensation beside his right lung. It made him want to cough. He restrained it.
“Where did you get them?” the Captain asked.
Garret was shrinking fast, the size of a chicken, now the size of a bug. At any moment, he felt sure Maxwell was going to tire of him, walk across the room and step on him.
“I…”
Maxwell looked up, pinning Garret to the bulkhead with grey eyes.
“I asked you a question, seaman,” Maxwell said.
A tremor started in Garret’s guts, spread, and settled in his hands. He clenched them tightly at his sides.
“I… I can’t tell you that, sir.”
Maxwell leaned away from the sextant a little. “Why is that, sailor?”
Clenching his hands wasn’t helping, they were shaking anyway. The image of his son’s tiny skeleton, desiccated and beginning to disintegrate flashed through his mind. Garret broke. “Please sir, don’t make me tell you.” He was supposed to stand straight at attention, chest out, shoulders back, chin held high, but his posture caved. His head fell. “Please, please don’t make me.”
Maxwell had somehow slid across the deck between them without making any noise. Garret was looking at the floor.
“Why not, sailor?” the Captain asked.
“Because it might hurt my wife and baby,” Garret said.
Maxwell let that hang.
In the silence, a horrible thought hit Garret. Oh my God. Is that why Molly hasn’t written back to me? I just thought it was because she’s angry with me, but what if they pinned her with it? What if she can’t write me because she’s in jail? Oh Jesus, what if they thought she killed those men? Oh Jesus, they’d… they’d hang her!
Garret was hyperventilating. Maxwell was watching him do it.
I told her to tell them I did it! I wrote that letter and slid it under Sarn’s door! He was supposed to print it in the newspaper! I did it! Me! Not Molly!
The tickling in Garret’s lung got worse, and he was seized by a coughing fit, the first one in weeks. He ended up doubled over, trying to get control of it.
The hand of panic closed around Garret’s throat as he hacked. Oh my god. Oh my god. He thought frantically for a way out. Maybe I could run away from him and hide somewhere on the ship for the rest of the trip. Panic had taken Garret’s reason, and he was near to doing something foolish when he thought he caught the slightest scent of roses on the air, and a completely different line of thought entered his mind. This one was not the voice of the Hollow Man. The new voice that spoke to him now was from somewhere else. It was low and quiet, warm and enfolding.
Calm down, Garret. Think about your son. Molly would never let anything happen to the baby, and Sarn would never let anything happen to Molly. You took responsibility. They are safe from the law.
The other voice was probably just a desperate grasp at solace, made up by his addled brain, but it was enormously relieving none the less.
Garret’s coughing fit left him sitting on the deck, pulling rattling breaths. He felt something on his lips and wiped it away. The back of his hand came away with light blood smears. Garret’s lungs, especially the right one, felt scratchy and raw.
In the meantime, Maxwell had squatted down next to Garret.
“Is that why you’re here?” Maxwell asked.
What?
Garret nodded at the deck, even though he was supposed to say, “Aye sir.”
Maxwell returned to his table. He dragged one of the leather chairs over next to the table, then sat back in his own chair and picked up his sextant again.
“Sit.”
It was an order, and after the months of bootcamp and training, his legs would probably have carried him across the room and placed him in the chair whether he wanted them to or not. So he sat and looked at the deck.
“Look at me, sailor.”
Garret raised his eyes. Captain Maxwell was weathered, but he had the strong, balanced features women seemed to like. His face was guarded, not as if deceitful, but as if his mind had taken a permanent step back so that it could judge the world dispassionately.
Despite the Captain’s reserve, his personality was forceful enough that sitting close to him was uncomfortable. Looking him in the eye was even more so. Garret held his gaze for as long as he could. It wasn’t long. He dropped his eyes to the deck again.
Garret felt the pressure release when Maxwell finally turned his attention back to his sextant, which was coming back together so smoothly that the parts seemed to be rolli
ng across the table and falling into place by themselves.
“Tell me about your wife,” Maxwell said.
Garret bit his lip. Maxwell saw him do it. He put the sextant down.
What do you want? Garret begged inside his head. Why are you doing this to me?
“Doing what to you, sailor?”
Garret turned white. Dear God, I said it out loud. He groped. “I… I’m sorry sir.”
Maxwell regarded him for another stretched silence, then seemed to come to some sort of decision. “Seaman Vilner, you will be my steward for the rest of this voyage.”
Steward? Garret knew what that meant. The captain’s steward was his personal servant and errand boy. It meant most, if not all, of Garret’s regular duties would be assigned to someone else. Garret’s heart fell into his boots.
“It displeases you to be given this honor?” Maxwell asked, even though Garret was sure he hadn’t said it aloud this time. The appropriate thing to do would have been to stumble around with Yes sir, I mean no sir, I mean I’m honored sir.
Instead, Garret put his head in his hands and said nothing. Most of the time he spent with his friends was when they were all on duty together. If those duties were reassigned to someone else…
He’d lost his wife and son. Now in a way, he was losing his friends too. There was no honor in this, only loneliness.
Maxwell had moved the sextant aside and was scanning some sort of form he was filling out, with a ridiculous pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “You will still have time to spend with your friends. I do not require a steward in the ordinary manner, and your duties to me will be scant, though I will send you to—”
The electric lights in the stateroom dimmed, folding Garret and his Captain in an ominous semi-darkness that seemed to press them closer to together. Alarm bells slammed into the quiet, shattering Garret’s already frayed nerves. The lights came back up, though still dimmer than usual. The alarm bells continued. Maxwell shot a glance at the overhead bulb, then he waved a hand to his reluctant steward. “Come with me.”
Ironclad Page 14
