THE ANCIENT

Muriel Gray is a broadcaster and author. She lives in Glasgow
with her husband and three children.

Also by Muriel Gray

THE TRICKSTER
FURNACE

MURIEL GRAY

The A ncient

HarperCollinsPublishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

135798642

Copyright © Muriel Gray 2001

The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN 0002253143

Typeset in New Baskerville by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed in Great Britain by
Omnia Books Limited, Glasgow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Hamish, Hector, Rowan and
Angus James Barbour, with love

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Captain Robert Paje for access to the CSK
Tribute, Jim Shields of the Clyde Port Authority, Nick
Nairn, Bruce Hyman, Michael Fishwick, Jane Johnson,
and most of all Hamish.



1


In other circumstances, Eugenio might have given the rat a
name. Rats, and the bold rats of this sun-baked slum more
than most, were hard to capture. He might have kept it under
a crate and thrown it pieces of food, simply to be its master, to
control it, to confine it, the way his own life was determined
by pinched-faced adults.

But this rat was to die. It was their sacrifice, and as such,
it needed no name.

The creature writhed and thrashed in the soiled canvas bag
that Eugenio held out from his body. His two companions
watched, eyes big in anticipation, waiting for their leader,
their priest, to guide them.

As the oldest at nine years of age, Eugenio felt the weight
of that responsibility: he moulded his face into an expression
of suitable solemnity as he kicked at a piece of hardboard in
the rubbish.

'Here.'

The two smaller boys glanced at him, then went to work,
pulling the wood from the malodorous pile, farmers lifting a
diseased crop from a toxic field. This slowly-shifting glacier
of garbage was their home, their playground, their store
cupboard. The fetor had long since ceased to make any
impact on their senses, nor did the uniformity of its colour
and texture, a mosaic of greys and primary hues, fill them
with despair. They were the naturalized creatures of this
place and the stained Nike T-shirts they wore ticked them
with approval.

The board was extricated and positioned at the mute
head-nodded directions of Eugenio the priest. He squinted
at the sun to check its position and was satisfied.

Both boys knew what to do. The smaller took the awful
thing, the thing none of them wanted to touch, from his
plastic carrier bag and laid it carefully in the centre of this
makeshift altar, while the other unsheathed the salvaged
hunting knife.

Eugenio glanced at the doll, if anything so repugnant
could be described as a doll. Its head was formed from
the skull of rat, which had been stitched onto the leather
body by means of a strap through the sockets, onto which
two black orbs of cloudy stone had been glued to mimic
eyes. Below it, tiny irregular tin teeth had been meticulously
embedded into the yellowed bone, bestowing a manic grin
upon the skull that was worse than the grimace of any corpse.
It topped a grotesque torso, worn shiny leather that described
a bulbous belly, gashed open and stitched back with the
same loving craftsmanship as the head attachment. There
was a cavity inside, open and ready to receive their sacrifice.
It was ovoid like a recently-vacated womb, hardened and
blackened from previous offerings, and the scabbed interior
gave the slit womb an authenticity as though any baby's
exit had been a bloody and fatal one. But if the figure was
meant to be female, then the horrifically-oversized leather
penis that hung obscenely between its legs was a strange
contradiction. The arms and legs were thin, reptile-like,
too long for the squat body; but the worse aspect of their
fragility were the long, serrated shards of metal, like broken
claws, that completed each limb.

Eugenio began to feel nervous. If his aunt discovered
that he had taken this figure from her few possessions she
would make him suffer. Her rage was always contained and
deadly, and he swallowed at the idea of what she might do.
But she would not know. The ceremony would be over in
minutes and if successful, would grant him the power that
would make even her spite meaningless. His greatest fear
was that it wouldn't work. His knowledge was patchy, only
a tiny portion of what his aunt and her clients discussed in
their drugged ramblings. The rest he was going to invent.
Somehow he felt sure that improvisation would suffice. The
power of the ceremony after all, he had convinced himself,
was in the intention, not the vocabulary.

Tiny as it was, it took all three of them to hold the rat
down as Eugenio sliced through its filthy fur. It bared its
teeth and piped its agony in a series of shrill screams that
fascinated the boys as they worked. They heard rats fight
all the time, but the piercing, high-pitched squeals that
accompanied those scuffles, so high they operated on
the very edge of human hearing, were quite unlike this.
These protestations were guttural, having a power that
defied the small lungs that expelled them, and secretly,
Eugenio enjoyed the sound. He hated rats. They crawled
on him at night, pissing on his blanket, boldly feeding
on the scraps of food that were never cleaned from the
hard-packed earthen floor of his family's shack. Now here
was fitting revenge.

Delicately Eugenio sliced out the beating heart and pincered
the ludicrously tiny organ between thumb and forefinger,
quickly transferring it to the leather slit, poking it into place
with a bloody finger and wiping his hand unconsciously on
the side of his shorts.

Three pairs of eyes darted between each other's faces then
closed in reverence.

Eugenio cleared his throat and began to speak with a
curious mixture of the self-consciousness of a young boy,
and the gravitas of a priest.

'Fallen One - whether male or female, at any rate com
mander of heat and reproduction, being one who even with
his spittle can work sorcery - where art thou?'

He opened his eyes and looked at the now-still heart in its
leather nest, but the figure's empty eye-sockets stared past him
into space, oblivious to the gift in its belly. Eugenio closed his
eyes again, this time screwing them tightly shut as though the
effort would increase his potency.

'I shall be seen by thee, and thou wilt know me. Would
that thou were not hidden from this son of thine. Eat of this
sacrificed heart, and also of the one still beating in the body
of thy servant.'

He stopped. This was as much as he had memorized from
his aunt. From now on the quality of the prayer would
plummet. He would have to make it up. His saliva dried,
both from the tension of what he desired to happen, and
the terror of looking a fool in front of his companions.

'I am ... no one. You ... thou ... are eternity. We want
you to come to us... and to give us power to... do many
things.'

One of the boys opened his eyes and looked across at his
leader. The change in tone had not gone unnoticed. Eyes
still closed tightly, Eugenio continued undaunted.

'Come to us now, as you have come to others before us. As
you have come to the older ones before the Spanish came.'

He opened his eyes and saw that his entire congregation
of two were now staring at him.

He stared back defiantly, then let his eyes drop to the
useless, static doll, and the flat-furred husk of the rat, mottling
the already-stained hardboard altar with its thick, poisonous
blood.

A terrifying and powerful bellow broke the silence, and
the three boys jumped in fright.

There was a brief moment of confusion, a moment in
which they believed the Fallen One had answered them with
that fearsome bestial noise, and then their inbred survival
instincts processed the information and made them scatter
like rats themselves. There was trouble approaching. But not
of the supernatural kind. In seconds they had disappeared.

Their hurried departure knocked the altar at an angle, and
the figure flopped over, slowly letting its tiny prize slither onto
the wood and down into the trash.

The shout was repeated, but this time it was followed by a
sharp laugh from another source. Scrabbling in the rubbish
like a runner in sand dunes, a youth burst over the short
horizon of plastic bottles, car tyres and old mattresses.

His face was contorted with fear, his mouth a black
downward crescent of horror, as he stumbled across the
unforgiving terrain like a drunk. Close behind came two
men, running, but with less urgency, the broader of the two
allowing a gun to dangle casually from his hand.

Anything could have tripped the runner; a piece of metal
lying beneath the cartons and rotting vegetable matter; a
rope tangled in the mesh of discarded chicken wire; a
broken drawer from a chest protruding from the sea of
trash like a dorsal fin. But it was actually the hardboard
altar that snagged the pursued man's foot, and sent him
slapping into the undulating mush with a soft, revolting
thud.

His assailants slowed then approached him with party
smiles, while the fallen youth stayed face-down in the trash,
shoulders heaving, hands closing on discarded newspapers
and coffee grounds.

There was no dialogue, no conferring or taunting. The
man with the gun in his hand, swivelled his limp wrist and
shot the youth through the back of the head.

It was a gun without the benefit of a silencer. The sharp
crack reverberated shamelessly through the still afternoon.

Both men looked around like lions after a kill. Not afraid,
nor guilty, but bored, indifferent, blank.

No resident of this filthy colony would come to investigate.
No policemen would gallop to a chase. In this landscape
they were the law. They had the gun. The smaller of the
two men bent down and fumbled in the dead youth's jacket
until he had retrieved the tightly-packed plastic envelope of
white powder that had sentenced him to death.

Even then, there was no conversation, their companionship
being the company of animals, dumb and cunning at the
same time.

They turned to go, and as though some primitive electrical
connection had been made in his brain to remind him of his
last deed, the executioner turned back and spent one more
bullet on the corpse.

This time the trajectory took it through the very top of the
skull. He watched for a beat with satisfaction as the back of
the head burst off and a dark black and grey mess oozed
from the splintered head. Then he turned and followed his
companion.

The leather doll lay on its side mere inches from the dead
youth's head, its impassive features regarding the remains of
the human like a satisfied lover. Eugenio's aunt would take
her time in punishing the nephew who stole from her when
she discovered that the doll had gone. It was old. Very old.
She treasured it as nothing else, harbouring sick and atavistic
fantasies about what it might do for her tragic life if she could
unleash its rumoured power.

For Eugenio would not retrieve it.

Because as only the confused flies that had settled to sup on
the viscous meal before them, and the blazing indifferent sun
above witnessed, the impassive hand-stitched abomination
began to shift slightly. Slowly and almost imperceptibly at
first, its limbs began to be drawn down into the garbage. Not
naturally, the way an object may shift and settle with gravity,
but like prey caught by something unseen. In a matter of
seconds the doll had drowned and was gone down into the
trash - along with its still companion.

As the two figures, man and leather, sank beneath the fetid
surface, it was only a matter of minutes before the burst video
tapes and toilet paper, the mashed cloth and food remains,
had joined once again to make a new skin over their secret
and buried possession.



2


just one short glimpse was all the dusty window afforded, but
it was enough to confirm she was too late. Esther Mulholland
wiped the glass with the flat of her hand, as if smearing more
grime across the bus window would somehow make it not
true. But it was true. The dock had revealed itself briefly
between a low warehouse and some shanty huts and there,
silhouetted against a glittering late-afternoon sea were four
ships, none of them the one she had the ticket for.

She leant her head against the window and quickly removed
it again as the bus dived into a pothole, shaking her bones and
battering her forehead against the glass. The woman beside
her, who had been nursing a fat, scabbed chicken on her lap
for the entire journey, cackled and nodded a toothless grin
at the bus in general as though it were somehow obeying her
command. Esther had been watching her with fascination for
the last five hours, amused as the wizened, squat old woman
somehow anticipated the chicken before it shit, opening her
legs at just the right time to let the startled beast squirt onto
the floor beneath her.

The chicken, Esther reasoned in her most bored moments,
must tense its muscles before taking a dump, allowing the
woman who cupped it in her callused hands to feel its
contortions and take action. But whereas this had been
a charming diversion a hundred miles back in the stony
monotony of the Peruvian countryside, now it was irritating
her. The smell of the baking chicken shit on the floor and
the musky reek of unwashed human flesh, which very much
included her own, was making her stomach contents shift.

Unless that container ship was hiding, and it was unlikely
that 150, 000 tonnes of metal could achieve such a trick, then
she was well and truly stranded.

It had sailed, and with it had gone her only means of
getting home. It wasn't like Esther to be irresponsible. The
diversion to the temple in Lacouz had cost her only five days,
and she had calculated she would make it up on the journey
back from Cuzco. And she would have done, had it not
been for the curious, infuriating thing that had happened
in the shanty town where she'd camped overnight to wait for
the bus.

Esther had become aware, quite gradually, that a small
Peruvian man, a peasant from the plateau, judging by his
dress, had been following her all day, staring. He was there
outside the tiny store where she bought mineral water and
biscuits for the bus journey. He was there when she packed up
her tent, standing a short distance away, his gaze unflinching.
And he was there, gazing from the other side of the dirt
road, when she sat in the shade at the side of the road,
her back against a cool stone wall, waiting for the one and
only weekly bus to Callao. She was used to being stared at
by people the further she had strayed from the cities, but
this was different. He was not looking at her with that naked
and childlike curiosity natives have for foreigners. His was
the stare of someone who was waiting for something. She'd
tried waving, acknowledging his presence, but he'd merely
continued to look. Esther had been getting freaked by it,
and was glad to be leaving the town. But as she sat against
that wall, she'd decided to meet his eyes and stare him out.

All she remembered now was that his eyes had been slits as
he screwed them up against the sun, and yet as she stared at
him, she still felt the intensity of their scrutiny. She had felt
her own eyes growing heavy, and that was simply all she could
recall. When she'd woken up, her head slumped forward on
her chest, her neck agonizingly cramped, the man was gone,
and more importantly, so was the bus.

Her fury at her idiocy was incandescent, but pointless.
There had been nothing for it but to wait it out for another
week. And so here she was, seven days late, but at least she'd
got here.

The optimistic part of her had thought that maybe the ship
would be late leaving, that maybe the kind of luck a girl her
age took for granted would hold out. But quite clearly it
hadn't, and the truth was, she was stumped, stuck in the
nightmarish industrial port of Callao with a nonrefundable
ticket for a ship that wouldn't be back this way for over a
month.

Her fellow passenger opened her legs to let the chicken
shit again, and Esther closed her eyes. Options. As long as you
were alive, breathing, talking and walking, there were always
options. She held that thought, but on her own chicken-free
lap her hands made fists as if they knew better.

The bar didn't have a sign outside because it didn't have
a name. It was housed in a metal shed that had once
served as the offices of a coal-shipping merchant. Then it
might have had desks, angle-poise lamps, piles of documents,
calendars on the walls, fax machines and wastepaper bins.
Now it was simply a shed. Running parallel to one wall
was a long L-shaped wooden board nailed to metal trestle
legs that created a crude barrier between the clients and a
poverty-stricken gantry of a few greasy bottles of spirits and
crates of unrefrigerated beer. On the wall a small portable TV
was attached to a metal bracket. Its flickering images fought
against the broad shafts of sunlight that filtered from high
slits of windows, light that was made solid by the thick fog of
cigarette smoke. A coat-hanger aerial stuck on with duct tape
accounted for the snowy, hissing reception of the Brazilian
game-show that was being watched by the occupants of the
shed. Esther had time to take in these figures before they
registered her quiet entrance, and it did nothing to lift
her spirits.

About a dozen men slumped forward from the hip across
the wooden bar, their positions so similar they could have
been members of some obscure formation team. Each held
a cigarette in one hand, the other cradling a drink, and their
heads were uniformly tilted up to stare at the glow of the TV.
The barman's position was in exactly the same aspect, but in
mirror image. Even though his body was facing Esther, his
head was twisted to watch the screen and he failed to notice
her entering until the cheap double plywood door banged
dramatically back on its hinges. But the pause had given her
time to locate what she'd come in for, and without catching
the man's eye Esther strode as purposefully across the room
as her massive back-pack would allow to the wall-mounted
telephone. There was only a one-hour time difference in
Texas. She pictured exactly what Mort would be doing right
now as she waited for the Lily Tomlin-impersonating AT & T
woman to connect her.

Of course he would let the phone ring as long he could.
His chair would be on its back two legs, leant against the wall
of the trailer where he could monitor the residents of Selby
Rise Park from the long window above his desk, and keep a
doting eye on his ugly mutt tethered to a stake by the door
as it barked at friend and foe alike. He would have a cheroot
between his rough lips and a bottle of beer in his fist, and
there was nothing on this earth that would make him take
a call collect from Peru or anywhere else.

'No reply, caller.'

Esther scratched at the wall with a finger nail.

'He always takes a long time to answer. Can you give it a
few more rings?'

The operator made no reply and Esther was about to hang
up, assuming the call was terminated, but a few seconds
later she heard the connection being made. It was weird
hearing Mort's voice so far away, a voice that belonged in
another world.

'Yeah?'

'AT & T. I have a call collect from Callao, Peru, from Esther
Mulholland. Will you accept?'

'What?'

'I have a call collect...'

'Yeah, yeah. I got the stingy bastard call collect bit, sweet
heart. Where the fuck you say it's from again?'

There was a pause as the operator pondered whether to
hang up on the profane recipient or not, and then she said
curtly, 'Peru. South America.'

'No shit!'

Esther heard him chuckle.

'And it's Benny Mulholland's girl, you say? The one with
out the fuckin' dimes?'

'Will you accept the call?'

'Huh? Like all of a fuckin' sudden I'm an answerin' service
for her old man? Tell her to send a fuckin' postcard.'

He hung up. The operator cleared her throat. 'I'm sorry,
caller. The number will not accept.'

'I gathered. Thanks.'

Esther put the phone down gently. She had absolutely
no idea why she'd made that call. Even if a miracle had
happened and Mort Lenholf had taken her call, what did
she expect him to do? Benny would be blind drunk by now,
asleep in the green armchair in front of a blaring TV. Mort
could hammer on Benny's trailer door as long and hard as
he liked but she knew it would take a sledge hammer to the
kneecap even to make him stir. And the thought of her dad
being able to help out in a situation like this was equally
ludicrous. Benny Mulholland had probably just enough cash
left from his welfare cheque to get ratted every night until
the next one was due.

He wasn't exactly in a position to call American Express
and have them wire his daughter a ticket home. She decided
she had simply been homesick. Only for a moment, and only
in a very abstract way, since home was ten types of shit and
then ten more. But it had been an emotion profound enough
to want to make contact, and now it left her feeling even more
bereft than before. Despite having been to the most remote
and inhospitable corners of Peru on everything from foot to
mule, it was the first stirring of loneliness she'd felt in the
whole three months of travelling.

Esther sighed and turned back into the room. The forma
tion team of drinkers were now all looking her way. The
men, although similar in posture, were varied in nationality.
A handful were obviously Peruvian, their faces from the
unchanged gene pool that could be seen quite clearly on
thousand-year-old Inca, Aztec and Meso-American sculp
ture. Stevedores by the look of their coveralls, and not
friendly.

There was a smattering of Filipinos and Chinese, some
with epaulettes on stained nylon shirts that at least meant
they were merchant crew and not dangerous. Only one
face looked western, but it was such a familiar mess of
mildly intoxicated self-pity mixed with latent anger that
she looked away quickly in case she somehow ignited it.
The barman was staring at her with naked hostility, but it
was another kind of look in the assembled male company's
eyes that was making her uncomfortable. Esther wished she
wasn't wearing shorts. One of the Peruvians taking a very
long look at her tanned, muscular legs said something that
made his hunched companions snigger like schoolboys, and
a flicker of indignant rage began to grow in Esther's belly.
It was important to leave, so she lifted her pack and made
for the door.

'He's pissed off on account you didn't buy a drink.'

It was an American voice coming from the western face.
Esther stopped and faced him, but he had already turned to
the TV again, his back to her.

'Who is?' asked Esther in a voice smaller than she would
have liked.

'Prince Rameses the third. Who d'you figure?'

Esther stared at the back of his head until her silence made
him turn again. He spoke without taking the cigarette from
his mouth so that it swayed like a conductor's baton with
every word.

'The barman, honey, that's who.'

'I guessed they don't serve women in here.'

He took the cigarette from his mouth, blew a cloud of
smoke and squinted at her. 'They don't. Only liquor.'

Most of the men had joined this objectionable man in
turning back to the TV, maybe thinking western man to
western woman was a cultural bond too strong to break
or maybe because they were simply bored with the task of
making her uncomfortable.

Only a very drunk Filipino and a dull-eyed stevedore
continued to stare. She was grateful for the shift in attention
and it emboldened her.

'Uh-huh? Well maybe you can explain to him it's a shade
up-market for me. Guess I'm not dressed smart enough.'

The man looked at her closely and this time it was with
something approaching sympathy. Maybe he heard the slight
break in her voice. Maybe he'd listened to her fruitless call
home. Maybe neither of these. But it softened his face and
the tiny glimmer of warmth in his bleary eyes relaxed a part
of Esther that was gearing up for a fight.

'Shame. Looks like you could use a drink.'

He said it softly, almost as though he were talking to
himself, and since the tone lacked any kind of lascivious
or suggestive undercurrent, the words being nothing more
than an acutely accurate observation, Esther inexplicably felt
a lump of emotion welling at the back of her throat.

For no apparent reason, she wanted to cry, and at the same
time, yes, her mouth was already moistening at the realization
that a beer would be just about the most welcome thing in the
world right now. She gulped back her curiously unwelcome
emotion.

'They serve anything apart from paint stripper?'

The man smiled, then turned to the sullen barman and
said something quietly. Reluctantly the man bent and Esther
heard the unmistakable rubber thud of a concealed icebox
door being closed. A bottle of beer was placed on the wooden
board, the cold glass misting in the heat.

Esther looked from the bottle to the American and back
again, wrestling with the folly of continuing this uneasy
relationship.

What was she afraid of? In the last three months she had
travelled and slept under the stars with a band of near-silent
alpaca shepherds, walked alone for weeks in the mountains,
and resisted the advances of two nightmarish Australian
archaeologists.

She had stood on the edge of the world, as awed and
terrified by the green desert of jungle that stretched eastwards
to seeming infinity as the Incas who had halted the progress
of their empire at almost the same spot had been. A dipso
American merchant seaman and a few ground-down working
men were not going to cause her trouble, even if they
wanted to, which judging by their renewed attention to
the Brazilian game-show host now hooking his arm round
what looked like a Vegas showgirl, was not high in their
priorities.

She walked forward, touched the bottle lightly with her
fingers and gave the barman a look that enquired how much
she owed him.

'On me,' said her self-appointed host.

Before she could protest and pretend that she would con
sider it improper, the man behaved outstandingly properly
and offered his right hand as though she were a visiting
college inspector and he the principal.

'Matthew Cotton. Enriched to hear my native tongue.'
Esther studied him for a beat then took the hand. 'Esther
Mulholland.' She removed her hand and touched the bottle
again. 'Thanks.'

The beer was delicious. She took two long swallows, closing
her eyes as the freezing, bitter liquid fizzed at the back of her
dry throat.

'They write up Pedro's joint in some back-packers' guide,
or did you just get lost?'

Esther wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
'The guys at the dock gate said this was the only phone.'

Matthew Cotton nodded through another cloud of smoke.
'Yeah. Guess it is.'

'Nice,' said Esther, gesturing to the room in general with
her bottle.

'It's also the only bar.'

Esther took another swallow, watching him as he shrugged
to qualify his statement. 'You off a boat?'

Matthew nodded. 'Lysicrates. That pile of shit they're load
ing.'

'Just a long shot, but has the Valiant Ellanda been in?'

Matthew looked up at her with mild surprise. 'You some
kind of cargo boat fanatic?'

'Cargo boat passenger whose boat looks like having sailed.'
Matthew raised an interested eyebrow, then turned his
glass round in a big hand as he thought. 'Valiant Ellanda.
Container ship. Right? Big mother.'

Esther nodded, enthusiastically.

'Sailed last week.'

Esther nodded again weakly.

'Then guess you got a little time to kill.'

'I wish. Due back at college in ten days.'

'They'll live.'

Esther looked at the bar. 'I'm military. Scholarship.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.'

Matthew was looking at her more closely now, continuing
to study her face as he drained the last of some yellowish spirit
that had filled his glass. Without even looking at the barman,
he gestured with the empty vessel and it was filled nearly to
the brim. Esther looked away, reminded of Benny and the
tiny, unpleasant ritualistic mannerisms that all alcoholics
shared.

'What they do then, if you're late? Shoot you?'

'Put it this way: military students don't get a lot of slack to
dress up in tie-dye vests and wave placards. And you sure as
hell don't get to pick when you show up for semester.'

Matthew tipped the glass back and emptied half of it,
baring his teeth in a snarl as the liquid drained down his
throat.

'Bummer,' he croaked.

'You got that right.'

Matthew turned his head back up to the TV and leaned
forward on his elbows. Esther waited to see if the conversation
would be continued and when it was clear that it would not,
she drained the rest of her beer and made ready to go. She
picked up her pack.

'We sail for Texas. Two days' time.'

He spoke as though talking to the game-show host.
'Sorry?'

'Port Arthur.'

Esther's heart beat a little faster, then it slowed and sank.
'My ticket's nonrefundable.'

'Aw, bullshit. Most companies say that stuff. They'll do
a deal.'

Esther shook her head. 'Not with this ticket. Even the
cheapest cargo ship ticket is way out of my reach. I'm only
here 'cause a geek I dated at college has a dad who works
for the shipping company. Man, to think I put up with that
guy's bad breath and stinking taste in movies for at least two
months to get that ticket.'

She paused and looked at the floor.

'And just on account of wanting to see some shitty old
temple they've only just half dug out the grit, I've blown it.
Big time.'

Matthew was still looking at the screen, but he was smiling.

'What'd he make you see?'

'Waterworld, for one.'
Jesus.'

'Yeah.'

Matthew stared at the screen a little more, then looked
at his wristwatch. 'Gimme an hour then come by the boat.
Captain's pretty easy going.'

Esther put her pack down slowly. 'For real?'

'No risk to me, honey. He can only say no.'

'What rank are you?'

Matthew turned to her, a quite different look in his eye
now, one that was difficult to read but undeniably harder
than when he'd last looked at her. 'First officer.'

Esther cleared her throat, embarrassed, though not quite
sure why. 'Right. Great.'

He looked back at the screen and Esther took the hint.
'An hour then.'
He made no reply.

She hooked the pack over her shoulder and made for the
door. 'Thanks for the beer.'

' Sure. '

The plywood door banged shut again and although there
was still an inch left in his glass, Matthew Cotton gestured
to the barman. It was important to think ahead. After all,
he would have drained that inch before the bottle was
uncorked.



3


As the giant crane swung on its arc, the sun shining between
the criss-crossed metal girders strobed across the deck of the
MY Lysicrates, and bugged the tits off its first officer.

Matthew Cotton blinked against it as he leant heavily on
the ship's tail rail and watched Esther's predicament with
amusement. He was leaning heavily because he was only a
few drinks away from the oblivion he'd been chasing since
noon, and he watched with amusement because her are was
becoming comical.

'Give the greasy little sucker some cash,' he mouthed at
her, then took another deep swallow from a can of thin South
American beer.

As if she'd heard him from the unlikely distance of fifty
yards, she turned her head and squinted up at the ship,
gesturing violently again at the vessel to the undernourished
harbour security guard, who was no longer even looking at
her. The guard flicked his hand dismissively in her direction
as though warding off a fly, and shifted his weight from one
bony leg to the other. She towered above this little man, and
perhaps if he hadn't sported an ancient gun in a battered
leather holster by his hip, she would simply have elbowed
him out of the way and walked on.

That option not open to a woman with an instinct for
survival, she was vigorously pursuing the only other one,
which was to shout.

In a moment Matthew would rescue her, but for now he was
using the time just to look. There hadn't been the time or space
to examine her properly in the smoky little bar, but now he was
in a position to study her without fear of spiky feminine reprisal.

She was too far off for him to take in close detail, but
already he liked the suggestion of athleticism in her angry
body, the way she was practically stamping her foot, and when
she mashed an exasperated hand into her hair he imagined
he could register its shine.

He smiled and wiped his mouth clean of the acrid beer
foam; shifted a drinker's phlegm from his throat.

'Hey! Hector!' His shout made the diminutive man look
up lazily. Though he couldn't make out her words, Matthew
assumed she had been braying at the guard in English that
merely increased in volume as understanding diminished. No
matter what her circumstances were, and if he were honest he
was so loaded now he could barely remember their conver
sation, she was just your average American back-packing kid.
Shout down what you can't control. He raked around for his
best Spanish.

'Let her aboard. She's a passenger.' He hesitated, then
added for no reason other than mischief, 'A little something
for the crew.'

The guard scratched at his balls and did nothing. Matthew
waited. He knew these people. To react to anything immedi
ately was a sign of defeat. Esther waited too, her eyes nar
rowed to slits in Matthew's direction.

The weary Peruvian hand motioned again, this time obliquely
directing her towards the gangway, then the man squatted
down and got busy picking his teeth, as though all along
his objection had been that she was preventing him from
performing this important task.

She took her time coming aboard, pulling on that enor
mous back-pack complete with tent, hanging tin mugs and
water bottles, then walked slowly forward with the gait of
someone used to carrying a large burden.

As she came closer Matthew noted the deep tan on the
thighs that protruded from her patterned shorts, and the
incongruously masculine muscles that made them move with
grace under such weight.

He stayed where he was, but lifted his head to greet her
as she negotiated the skinny drawbridge of wood that was
suspended over the moat of Pacific Ocean below. 'They don't
speak English too good, those guys,' he said with what he
imagined was a boyish grin.

She stopped and rubbed at her scalp again. 'You cleared
it then?'

Matthew squinted, uncomprehending.

'With the captain?'

He grinned, swaying slightly. 'Aw, yeah. Sure. Sure I did.'
She looked doubtful, and the sudden childlike anxiety
that crossed her face, the expression of a disappointed
kid, touched a nerve in the deep drunken miasma that
was enveloping Matthew Cotton. He breathed quickly and
sharply through his nose and tried to focus, tried harder to
clear his brain.

'Straight up. He's cool. You get the owner's cabin. It's cun
ningly marked "owner's cabin" on D-deck. Through there,
two floors up. Third on the right. Not locked.'

Her face lit with relief, then a more unpleasant emotion
betrayed itself as her eyes strayed to the beer can in Matthew's
fist. Pity.

'Listen. Thanks. I owe you.'

Matthew nodded, looking away to avoid her pitying eyes,
and she walked towards the passenger block, the cups and
pan clanking on her pack.

'By the way.'

He didn't look round. He didn't want to hear any adden
dum right now. Nor look back into the eyes of an attractive
young girl who was finding a drunken older man sad.
'Matthew?'

She spoke his name so gently it broke his resolve and he
turned.

'Huh?'

'I think you'll find that grammatically, "little something"
in Spanish, when you refer to an object with contempt, uses
the diminutive to emphasize the colloquialism.'

The Lysicrates' only passenger scanned the accommodation
block and disappeared through the door from the poop
deck.

Matthew watched the heavy metal lozenge long after it
swung shut, then drained his beer, crushed the can and
threw it into the water below.

Esther Mulholland liked to pee in the shower. When the
water was perfect, the hot stream of urine that spiralled from
leg to leg was without temperature. Visible, but not tangible,
it joined her with the needles of water in a way that made
her sigh with satisfaction. It had been so long since she had
revelled in this ritual that the developed world thought so
important, this rinsing of the body that separated them from
the savages.

It felt like a return. She let the hot water batter her for at
least ten minutes, opening her mouth to let it run in and out,
then stepped from the tiny plastic tray into the hot cabin.

Esther put her hands on either side of the porthole and
leant her forehead against the glass. The circular window
looked out onto a serpentine collection of pipes, their paint
peeling like a disease, and beyond them the port of Callao
clanked and whined with industry.

So what if the ship was shitty, this was luck beyond her
dreams. She knew it was irregular, probably illegal. Bulk
carriers didn't usually take paying passengers, only the bigger
ships, the ones full of officers' bored wives slowly drinking
themselves to death on bleak industrial decks, armed with the
civilized pretence that somehow every hour was cocktail hour.
But if the drunken first officer and his malleable captain were
happy to take her, she was ecstatic to accept. If it was against
the law then, hell, it would be their heads on the block
not hers.

And look what she got for free. The owner's cabin, with
shower. A seventies homage to Formica, flowered curtains
and hairy carpet tiles, a cell of privacy that gave her a whole
four days before they docked in Texas to make sense of the
hundreds of pages of scribbles she'd made in her tattered
red notebook, and more importantly, translate the pile of
Dictaphone tapes. She grabbed a thin towel stamped with
some other ship's name, rubbed at her hair and sat down
heavily on the foam sofa. This was going to get her a first. A
big fat, fuck-off-I-told-you-I-could-do-it degree, the kind that
only the lucky rich kids walked away with, regardless of what
was between their ears. Right now she felt luckier than hell.
She laid the excuse for a towel over her face and lay back
with a smile.

Hold number three was still dripping from the high-pressure
hoses that had bombarded its sides. Now it was ready to
receive its cargo. The two massive iron doors were rolled
back on rails to either side, and the water that dripped from
the lip echoed as it fell thirty feet into the dark pit below.

Two Filipino ABSs leaning on the edge of the hold
regarded the black-red interior impassively.

It was nothing more than an iron box, featureless except
for a rusty spiral staircase winding its way up one wall,
and scaling the other, a straight Australian ladder lead
ing to the manhole that emerged on the deck. Soon both
would be smothered under the hundreds of tonnes of loose
trash that the crane was already spewing into holds one
and two.

'Fuck me, Efren. Where'd this shit come from?'

The smaller of the two sailors looked round lazily at the
voice, with just enough animation in his body to avoid
the accusation of insubordination. He grinned, and sniffed
the air as if it was full of wind-blown blossom.

'Come from Lima. Big pile. People live on it.'

Matthew Cotton felt like puking, helped of course by four
double rum and Cokes, six shots ofgrappa and five beers; but
mainly because the smell from the holds was so terrible.

'Yeah? Well guess it ain't a whole lot different to living in
Queens.'

Though he hadn't the remotest idea what his senior officer
was referring to, Efren Ramos stood on one leg, smiled
through gapped teeth and nodded. Matthew could have
sworn they were going back to Port Arthur empty, but of
course the suits at Sonstar would rather piss on their own
grandmothers than have one of their ships burn fuel without
earning cash. If they were struggling for a decent load of ore
then he guessed the trash made sense.

Matthew didn't give a shit. He was on his way back to his
cabin to sleep this one off. Then he would get up in time for
dinner and start work on a whole new stretch of drunkenness.
That was what mattered. Keeping it topped up. Keeping it all
nice and numb.

He turned with a flick of the hand that meant 'carry on' and
walked unsteadily back to the accommodation block. The sun
was getting low, but even so its heat was bothering him.

He wanted the shade of a cabin with the drapes pulled and
the darkness of sleep, where for a few short hours nothing
and nobody could reach him.

Darkness brought a sour breeze to the dock, and to the
ship it brought a nightly invasion of mosquitoes that could
not only locate every inch of exposed human skin, but even
the fleshy parts of the countless rats that ran the length of
their metal sea-going home.

Of course there were no rats on the Lysicrates. Every official
form and inspection sheet signed and dated testified to that,
claiming proudly that the ship was free from infestation.
Indeed, that was what the circular metal plates ringing the
top of the ropes were for, to stop the vermin boarding ship.

But there were rats. And on a ship this size, that meant
there was plenty of room for them to carry on their daily,
and right now, nightly, business.

The MY Lysicrates was 280 metres long, weighed a dead
tonnage of 158,537, had nine holds and a crew of twenty-
eight, all Filipino except for two.

Even in this bleak industrial Peruvian port, the three other
ships that lay alongside her were doing so with considerably
more dignity, for the Lysicrates transmitted an air of decay that
was hard to prove in detail, but impossible to ignore in essence.

It was the feeling that everything that was necessary to
keeping her working had been done so only up to the legal
limit and not an inch beyond.

The paint was peeling only in places that didn't matter, the
deck was not littered with hazardous material that constituted
an offence, but neither was it particularly clean, and the hull
was dulled with variegated horizontal stripes of algae that
clearly were not planned to be dealt with as a priority.

Its depreciating appearance was not unusual in a working
merchant fleet, particularly in this part of the world, but it
was nevertheless an unsightly tub.

She had been lying in Callao for twelve days, which pleased
the lower-ranking crew who had been taking the train daily
to Lima, returning with a variety of cheap and unpleasant
purchases they imagined might curry favour with loved ones
back home.

But the turnaround time was unusual. The Lysicrates
worked hard for her living. Of a fleet of ten ships, she was
the eldest, and sailing as she was under a Monrovian flag
of convenience, she was hardly the most prestigious. The
dubious registration meant that the company could avoid
practically every shipping regulation in the book, and by
and large, it did. While she was still afloat, the ship's task
was to sail loaded, as often and as quickly as she could,
so the fortnight's holiday in port was not normally on the
agenda. But no one was complaining. And no one seemed
to mind that the captain had spent an unusual length of the
time ashore. All anyone cared about was that the holds were
filling up and it was time to go.

Just as Leonardo Becko, the cook, was putting the last
touches to a dinner of steak and fries, the door of the last
hold of the Lysicrates was rolling closed with a rumble.

That would mean it was only a matter of hours, and the
crew were already milling around above and below deck,
making the comfortable and familiar preparations to ensure
the constant uncertainty of the sea would once more be
under their control.

As they did so, the cargo in hold two shifted its bulk as
the strip of daylight that moulded its rotting undulations
narrowed steadily with the closing door, and the two massive
metal plates met, enfolding it in darkness.

What air remained in the three to four foot gap between
trash and steel seemed to sigh as the finality of the doors
being secured subtly shifted the pressure. And then the
broth of waste that was as solid as it was liquid was alone
in the dark. Locked in. Silent. Content with its own decay.

In the officers' messroom, Captain Lloyd Skinner was already
at his table, pouring himself a glass of water, when he caught
sight of his female passenger walking past the open door.
'Miss ... eh ... ?'

Her figure moved backwards into the door frame. Esther
had changed into a cotton shirt and jeans, and with her
deeply tanned flesh scrubbed she radiated a health that was
out of place in the atmosphere of mundane industrial toil.
'Hi? Mulholland. Esther Mulholland.'

The man cleared his throat, and smiled. 'This is where
you eat.'

She looked down the corridor, to the open door of the
crew's mess hall where she'd planned on eating, already
accommodating five silent Filipinos, smoking and waiting
patiently for their food. Esther returned the smile and walked
into the room.

There were three round tables set for dinner, empty, their
glasses and cutlery polished and waiting for diners. The
Starsky-and-Hutch interior designer had been at work here
too, adding plastic pot plants to the garish patterned fabrics,
affording the room the atmosphere of a sad waiting area in
a run-down clinic.

'Captain?' She held out her hand but didn't sit down,
waiting to be asked. This was a different deal from the voyage
out here. She had no passenger rights that normally elevated
the ticket holder to the status of officers, only the good will
of this man she'd never met, and Esther had an instinct for
making herself worthy of good will when she needed to.

The man had an abstracted expression, his attention else
where. 'Eh, yes. Lloyd Skinner.'

He took her hand without rising, shook it limply, moved
the book he had been reading to one side as though it were
in her way, then motioned in general to the three ugly
plastic padded chairs beside him like a reluctant furniture
salesman.

Skinner, she reckoned, looked to be in his late forties,
perhaps even early riffles, but in direct contrast to his soak
of a first mate he was in such good shape it was hard to
tell. Whereas Matthew Cotton was probably only scraping
the ceiling of his thirties, his hair had greyed prematurely,
and his face was lined, brutalized, the flesh sucked from the
bones by abuse, leaving him with the mask of a much older
man. Skinner glowed with health. Sandy hair topped an oval golden-brown face with distracted blue eyes and a mouth
that was perhaps a little on the thin side. He was powerfully
built, and the arms that emerged from his short-sleeved shirt
indicated that his body hadn't always been behind a desk.

Esther gave an internal sigh of relief that at least the man
in charge of this decidedly shabby tub seemed to be halfway
human. She sat down happily.

'I really want to thank you, Captain Skinner. I mean, this
is way past kindness and out the other side.'

The man coughed into his fist while looking beyond her
at the open door, then at the plastic plants.

'No problem. These, eh, tickets, are pretty flexible.' He
gestured vacantly into the air and continued. 'Merchant ships
change their schedules all the time.'

Esther's heart started to barnacle with lead.

'Didn't your first officer mention mine was nonrefundable?'

'Oh, we'll sort it.'

'No. I mean really. It's a grace-and-favour ticket.'

The captain looked at her properly for the first time, and
there seemed to be something akin to alarm behind his eyes.
'You have family in the shipping line?'

Esther thought about Gerald McKenzie. Thought about
his clammy hands on her breasts and his awful breath in
her ear. Thought about him guffawing in the darkness of the
theatre at the pathetic overwrought antics of Jim Carrey, his
wet mouth full of popcorn. She gulped back a combination of
revulsion and shame at how she'd used him, and like so many
boys before, hadn't let him use her like he'd planned.

'No. No. It's a friend's father. He works for Croydelle.'

Skinner ran a hand over his jaw and neck and looked away
again. 'Ah. Well ... whatever.'

There was an awkward silence, while Esther waited for
some kind of confirmation that indeed everything would be
all right, but was rewarded only by Captain Skinner looking
down and touching his book absently as though he wished
very badly to go back to it. She cleared her throat.

'So will that still be okay?'

'Mm? Oh yes. Yes. I'm sure. Your ticket. You can, eh, see
the purser with it.'

He smiled weakly, then looked to a figure hovering by the
door to the galley, more to avoid the awkwardness of this
conversation, thought Esther, than out of an eagerness to be
served. The glance, however, bore fruit.

A man in a stained white waiter's jacket approached the
table, handed them both a menu encased in a thick red
plastic folder like that of a cheap diner, then disappeared
again. Skinner straightened his arms and regarded the menu
as though it were the printed fare of a state banquet.

Esther looked at the intent on his face and quickly reviewed
her first impression. She ought to have guessed that no
ordinary captain would employ such a drunk for his first in
command, but the level of this man's dismissive distraction
seemed out of character for a man in charge of a large ship
and sizeable crew.

The captain on the Valiant Ellanda had been a straight
forward industrial boss, friendly, but very much in charge,
his officers a reasonable selection of men doing their jobs
and enjoying the limited social life at the end of their
watches. That journey had been uneventful, the company
boring, but the atmosphere comforting. This was disquieting.
Esther glanced down at the paperback on the table, desperate
to start a conversation that would at least engage him before
he changed his mind about her free passage. She expected
a Wilbur Smith or worse, the standard fodder of bored
sailors, but what she saw shocked her, immediately halting
the small-talk possibilities her brain was already preparing.
He was reading an English translation of the Koran.

Esther looked from the book to the man and back again.
'Are you Muslim, Captain Skinner?'

He looked at her for a moment as though she were mad,
then blinked down at the book placing the thick menu gently
alorgside it. 'Hmm? Ah. Ha ha. Good gracious no.' He lifted
the volume and looked at it as if for the first time. 'Just
working nay way through the religions of the world.'

A small Filipino man entered the room, nodded to them
both, showing no surprise at all at Esther's presence, then
sat down at another table and took out a book of his own.

'Really? Some task,' said Esther, quite genuinely intrigued
and not a little impressed. She tried to force his eye contact
back to her again by touching the book lightly. 'You're
interested in theology then?'

Captain Skinner looked over at the officer engrossed in his
own less contentious volume, a Filipino translation of some
ancient Tom Clancy, then gazed absently again at the plastic
pot plant.

'Interested in the uniform stupidity of mankind.' He looked
back round at Esther coolly. 'No offence of course, Miss
Mulholland. If you're religious yourself.'

She shook her head slowly.

'Not at all.'

'Then you might take my point.'

'It's certainly one view of spirituality.'

He smiled benignly as though they had been discussing
the weather, then folded his hands neatly on the menu in
front of him.

As the three expectant diners sat in a tense silence the
Filipino man at the next table was joined by one other, and
as if on cue the waiter appeared again, handed them both
menus and shuffled to the captain's table to take orders.

Esther endured the first course - some green wheat-floured
soup - in miserable silence, listening to the two other men
talking softly in their own language, occasionally laughing
and nodding, enjoying an easy companionship. When the
leathery steaks came and it became clear that her fellow
diner had no intention of speaking, she decided it was too
much. She was going to try again.

'So where you from then, Captain?'

Skinner looked up as if he'd just noticed her. 'Denver
originally. Florida now.'

Esther beamed. 'Gee. That's a change and a half.'

He returned her smile without warmth, but the prompt
seemed to work. 'And you?'

'Scranton PA, originally. Texas now. So guess I'm not one
to talk.'

'Ah. Hence no southern drawl,' he said without interest
through a mouth of fries.

'Why I do declare I can manage when I try,' said Esther
in her best Pam Ewing.

Skinner ignored the burlesque but looked at her with
renewed interest. 'And you do what exactly there?'

Esther moved her food around a little with the fork to
mask embarrassment at her failed entertainment. 'College.
Last year majoring in anthropology. This was my dissertation
field trip.'

Genuine curiosity, the first she had noticed since their
meeting, lit behind Skinner's eyes. 'Interesting. What do you
hope to do with such a thing when you graduate?'

'Well it's a military scholarship. So I guess during the seven
years of active service I'll owe them after I qualify, at least I'll
understand people and their diversities of culture before I
kill them.'

Skinner looked at her for a moment in stunned silence,
then he put his big hands down on the table, threw his head
back and laughed.

Surprised, but delighted at the reaction to such a feeble
joke, Esther watched his face then joined in his mirth.

'I guess we're a lot alike, Miss Mulholland.'

And that was the last thing he said to her before he finished
the remainder of his meal in cheerful silence, leaving her
alone at the table to contemplate exactly how that similarity
might be manifest itself.



4


No matter what time of day or night it was, the accommo
dation block of the Lysicrates always housed someone asleep.
Different shifts and watches meant the crew made their own
day and night, and there was an understanding about noise
and privacy that was delicately observed in the way that
people living at such close quarters are forced to do. There
were currently four bodies lying in their respective cabins.

The first officer was unconscious on his foam sofa, a
crushed beer can held to his chest like a teddy bear. The sec
ond engineer was fast asleep in a neatly-made bed dreaming
of his wife, and the sixteen-year-old deck cadet, the youngest
of the. crew, was snoring loudly on his back in a top bunk
after having masturbated over a not-particularly-explicit porn
magazine the cook had brought him back from Lima.

But although it was his turn to sleep, and with only another
legitimate hour and a half in which to do so, Fen Sahg, a
greaser and fireman, was wide awake. He had turned his back
on the cabin in an attempt to avoid looking at the gaudy idols
and 3-D posters his cabin mate Tenghis had fixed to every
surface he could morally call his own. Even though he was
staring fixedly at the white painted metal of the cabin wall, the
image of Tenghis's plaster Virgin Mary, her head inclined in
pity, her white arms outstretched as though for his soul alone,
was burnt into the back of his eyes. He knew the man only
did it to rile him. They were both Catholics by upbringing of
course, but Tenghis had taken exception to what he called
Fen's 'wicked pagan superstitions', and believed it was his
duty as a good Christian to bring him back into the fold. It
was true he was superstitious, but only with good cause.

Tenghis's fears were hypocritical, since Fen knew only too
well that Tenghis himself could have his moments too. They
had both worried when two voyages ago the chief engineer
brought his wife on the ship. Surely every sailor knew it was
unlucky to have a lone woman on board. Two or three
officers' wives, well maybe that was okay. But one alone?
No. And look what had happened. The cook had nearly
sliced his little finger clean off during that storm south of
Panama. There was no doubt amongst the lower-ranking crew
who had been responsible for that. No, superstition was not
always baloney and old women's fears. But as to his wicked
paganism, Tenghis was wrong too. To amuse his fellow crew
members, Fen often held Saanti readings in the mess hall
or his cabin, the method of prediction and revelation being
an obscure Asian mixture of Tarot and ouiji. The Saanti
showed him the truth of things, and he would be a fool not
to pay heed. That didn't mean he too couldn't be a good
Christian, and Tenghis's sulk after such an evening, which
would sometimes last for days, punishing his cabin mate by
saying his rosary loudly in bed at random times, was a gross
insult. But tonight it was not Tenghis's irritating piety that
was making him wakeful. It was thinking about the Peruvian
stevedores.

Gossip in any port spread quickly, and Fen usually liked
to help it along if it was juicy enough. So when there was a
rumour that the stevedores were unhappy about the cargo
of trash being loaded onto the Lysicrates, Fen was the first to
make himself amenable to the gang chief to try and find out
why. The chief was a small suspicious man from the country
and it took a lot to befriend him, but since the ship had been
lying here for so long, longer than any other vessel usually
did, Fen managed by persistence to make the man take him
into his confidence.

It certainly was an unusual load. The Lysicrates normally
carried coal, iron ore or gravel, and even on other bulk carriers
he'd sailed with he had never come across the bulk shipping
of uncompacted domestic waste before.

And apparently he was not the only one to find it irregular,
since there had been some kind of negotiation being carried
on between the company and the dock authorities, which had
caused the trash to have been sitting in a vast rotting pile
in the dock's loading area for nearly a week while Captain
Skinner sorted out a bill of lading.

The rumours had started after two days. There were com
plaints about rats and roaches of course, but when a prosti
tute that visited the docks on a nightly basis had gone missing
after servicing two of her regulars in her temporary boudoir
inside an empty container, talk started that it had something
to do with the trash. Fen couldn't quite get from the man
what he thought the connection was, but some names had
come up, curiously none of them Spanish, but of a tongue
he didn't recognize, and there was a whispered uneasiness
amongst the men about something one of them had seen in
the great and stinking pile.

In itself this was merely the normal superstitious nonsense
of simple under-educated working men, of which Fen was
one, but he was more intuitive than most, and could usually
distinguish the nonsense from the genuine mystery. What
was bothering him now was that as he had watched the trash
being loaded from the vantage point of the deck, Fen could
have sworn he had seen something.

Rats probably, he reasoned, but then in fifteen years at
sea, years when he'd seen just about every trick the repulsive
vermin could perform in everything from grain to cocoa bags,
he'd never seen rats undulate under a pile of anything in
quite the way this grab-load of refuse had moved. If it had
been rats, then there had been a lot of them, and working
together. Because the surface of the junk had pulsated in a
way that made him break out in a sweat. The thought of the
rodents, however logical an explanation, was not in itself a
particularly comfortable one.

Beasts that size that could move with such ordered intent
were not beasts he looked forward to sharing a voyage with.
But if the movement was not caused by rats, then Fen wasn't
entirely sure how he felt. A hot sensation had overwhelmed
him as he'd witnessed the swift but substantial movement,
and the unpleasant notion had swept across him that it was
moving, revealing itself, for his benefit only.

Fen's only consolation was that he had been so horrorstruck
by the sensation that he had made himself watch
the grab drop the pile from a height into hold number
two, monitoring it carefully as it fell, and could see all the
individual pieces that made up the pile clearly revealed.
Nothing alive and writhing had made itself visible against
the bleached South American sky. No heavy rats tumbled
and squirmed in the air, and neither did anything else.

Still staring at the wall, he turned over in his mind whether
that was a comfort or not. Maybe the truth was that he never
really saw the movement in the first place, that the talk of the
stevedores had primed him with nervous expectations that
his superstitious mind obligingly furnished.

Or maybe it was a simple trick of the sunlight and the
unpredictable movements of the huge crane.

Fen sighed and turned back over in his bunk to look
reluctantly at Mary.

This was not going to be a lucky voyage. First the girl
passenger Cotton had brought aboard, and now the worry
about what he thought he had seen. If sleep evaded him
much longer he would get up and consult the Saanti. Then
he would know.

The holy Virgin glared at him reproachfully. He would
stare at her fixedly for the remainder of his rest period,
because regardless of what his logic wanted him to believe,
in his heart he knew there had been something moving in
that trash. And whatever it was, it was now on board.

Adjusting the hard hat which was tipping over his eyes,
Captain Skinner finished his leisurely perambulation of the
long cargo deck, one hand in his pocket and the other
holding the thin paper on which the details of the cargo
were scrawled. He could see the second officer and the bosun
leaning together on the rail, smoking and watching the dock
hands mill about aimlessly on the harbour edge below them
as they waited for the Lysicrates to go, and he detoured his
route to join them. Instantly the bosun stamped out his
cigarette and adopted a posture of readiness. The second
officer made an upward nod of greeting and continued to
stare down at the harbour. Skinner leant beside the officer
and smiled past the two men at the lights of the port.
'Reckon that's us, Felix.'

The bosun smiled, nodded and left. Renato Lhoon, the
second officer, tapped some ash overboard and looked up
at his captain.

'Chief Officer Cotton?' enquired Skinner into the night
air.

'In cabin.'

The two men watched a cat dart surreptitiously along the
edge of a wooden shed, spurred faster by a piece of coal
thrown by the bored stevedore waiting to untie the ship.

Skinner looked at his wristwatch.

'Fifteen minutes.'

He smiled again at nothing in particular then left Lhoon
to figure out what was required. It didn't take much figuring.
The second officer sighed, flicked his cigarette over the edge,
tucked an errant shirt-tail into his neat pants, and walked
toward the door of the accommodation block.

The door opened onto C-deck, the living quarters of the
crew's lower rank, and to advertise the fact, the hand rail out
side each cabin sported a motley selection of garments ranging
from socks to grimy T-shirts airing in the hot corridor.

An elevator served the decks from the bridge down nine
floors to the propeller shaft in the engine room, but Lhoon
decided that to stand and wait for it to chug and shudder to
his command from wherever it happened to be, would give
every passing cadet and ABS the opportunity to bend his ear
on some gripe or other, and frankly right now, with the task of
waking Cotton before him, it was the last thing he needed. He
climbed the metal stairs without enthusiasm two floors to the
officers' accommodation deck and walked slowly to the door
of Cotton's cabin. As usual he tried the handle first, and as
usual it was locked.

He coughed into his fist, then used it to bang the door
twice. There was no reply. He banged again.

'Matthew? Come on.'

A groan from within gave strength to the next bout of
hammering, which Lhoon kept up relentlessly until he heard
the groggy voice again.

'Fuck off.'

'We go now, Matthew. Your watch.'

'Sail the fucker yourself, Renato.'

Lhoon started to bang with both fists now, and kept it up
until the metallic snick of the lock being thrown rewarded
his efforts. The small man stopped his assault on the door,
turned the handle and entered. The cabin was in darkness
save for the orange-and-white light of the deck filtering
through the thin porthole curtain, and he flicked the switch
behind the cabin door.

The lights of Matthew Cotton's cabin revealed that at least
tonight Lhoon would not have to dress him. He was lying
back on the sofa again, fully clad, his arms across his face
as a shield against the sudden glare. As far as the officers'
cabins were concerned, Cotton's was no different in design.
One room with a seating area and coffee table, a bed riveted
to the wall and a half-open door leading to a shower room
with WE.

What marked his out as unusual would not be immediately
apparent to a casual observer, but to any sailor it was
glaringly obvious. Unlike every other cabin on board the
ship Matthew Cotton's was the only one that was completely
devoid of family photos. Even the youngest cadets, barely out
of school, and the filthy and objectionable donkeyman whose
mother would find him hard to love, had photos, framed or
otherwise, of sweethearts and family adorning every possible
personal space of their quarters. Nothing in Cotton's cabin
revealed anything about who might occupy his most intimate
thoughts or longings. Apart from a few piles of clothes and
shoes that cluttered the floor, more than a few empty beer
cans that filled the wastepaper bin or sat redundantly on
the table top, nothing suggested there was any sign of a man
living here, that this was a private space in which a man could
recreate part of his shore world on board.

Lhoon stood with his hands on his hips above the recumbent
figure and waited. 'You want to puke first?'
Matthew's voice was muffled behind his arm. 'Yeah.'
Lhoon waited some more, knowing that even the suggestion
would spur his senior officer's guts into action. A
moment later Matthew raised himself up from the sofa,
stumbled slowly through to the shower room and bent to his
work over the sink. The noise made the second officer catch
the back of his throat and he swallowed and looked away.
'I wait or you done?'

'Done.'

Matthew ran the tap and stuck his head under it, and after
a moment of recovery walked through to join his colleague
for the routine escort up to the bridge, and for the duration
of the short walk Lhoon let Matthew walk in front, a guard
escorting his prisoner to the gallows.

Apart from the fax machine behind Matthew, droning as
the weather report rolled through, and the ghostly, muffled
voices on the radio that he had turned down to a dreamlike
volume, the bridge of the ship was quiet.

Before him, the hold deck looked almost glamorous, illuminated
as it was by pinpricks of white light, and framed
by glimpses of the white ocean foam the stern was pushing
aside.

Matthew ran a rough hand over his face and sat down
heavily on a chrome stool that wouldn't have been out of
place in a New York bar. They were well clear of port now,
and there was nothing to do for the next four hours except
stare at the darkness ahead, and drink neat vodka from a
china mug that declared 'Swinging London' on the side
beneath a garish Union Jack.

He'd planned to be asleep again before the end of the
watch, but that didn't matter, since Renato would come and
check on him every twenty minutes and do anything that
needed done. But nothing would. He'd pointed the tub for
home and that was it.

This was the worst watch for him, the long hours of
darkness, with nothing, no distractions, no human company,
no chores or excuses to think, to keep him safe from his own
black interior.

He'd tried reading at first, but his mind wandered after the
first two paragraphs, his eyes scanning the meaningless words
as other images replaced the ones conjured by the invariably
bad authors, and with considerably more impact. So now he just sat and stared. And of course, drank.

Tonight the vodka bottle was behind the row of chilli
pepper plants that Renato grew in plastic pots along the
starboard bridge window. It was only habit that made him
hide it. Skinner didn't care and there was little need for
deception, but it was an important part of the alcoholic's
ritual to conceal, and ritual was all he had left. He drained
his mug, walked to the plants, retrieved the bottle and poured
another big one.

Matthew fingered one of the swelling fruits and smiled at
Renato's dedication. A storeroom below groaning with fruit
and vegetables, and yet the man lavished attention on these
scrappy plants as though all their lives depended on it. The
nurturing instinct. As strong in some men as it is in women.
With the thought, a black ulcer threatened to burst in his
heart and he turned quickly from the fruits, swallowing his
vodka as he walked quickly back to the desk.

With a shaking hand he fumbled through the folder of
paperwork. Something to do was what he needed. He'd
pretend to be a first officer. At least until the demons
receded. Read about the cargo. That would work. The part
of him that was still alive had been intrigued that loose trash
was being loaded. It was a cargo he'd never come across.
Compacted metal, industrial waste, sure. But domestic loose
trash from some city site? Never. It would be interesting
to see where it came from and more importantly where it
was going.

Matthew skimmed through the piles of paper recording
every on-board banality from crew lists to duplicate gal
ley receipts, but there was nothing. No bill of lading, no
sheaves of inspection certificates from the port authorities,
no formal company documents with tedious instructions and
warnings.

He found some dog-eared cost and revenue sheets that had
been used practically unchanged on the last three trips. They
told the company, the shipping federation, the world, that
the Lysicrates was going home empty as planned. The ship
contained nothing but ballast water. He blinked down at the
paper and then stupidly out the window to the silent deck.

Presumably Skinner hadn't finished doing whatever he did
so privately in his office with all that paper before entering it
in the log and the document folder, but it was unusual, and
unlike the captain's usual form, very sloppy.

You could load anything from custard to cows at Callao if
you greased the right palms, and from the eleven voyages
he'd made so far with this company, Matthew had decided
they were perhaps not amongst the most honourable of
traders. Forever trying to dodge regulations they'd even lost
a vessel five years ago with all hands, and had despicably
argued about compensation to the families of the deceased
for as long as they could, even though the insurance company
had paid up in full. Shysters and crooks, and naturally the
only ones who would employ someone like Cotton after his
fall from grace, although Skinner, he admitted reluctantly
to himself, had had more to do with his second chance
than the avaricious gangsters who owned the ship. But if
the company was pulling some kind of a fast one, what
in God's name were they planning to do with the trash
when they got to Port Arthur? For a few moments the
slow, drunken brain of Matthew Cotton thought about it.
He let himself think like a captain again, think about the
nature of loose trash, of how it would sit in the hold, how it
might shift in weather. Gradually, as his brain cleared more
thinking-space, he thought of methane gas building up like
a bomb in the sealed holds, and the consequences of that
when the hot South American sun hit the deck from dawn
and started to bake it like a desert stone. A tiny sliver of rage
started to build in his chest. Tiny but insistent. If he could
die he'd be dead a thousand times by now. Dying was too
desirable, too good for Matthew Cotton. It was a release he
didn't deserve. It wasn't up to the slimy suited bastards in the
Hong Kong offices of a shipping company to change that.

He glanced at the weather fax again, which he'd already
registered indicated nothing but fine weather. Then he picked
up the phone and called down to B-deck.

A deck cadet answered in Filipino.

'Rapadas. Open all the hatch covers fifteen feet.'

The man didn't even reply, but several minutes later two
men walked lazily into the white light of the deck and started
working the hydraulics that would wind open the huge metal
doors, slapping each other on the shoulder and continuing
some animated conversation as they worked their way along.
For a moment Matthew almost felt like an officer in charge.
Someone who'd taken a responsible and intelligent action
to prevent disaster.

But the moment was brief. Reality hit him and reminded
him he was nothing higher than pond scum. He sank down
again and drained his mug. The holds wouldn't blow. The
ship and the crew would be safer now than they were twenty
minutes ago.

Big fucking deal.

The sun would come up and go down. The earth would
turn. Stars in space would die and be born. And nothing he
ever did, good or bad for the rest of his life would make him
anything other than a piece of shit. Swinging London tipped
up and Matthew Cotton's eyes closed. His free hand made a
tight claw on his thigh.



5


The fantasies of most ancient cultures almost always included
one of walking on water. From Christianity through Mayan
domestic legend, even into modern obsessions with surface-
bound sports, the defiant, burnished skin of the ocean
presents a challenge to man that is considerably deeper than
the mere domination of nature.

As the early morning sun gave the Pacific a pale cream
solidity, Esther felt she could run straight off the deck and
onto that glittering rugged surface without puncturing it.
However, a dull but well-meaning officer on the journey
down to Callao had regularly and unbidden furnished
Esther with sea-going statistics, and the revelation that
the sea along the coast of Peru concealed a trench that
was over twenty thousand feet deep had induced in her an
immediate vertigo as she thought of the blackness yawning
beneath her feet. Gazing out now at the innocent shining
surface, she felt that same mix of fear and thrill again at
the ocean's secret.

Maybe, she reasoned, that was why mankind always felt
impelled to make instant contact with water the moment it
was anywhere in his vicinity. The child on the beach who
runs without fail to the sea, the adults who pull off their
socks and shoes to paddle in the shallows, the fisherman
who catches nothing but is satisfied with the contact of
weighted line and water; all are reassuring themselves that
what excites them about what they see, that beckoning
seductive sheet of light, is as flimsy as net and as dangerous
as fire.

If she could, Esther, too, would have made contact with a
cool sea.

A swim after the punishing circuit she was pounding would
have been delicious, but even if the boat were a pleasure
yacht that drifted to let her bathe, she wouldn't care to
swim thinking of the sunless chasm that lay beneath her. A
cramped, steamy shower would do and with only four more
laps of the cargo deck to go, even that was pretty damned
attractive.

She needed to get back in shape, and although the moun
tain treks had been hard, nothing in her field trip had left
time for the kind of physical programme she liked to stick
to back home. Fifty-one laps of the deck, twenty of them with
a stitch ripping her side apart, only confirmed that she had
serious work to do, and as she sprinted for the bow it was with
a sinking heart that she realized she would have to stop and
let the pain subside.

Her trainers squealed on the metal as she slowed down
and jogged to the edge of the last hold, whose open hatch
protruded about six or seven feet beyond the lip of its fixings.
Esther put out a hand and leant heavily against the metal,
her head bowed to her waist, sweat dripping onto the deck
between her feet.

Less than a minute passed before her heart rate had
slowed to near normal, and she straightened up rubbing
at the side that was still tight and sore. Despite the eternal
thrumming of the engine vibrating through her body that
was so constant and rhythmic it ceased to exist for most
sailors only hours into any new voyage, the serenity was
exquisite. The breaking water around the hull swished
erratically and the light wind that toyed in her hair was
no more than a whisper.

She leaned back against the hatch and looked out over
the sea. Although the route was hugging the west coast of
Peru, Ecuador and Columbia, they were far too many miles
from land to view it. The sun had an uncluttered stage
upon which to rise and it was doing so with unparalleled
magnificence.

This was a lucky time. Esther had always divided her days
since childhood into lucky and unlucky times.

When things were bad, unlucky bad, she knew that by
waiting, the lucky bits would present themselves, and however
brief they might be, she had learned to grab them and hold
them tight. She'd started it at the age of eight as she stood
over her mother's grave, Benny's whisky breath filling her
nostrils as he clung to her little shoulder as a means of
steadying himself rather than of comforting her. Her grief
had been too profound to articulate, but she had felt her
father's confused adult despair being transmitted to her
though his curled fingers the way a plant carries chlorophyll,
and as she had shaken free of his grasp she had looked
around in desperation to see something beautiful, something
distracting, something lucky.

A heavy-set woman in a pink organza hat was tending a grave
beyond the untidy scrub in that cheap little Pennsylvanian
graveyard, and as she bent a gust of wind blew it from
her head and made her stumble after it in a way that was
both grotesque and funny. Esther had looked around and
noted that no one else had seen it but her. So that, she'd
decided, had made it lucky. She could think of that instead
of her Morn lying in the ground, and that would help get
by the unlucky bit. It became habit, and here she was at
the age of twenty-three still doing it in the most mundane
of moments.

And yes, at this moment away from the decidedly ragged
collection of shipmates, with the sun and the sea as
her only companions, her passage home assured and her
dissertation shaping up in her head with every mile, she
had the right to feel lucky. Lucky, even though the trash
in the hold was tainting the perfect scene a little now that
she'd stopped, by randomly releasing its foul odour in small
nauseating gusts.

Esther waved a hand over her face.

'Shit.'

She turned and looked to the hatch as though a stern
glance would halt its emissions, but since its metal surface
was at least three or four feet above her head, the culprit the
mountain of waste - was impossible to see.

Esther inclined her head back out to sea, then looked
slowly back again, curious. A sheen on the edge of the metal
hatch had caught her eye, and she stepped back to examine
it. There was a trail emanating from the lid of the hatch above
her head, running over the edge and then continuing along
the deck below, as though whatever had left it had dropped
the seven or eight feet and continued its progress. She rubbed
at it with a toe. It had been dried hard by the sun exactly like
the trail of a slug, but with the marked difference of being
at least three feet wide instead of the innocent half inch you
would curse at in your glasshouse, and when her trainer made
contact it broke off in wafer-thin flakes.

Esther bent and looked more closely at it. Under the hardened
flakes of slime there were other things sticking to the
deck, things that were still slightly moist, streaks of effluent
maybe, a trace of oil or tar, but worst of all a brown-red smear
that looked almost like blood. Still crouched, she followed
the trail on the deck, her hand shading her eyes from the
sun, until, squinting, she could just make it out disappearing
over the edge of the deck about twenty feet short of the
accommodation block.

Esther stood up and wiped her foot unconsciously on
the edge of the metal hatch runner. She shook her head.
The only explanation could be that someone had pulled
an unpleasant portion of the trash from its pile, dragged
it nearly seven holds further up the deck and then tipped
it into the sea. She knew she shouldn't look a gift horse
in the mouth, but everything about this ship was making
her long for the dull, reliable neat container ship she'd
arrived on.

Most likely the trail was the residue of drunken behaviour,
a bet, a forfeit or a prank, and the worst of it was that
discipline was obviously so lax no one had bothered to come
out and scrub away the evidence. This was a crew that needed
its ass kicked.

The stitch healed, she bent forward and took two deep
breaths, ready to finish the circuit. She straightened. For
no reason other than that the unscrubbed trail of goo had
irritated her, she had an overwhelming desire to peer into
the hold to see exactly what they had been up to.

A quick glance up to the far-off windows of the bridge
suggested that she was not about to be observed, and so with
her hands on the guide rail of the hatch cover she hauled
herself up to the edge of hold number two. There was a
moment of feeling precarious, the action putting her higher
than the ship's tall rail, and she paused to steady herself.
When she had adjusted to the height she walked carefully
forward to the fifteen-foot slit between the open hatch doors
and crouched down at the edge. The smell nearly knocked
her backwards and she covered her nose and mouth with one
hand, leaning heavily on the other.

Ten or twelve feet below her, the pile of irregular and
unidentifiable waste was illuminated by a slim strip of daylight,
while the rest of the load skulked in darkness beneath
the ledges of drawn hatch covers. It was an ugly cargo, and
looking down into it gave Esther the creeps. The sea breeze
seemed chillier up here, and she hunched her shoulders
against it as she scanned the top of the waste to try and
understand what someone might have been pulling free
from it.

From the dark starboard portion of the pile came a movement.
Her eyes flicked to it immediately, her breath caught
in readiness.

She focused hard on where she thought she saw the subtle
peripheral shifting and waited for it to happen again.

Her leg was grabbed in a vice-like grip below the knee, and
before she could cry out Esther was dragged backwards.

'What the fuck do you think you're at?' It was a male
voice.

Esther found herself on her back, her fists clenched ready
to strike, blinking up at the figure silhouetted against the
sky. Her panting breath slowed and she untensed her body
enough to sit semi-erect and recognize the figure of Matthew
Cotton.

'My God. You near made me shit myself.'

'Yeah?' It was said with aggression, not apology.

He offered her a hand to get up. She ignored it and sat
forward instead. Matthew pointed to the deck. 'Get down.

Right now.'

Esther looked at him sulkily and slowly stood, walked
forward and lowered herself to the deck. Cotton dropped
after her, dusting off his pants and never taking his eyes
from her sullen face.

'You any idea how stupid that was?'

'Aw, come on.'

Matthew nodded vigorously as though she'd offered to
start an alley fight. 'Okay, smartass. Let's just say we hit a
swell there and you tipped in. You think you'd just land on
it and step right out? Huh?'

Esther said nothing, but put her hands on her hips and
stared out to sea.

But Matthew had no intention of stopping the lecture.
'Year and a half back, an ABS who decided to take a jaywalk
across an open hold full of grain while the hatches were still
open in port, fell in. Okay? Crew thought he'd jumped ship,
done a runner, when he didn't show up for his watch. So
they sailed, they thought, without him. Found his body at
the bottom of the grain at the next port. Care to think
about what drowning in raw, unhusked wheat must feel
like? No? Well try thinking about how drowning in a big
pile of shit might be for laughs, because believe me, honey,
that's what would have happened to you if you'd gone ass
over tit.'

Esther looked at him. He was genuinely angry, breathing
hard, his eyes lit with indignant fire. She held up restraining
hands. 'Yeah. Okay. Sorry.'

Matthew turned and looked out to sea himself now, as
though trying to calm himself. 'Man, you shouldn't even be
out here without a hard hat. It's a bulk carrier, not the QE
fuckin' 2.'

Esther was getting annoyed. This, after all, was the drunk
who could barely stand upright yesterday, and even though
she was grateful he got her on board, he was hardly Cap
tain Kirk.

'Yeah, well it doesn't look like "shipshape" means much
out here anyhows.'

He snapped his glance back to her. 'Meaning?'

She pointed down at the hardened slime trail beneath his
feet. 'I got curious as to what that was.'

Matthew looked down, and followed the trail with his eyes
from hatch cover to ship's rail.

She watched the slow wit of the perpetual drunk try to work
it out and fail, and pity returned. 'But I guess I was out of
line. Sorry.'

Matthew was still staring at the trail. 'Yeah.' He said it
absently, obviously still perplexed.

'Can I finish my run?'

He turned back to her, his hand stroking the nape of
his neck in thought. 'Huh? Yeah. Go on. You heard me
out.'

She held his gaze for a beat then turned and sprinted for
the bow.

Matthew watched her absently for a second then turned
and walked along the trail to where it left the deck and
slipped beneath the rail. He leant over and stared down at
the stained hull of the ship. There was nothing to see except
the oily blue-black of an insanely deep ocean and the virgin
white of its foam.

By the time Esther had come around again, he was gone,
but the third and last circuit saw her nearly run into two
cadets wandering on deck with buckets and mops.

Although she didn't know why, Esther was pleased they
were coming to clean it up. Very pleased.

The captain's door was closed, which Renato knew signalled
he was either in the shower or asleep. But it was already gone
eight-thirty and neither possibility was very likely for a man
of such regular and early rising habits as Lloyd Skinner. As
he paused by the closed door and pondered what to do, he
was joined by Pasqual the radio officer, clutching a piece of
paper and yawning.

'Taking a dump is he?' said Pasqual in their native tongue,
secure in the knowledge that even if the captain was on the
other side of the door, the words would be meaningless. That,
of course, was the great advantage of sailing with American
top brass. At least usually it was. Although the captain had
picked up a word or two of Filipino, enough to say please
and thanks, the crew could largely talk amongst themselves
in front of Skinner without the threat of being pulled up
for verbal insubordination. Unless, of course, you were a
rating and second officer Renato Lhoon heard you. Then
you were in big trouble. Cotton however, required more
caution. His Filipino was pretty strong for an American,
as was his Spanish. But since Cotton was mostly drunk
the crew could afford to relax when discussing him in his
earshot. Anyway Cotton wasn't here. They could say what
they liked.

'Yeah, well we all got to go sometime, Pasqual.' Renato
knocked lightly on the door.

'Come.'

The captain's voice revealed that he was indeed on the
other side of the door, sounding, by Renato's familiarity with
the master's quarters, as though he were merely seated at his
couch and chart table.

The men entered, and Renato was rewarded by having his
theory proved exactly right. The captain's quarters consisted
of an office that was joined by a closed door to his personal
suite of rooms, no more than a larger version of the officers'
cabins with a slightly bigger shower room. In the office that
the men entered, a large desk covered with papers was
fronted by a seating arrangement of three cheap block-
cushion sofas pushed together to make a C-shaped fortress
of foam, surrounding a low table designed to be exactly the
correct size to accommodate a standard navigational chart.
Skinner was seated at the table, his hands cupping a knee,
nothing on the table more sinister than a chart of the area
they were currently sailing and a mug of coffee. He looked
up at the men with the mild irritation of someone who has
been disturbed.

'Gentlemen?' Skinner said shortly, as though they'd walked
in on him naked.

The two men exchanged glances. 'Eight thirty-four, cap
tain.'

Skinner blinked at Lhoon, then looked down at his watch.
'Ah. Right. Sit.'

The radio officer held out the paper. 'Just delivering
this, sir. Two messages from company for you, and one for
purser.'

Skinner took the paper, and Renato sat down on the
ungiving couch opposite his captain.

'Thank you, Pasqual.'

Looking down at the paper without reading it, he spoke
casually, absently avoiding eye contact with the man.

'Eh, yes. Make a reply in a couple of hours. You can let
me know when will be convenient for me to use the radio
room alone. Confidential ship-to-shore.' He scratched at his
neck and added, 'Nothing urgent.'

Pasqual nodded. 'Sure. No problem.'

The radio officer left them, stifling a yawn again. He
hadn't slept well last night as a result of eight hours of
fierce half-waking dreams and half-conscious anxieties, an
unusual occurrence for him, and now it was taking its toll. No
matter. After he'd got his morning watch out of the way,
maybe he would slip back to the cabin and catch up. After
all, the sea couldn't be calmer and everything on board was
normal to the point of tedium. He left the captain's door
open as he exited, the way ship-board etiquette said it should
have been when he'd entered.

Renato coughed into a fist, then clasped his hands in front
of him ready to deliver his routine daily report. 'Quiet watch,
captain. All's well. Only action, First Officer Cotton opened
hatch doors round eleven-thirty. Thinks there might be risk
of methane. Weather looks like being okay to leave them
for now.'

Skinner raised an eyebrow, then nodded. 'Methane. Yes,
well.'

'Third officer on duty now, and he knows to keep an
eye on weather fax to close them if it blows above force
four.'

'Good. Right.'

'Anything for today, sir?'

Skinner looked casually at the radio officer's communi
cation again. 'Eh. Maybe some routine inspection. Down in
the engine rooms and in the cofferdams.'

'I can organize that.' Renato held out his hand for the
paper.

Skinner looked up at him, and there was nothing absent
or distracted about the piercing gaze he fixed on the man.
It took his second officer by surprise.

'That won't be necessary, Renato. This is my duty.'

The man nodded, withdrew his hand self consciously,
then waited. The captain continued. 'The bosun briefed for
the day?'

'Sure.'

Skinner held his eye, then said quietly and with great
finality, 'Thank you, Renato.'

Lhoon coughed again and stood up. 'Thank you, cap
tain.'

He left quietly, and before he had got even halfway to
the lift, he heard the quiet but unmistakable metallic sound
of Skinner's door closing. Renato paused, thought, then
dismissing the man's eccentricities of the day, went about
his business.

Esther was enjoying her breakfast. The eggs and bacon were
good, the coffee hot, she felt revitalized after her shower, and
unlike the awkwardness of last night, her dining companion
this morning was a jolly and talkative chief engineer called
Sohn. Through broken English and equally broken teeth he
was telling her about his family which consisted entirely of
women: six daughters and what sounded like a formidable
wife, and how even the nightmare of an overheating engine
room was a blessed escape from the heat of their nagging
when he was ashore.

He was candid and funny, and even Matthew Cotton
entering the mess room, bringing a nauseating faint stale
whiff of alcohol with him as he sat and joined them, couldn't
dampen her high spirits.

Sohn nodded and grinned at Cotton as the lugubrious-looking first officer poured himself a coffee from the communal
plastic flask on the table.

'Feel good this morning, Mattu?'

'Goddamn born again, Sohn,' he replied without warmth
and took a long swallow of coffee.

The engineer laughed and nodded again. 'No one like
night watch. Mattu get it every time. Ha ha.'

Esther smiled at the man's jollity in the face of the second
officer's gloom. She crunched on some toast and smiled. 'So
you do eat then?'

Matthew looked at her. 'The only damn thing Leonardo
can cook.'

Given last night's dinner Esther had to admit he had a
point. Sohn pointed at Esther as though Matthew had never
seen her before.

'Esther army stoodent.'

'Yeah?'

The engineer cheerfully ignored Cotton's dismissive grunt
and turned back to his considerably more charming companion.

'You shoot guns and all?'

Esther looked down at her plate as though she were
talking about something dirty. 'Standard M16 A2. Nothing
fancy. You get acquainted with your weapon at advance
training camp.'

Sohn nodded enthusiastically, wanting more. Nothing
came. Matthew sat back in his chair and looked at her.
'Guess you got on well with Lloyd last night then, huh?'
Esther narrowed her eyes. 'Why do you say that?'

'He's a Nam vet. Explosives. Used to defuse bombs, lay
land mines.'

She was interested. 'Yeah? It didn't come up.'

Matthew drained his cup and poured another. 'Doesn't
talk about it. You blame him?'

Esther shook her head at nothing in particular.

'Shit, it's crazy when you think about guys Lloyd's age, walk
ing about looking like they spent a lifetime doing nothing
more than mow a lawn and polish their Lincoln Continental,
yet they've seen stuff that you and I only have nightmares
about.'

Sohn tried to keep up with what she was saying, watching
her with rapt attention now she was talking at regular speed
to a fellow English speaker, instead of the slow deliberate
words she'd been enunciating for him in the last half hour.
He caught the gist.

'Yeah. He nearly go down on the Eurydice too. That really
mess him about, I think.'

Sohn pointed to his head to illustrate where exactly he
thought the captain had been messed about.

'What was that?' enquired Esther of Cotton, knowing that
Sohn's explanation would be tortuous.

The same waiter as the previous night brought a plate
across to Matthew and set it down. Obviously Cotton was a
creature of habit. He picked up a fork and shovelled some
scrambled egg into his mouth.

'Carrier Skinner sailed about five years ago. Got called
ashore for some personal reason halfway through the voyage,
and handed the command over to another captain at Lagos.
Damn thing disappeared without trace a day later out of port.
No survivors. No salvage.'

Esther was genuinely horrified. '.Jesus. That must have been
rough. He would have known all those guys well?'

'Sailed with the same crew for nearly two-and-a-half years.
Like family.'

'Did they find out what happened?'

Matthew shook his head. 'Lloyd had to give evidence at the
enquiry. He'd kept his own log after they'd left Luanda and
for some reason had taken his notes ashore when he left for
Florida.

'Apparently he thought there'd been an irregularity he
couldn't prove with cargo stowage by the African stevedores,
and on account of everything he was able and obliged to
check having been in order, they had forced him to sail.

'But he hadn't been happy, so guess that's why he took his
copy of the log. Company loved him for that. With no wreck
to examine, Lloyd's evidence was the only thng that cou ted.
His log proved everything had been done just right by the
captain and I guess by Sonstar too. Meant the insurance
crooks had to pay up in full.'

Esther's estimation of the captain had risen again. No
wonder the guy was reticent and distracted. It sounded like
he'd had more than his share of shit. Sohn was nodding
enthusiastically at this story.

'They make a lot of money when ship go down like that.'
Matthew looked sour. 'Yeah. They sure as hell ain't got
the reputation for charity.'

Esther ate in silence, thinking of the horror of being
sucked down on a ship this size into the blackness of that
trench below them, and her food lost its taste.

Sohn pushed his chair back and bowed cheerfully to
Esther. 'You want I show you my engine room later?'

Esther beamed. 'Aw, neat. I'd love that.'

'I on watch for four hours now. Any time.'

He bowed again and left. Esther was once again stranded
with company she could well do without, and she watched
Matthew eating in silence, much of her cheerfulness having
exited the room with Sohn. Now might be a good time to
set things straight, so she took the chance.

'Listen, I'm real sorry I made you mad on the cargo
deck.'

Matthew shrugged as he ate, then mutely nodded his
forgiveness.

She continued. 'Find out what that stuff was?'

He shook his head and shrugged again, completely unin
terested, his mouth overful with hot food. Esther could see
a repeat of last night's one-sided conversation looming, and
she wiped the sides of her mouth in readiness to go. No one
could say she hadn't given it her best shot.

Matthew looked up at her and intuitively caught the body
language that meant she was getting ready to leave and, to
Esther's surprise, did something to halt it. He waved a fork.
'So tell me. Why'd you choose the military?'

She looked at him to see if there was bitterness or sarcasm
behind the question, and when she saw none, she answered.
'I wanted a degree. It was the only way I could afford one.'

Matthew looked genuinely interested. He swallowed what
he'd been chewing and gesticulated at her again with his fork
as though he needed it to talk. 'Yeah? What kinda service you
need to put in for that? Three, four years?'

'Seven.'

Matthew raised both eyebrows. 'No shit? Hell, you must
want that degree real bad.'

It was Esther's turn to shrug.

Matthew took another swig of coffee, watching her over the
rim of the cup. 'Or maybe I'm getting it wrong here. Maybe
you wanted to join up anyhow. Seen those commercials
myself, the guys rappelling in California and cross-country
skiing and shit? Makes me almost want to do it too.'

She scratched her neck and gave a light laugh. 'Well, since
you ask, funny thing is, sure, I thought it was just a way to
buy me some academic time. Stuff I thought my whole life
I wanted to do. Kind of always dreamt that it was education
could let me escape. Know what I mean? But when I went
to advance training camp? You know, I found I had an
aptitude for it I never knew I had. Surprised the living shit
out of me.'

'Aptitude for what?'

She picked up her coffee cup and looked him square in
the eye. 'Combat.'

Matthew looked at her, smiled weakly, then returned to
his breakfast.

She knew he didn't believe her. He knew nothing about
her, but she could practically read his thoughts.

He'd picture some white-collar home, see her playing at
being a soldier, getting off on the masculinity of holding
and firing a semi-automatic weapon. How could he know
she'd been shooting guns since she was nine? Dogging off
school with Henry-Adam Shenker to go to the wasteland of
scrub willow a mile away from the trailer park, and shoot
at everything that moved and everything that couldn't with
his big brother's hand gun. The same gun that eventually
helped put him and his other two drug-dealing, store-robbing
siblings behind bars. And how could he know she'd spent her
teens fighting with her fists and her teeth, against almost
every kid at school that called her trailer-trash, or asked after
her daddy with those shit-eating smug grins?

All that until the autumn term when Mr Sanderson took
over as her grade teacher and discovered, like some lion
tamer with the magic chair of academia and genuine concern
for her, there was a brain in there, under that wild animal
that tore and kicked and bit anything that got in her way.

Matthew Cotton couldn't know any of that, and frankly
she didn't care. She was civilized now, a tamed creature that
read philosophy and studied culture, and that was all that
mattered. She would give her best to the US army, and then
see what life held at the other end. But that was enough. It
was Matthew's turn for spilling the beans, she decided.

'What about you?

He stabbed some bacon. 'What about me?'

'Well where you from?'

'Nowhere special.'

Esther pursed her mouth. She was a private person by
habit, and it annoyed her to have shared even a tiny part
of her life with him when he was plainly so reticent to do
the same.

'Oh pardon me. Did I say I came from anywhere special?
Texas sure ain't frigging Arcadia.'

'You sail, you live on ships. There's nowhere else.'

'So I guess you were born and raised on a bulk carrier?
Cool.'

He looked up and the pain behind his eyes made her regret
her tone. He wiped his mouth. 'I was born and raised in New
York. I lived for a time in Atlanta. Now I don't live any damn
place. Okay?'

Esther held his gaze, embarrassed, then nodded.

' Sure. '

He got back to his meal.

Esther waited until a decent amount of time had passed to
let the dust settle from his inexplicable are, then pushed back
her chair and stood. 'If I run tomorrow, I guess I'll wear the
hard hat.'

Matthew nodded down into his eggs. 'You do that.'

She nodded back to the top of his head, cleared her throat
and left. As she walked back up the corridor to her cabin,
Esther let out the breath she'd been holding in for nearly a
minute. A peal of laughter burst from the crew's mess hall,
and she rubbed at her hair with an exasperated hand. Right
now, Esther Mulholland wished she'd majored in languages.
Namely, Filipino. Life ahead for the next five days would have
promise to be a lot more entertaining if she had.

Fen had been keeping out of the bosun's way all morning,
when he finally caught up with him on the main deck,
crouching in front the accommodation block, staring at the
long perspective of holds in front of him.

'What the hell are you up to?'

Fen looked up at Felix Chadin from the bucket of unused
water he was squatting beside and blinked. 'Deck,' he said,
standing and waving a hand weakly at the surface as if he
had just named it. 'I was scrubbing the deck.'

'For the whole of your watch?'

'Eh, no. I was helping cook move some crates.'

Chadin crossed his arms. He was in a bad mood. Sleep
had evaded him last night and he was grouchy.

'Well isn't it convenient that I find you just as your watch
is over, particularly when the derrick cables need checked?'

'I can check them. I don't mind.'

Chadin looked at the man. It was not the answer he
expected from a rating he suspected of skiving. It threw
him.

'No. Go on.' He dismissed Fen with an imperial wave that
was peculiarly Filipino, used liberally by foremen, mothers-in-law and dictators alike in their homeland.

'I want to know exactly where you are on the next watch
though,' he called after the hastily-retreating figure. Fen disappeared
into the block's door, and Chadin looked down at
the bucket. It was clear that the man had not been scrubbing
at all, yet the eagerness with which he'd offered to extend his
watch was confusing. Chadin looked up along the open holds
and squinted against the low sun, then went to find someone
else he could make suffer for his poor night's rest.

Fen entered the crew's mess room, went to the coffee
machine and punched in his command. The whining
machine pissed a spiralling stream of brown liquid into a
plastic cup that was too flimsy to prevent it burning any
inexperienced hand that attempted to hold it. He waited
until it had finished its business, grabbed the cup by its thick
rim, and went to join the four men, three of whom sat
smoking, one sulking, at the Formica-covered table nearest
the serving hatch.

'Ah, now then, the very man,' exclaimed Parren the storekeeper,
slapping the table top. He pointed at the surly
sixteen-year-old cadet, Hal, and laughed. The other two men
laughed in a snickering kind of way, childish, but entirely
unkind.

'This little shit-eater wants to know if his girlfriend's being
faithful.'

Fen looked from face to face, then sipped carefully at the
nasty coffee. 'So?'

'So you're the guy to tell him.'

Fen scowled. 'Yeah, well not today. Okay?'

Hal emerged from his sulk. 'Aw come on, Fen. I'll pay
you.'

'No.'

The boy snorted and picked up his own white plastic cup.
'Yeah, well it's a load of bullshit that stuff anyway. It doesn't
tell you anything you don't know.'

Fen's face darkened and he lowered the cup. The three
older men looked at each other with eyebrows raised gleefully
in anticipation of an explosion.

'You want to be careful, kid. Stupider people than you
have fallen foul of Saanti. The dumber you are the harder
it is to take the truth.'

The boy made a face, pretending he was scared, then
laughed. Parren leant forward, trying to break the iron rod
of gaze that Fen had fixed on the boy. 'Do it for us then,
Fen. Come on. I wouldn't mind asking a couple of things.'

Fen looked round slowly at the storekeeper and frowned.

'Yeah,' added the steward who sat slouched to Parren's
right. 'Why not?'

Why not, indeed. Fen knew why not. Because when he
had scattered the Saanti bone-dice last night and laid out
the alphabet cards, reading them for himself instead for
someone else for the first time in fifteen years, they had
terrified him. He would never normally cast those dice for
himself. It had been the dream that had made him do it. The
dream that had made him doubt what was real and what was
not when he awoke in a sweat. But he had done it, and as it
was with those he read for, he took what the dice told him
very seriously. The reading always required the card-caster to
read out the message that was being spelled for his eyes only,
and sometimes Fen found that his voice adopted the tone of
the person who was communicating, whether they were alive
or dead. It had been uncanny at first, and almost everyone
he read for imagined at first that he was faking it. Until, that
is, someone they loved, or had lost forever, spoke through
Fen's mouth. Then they believed. They had no choice.

But last night... Fen shivered at the memory. Someone no
that wasn't quite right- some thing, had spoken to him, or
rather made him speak, and done so in a voice and a language
that was both unintelligible and indescribably horrible. He
had broken off the reading even before it had completed its
first communication, his mouth fouled by the noise that had
come from it, and now he was afraid that if he read again, it
would come back.

But that had been in the night. He had been too tormented
by his dreams to sleep well, no doubt fuelled by the schoolboy
superstitions of ridiculous peasant stevedores. Now that it
was day, and he was sitting in the brightly-lit mess room
that was familiar as his own skin, the faces of his longtime
shipmates looking at him expectantly, waiting for some fun.
If ever there was a time to exorcise the demons of the
night with a playful and harmless reading, telling these
men of their loved ones at home, then perhaps it was now.
Cowardice was not compatible with being a Saanti-master.
Fen licked his lips and wiped the sides of his sweaty shirt
with his palms.

'What kind of things?' he asked Parren.

The men smiled, sensing entertainment.

'Well, for one, I want to know if my boy working in Dubai
will marry a good girl and give me grandsons.'

The man at the end of the table laughed and blew out a
cloud of smoke. 'I can tell you that Parren. I have it on good
authority he's choking on Arab cock right now.'

Patten made a mock-threatening swipe with the back of his
hand, but he was smiling. He looked back at Fen. 'So?'

Fen toyed with his cup, his gaze fixed on the brown circle
of liquid, then slowly put his hand in his trouser pocket and
brought out the pack and dice. The four men shifted in their
seats with delight and sat forward in anticipation.

Fen held the pack and looked from face to face, then slowly
began to shuffle the cards. They watched closely as he laid out
a semi-circle of ancient and bizarrely-marked cards, each with
letters of the alphabet inscribed over a lurid illustration. The
three bone dice had occult symbols burnt into them, two of
them inlaid intricately around the symbols with tiny slivers
of gold, one with silver.

Fen realized his hand was trembling. He stopped and took
another swallow of coffee. This was ridiculous. All the more
determined now to shake this night terror off, he sped up,
concentrating hard as he laid and arranged the cards.

This task complete, he gathered two of the three dice
together in his hand and looked up. 'Who's first?'

Patten wiped his mouth with a hand then looked to the
cadet. 'Well I suppose it's Hal whose losing most sleep.'

'Yeah. Or his girlfriend,' sniggered the carpenter.

Fen looked to the boy. 'You answer only when I ask you
a question. You touch none of the cards, but only this die
when I tell you to. Understand?'

The boy smiled and nodded, looking round for approval.
All eyes were on Fen, and the serving hatch filled as the two
assistant cooks leaning forward happily on their elbows, well
used to the show that the rating could put on.

Fen placed the single die in the centre of the semicircle
then shook the other two in his palm and cast them. They
clattered onto the table top, rolled and came to rest in front
of Parren.

'What's your name?'

Fen was looking at the cards, not the boy, but Hal knew to
answer when he was poked in the ribs by a sharp finger.

'Hal Sanin.'

'What's your question?'

Hal licked his lips. It felt more tense now, less of a game.

Fen's face was stern with concentration.

'Em, will my... no, sorry.' He took a breath and composed
himself. 'Is my girlfriend, Phaara, being faithful to me?'

Fen looked at the two cast dice. 'And who do you ask? The
wind, the sun, the water or the fire?'

Hal looked to the other men and gave a worried shrug.

Parren shrugged back cheerfully and mouthed silently the
word 'water', for no other reason than to keep things going.

'Eh, water.'

Fen stretched forward and put his little finger on the die
in the semi circle of cards. He breathed in hard, then waited.
The men waited, Parren throwing Hal a fatherly wink. Slowly,
Fen's finger began to move the die across the table top.

It bobbed and hesitated in front of the cards, then moved
on, stopping and starting randomly before setting off again.
And then his finger speeded up, sliding faster and faster until
it was darting across the table top like some impossibly fleet
insect captured between the laid-out cards. Most of the men
had seen this many times, but they were still impressed. Even
if it wasn't supernatural, just Fen doing some long-practised
party trick, it was still damned dextrous. All the time, Fen's
eyes darted with the die, reading the letters as it spelled
them out, interpreting what the illustrated cards denoted,
and waiting for the voice he had asked to come through.

Fen stopped. His eyes were closed but his head came up
sharply.

'Hal?'

It was a woman's voice. No question. The stewards at the
hatch nudged each other in glee. This was good.

Hal gulped. He looked around for support, but all eyes
were fixed on Fen's face. 'Yes?' he replied weakly.

'You son of a sow.'

Hal gaped at Fen. There was no question it was his
girlfriend's voice, and if he were honest, her language too.
'What?'

'You dare accuse me of infidelity, you bastard?'

The boy was silent, his mouth working without words.
Tll tell you about infidelity. What about my cousin? Yeah?
That bring back anything? Tasik and Carlo's wedding in
Manila?'

Hal gawped stupidly at the cards then back up at Fen. He
looked as though he might be sick.

'You tried to have her in my brother's car, didn't you?
Go on deny it. Right there while the dancing was starting.
Fumbling at her bra like a kid.'

'Stop. Stop it.' The boy was nearly crying.

'And you're asking if I'm being unfaithful? I bought that
dress specially for you, not for the wedding. Blue, because
I know you like blue. And what do you do? You take Deni
out to my brother's car the moment I...'

Fen stopped suddenly and opened his eyes. There was
silence except for Hal's sharp hard breathing as he wrestled
to compose himself like the man he wanted to be. Wrestled,
in fact, to stop himself weeping with fear and shame.

Every face watched Fen intently, but his eyes, though
open, were cloudy and unfocused. Then, slowly, Fen's mouth
contorted, and from it came noises that chilled the blood
of everyone present. Guttural, throaty noises that sounded
almost like words...

' Caaahrdreeed. Cahrdreeed montwaandet.'

On the table, Fen's finger started to move. It started
slowly, then as before gathered speed, until it was flying
from card to card. Sweat had started to bead on his temple.

The men watching stayed perfectly still, hardly breathing
as though stalked by some invisible predator.

Spit started to foam at the corner of Fen's mouth, his eyes
rolled in their sockets, and the finger on the die stopped
abruptly. The next sounds from his mouth came from the
same ugly contorted lips, but this time they were delivered
in a low, almost inaudible whisper, as though something
were experimenting with his tongue. The words started
indistinctly, becoming more articulate, more formed, as the
volume increased. It was as if someone were practising speak
ing in an unfamiliar language, growing bolder as they became
more coherent.

'Yes. Yes. Scum. Scum. Oh filthy scum of scum. Listen,
scum. Sons of scum. Fathers of scum. Husbands of shit.
Brothers of barren spunk. Listen ... listen to me. To
meeeee...

Parren broke his own spell of paralysis. This was too much.

'Fen. Fen stop it.'

Fen appeared completely unable to comply.

'Dung that drops from the dead. I am whole. You scum.

Listen ... listen ...'

The die beneath Fen's finger started to tremble as though
sitting on a vibrating surface, and it continued to do so, even
when it shook loose from his grip. The men watched it with
horror, then Parren leapt to his feet and slapped Fen hard
across the face with a blow that knocked him back in his chair.

Fen let out a shriek, and raised his arms across his face,
but not, thought Parren later, to protect himself from the
blow. The die ceased its tremulous progress across the table
top, once again becoming an innocent and inanimate object,
and the men looked at Fen with horror.

The cadet and the steward had also leapt to their feet, and
two of them grabbed Fen under the arms and brought him
back upright.

'Get some water,' Parren barked to the two cooks standing
dumb-struck in the hatch.

Water was fetched and duly administered, but even an
hour later, the time when the men should have laughing
and reflecting on what must have been nothing more than
a ugly prank, neither Fen nor his audience had recovered
sufficiently to laugh at anything.



6


It was a matter of priorities. She'd washed all three of her
T-shirts, her entire collection of underwear, which wasn't
much and depressingly utilitarian, and even her trusty sandals,
which had begun to smell like an old carcass. Now, they
were all hanging like puritan bunting over the plastic frame of
the shower cubicle, or on the rail that ran around the cabin,
and it meant only one thing. It was time to do some work.

Esther sat down heavily on her sofa, crossed her bare legs
beneath her and gathered the pile of paper, notepads, the
Dictaphone and red, hardbound book that she'd carried
halfway across Peru, onto her lap, sighing as she started to
sift through the confused mess. She grazed until she found
what she wanted, the cream of the crop, the thing that she
believed was going to make this whole project.

She'd come up with the dissertation idea in a response
to a particularly politically correct lecture from a lanky
objectionable English professor on a book promotion tour,
who had come all the way to their college to present his
lecture, bearing the same title as his book: Democracy: The
Natural State of Man. Esther didn't know why, but she'd hated
him the moment he'd smoothed his sad academic beard with
long fingers, smiled smugly at the audience, and said, 'What
has politics got to do with anthropology, you must be asking
yourselves?'

Esther was in fact sighing, asking herself why this man was
patronizing them with his opening sentence.

By the time he got to, 'You know, you take it for granted
that if I offend you, horrify you, or bore you, you have the
power and the freedom to leave. Democracy, ladies and
gentlemen. Voting with your feet. It is more natural, more
immovably inbuilt into the fabric of humanity, from Piltdown
man to a Wall Street broker, than any other form of known
social behaviour,' she so desperately wanted to prove him
wrong merely for the sake of it.

He went on to argue that dictatorships, however benevol
ent, held back humanity and halted progress, and at question
time Esther put up her hand.

'What about the Roman Empire?' she asked without
aggression.

He smiled again, a father to a child. 'Ah yes, Fascism.'
Before he could begin a prepared response about that par
ticularly abhorrent form of human politics, she interrupted.
'I mean, specifically, how did it hold back humanity and halt
progress?'

He had raised his eyebrows. 'How about slavery, genocide
and corruption?' He was looking forward to humiliating her.
She could tell he made a living out of it.

'How about social order and justice for the majority, engi
neering and military advances of a type that have suived
even until now, creativity in the arts equal if not superior to
anything we enjoy today?'

'No, no, no...' He tried to stop by her shaking his head
with sympathy, but she was undeterred.

'Oh yeah. And ice cream.'

The class burst out laughing. He laughed with them, but
only with his mouth. His eyes were pinning her down,
marking her out.

'And Hitler? I trust you admired the fact the trains ran
on time?'

'Hitler was voted into power.' She spoke the next word
deliberately slowly to irritate him. 'Democratically.'

She was starting to irritate him as much he annoyed her.

She could tell.

'I guess you must be a National Socialist, young lady.' He
smiled at his own joke.

'I'm Jewish.'

His smile faded and he looked at her coldly, cleared his
throat and gave his pat response to the rest of the class while
Esther sat thinking. It wasn't important to prove the point
here. Of course she believed in the might of democracy. It
had simply become interesting to her as a student to see if
what the English jerk was saying was true or not, and more
importantly, in the true naive spirit of the young, to try and
ruin his experienced certainty.

That night she sat in the library and after three long hours
chose the most successful ancient civilization she could find
that was comparable to her own, and one that was not based
on any form of democracy whatsoever. The Incas.

They were perfect. Haughty dictators who were so successful
in building their empire that their people always had huge
surpluses of food. They had plumbing they would be proud of
in Idaho, irrigation engineering over thousands of miles that
still defies modern understanding, and a hierarchy that by
and large only slaughtered each other, leaving the man and
woman in the well-paved streets unharmed. There was social
welfare, free education and health care, little or no crime,
and all with not a sniff of anything remotely approaching democracy.

Unfortunately there was also human sacrifice, but since
church was not separate from state in the way it must
always be in modern democracies, this would only help to
further prove her point. So it was just what she needed. An
enviable civilization destroyed not by its lack of democracy,
but by an equally undemocratic horde of avaricious religious
hypocrites from Europe. Now, thousands of years later, under
the democratic rule of a bastardized Spanish civilization,
was Peru more successful? No sirree. She was off, and her
dissertation was born.

The paper she had created from the dross of notes and
photos of temples and dig sites she'd had developed in
Cuzcou included sketched diagrams and twenty-nine full
pages of her writing. Because unbelievably she had chanced
upon something she wasn't expecting. Something that was so
exciting she could hardly contain it. A three-week trip onto
the high plateau with some shepherds she had befriended in
a small village had led her to an extraordinary piece of living
human archaeology, something she hoped she was the first
to find, and when she wrote of it might just cause a stir.

The shepherds had told her of a small group of nomadic
people, rarely seen, who moved and lived on the very edges
of the eastern mountain range that divided the high Andean
plateau from the Amazon jungle. What was remarkable about
these people, apart from the fear they seemed to inspire in
the otherwise hardy shepherds, was the fact that they were
Incas. Esther had tried not to laugh. There were, of course,
no Incas. All the research told her that in the days of the great
empire there were in fact only forty thousand full-blooded
nobles who called themselves by that name. The hundreds
of thousands of people who lived peacefully under their rule
were merely Inca subjects.

The pure-bred Incas were either slaughtered or interbred
with the Spanish to create through countless generations the
modern Peruvians. To suggest that some of the original royal
Incas had survived thus far intact would be outrageous. But
the normally reticent shepherds were adamant, insisting, as
further proof, that these people were still sun-worshippers,
that they had the power and dark practices of the ancient
ones very much in their grasp. Not only that, but the shep
herds spoke enigmatically, and Esther thought, somewhat
fearfully, about the tribe being unusually active recently.
One had said in a small anxious voice that some of them
had been travelling to towns and cities, a thing previously
unheard of.

She begged to know where they might be found and after
days of pleading and haranguing, they had left her in a place
where the tribe were sometimes seen. She was afraid at first,
being left alone in such a desolate spot, but even more afraid
when after three days she emerged from her tent in the early
light of dawn to find a small group of men sitting silently
outside, waiting for her to emerge.

She'd had an incredibly brief twelve days in their company,
before they disappeared in the night, their tracks indicating
they had moved off in a direction that was too obviously a
route to the jungle for her taste. Everything she'd learned
from them during their time together was from a peculiarly
intense and very beautiful seventeen-year-boy in their midst
who could speak a little halting Spanish. She had spent
time cultivating him, flirting even, to make him sit with her
and talk into her Dictaphone in very broken and difficult
Spanish. But then Esther had a talent for making men want
her without ever giving them what they expected might
be theirs after time. He was no different. Just younger.
He'd started haltingly, shyly, glancing at the older men who
regarded him and Esther impassively as they sat together by
her tent. But as the days progressed he began to take a great,
almost obsessive interest in her, talking more animatedly and
rapidly, leaving her confused and ignorant of the majority of
what he was trying to tell her. He'd been so intense, sweating
profusely as he spoke, even though they were camped on
the freezing plateau. But at least she'd confirmed what the
frightened shepherds had told her. The boy had been to
Lima, an incredible journey from here. But his eyes shone
when he spoke of it, even though the elders lowered their
eyes when they heard the name of the city. Teenagers the world
over, thought Esther. Here she was wanting him to tell her
about the traditions and rituals of his tribe, and probably
all he wanted to talk about would be discos and girls. He
certainly became even more flushed and excited when she
made him understand she was heading for Lima on the way
back, and indeed after that, he rarely left her alone. But
his Spanish was too rapid for her. No matter. She checked
the tapes each time he finished, and whatever he said was
all there.

All she would have to do was to take the time later to
decipher and translate, no doubt kicking herself for not
asking the right things when she had the chance.

She had also written everything down that the elders had
said, in exactly the words they'd used, unfamiliar or not. It
was not for her to interpret it until she could think straight
later.

The diagrams she had were of the makeshift altar they
would build and destroy each morning and she sat examining
it, looking forward to comparing it with the ancient lay-outs of
the temples she had visited endlessly throughout the rest of
the trip. When she awoke one morning to find they had gone
in the night, there had been a particularly intricate pattern
scratched in the hardened dust directly outside her tent, and
what interested her when she'd made a careful sketch of it,
was that unlike the altars they built, there was nothing even
remotely familiar about its twisting lines. She treasured that
one above all.

Esther blessed the dull English professor with the beard.
Through a routine academic exercise to try and discuss
the effects of democracy on civilization, she might, quite
incredibly, have run into what she firmly believed was an
almost completely unknown tribe of people.

She had no one yet to share the thrill with, particularly on
this ship of fools, but even if it was laughed out of college
when she got back, right now she was as excited as if she'd
struck gold.

She lay back, and with some difficulty started the long task
of deciphering her own appalling handwriting.

Sohn was trying not to laugh. Lloyd Skinner was a big,
powerful man, and from the engine room, the only hatch
into the cofferdams between the cargo holds and the outer
hull was one that was considerably smaller than him. The
fourth engineer and a cadet had unscrewed it laboriously to
give him access, but he was struggling to get in, especially with
the big industrial torch and ridiculously formal flightcase he
was carrying.

'You need that in there?' Sohn asked, pointing to the
aluminium case.

Skinner looked back. 'The only way to keep this damned
paperwork together.'

The chief engineer grinned and shrugged. Skinner was a
strange man. Anyone would have accompanied him if he'd
ordered it, would have held the papers for him and offered
their back as a makeshift table for any documents that needed
ticked or filled in at site.

Indeed, Sohn would have been pleased to do it himself. He
hadn't been inside the cofferdams on this ship before, and he
was always delighted to acquaint himself with the concealed
architecture of any vessel he powered through the water. But
Skinner was a loner, a perfectionist, an utter stickler for duty,
and if any inspection needed to be done, he always wanted
to do it by himself.

The curious thing was not only why the company would
want this done now, while at sea, but why they wanted it
done at all.

There was nothing in there. Just a long dark space, at least
eight feet wide and as tall as the entire hull, running the
length of the ship, both to port and starboard. They were
supposed to be checked and flushed regularly at port, so
that any problem would become rapidly obvious on the
loadicator. But that took time and manpower, and Sonstar
were not a company to waste either if it got in the way of
making money. Skinner was to be admired for pursuing the
official line when his bosses would almost certainly have
turned a blind eye to its omission. And if he wanted to go
wandering in the dark, fumbling with plans and treading on
rats, then that was his business. It was Lloyd Skinner's ship
to command and he could do what he wanted.

The captain had already pushed through and was standing
upright on the other side by the time Sohn formulated his
last offer.

'You want to take walkie-talkie? In case you fall or some
thing?'

Skinner shook his head, but smiled weakly. 'Thank you,
Chief Engineer. No. I only need to check and see there's
no leakage from the holds. The bosun reported there might
be a small lesion near the bow. It'll only take half an hour at
most. If I'm not back by Friday you can send in the dogs.'

He turned and walked away, his boots making a lonely
echo on the virgin metal floor. As the circle of his torchlight
retreated into the long dark tunnel of dripping metal, three
heads peered after him, glad to be on the side of the hatch
where the striplights burned bright and Radio Lima played
Mariah Carey.

'Shit fuck bastard and double fuck!'

Leonardo Becko looked round quickly and tutted with
exasperation. The galley boy was hopping from foot to
foot, his hand tucked protectively under his arm, his face
contorted with pain. One glance down at the deep fat frier
he'd been feeding told the cook all he needed to know.

'You stupid fucking idiot. You drop the potatoes from
a height, ooh, surprise surprise, they're going to make a
splash.'

The boy was hissing through bared teeth, immune for
the moment to his boss's taunts. Leonardo wiped his flour-covered hands on a filthy apron and walked across the
galley floor.

'Here. Let's see it, you moron.'

Salvo Acambra took his hand from his armpit and looked at
it. It was burned only very superficially, a thin red weal rising
from the wrist to the thumb. Leonardo tutted again, this time
with heavy sarcasm, shaking his head like a vaudeville doctor
making a fatal diagnosis. 'Have to come off, I think.'

Salvo scowled.

Leonardo gave him a harmless swipe over the head and
turned away to get on with his pastry. 'Take ten minutes, and
make sure it's only ten. You bloody moron.'

'Yes, Chef,' said the boy, brightening considerably. He
moved quickly to the galley storeroom, and sat down on a
crate. An examination of the weal told him it was indeed an
injury of no consequence, and he smiled at the ten-minute
break he'd earned as a bonus in the hot, busy hell that led up
to lunch. He craned backwards and peered out into the galley
to see where the cook was now. Becko's head was turned the
other way, and the boy quickly shut the storeroom door a
fraction more with his foot, reached into his back pocket
under his apron ties and took out a packet of cigarettes.

He glanced up to the porthole, then stood on the crate and
opened the window. Leonardo Becko hated smoking in the
galley, so he would have to be extra careful. He pushed his
body against the bulkhead, stuck his head as far out of the
porthole as the limited hinge would allow, lit up a cigarette
and
took a long, delicious drag. The sun beat down on his
hot face, but the breeze from the sea blew away both his
smoke and his sweat in a way that made him close his eyes
in pleasure, enjoying the rare moment of solitude.

Salvo loved the ozone smell of the sea, the fresh, salty tang
that it left on your skin and in your hair. It was the one
great consolation for working in this hole of a ship. He
took another long suck of nicotine and let himself dream
of home.

The breeze was souring. He opened his eyes and took a
deeper sniff, curious as to where this new smell was coming
from. Instantly, his senses were assaulted by an almost solid
intake of air that was fetid and foul beyond reason. He
coughed back a throat full of vomit, fighting to control it
and sent it back below where it belonged.

Tears in his eyes from the effort of this, he stepped down
from the crate and looked around to see if the cause was
coming from within. The air he breathed freshened again,
full of the hot comfortable smells of cooking, steam and
condensation. The rotting had most definitely come from
outside.

He looked quizzically up at the porthole, and this time
stepped more gingerly up on the crate and put his head
out. Only four or five inches of the window would open
on account of the safety catch, but he forced his face out
through it, trying not to breathe deeply this time. To his
left, the limited space let him see along the outer hull of
the ship as far as the bow. It was harder to see to the right,
or above, but he could also look down and just see the
foam breaking below at the waterline. He sniffed more gently
this time, and the same reek attacked his nostrils like acid.
He coughed, waited until his eyes cleared of the tears, then
strained to see.

There was movement. It was above him, faint, only on the
very edge of his vision, and he felt it rather than saw it. Salvo
contorted his head to twist up and see what it might have
been, but the movement was unfeasible. He flicked through
some possibilities of what might have moved on a smooth
metal hull of a ship doing twenty knots. A seagull, maybe,
caught in some peculiar way on something sharp? Or maybe
a rope or cable come loose, dangling and scraping on the
side. But what was making the smell? He tried one more
tortuous move then gave up. Who cared what it was?

He flicked his precious cigarette from the porthole and
shut the glass tight. The air inside the storeroom was like
nectar after the stench from outside, and he sat back on
the crate, his back against the wall, to enjoy his last few
minutes of freedom, gazing dreamily at the square of brilliant
sunlight being projected onto a pile of potato sacks on the
wall opposite him.

Not much would send a galley boy back to his work early
from a break he had been gifted by the chef, but two things
happened simultaneously that did just that.

Behind him, through the very hull of the ship itself, he
felt a manic scraping, the vibration of some horrible metallic
scuttling. The sound rats would make if they were ten feet
long and made of something other than flesh. And the square
of light that bathed the potato sacks blackened quickly into
shadow and lit again. The boy leapt to his feet and whirled
around to the porthole. It framed a perfect blue sky and
bathed him in nothing more than benign sunshine.

Leonardo was surprised to see Salvo back so quickly, but
he was pleased to have the help.

'Turn that bloody stock down. And get over here and finish
these carrots.'

'Yes, Chef,' the boy said weakly and wiped his sweating
upper lip with a burnt hand that he had quite forgotten.

Even the most expensive penthouse apartment in any of the
world's greatest cities would have a hard time competing
with the view from the bridge of the Lysicrates. Dilapidated
and shabby though it was, when the ship was in sail and
the cargo deck below stretched like pointing finger into
the dark blue Pacific, it would be hard to stare down
from the bridge's angled windows with anything other
than awe.

When Renato Lhoon entered, the third officer on watch
was staring out ahead as one might expect, but not with awe
at the might of the ocean and its domination by man. He
had the look of a man who was half asleep.

'Wakey wakey, Ernesto.'

The man turned round quickly and tried to look alert.
He nodded to Lhoon then looked down at the screen of
the echo sounder as though he were interested. His senior
officer stood at his side and glanced down at the array of
flickering instrument screens between them and the ocean
panorama.

'Set fair?'

Ernesto nodded and pointed to the curling weather fax on
the console beside him, but Renato's eye had already drifted
to the GPS.

'Have we altered course?'

'Eh, yeah. Just to the co-ordinates that Officer Cotton
decided.' Ernesto gave an expansive sweep with one open
hand over the instruments, imagining that might help explain
things.

'Let me see the log.'

The third officer handed it to him and he scanned last
night's entry. There was no mention of a navigational alter
ation. But then Cotton would forget to make an entry in
his log if dinosaurs roamed onto the cargo deck and tore
down the derricks with their teeth. Renato sighed with exas
peration.

'What was the alteration?'

Ernesto fumbled for a moment then told him. The ship
had been re-routed five degrees west, and their course was
taking them directly up the middle of the Milne Edwards
Trench, the one that had so freaked Esther. It was not
the usual shipping lane and although it was only a small
detour, its purpose, in fine and settled weather, seemed
meaningless.

Renato was not going to challenge his senior officer's
decision in front of a subordinate, and so he nodded as
though he knew about it and had simply forgotten.

The man seemed relieved, took back the log, and turned
again to feign interest in the echo sounder, which was
presently showing a vertiginous depth of seventeen thousand
feet.

Renato walked casually over to the starboard window and
checked on his chilli pepper plants, then as quietly as he had
entered, left to go and find Cotton.

'Recreation Room' was rather a grand term for a space that
boasted only one bookcase with some dog-eared potboilers
in various languages, and a pile of elderly magazines. But
Matthew Cotton was not slumped back on one of the three
foam sofas, a rum and coke in his hand, because he was
attracted by the possibilities of the reading material. The
sideboard that ran the length of the wall was the officers'
makeshift bar, a trusting affair run by the catering staff, from
which imbibers took what they wanted from the generous
gantry and filled in their intake for later payment on the
personalized sheets left for the purpose.

Matthew had long since given up entering his drinks on
his dog-eared piece of paper measure by measure, and it was
understood now that he would simply purchase his ration by
the bottle.

The dent he had made on his current bottle of Bacardi
was not inconsiderable, and his eyes were closed, his head
leant against the hard foam as the effects of it started to make
their mark.

'Double watch again, Matthew. Eight till four.'

Cotton didn't open his eyes. 'Shit, have a drink, Renato. I
know when my fuckin' watch is.'

Renato Lhoon left the doorway where he'd been standing
for some time, looking at his senior officer with contempt,
and entered the room. 'It's two-thirty. I don't need no
drink.'

'We don't need no stinkin' badges,' sniggered Matthew in
a mock-Mexican accent, enjoying the unfunnyness of his joke
alone, in the way only drunks can. When there was silence in
response he opened his eyes and blinked around him to see
where Renato Lhoon might be. He was standing over him,
and Matthew lifted his head to focus on his face.

'What?'

'Thought we had a deal, Matthew.'

'Huh?'

'You gonna drink all watch, then you tell me what hap
pens. I fill the log. That's how it works. That's how I save
your skin.'

'Yeah? What, you want me to thank you for it like every
day?'

Renato crossed his arms. 'I want you to tell me what you
do on duty.'

Matthew shrugged in agreement. 'So?'

'You changed course last night. I told the captain every
thing this morning, like you know you should do and not me,
but I don't tell him that. Know why? 'Cause I don't know,
that's why.'

Matthew sat up and blinked at Renato. The man was angry.

Not like him. 'What's the big deal, Renato? So I forgot.'

'What the captain going to say?'

Matthew took a swig of his drink and exhaled his words
on the resulting expellation of air that followed his swallow.
'Nothing, I shouldn't reckon.'

Renato snorted. 'Yeah? You alter course, don't log it and
you think he don't mind?'

'I know he won't.'

'Yeah? How come?'

Matthew lay back again and looked at Renato as if he were
dumb. 'Because the captain came to the bridge and changed
it himself.'

A subtle alteration in Renato's face made Matthew sit up
slightly, ashamed momentarily of his slovenly appearance.
For no reason that Matthew could comprehend, the second
officer looked as though he had been betrayed.

Matthew cleared his throat. 'Sorry, man. I just forgot to
log it.'

Renato looked down at him for a moment, then walked
across to the gantry and poured himself a Sprite. 'What
time?'

Matthew was now uncomfortable, staring at the man's
tense back as he drank his lemonade. 'What time what?'

Renato turned to face him, his face now inscrutable. 'What
time did he come on the fucking bridge?'

This was not like Matthew's friend and partner in crime,
Renato Lhoon. This was the man who kept him in a job, who
kept him on the very edge of the legality of his post, who
made sure he got up, made certain he fulfilled his duties,
made absolutely sure that First Officer Matthew Cotton didn't
plough the vessel into a tanker at three in the morning.

And in return Renato Lhoon got paid. He got paid well.
Why now, was he getting so upset about such a tiny regular
misdemeanour as forgetting to log? Matthew ran a hand over
the back of his neck. 'Uh, let me see. I reckon around two,
maybe half past. I dunno.'

If only Matthew knew it, there were in fact two reasons that
Lhoon was getting upset.

But then there was no way that he could have known, since
Lhoon spent a great deal of time and energy concealing them
both, but they were nevertheless at the forefront of his are
right now as he stood regarding the hopeless drunk who
was one rank higher than he was in the important chain of
command.

The first reason was probably the most important: Renato
Lhoon hated Matthew Cotton. Hated him with the kind of
passion that was bordering on animal. He hated the fact that
this man had been given a job he was incapable of doing,
that he was given a second chance and employed again after
throwing away ten years of being a captain because of his
decline into alcoholism in the last two, and that he took the
job and paid Renato to keep him there in the full knowledge
that he should be ashore, ashore for good.

It made him sick, dressing Cotton when he was naked and
ranting, fulfilling his mundane duties for him when he was
on watch, keeping the gossip of the crew at bay to prevent
the withdrawal of co-operation, and most of all taking his
money.

But the second reason was the captain. Lloyd Skinner was
a decent man. So decent he had deliberately chosen this
wreck of a human being to be his first officer when he could
have chosen anyone he wanted. Anyone, for instance, like
Lhoon.

Renato knew something had happened to Cotton ashore
that had made him the way he was. He didn't know what,
but frankly, he didn't give a shit. He'd never asked, and he
didn't care. Everyone had bad times, everyone had tragedies.
This man had once been a respected captain and now he was
a bum.

The sea demanded more of a man.

Lloyd Skinner should know that, and it irked him that if he
did, in this case he turned an extremely blind eye. Renato's
relationship with the captain had always been good. They
had, he thought, an understanding, an empathy, a rapport.
Now, just lately, he felt Skinner was excluding him, and to
exclude him in favour of this useless baggage was too much.
He couldn't give a flying fuck about a tiny change in course.
What was upsetting him was that the captain had visited the
bridge at a highly unusual time in the night, altered course
for no reason that Lhoon could see, and most importantly,
hadn't mentioned it to him during the report of the watch
he always gave on Cotton's behalf in the morning.

Sure he was mad about it, but for now he would maintain
his inscrutability. Because Renato Lhoon had plans.

He looked back at Matthew. 'Half-past two? He say why he
changed course?'

'Search me. Maybe there was a tanker or shit. I didn't see
anything on the radar.'

Renato nodded, as though satisfied, then placed his can on
the sideboard and walked to the door. Matthew watched him
go, expecting more, but he disappeared from view without a
parting word.

'Hey!' shouted Cotton to an empty door frame. 'You forgot
to write down your Sprite.'

The spaces between the cofferdams were open and stepping
over them was possible with care and a little effort. The
torchlight illuminated the long cathedral of buttressed iron
that supported the main holds like some insane gothic
fancy.

A lesser soul might have been tempted to turn and run
with every creak and clank of shifting metal that reverberated
along the endless corridor, but Lloyd Skinner was not a man
to Spock easily. He had been surprised, unpleasantly so, to
discover that there were rats down here. He knew there were
rats on board. He himself had falsified the inspection sheet to
claim that there were not, but it was unsettling that they had
penetrated into the part of the ship that should be sealed and
secure. More than once, the beam had caught the ugly back
of a scuttling grey beast, scrambling for safety over the iron
spines of the tanks and splashing through the small puddles
of sea water that still persisted even after flushing.

Skinner gave a moment's thought to wonder where there
might be a breach that allowed them access to this area from
the main holds where he knew they lived foraged and bred,
then as quickly dismissed it and carried on.

He had turned the corner, away from the square of light
that came from the engine room, and now he was in a world
of total black, with only a cavernous echo to remind him of
the scale of his largely invisible surroundings.

Back there, he knew, the engineers would be gossiping,
pouring mugs full of the repulsive Filipino coffee they drank
in unhealthy quantifies, and looking curiously from time to
time at the hole through which their captain had gone to do
his duty to the company and international safety regulations.
But in here, well below the line of the sea that pushed against
the iron skin, eager to enter and fill those gaps with its heavy,
salty, irresistible body, he was alone, unobserved.

Skinner stopped and put down his heavy flight case.

He pointed the torch at the wall between the tank and
the hold and calculated where exactly he was standing. His
progress had taken him into the curve of the bow so this
would make him level with hold One or two. He swept the
torch beam across the ceiling of the tank and down the
vast iron wall to his right. The surface seemed dry. He put
out a hand and touched it, paused for a moment, enjoying
the vibration that the engines sent through the ship like a
heartbeat, then ran his fingers across the flaky, oxidized
surface. There was a smell to the rusting metal of the ship,
and he breathed it in: a musky, sharp aroma of minerals
and water working together to break down the iron that
had come from the earth and wanted nothing more than
to return to there.

A glance back confirmed there was no glimpse of light,
either from door or rival torch, and he sighed and withdrew
his hand.

Captain Lloyd Skinner knelt down and placed the torch on
the ground facing his flight case. In the concentrated beam of
light he turned the combination lock carefully to its four-digit
sequence and waited until he heard the satisfying click. For
a moment he placed his hands together, fingers making a
steeple, and tapped at his chin. He closed his eyes and just
as quickly opened them, as the visions he daily kept at bay
with superhuman effort tried to surface like black shapes
from the deep.

From his right came a scuffling. A rat, mistaking the silence
for safety, emerged from its shadows and, panicking in the
unexpected circle of spilled light, planned a route that would
take it across Lloyd Skinner's case. It was a youngster, no
more than four or five inches long. Skinner watched it with
his eyes, without turning his head. Watched it as it stopped
and sniffed the air with a pointed pink nose, and watched it as
it moved quickly forward and hopped onto the flight case.

His hand came down with such force that the rat's spine
snapped before the message had reached its brain. Its jaws
wrenched open in agony and fury, unable to exact any kind of
revenge without the co-operation of its body. It screamed and
twitched, and Skinner watched it impassively, doing nothing
to end its pain. He watched it for three minutes until the
twitching became no more than a slight tick, and the body,
bent in a hideous upward crescent, became still and stiff.

Lloyd Skinner picked up the rodent by its long worm-like
tail and threw it into the darkness, then slowly, carefully,
like a man uncovering buried treasure, opened the case
and regarded the contents with the closest his hard blue
eyes came to satisfaction.



7


Tenghis closed the cabin door, turned the light on, stripped
off his shirt and hung it on the radiator where the sweat
would evaporate and grant it another day's use. He ran a
hand over his fired face and then moved to his altar and
knelt before the Virgin and her imploring outstretched
plaster arms. He bent his head and began his muttered
gallop through the prayers that were so monotonous and
familiar that he was three or four minutes into them before
realizing his mind was occupied with anything but piety.
Through all the Hail Marys he had merely been freewheeling
over a variety of petty mundanifies, from the unjust nature
of some shift alterations, to the price of a Japanese car
back in Manila. He took a deep breath and tried to con
centrate. The love of Jesus and the purity of His mother
on earth stayed with him for around thirty or forty seconds
of chanting, until his concentration gave up in favour of
whether he was eating too much dairy fat for his own
good.

'She doesn't hear you.'

Tenghis jumped up and swung round in alarm. Fen was
leaning against the wall at the end of his bunk, staring past
his cabin mate at the statue.

He was naked, his arms crossed, not casually, but as though
protecting himself from the cold.

'Fen. For Christ's sake.' Tenghis breathed his protest
from a body that was fighting to make its heart beat normally
again.

Fen slid down the wall and crouched, still staring at
Mary. He smiled, then slowly began to laugh. Tenghis had
recovered enough to become annoyed.

'What were you doing skulking in the dark? And put some
clothes on.'

Fen stopped laughing. 'You like it that way, don't you?'

'Get dressed.'

'You like to think of her as soft and loving and forgiving.'
Fen took his eyes from the statue and looked at Tenghis.
His pupils were large and unfocused, but there was no
smell of drink from him. Tenghis stepped back without
even realizing he had done so.
'But you see,' continued Fen, 'God isn't like that. God is
brutal. Unforgiving. Demanding. He's the god of shit and
death, of tears and torture.' He raised an arm and pointed
at the statue. 'And that new-made thing is not even good
enough to be his whore.'

Tenghis had had enough. He pulled his shirt from the
radiator, opened the cabin door and left. He was going to
see the bosun. Clearly, Fen was ill.

As the door closed behind him he paused, halted by the
sound of Fen's low voice, still talking as though Tenghis was
still there.

'So new, you see. So new the Lord the Sun has risen and set
a thousand million times before you even cast your whore's
shadow in his light.'

And then he laughed again.

Tenghis put his arms through his shirt sleeves and walked
quickly away without stopping to button up the front.

He wanted to put a hand over his nose and mouth, but the
rating standing over him with the mop was watching his
every move. Instead, Bosun Felix Chadin attempted to look
as calm as his awkward crouch would allow, tapping his knee
with a finger as though what he was looking at was perfectly
normal.

There must have been around twenty of them. All fully-
grown rats, all dead and every one skinned, with its belly
slit open. The bodies had been dropped down the back of a
life-jacket fixed shelving unit on C-deck, and so recently that
there was no smell. It had been the thin serpentine trickle
of blood that had attracted the attention of the rating who
had been mopping the floor and now, after extricating the
bodies with a length of coat-hanger wire, Felix was trying to
figure out what it meant.

'When did you last clean around this area?' he asked, still
staring at the mess of shiny red skin and guts.

The rating shrugged. 'I dunno. I guess about noon yester
day. I didn't see no blood then.'

Felix stood, wiping his trouser legs as though there had
been physical contact with the dead animals, though plainly
there had been none.

'Go to the galley and get some refuse bags.'

The rating stared at him, expecting more, his impassive
eyes demanding an explanation of the horror.

Felix stared back. 'Now.'

The man retreated sulkily, dragging his mop and leav
ing the bosun with the unsightly little pile of corpses and
the blossoming horror of what the Christ this could poss
ibly mean.

She rewound the tape and held her forehead in her hands
as it whined backwards. Not Spanish. Definitely not Spanish.
But neither did it sound like the other two commonly-used
Peruvian languages, Quechua or Aymara. Esther stopped the
tape and pressed play again. The boy's voice was soft but
he was clearly enunciating, trying his best to be understood
by this strange foreign woman he had so obviously wanted.
On the page she had been writing on, she traced with her
finger the words translated so far, listening as he spoke,
matching the words with her English, ready to stop the
tape when she came to the unidentifiable section again.

'... so we come long time, long long time, to the mountains here...
far, now.., the sun tells us... we come.., he is risen.., and
when he is fully risen then we will be...'

She stopped it. It was the next garble of guttural language
that had completely stumped her. She cleared her throat, got
her pen ready and started the tape again.

'Kuchitoowah ghukkewal ghukkenalla kareeh. . .'

She clicked it off and checked to see if what she'd written
matched the phonetics of what she was hearing. There had
been a phleghmy, back-of-the-throat quality to the words, like
German or Gaelic, so unlike the lyrical sing-song of the boy's
basic Spanish. It completely confounded Esther. Worse. If she
were honest, there was something that spooked her about the
sounds.

She sighed and closed her notebook. Doubtless there
would be someone on the internet who could identify the dia
lect, but she was irritated. She had hoped to have the majority
of it translated, even roughly, before she docked, and now it
looked as though that wasn't going to be possible.

Maybe she could work out the context, and therefore
its meaning, by labouring through the rest of his lengthy
babblings, but judging by what she had already successfully
deciphered, none of it seemed to be making much sense.
Esther stood up and rubbed her back. She had been working
for hours, oblivious to the time, and now she was surprised
to find that it was dark outside and she was hungry. The
thought of another stilted, tasteless dinner in the officers'
mess filled her with gloom, but she had to eat. She pulled
on a sweatshirt and left the cabin to see if there was any
alternative.

The button on the lift glowed red as she passed, indicating
that someone was using it, so she moved to the stairs that
would take her from D-deck down to the upper deck and
the galley. Not that she would have used it anyway. She
thought of the tiny cramped box that shuddered up and
down between floors, smelling of sweat and stopping at floors
without warning, as a hellish device. The peephole on the
outer doors told her all she needed to know about how often
it might break down. Why else would you need to see into a
lift? Presumably to check the occupants were still alive. She
skipped down the metal stairs pausing only to look curiously
at the small group of men on C-deck who were standing
round the life-jacket shelves, and continuing quickly as the
ratings on the periphery returned her inquisitive gaze with
inscrutable stares that were not entirely without hostility.

Esther had learned the layout of the ship sufficiently to
know that the entrance to the galley was a few doors down
from the officers' mess, and so she passed along the corridor
and halted in the open doorway. The galley was mayhem.
Becko the cook was barking staccato orders to three young
men, amidst a cauldron of steam and unpleasant cooking
smells that seemed always to contain a hint of rotting cab
bage. She waited patiently until his frantic gaze swept across
the doorway and caught her in its beam.

She raised a hand. 'Hi!'

Becko stared back mutely then nodded almost impercep
tibly and wiped his hands on the filthy cloth around his waist.
She was intuitive enough to regard the slight change in his
facial expression as a question.

'I'm working in my cabin right now. Is there any chance
I could maybe take something back? A sandwich maybe?
Anything really.'

Becko looked as if he hadn't heard her, turning back to
the large aluminium pot on the stove, but as one of the young
men passed behind him, Becko grabbed at him and pointed
to the doorway with a terse order. The boy approached
Esther and smiled. She hadn't noticed him before, either
above or below deck, and was struck by how beautiful he
was. Around sixteen, he was tall and slim with perfect skin
and glittering black, almond-shaped eyes. But it was more
than just his youthful perfection that made her feel peculiar
in his presence. The boy was shining with a kind of inner
glow, an almost manic enthusiasm and vigour that made her
want to step away from its heat. Becko, she mused, must run
a pretty thrilling galley if this was an example of how his staff
reacted to his instruction. She fought back a blush she hoped
could be attributed to the heat and rubbed at her hair.

'I was just wondering if I could maybe take away a sandwich
or something.., you know...'

The boy nodded furiously and waved his large hands. 'I
bring you dinner. You say you want.' He turned around and
scanned the galley. 'Tonight it fish or maybe a little pork.'

Esther shrugged. 'Fish, I guess. That would be great. Thanks.'

The boy nodded again, beaming at her with a row of
gleaming white teeth. 'It good. Real good.'

She smiled back. 'Shall I wait?'

He gestured for her to go. 'I bring. I bring.'

'Sure. Thanks.'

She smiled again, then turned and left. Behind her, the
boy watched the empty doorway until Becko kicked at him
and called his mother a cock-sucker. The boy, beaming, went
about his tasks, unaware that Leonardo Becko's narrowed
eyes were following his every move, weighing up what drug
his normally sullen surly trainee cook had taken that was
making him float around like a girl on her first date, and
had done for the last three or four hours.

'What do you reckon?'

Cotton held his hip-bones through his trousers and shook
his head at the pile of corpses.

His captain tried again. 'Ever seen anything like it?'

'Nope.'

Lloyd Skinner sighed and gestured to the rating clutching
the plastic bin bag that he could shovel away the rats.

Felix Chadin had waited long enough. He was bored with
this group of silent men standing around the bloody mess
as though examining a car at auction. 'What shall I do,
Captain?'

Skinner looked up and regarded him with distaste, almost
as though he found him responsible for the outrage. 'Find
out who did it.'

The bosun returned the look and crossed his arms across
his chest, biting back the sarcastic retort that had already
formed itself in his native tongue. He looked to the first
officer for something a little more expansive, but Cotton's
attention had already moved from the pile of rats now being
bundled into the bag, to the area of floor at the bottom of
the stairs.

It was clear that the rating had started mopping there,
working his way towards the life-jacket shelf and then stopped
abruptly on finding the horror. What made Matthew so sure
of this was the fact that a subtle residue of glistening, snail-like
trail was still present on the stairs. If he were a betting man
he would have laid money on the fact that there had been
more of the stuff. More of it that would have led directly to
the shelf, and had mercifully been wiped away.

Captain Lloyd Skinner let out a long sigh and looked
around at the group of men. The flat look in his eyes
betrayed that this bizarre event was no more or less than
he expected from the complex and irritating species that
was humanity, that somehow everybody present had let him
down. He nodded curtly to the bosun and left them to their
mystery and the mess. Cotton didn't join the other men in
watching him go. He was at the bottom of the stairs, squinting
up to where they turned on a landing.

'Felix.'

'Uh-huh,' the bosun replied with a dull tinge to his voice
as he watched the unconcerned captain's back disappear
around the corner.

'Come here a second.'

Felix motioned to the men with the bags to carry on and
walked forward to join his first officer.

'What the fuck is that?'

The slime trail was so faint that at first Felix Chadin
couldn't understand what Matthew was pointing at.

Then gradually he picked up the faint reflective sheen of
the dried mess meandering up the stairs and at the point it
turned the corner, climbing a little way up the wall. It was
his turn to sigh. 'That, Matthew, is... how you say it?.., ass
needing kicked.'

Matthew looked at him uncomprehendingly.

The bosun indicated the men behind him with a slight
incline of the head. 'Looks like a burst refuse bag been
dragged instead of lifted.'

Of course it was. It was exactly the residue left on a kitchen
floor when a plastic bin bag decides to leak its glutinous
contents, except this time, as the man had pointed out, this
one had been dragged. Cotton nodded. 'Yeah, well let's find
the ass and kick it good.'

Matthew mulled for a second why he was more upset by
this minor piece of insubordination than it merited, or was
usual in his own slack command. He was irritable. That was
all. His tank needed topped up.

His tone did not escape the bosun. Felix glared at him.

Sure thing. He would find out who was killing, skinning and
tearing the hearts out rats, then he would find out what slut
of a deck hand was dragging leaky refuse around, and then
maybe he'd have some spare time to find the cure for fucking
cancer. Meanwhile he knew his captain would be helping out
by pottering in his quarters and his first officer would be
busy elsewhere drinking himself silly. He could use a little
more support. 'I got a problem with a greaser right now.'
He brought it up not because it was important, but merely
to try to burden Cotton with any other difficulty he could
think of.

'Yeah? What kind of problem?' asked Cotton without much
conviction, his eyes back on the shiny trail.

'Fen Sahg. Cabin mate say he's acting real strange.'

Cotton looked at him. 'Strange enough to go cutting up
rats?'

The bosun shook his head. 'Nah. I spoke to him. He sure
is up-tight, but he's not going as psycho as Tenghis had me
believe. But I reckon I need to split them up.'

'Yeah. Okay.'

The men stayed silent for a moment, then Cotton spoke
quietly, conspiratorially. 'Any theories? The rats, I mean.'

Felix studied Cotton's face and read his eyes. He felt anger
rise in his throat again. 'Ah, you mean maybe the common
Filipino custom? The one where the first born must eat rat
hearts to be a man?'

Cotton looked hopeful. Chadin sighed through his nose,
held Matthew in his gaze inscrutably for a second then
turned and walked away, leaving his first officer in no doubt
whatsoever by the set of his shoulders, of the contempt in
which he was held.

Cotton felt a fool. He closed his eyes for a second and
pinched the bridge of his nose. He needed a drink, and
in just a minute, when the shame had passed, he would
go to his cabin and start working on the evening's oblivion.
This weird shit was already too much for him. And what
was worse was the question he couldn't get out of his mind.
The bosun was comforted by the leaking-bag theory, and if
Cotton hadn't known better, he would be too. But he did
know better. Whoever did it needed more than just an
official reprimand for sloppiness. They needed to explain
why they would drag leaking refuse not just up and down
the accommodation block stairwell, but more importantly,
haul it out from hold two halfway up the ship and then drop
it over the side?

He let the two men brush past him with the bag of rats,
then decided to return to his cabin by lift.

The stairs suddenly seemed rather unappealing.



8


The cayenne pepper genus he had chosen was the F1 Apache.
That did the best in such small pots, and produced a crop that
was as useful as it was decorative. Renato Lhoon felt the soil
with a finger to check it was moist, them wiped his hands on
his trousers and put his hands in his pockets. He thought of
his greenhouse back home in Iloilo and wondered if Mary
was keeping the coriander going. The extra that Cotton was
paying him would mean that maybe next year he could grow
plants to look at and smell, instead of to eat, but the thought
gave him little pleasure. After all, if he had Matthew Cotton's
job and the extra salary and pension that went with it, he
wouldn't even be weighing up the choice. And it should be
his job. He did it, day in, day out, as well as his own. And he did
it better than the captain would ever know. Except Renato was
going to make sure that this voyage would be the one on which
Skinner found out. Then he might change his mind about
his precious first officer, and stop protecting him from the
company and every international shipping regulation known
to man that said that hopeless drunks shouldn't pilot ships.

He frowned and walked slowly back to the instruments in
the middle of the bridge. The telephone was silent. Still no
word from the captain as to when they should resume normal
speed. Skinner had come on the bridge at the beginning of
Renato's watch and made him have to. They were doing no
more than around seven knots, waiting, the captain said,
to hear from the company about a possible back-track and
change of route. That had been nearly three hours ago and
the Lysicrates had barely moved.

The second officer was becoming increasingly curious
about the nature of the captain's communications with the
company.

Not only had they altered course to come farther out from
the regular shipping channel, taking them up the middle of
the Milne Edwards trench, and not only was the cargo highly
irregular, but now they were treading water, standing still
while someone in Hong Kong decided where they should
be heading. The Lysicrates had never had such a mess of a
voyage. It was an ancient and unprestigious ship, but it was
a creature of habit and had more or less run the same half
dozen routes for its overlong life, and Lhoon had become
used to the mundanity of it.

But in a way it was perfect. The very irregularity of the
voyage gave him more opportunity to escape his ties to
Cotton. It would have to be more than just Skinner finding
him drunk and asleep on watch. That had happened once
before, the time in fact when Cotton had decided it would be
worthwhile paying Renato a substantial portion of his wages
to ensure it didn't recur, and yet somehow it got forgiven
and forgotten.

No. Renato longed for Cotton to be caught in some public
and unforgivable dereliction of duty, one than even the
laissez faire attitude of the captain couldn't find a way of
overlooking. He hadn't thought of what it might be yet, but
as the captain's orders became more peculiar, and this voyage
looked like lasting longer than any of them anticipated,
Renato Lhoon knew his opportunity to stop being Cotton's
safety net would come.

He sniffed back some mucus and sat down on the chrome
stool, with only the thrum of an idling engine through the
floor and the hum of instrument panels as background noise,
while he savoured, with all the time in the world before him,
the delights of stepping over his drunken superior into a
better future.

'Lo tiraraon a los cerdos ... con la miedra humana ... pero el
que constituye partes del hombre ... les cuales el hombre mismo
evade... '

She stared at the Dictaphone with her mouth slightly
open.

'What the fuck?'

Esther tutted and played it back again. This section of the
tapes was driving her crazy. She remembered the chilly dawn
when she recorded it, and remembered too that she had been
paying the boy very little attention as he spoke, watching
instead the elders of the tribe as they broke up their altar
the moment the sun had risen safely over the barren line
of mountains. The reason she recalled the recording so well
was that the boy was more agitated than normal. He had
sweated and shifted around, talking too fast for her, but had
obviously wanted her full concentration. The irritation the
boy had felt was quite plain here in his voice, a rising, darker
quality in it indicating he was insisting on her attention and
not receiving it.

But now she came to translate it, the stuff made no sense
at all. She hadn't a clue what he was talking about. Was he
referring in some way to the men taking down the altar? A
legend? A tribal story? It made little sense, particularly when
she hadn't taken the time to ascertain its context. She glanced
at her translation so far.

'They threw him with the pigs.., with the human shit...
but he is made from the parts of man that man himself
shuns...'

There was a gap in the tape after this, presumably where
the boy waited for a response and Esther provided nothing.
The faint background noises of men talking, alpacas stirring
the bells around their necks and the calling of alien birds
was all that wall-papered behind the hissing silence. The boy
spoke again.

'Adoramas al sol, pero sabemos, asi como sabian nuestros
antepasados, que adirar la oscurldad el sol vuelve a aparecer. . .'

She glanced down at the notebook again to check her own
interpretation.

'We honour the sun, but we know as our forefathers did
that only by also honouring the dark will the sun continue
to return...'

More silence. A sullen silence. She fast forwarded.

'Esperamos. . . y ilamara. . .'

It was here she must have given up watching the men and
turned back to her indignant interviewee. She listened with
mild embarrassment as her voice on the tape cleared its
throat and asked in an indifferent, dreamy way, and in a very
poor Spanish accent, 'Hmmm? Who? You wait for who?'

The boy's voice grew so soft she could hardly make out
the words. She listened once more, rewound then turned it
up as loud as it would go.

"Aquel que camina con el sol pedro comanada alas tineblas."

She scribbled, rewound, and scribbled again, then looked
hopelessly at the phrase. 'He who walked in the sun but
commands the shadows.'

And then soft, softer than even before: 'El... something...
sin.., something.'

Rewind. She concentrated hard, ear to the tiny speaker.

'El... cura. . . sin.., iestrio.'

Esther switched it off, put down the Dictaphone. She toyed
with the pen and then in capital letters, though she was not
sure why, she wrote the boy's words in English and sat forward
looking at them.

'The dark priest.'

The hammering at the cabin door made Esther drop
the notebook. It bounced from a rapidly jerked-up knee
and landed spine-down on the sofa like a dancer doing
the splits.

'Christ!'

The hammering came again.

She expelled a long breath, leapt up and hollered. 'Yeah?'

A muffled voice from the other side of the metal door.
'Dinner. Bring you dinner.'

Esther put a hand to her beating heart and slowly let a
smile spread over her face. She had no idea she had been
spooking herself so badly. It was her dinner. Of course it was
her dinner. She smoothed down her sweatshirt, ran a hand
through her hair and walked to open the cabin door.

The boy's smile had not become any less dazzling since the
last time she saw him. He stood in the corridor brandishing a
tray that boasted a glass of milk and a round steel lid covering
a plate.

'Hey, thanks,' said Esther, returning the smile and stretch
ing out her arms to receive the tray.

The assistant cook shook his head and gestured that
he was going to bring it in, and she stood aside with a
polite and grateful nod. He laid the tray down on the
mean little fold-down shelf beneath the window, and as
he did so Esther found herself unable to stop staring at
the slim nape of his girlish neck and the sheen of sweat that
moistened it.

'Thanks,' she said again as he turned.

The boy stood and beamed. 'Pork. Very good.'

The fact that she asked for fish seemed too ungrateful an
observation to make. So she decided against it. After all, she
was Jewish by birthright alone. Her maternal grandmother
had been orthodox, but Esther's mother not only married
a Gentile, but neither she nor Esther had ever crossed the
threshold of a synagogue in their brief lives together. Pork
would be fine.

'Great.'

He nodded, still standing, showing absolutely no sign of
wishing to leave. Esther wrestled with this for a moment.
Were you required to tip if the crew brought you food ? If
so, how much? It didn't seem right. She had felt from her
encounter with the cook that her request was not all that
unusual: it had the feel of a favour being granted rather than
of ordering room service.

'And milk,' he added, increasing his smile.

'Milk. Yeah. Great.' She nodded back, and while smiling
walked a few steps towards the door in rather an obvious
movement that signalled she was going to see him out. It
had little effect.

'You drink milk back in Texas?'

Esther looked at him, contemplating the level of gossip
amongst the crew that would bring the information concern
ing her geographical origins to this boy she had never even
noticed before. It annoyed her. She masked it.

'Uh, sure. Everyone kinda drinks milk. You know, from
time to time.'

He nodded again. The sweat she had noticed on the nape
of his neck was blooming on his face, neck and sharply-
sculpted collarbones now. Becko's kitchen must be close to ....
hell in the middle of the day, she mused, if this was the effect
it had on his staff even at a distance and in a cool night.

'They got stores sell milk in that trailer park?'

The annoyance abated, and in its place something chilly
ran over Esther's heart. How could he possibly know where
she lived? She had told no one on the ship about her home.
Her smile remained, but it wilted around the corners and
her eyes narrowed. 'Sorry?'

'Mort sell it, maybe? You know when he come round
for rent?'

'I don't... I ...'

She was stuttering, but the boy threw his head back and
laughed like a child. He pointed at her as though she were
in on some great gag they shared.

'I bet that big dog he got not let anyone buy it, though.
What he called again... Tyson?... you like see him try? Here
Missy, you take milk.., good price.., woof woof... Tyson
grab milk with those big teeth ... ruff ruff, milk gone ...
ha ha.'

He slapped his thigh in mirth as Esther's mouth dried of
saliva. Her smile had faded completely now, and when she
found the power to speak her voice had an edge to it that
was a million light years away from friendly.

'What are you talking about?'

He wiped some more sweat from his brow, laughed some
more and waved a big hand. 'Make joke, make joke.'

She watched him as he struggled to control his glee and
let his eyes wander to the pile of work on her sofa.

'Going good?'

Esther made no response. She was on red alert, watching
this boy in her room now with a feral caution that was
increasing in intensity.

He, however, was unfazed by her silence, and his grin
remained wide. 'You gonna have work hard get that by
Professor Radcliffe, huh?'

She nodded, keeping her eyes on his face, her body tense.
'Yeah. Maybe.'

He beamed back at her. 'Yeah, 'cos he not like you
much, huh?'

'I'd like you to leave.'

The assistant cook nodded again and shrugged, still smiling.
He walked across the room to the door and Esther
instinctively moved back into a defensive position. He halted
in front of her.

'Not worry. Be okay,' he said with genuine friendliness.

'Sure,' she placated, eyes steely.

'We the same.' He patted his genitals.

Esther registered the action without taking her eyes from
his, her muscles readying for action. 'Yeah?'

'Yeah.' He nodded vigorously, and turned to leave. He
stopped in the door frame. 'Both virgins.'

Before she could draw breath he had left, leaving behind
only a faint odour of Becko's stinking galley, the acidic
metallic tang of sweat, and a pork dinner that was unlikely
to be eaten.

Ronaldo Valdez glared at his new cabin mate as he unpacked
his belongings on the bunk. As a humble wiper he wouldn't
normally have enjoyed a cabin to himself, but since his usual
constant companion, Benito, had been taken sick back in
Port Arthur and stayed ashore, he'd been surprised how
much he'd appreciated the solitude. Now this clown from
the country, who did tricks in the mess with his cards and
dice, was joining him. He wasn't pleased. The bosun stood
over Fen like a gaoler, watching him as he unpacked.

Fen seemed perfectly normal to Felix, the usual mix of
sullen subservience and disaffection most greasers adopted
around their superior officers. It made him wonder if Tenghis's
report of insanity hadn't merely been retaliation for some
minor dispute, although Felix had heard the reports of Fen's
over-zealous Saanti reading in the crew mess hall, and he
didn't like the effect it had had amongst the men. But there
was enough to worry about on board without the added
complication of feuding ratings.

Felix was already composing the address he would make to
the lower-ranking crew members in the morning to try and
get to the bottom of the skinned-rat mystery.

'Don't put that there,' barked Ronaldo as Fen reached over
to lay a shoebox of possessions on the Formica folding table.
Fen glared at him, and withdrew the box.

'This is a two-man cabin, Valdez,' said the bosun, and
motioned that Fen could do as he pleased.

'I use that space every day,' whined the wiper.

'Tough. Benito'll be boarding again anyway at Port Arthur.
You'd go blind with any more opportunity to pull your knob
in private.'

'Yeah, well Benito knows how to behave,' muttered Ronaldo
under his breath.

Felix glanced at Fen to see if a fight were brewing, but the
man was oblivious to the unwelcoming demeanour of his
new companion, squinting instead at the dark window and
holding the box in his hands as though weighing up some
problem.

Chadin sighed and left them to it, bestowing a patriarchal
warning glare to both men as he exited that he trusted would
be properly interpreted.

The wiper watched the cabin door close then turned
and looked at Fen. 'You snore, I'll kick you right up your
shit-hole.'

Fen continued to ignore him, putting a finger gently to
his mouth, still staring at the square of black glass, tapping
at his lips as he thought. Slowly a gentle smile spread across
his face. 'East. Yes. East. Good. Very good.'

Ronaldo scowled at him, lay down on his bunk and turned
his back.

He had no idea what he was looking for. Nor, for that matter,
why. Matthew had given it his best shot in the privacy of his
cabin, trying to put his uneasiness about the rats in the same
numbed-down box as everything else, with the assistance of
a bottle of export-strength gin. But even through the familiar
padded cushion of quickly-consumed alcohol, the anxiety
had niggled like a toothache. Now, like a fool, he was walking
unsteadily along the white-lit cargo deck, holding a powerful
spot flashlight in his fist.

The figure of Renato Lhoon moved about through the
glass of the bridge above him, but Cotton was undisturbed
about being observed, In fact, for some curious reason, even
on this bright familiar metal stage, he was rather glad of it.

It would be fair to say that Matthew Cotton's senses were
not at their most finely tuned. He registered only very
distantly the fact that the ship was barely moving, and it had
taken him nearly three or four minutes of clumsy crashing
around to find and fit the rechargeable batteries for the
flashlight in the apparatus room at the end of the deck. But
he had already made the decision to eschew the comfort of
passing out on his sofa until Renato woke him, and here he
was. Drink and its familiar befuddlement had mellowed only
his co-ordination, not his curiosity.

He wove his way along the yellow-painted pathway that led
across the deck to hold number nine, and stopped at the lip
of the open hatch. The holds on bulk carriers were always
numbered from the bow backwards. Hold number one was
right at the bow and the last, number nine, sat beneath the
bridge at the foot of the accommodation block. There was
a strange silence when the ship was have to. A melancholy
lapping sound from the sea, instead of the busy swishing
noise it made as the ship normally pushed it out of the way,
was the only break in the monotony of a distant and stifled
engine.

Matthew's ears were already muffled by the night's first
stages of drunkenness but he felt the stillness as he walked,
and found himself treading more lightly because of it.

He stopped at the first hold, and with the concentration
that all drunks employ in performing simple tasks, placed the
flashlight carefully on the hatch door above him and hauled
himself up.

The fifteen-foot gap between hatch doors illuminated the
refuse below, but Matthew knelt at the edge and probed
under the iron lids with the spot. A rat scuttled from the
intense beam, moving snake-like over the repulsive uneven
surface until it disappeared, burying itself beneath some
unidentifiable piece of human detritus. The smell was ter
rible. Matthew put a hand to his mouth and backed offbefore
he puked.

He crouched on his haunches for a moment to try to
think. If someone were merely dragging refuse from the
hold along the deck, there was another question that needed
to be answered. Now that it had settled, the top layer of
waste was at least nine or ten feet below the hatch open
ing, which meant that no one could reach it to remove it
without some form of grabbing device. Certainly no one
could drop down there onto the surface and live to tell
the tale. But surely a man with equipment to scoop and
retrieve waste from the holds, however bizarre that might
seem, would certainly be spotted by whoever was on watch?
A hot flush of shame washed over him as he realized that
his watch would almost certainly prove the exception to that
assumption. But the ludicrousness of the whole imagined
operation made him dismiss it as fancy. There had to be
some other explanation.

He wiped at his nose in an unconscious and pointless
effort to relieve his senses from the hot, thick reek, and
stood up on the square metal hatch cover to continue his
tour of the holds.

There was a distant sound. He looked round slowly, listen
ing to identify its source, and as it came again he turned his
head to locate it. It was a remote noise, as far away as holds
one or two at the very bow of the ship, and it was peculiar.
He crouched down again and waited, holding his breath.
A combination of scraping and scrabbling, it was a noise
that only avoided sounding like the magnification of a rat's
progress behind a barrel because of a certain metallic quality.

It stopped abruptly, almost as if it knew it had been heard,
and after less than thirty seconds Matthew let his breath go
in a long exhalation. Keeping his eyes on the rough location
he'd guessed it had come from, he gripped the flashlight and
gently dropped down from the hatch cover. He glanced back
and above him briefly to see if Renato was still at the bridge
window, but the glass was dark and he could see no one.

Matthew Cotton ran his wrist over a dry mouth and weighed
up his options. He could go back to his cabin where two-thirds
of the gin bottle waited along with a bucket of ice and a carton
of fresh orange. Or he could walk the length of the deck and
find out what had made that noise.

For a moment he allowed himself to remember how it felt
to be a captain, how the welfare of his ship and crew would
never have allowed him to think twice about such obvious
decisions, and the part of him that still cared started to
grieve again for the man that was lost. But he was a master
at subjugating such moments of emotional weakness, and he
skilfully stamped out its weak flame before straightening up
to face towards the bow.

For once, the gin could wait. He would go take a look.
The harshness of the tungsten lights cast hard but con
flicting shadows across the deck, and as he walked, he was
aware of his own dark shape crossing itself and multiplying
in certain pools of light where the beams fought to illuminate
the same patches of confusing metal shapes.

The cargo deck was over two hundred metres long, and
the open hatch doors of the remaining eight holds that
protruded over the walkway took on a formality in the light
and shade, like the complex geometric topiary that might
have lined some Boston colonial mansion's driveway.

He moved between them with a gingerness that was as
much to do with his reluctance to trip drunkenly, as it was
to be on alert should the noise recur.

It recurred as he reached hold six. But this time it had
a shape.

From the corridor that separated holds two and three,
running from port to starboard, something dark darted out,
and vanished as quickly as it had appeared into the space
between holds one and two. It happened so quickly that
Cotton stopped and blinked, doubting his own vision, but
the increased beating of his heart confirmed that even if his
mind took its time to catch up, his eyes had already conveyed
a primeval panic to his internal organs.

What was it? It had been big. At least as big as a small to
medium man. But the residue of image it left on his retina
had not been that of a man at all. In the fraction of the second
he had had in which to register it, the shape had seemed
more animal, but moving like an insect or a reptile, unnatu
rally quickly and with a gait that was unpleasantly unfamiliar.

Cotton blinked and tried to calm his heart. An animal
on board, a big one. What sort of animal? But that was
ridiculous. Of course, he might simply be more bombed
than he realized, his suppressed senses merely witnessing
a guilty deck hand up to no good, trying to hide from his
first officer. The thought delivered a welcome injection of
courage to his veins, and from his current advantageous
position, placed as he still was at the end of the holds,
Matthew could scan the surface of the hatch covers and
the corridors that ran between them, deciding which way
to proceed. If it was a deck hand, Cotton would make sure
he was sorry for making him use up some extra heart beats
on his behalf. And hopefully, the explanation of what the
hell he was doing out here would be interesting to say
the least.

There was no more movement, and Matthew decided to
take a route that would double back, crossing to the port
side of the deck and creeping up under the shadow of the
hatch covers until he reached hold one.

Slowly and as silently as he could he dropped down,
keeping his body low as he moved to the port side of
hatch eight.

His plan was good. The bright illumination made the
shadows dark by contrast, and there was at least a five- or
six-foot-wide line of deep black under each hold's hatch cover
that gave him almost complete concealment. The only place
in which he could be seen would be when running across the
mouth of each well-lit corridor that separated the holds. He
scrambled from the cover of hold eight to hold seven, then
paused in the black to listen again. Nothing.

Now that he had regained his nerve, his concern was that
his quarry might escape back to the accommodation block by
utilizing the same guerrilla on the starboard side. He stopped
to think about that, gazing out at the space between his dark
hiding place and the tail rail.

The deck glistened in the light. He narrowed his eyes.
The trail of refuse slime was running parallel to his oblong
of shadow, taking a bold path along the metal walkway
mapped out for sailors between the yellow lines. Cotton
glanced ahead at the empty starboard deck, licked his lips
and, still keeping low, moved forward, out of the shadows.
Here, the trail was not hardened and flaky. It was wet and
sticky and he bent to touch it with his finger. A stench
arose from it, and it was with some disgust he discovered
that it had a viscosity to the touch that made him want it off his finger tip the moment it made contact. He wiped it
hurriedly on his trouser leg and squinted at the line of mess.
It was clear in patches, with a milky effluent marbling running
through it, exactly, as Felix pointed out, like the run-out
from a refuse bag.

But it had an under-layer of reddish brown, a tainting
of its clarity with a cloudy darkness, that most definitely
resembled watery blood. The dilute nature of it reminded
Matthew of a discarded wound dressing, or the residue of
butcher's-meat blood on the bottom of a supermarket carton
of steak. His unease returned and he moved quickly back into
the shadow.

The scuttling noise again. He snapped his head up and
listened. It was brief, but it had almost certainly come from
the bow.

Matthew caught his breath, clutched the spotlight and ran.
He sprinted from hold to hold, glancing anxiously to his
right each time he crossed a white-lit corridor, dreading and
hoping in equal measures that he might glimpse his target
doing the same.

He reached hold two, dived into the shadow of its hatch
cover and panted against the cold metal. His head was
spinning, and since the only organ that got any regular
exercise was his liver, his heart was having to struggle to
keep pace with its owner's unusual exertions. The only way
to surprise his prey, he decided, was to move quickly. He
regained his breath then scampered forward to the corridor
between holds one and two and grabbed hold of the metal
rail that guided the covers together. With one swift movement
he pulled himself up onto the hatch cover and crouched low
as he regained his balance, allowing himself a quick glance
back up to the distant bridge to see if Renato was visible
again yet.

He was not. But in that fraction of a moment, when
Matthew Cotton turned his head back to face across the
split hatch covers, something else was. It was crouched lower
than him on the opposite cover, the fifteen-foot trench of
opened doors between them, the figure hidden in the inky
black shadow cast by a derrick. But it was watching him with
an intensity that prickled his scalp.

In the time it took Matthew to open his mouth and
attempt to draw breath, it had leapt from the shadow, scrambled
across the metal surface and disappeared with a brief,
obscene rustling and squelching, into the abyss of the hold.

Cotton stayed very still. His body was ice and the mouth
he had just opened stayed that way. He tried to recapture
what exactly he had just seen.

It was an impression. Just an impression. Blackness and
decay. Bits of things that couldn't possibly be part of an
organic creature. Shards of metal and patches of scabbed
fur. Rotting flesh and melted plastic. Bone and fabric, and
blood-matted hair.

Cotton swallowed back bile. If the contents of hold number
two had really formed themselves into that hideous sem
blance of a man, he was unable to find the strength to
move forward and confront it again. He crouched in the
same position for a long, long time, and when the two deck
hands sent by an exasperated Renato approached him with
subservient offers of assistance, he climbed down silently and
walked back to the accommodation block without acknowl
edging their existence.

Her hands were either side of the window and her forehead
touched the glass. Attempting to work had been pointless,
and eating even more so. As proof, a pork chop lay with a
solitary slice taken from it, in a congealed half-crescent of
gravy, and Esther's notes and tapes lay scattered around the
sofa and floor where they had been since the boy had left
her cabin hours ago.

The worst of it was, she was a girl who could work out stuff.
Esther had a velocity of thought that could either impress or
intimidate, depending on who was witnessing the process.
Perhaps it was a primitive skill, the very essence of survival, or
the reverse, an example of a modern mental finesse that had
taken millions of years to achieve. Either way, Esther had it,
and knew she had it, which was why it had taken her a matter
of seconds to realize there was no rational explanation for
the boy's display whatsoever. The rest of the time, she had
simply spent fretting.

She had been through everything. From the conversations
at meals she had contributed to since boarding, right back to
making the phone call home from the bar on the dock when
she met Cotton. And there was nothing, not a single lapse
in any of her social intercourse, that would have revealed a
fraction of the information that the young Filipino boy had
so cheerfully repeated.

She banged at the glass with a fist and turned back into
the room. Was he a mind reader? A clairvoyant? And most
importantly, did it matter? She remembered his patted groin
and his parting words, and decided, that yes, a total stranger
being privy to that kind of personal detail mattered very much
indeed.

She looked down at the tray. The milk had been quickly
consumed, but the food had stuck in her throat. Esther stared
at the grey meat for a moment, then took a deep breath.

It was nearly midnight, but she needed to get out of the
cabin. She would take the tray back to the galley and if the
boy was still about, confront him. Or even better, maybe she
would talk to Becko.

Esther rounded up the plate and cutlery with a clumsy
clatter, grabbed the tray and left her room.

The well-lit corridors confirmed that it was late, humming
with fluorescent light and an underlying silence that was not
dissimilar to the eerie nocturnal stillness of a hospital. She
crossed to the narrow stairs and descended carefully, trying
not to let the plate slide from the cheap plywood tray.

The corridor that served the galley and mess rooms was
more comforting in that it contained a low murmur of
human conversation. On any ship with rotating shifts, there
are always those whose day is night, and right now two of
them were having a smoke and a coffee from the machine
in the crew mess diagonally opposite the galley entrance.

Esther was surprised at the relief she felt on hearing the
curious staccato of Filipino voices in the room, realizing
now as she did that the galley was completely empty of its
hard-working kitchen staff. She looked in and nodded to the
two men as she passed, and they returned the gesture through
a veil of smoke with minimum effort and inscrutable gazes.

All the lights were on in the deserted galley, the long,
stainless steel surfaces scrubbed clean and shiny, and the
thick-bottomed aluminium pots all stacked and ready for
another day of mediocre institutional cooking.

It felt intrusive, being in this room when its master, the
chef, was not, but Esther found it mildly thrilling. She had
hoped that maybe at least one of the staff would be there,
although thinking about it now, she had no idea why. Of
course, they would be on duty very early in the morning,
but for now they were in their cabins asleep and she had
the opportunity to look around Becko's little kingdom at
will. She placed the tray near the big sinks, and scanned
the room.

Esther enjoyed detail. She'd waited plenty of tables in
her time, shouted at her share of short-order cooks to get
her three soup and crackers quickly, but it was interest
ing to her to note the differences between a ship's galley
and the kitchens of the greasy diners she'd worked back
in Texas.

Here, the stoves had rails around the hot-plates to stop the
pots sliding off in a swell, and everything was on a smaller
scale, being designed to fit into the space that the ship
afforded it rather than demanding the room it needed. She
walked along the line of stoves and ovens, running her hand
over the scarred steel top, burnished by a thousand circular
wire-wool marks, feeling the residual warmth beneath the
metal as if it was skin.

There was always something comforting about a kitchen,
no matter how municipal. She had always wanted one. A real
one. Not the phoney walnut-veneered, swing-down cabinets
of the trailer, the tiny aluminium sink with foot-pedal faucets,
and the crappy little propane hob that Benny heated up his
tins of beans and hash on. Something like the Waltons'
kitchen was more what she had in mind. A football-pitch-sized room with gingham cotton and colonial pine dressers,
and a table that was always groaning with food and ringed
with laughing diners. Something, in other words, that she had
never had, and probably would never have. The commercial
kitchens of the diners had provided the next best thing. Big
and noisy and hot, clanging with industry and profanities,
but ultimately friendly.

She wondered if the same atmosphere prevailed in this
floating version.

Undercutting the buzz of the lights was the buzz of
insects, a few fat ugly blue-bottles darting in and out of
the galley from the half-open door she assumed was the
storeroom.

The trainers at base camp who had given Esther top
marks for just about everything would have patted themselves
on their backs at the unconscious physical nature of her
response, although their pride in their training would have
been misplaced. Esther had been born to the philosophy
of survival, not taught it, and the scrublands of trailer park
hell had made the military's simple obstacle courses seem
laughable.

Because while her mind was still mulling over the kind
of sloppiness that would have allowed rogue food to be left
out in the storeroom, and contrasting it with the obsessive
cleanliness of the galley, her body had already naturally
assumed a position of defence.

She had rocked onto her toes, her hands were now above
waist height, palms open, held a few inches from her body,
her balance and posture perfect for either swift flight or
sudden defence, and as she moved forward, which she did
without having planned to, it was with impressive stealth and
precision.

Two or three flies buzzed around her face, banging against
her like drunks trying to pass through a late-night movie line,
but without causing her to blink or alter her posture.

The storeroom was lit, and as she approached the half-
open door she paused. Esther Mulholland had no idea why
she was uneasy about the presence of a couple of flies in
rooms dedicated to the preparation and storage of food, but
there was no doubt whatsoever that she was.

With a caution that would have seemed misplaced and
ludicrous to any casual observer, she slid her body round
the frame of the metal doorway and entered the storeroom.

It was a space that had been divided meticulously into the
perishable and the nonperishable.

Behind the sacks of potatoes and shelves of giant cans that
could last a whole voyage without spoiling, the back wall
housed the massive walk-in freezer, the room-withina-room
that contained everything from the catering packs of greens
that Becko would systematically ruin by ruthless boiling, to
great haunches of meat swinging from hooks.

The reason that Esther could know its secret contents so
intimately was that the freezer door was hanging open, its icy
atmosphere seeping onto the warmer floor in small puffs of
vapour that spilled across the lip of the doorway onto the
metal floor of the storeroom. To the side of the door a red
light burned brightly.

This was where ship was no different from diner. Anyone
who had worked near a walk-in freezer knew the rules. You
turned the light on when you entered, and you turned it off
when you left. That meant that even in the event of some
moron closing the door on you, they would know you were
still inside if that light still burned red. The light on the
Lysicrates' freezer door was still red. She listened, trying to
make out if the person responsible was moving around, and
heard nothing.

Esther moved forward and slid cautiously along the edge of
the storeroom shelves. She should have called 'hello', should
have coughed and made her presence known, but somehow
she wanted to remain undetected until she had worked out
what was wrong with this picture.

Quickly she gained the space behind the freezer door. Her
gaze started at the top of the large cream door and dropped
to the floor. There was a piece of meat lying half out of the
door, red and shiny and skinned. It was on this portion of
opportunity that the flies were busy. Whoever was in there
was hardly being a model food hygienist. She put a hand up
to the large chrome handle and pulled the door open all
the way, stepping out from behind it as she swung back the
weighty slab.

Blood is interesting when it freezes. Perhaps its most
interesting aspect is its tendency to crystallize. All around
the torso of the corpse that lay splayed like a crucified Christ
on the freezer floor was a large pool of flaky, iced blood,
jagged and whitened at the edges where the temperature
was at its lowest.

Where the heat of the outer room had got to it, right here,
at the leg hanging over the threshold that Esther now realized
was human and not porcine, there was just regular thick,
congealing liquid. She didn't scream. She didn't even step
back. She crouched and turned, covering her back, flicking
her eyes only briefly one more time to the unbearable horror
in the freezer.

It resembled an anatomical drawing. The flesh was still
intact, since only the skin had been removed. It was where
the flesh had left the face that she saw the tell-tale sign of
a task that had been done in a hurry. Eyes bulged from
sockets, devoid of lids to give them expression, and one had
been dislodged so that it hung precariously against a shining,
bulbous cheek.

But despite the skill with which the body had been liber
ated from its skin, there was a glaring aesthetic atrocity. The
torso was slit from collarbone to navel, and a gaping ovoid
between the rib-cage grinned up at Esther.

She was out of the storeroom, through the galley and into
the crew mess hall before the flies on the skinned leg could
stir, orbit and settle again.

The two men who looked up at Esther's entrance needed
no great command of the English language to understand
that their presence was somewhat urgently required.



9


'Panic,' the captain had said quietly as he'd stood impassively
over the boy's body '... is the enemy of survival.' But that
had been three or four minutes ago. A lifetime away. Now,
Matthew gripped the tail rail and bit the inside of his cheek
in a vain attempt to stop a second stream of hot vomit from
scouring up his throat. It was too late. He arched his back
and threw up noisily over the rail.

Behind him, the door from the galley to the main deck constantly
opened and closed as men spilled out, shouting and
gesticulating, herded out by their bosun to await orders. But
their rising staccato foreign exclamations were not providing
the placebo of human companionship he so desperately
needed right now to chase away the bitter chill of death.
He hunched his shoulders against it, his hot head pressing
much too hard into the unforgiving metal of the rail.

The door banged once more and with his head still bowed,
Matthew felt a body position itself close to his. He wiped his
mouth with his forearm and looked up. Esther was hugging
herself against the cool night breeze, her back against the rail,
eyes scanning the growing number of alarmed faces that were
gathering on the deck.

'Why do they want us out here?'

Matthew blinked at her. The part of him that still retained
a sliver of vanity was both embarrassed by being caught with
the threads of mucus-bound vomit adhering to his shirt, and
also curiously riled by her use of 'they' that excluded him as
a senior officer.

He wasn't part of this herd.

A few minutes ago he'd been a constituent of that grim,
superior delegation, standing over the skinned and eviscerated
horror that spilled out of the freezer and into their
nightmares, trying desperately to decide what to do.

They were m6rchant seamen, for Christ's sake. Not military.
There simply wasn't anything in the handbook that
prepared a crew like this for their junior cook being skinned
alive and having his heart ripped out.

He'd only come outside to be sick, not through drink
for a change, and for some reason he wanted her to know
that. Matthew straightened up and looked at her anxious,
frowning profile. 'We're searching the cabins,' he said, overemphasizing
the 'we'.

She nodded, not meeting his gaze. 'Uh-huh? For what
exactly?'

Her tone was crisp, unfriendly, nervous. Despite knowing
what this young girl had just gone through, Cotton found
he had little compassion to spare, and that her clipped tone
merely irritated him further.

'Someone didn't bring back their coffee mug.'

Esther turned to look at him, and her eyes froze him. They
were as hard as coal, but somewhere deep behind their cool,
contemptuous appraisal of him he could read a menu of
sadness and fear. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip
and softened his voice as he turned his gaze back out into
the black ocean.

'Blood.'

Esther was silent for a moment, and then she began to
speak quietly and steadily to herself as though she were a
coroner dictating over an autopsy. Matthew wiped at some
vomit stains as casually as he could manage, and watched her
with caution. She was wired, it was plain, and he couldn't
blame her.

'But there were no blood trails around the corpse at all.
Nothing. The floor was clean. Completely clean. How could
a murderer kill, skin and split apart a body without leaving
a trail like an explosion in an abattoir? How? Unless the boy
was killed elsewhere and deposited in the freezer. But even
then, there would be trails, signs, some kinds of disturbance,
and of course the actual site of the killing wouldn't take long
to find on a vessel this size...'

'Esther.' Matthew's voice was gentle now.

She kept going. '... but, importantly, how would it be
possible to covertly move such an atrocity from one part
of the ship to another when there are always other people
around... ?'

'Esther!'

'... and even if you could, how could you...'

He put out a hand and laid it on her arm. It stopped the
torrent of her talking abruptly. 'Enough.'

She surprised him and laid her own freezing hand on top
of his, turning her face to him, the smooth skin contorted
into lines of something approximating grief. 'He brought me
my dinner.'

Matthew nodded. 'Yeah.'

Esther Mulholland scanned his face rapidly, aggressively,
searching for a fight. She blinked twice, then bent her head
to her chest and began to cry. As he ringed her shoulder
with an awkward arm, Matthew Cotton wished he could join
her in her weeping.

But now that his nausea had passed his attention was
focused on only one thing. The long partially-lit corridor
of metal that ran alongside holds one to nine.

The funny thing was, he could tell there was something
wrong before he even opened the door. Maybe that was how
mothers felt with a cot death. They knew the baby was there
in the crib when they crept up in the morning, dressing-gown
just tied, cup of coffee in fist, maternal smile twitching and
ready to catch the returned gummy grin of their most beloved
possession. But before they even looked in, they knew there
was something missing. Something important. The breath.
The life.

And that was exactly it. Pasqual knew before the door
swung back that his baby, the radio room, the beating heart
of the ship, was not breathing.

No lights spangled the grey metal panel fronts. No crackle
or hum of electrical life came from the industrial punched-
hole speakers. And the air that he took for granted was
always full of a million potential voices, music, information,
just waiting to be filtered through his radio, was as still as
the grave.

Pasqual wiped his upper lip with a finger and put his hands
on his hips. He had been the first one despatched by the
captain after the discovery of the horror that they would not
let him near enough to see, his duty to send out an immediate
distress call, and it was partly a sense of that responsibility that
stalled his panic.

If it was an electrical fault, which it most probably was, then
there was back-up. And that was exactly what he was going
to get on top of right now. Problem, action, problem solved.
Nothing to worry about.

He walked more confidently into his little twelve-by-eighteen-
foot world, rolled out his worn chair from under the console
and sat down.

He flicked a couple of switches just to confirm there was
no life in the equipment, and then pushed back to access
the panel behind the main medium-wave radiotelephone
containing the back-up controls.

His hand brushed the top of the scarred wooden desk and
something tiny and metallic skittered to the floor.

Pasqual blinked down at a small screw that pirouetted on
the linoleum like a child's top, then turned away to continue
his task. He stopped, then slowly looked down again.

His gaze rested on the slowing screw then transferred itself
to the panel above the desk. The main control panel had
eight screws holding it in place. Now it had eight holes.

Pasqual put out his hands and rested his fingers on the grey
metal. He pulled the panel gently and the large rectangle of
steel shifted forward, catching slightly on the left side as it
always did when he had to remove it for maintenance.

It took him a moment or two to register what he was
looking at when the panel finally came away and rested
face-down on the desk, but when it did, it was not quite so
easy to stifle his previously-contained fear.

Whoever had opened Pasqual's precious equipment and
removed its guts had done so with considerable skill and
knowledge. There was barely anything left, and nothing
that was usable. He knew before he checked that the rest
of the room's equipment would be the same, and while he
contemplated that, he placed the metal panel in front of him
and rested his hands on the desk, wishing that he had heeded
the captain's orders for everyone to move around the ship
only in twos or more.

The thought of the journey back to his superior officers was
not making his stomach churn because of what they might say
about a ship stranded with no means of communication.

It was making his hair prickle and his sweat bead, because
whoever had murdered the boy might also have murdered
Pasqual's radio in order to stop anyone shouting for help;
and unless the murderer had come like a spirit from
the sea, he was still on board, and his job was not yet
finished.

Felix Chadin stood at the door of the cabin while his two
assistants entered. Ronaldo's living space had been largely
unaffected by Fen's recent occupancy, its Spartan interior
more or less the way it had been since Port Arthur, and it
was clear the moment the bosun swung open the door that
it was also not the scene of the great carnage for which they
searched.

Chadin was weary of this task already, and nervous of its
failure. The captain had been obliged to order it, but his logical
mind told him that no murderer would leave a trail of gore
where he slept, and Felix was already searching for alternative
courses of action while he dutifully carried out this one.

'Clean,' shrugged the ABS scouring the outer cabin, while
the one in the toilet shouted an echo from the tiny cubicle.
The men were as perplexed as their bosun. They were fright
ened and confused and detective-work had most certainly not
been part of their scanty training for life at sea.

Felix nodded and inclined his head to the next cabin down
the alleyway, and they skulked past him to obey, casting
anxious glances left and right as they went.

The bosun tightened his grip on the handle to shut the
door and then stopped. On the fold-down table was the
shoebox that Fen had so jealously guarded on arrival, and
Felix's eye fell on it with interest.

True, no one had been guilty of blood-thirsty work in this
room, and it was therefore not his place to use the search as
an excuse to invade privacy, but the sight of the box pricked
a compulsive curiosity in him.

He stepped into the cabin and with one quick backward
glance lifted the tattered cardboard lid and looked inside.
It was empty. Guiltily, Felix Chadin replaced it and sighed.
He was tilting at windmills now. There were still eight
more cabins to search, more corners and crannies of the
ship to poke into until they could truly say that nothing
had been found, and quite frankly in the dire circumstances
he wasn't sure whether a find or a blank would be more
comforting. Another look at the grey-green cardboard carton
that proclaimed that it had once contained sandals from a
factory outlet store in Galveston, made him embarrassed at
his abuse of power. What had he imagined could possibly
be in a shoebox that would help them understand the
nightmare that had engulfed this ship? With his shoulders
set in a position that would take a stress-managing masseur a
couple of weeks to put right, he turned and left the room.

As he went, the usual contents of Fen's box lay sightlessly
facing the bosun's retreating shoes, from the shadows
beneath its owner's bunk.

Dawn was a long way off. Lloyd Skinner stroked a finger over
the white, yellow and blue Admiralty chart, number 4608,
Guayaquil to Valparaiso, and let his radio officer whine
breathlessly about their perilous situation. From the other
hard foam couch, Matthew Cotton and Renato Lhoonwatched
silently, Renato sitting forward, hands clasped over his knees,
Cotton lying back, hands holding either side of his neck as
though it were leaking.

'No back-up. Not even no back-up. They take everything.
I don't know how we...'

The captain interrupted this high-pitched monologue with
a question to Lhoon: 'The body, Renato. Where is it now?'

Pasqual looked as though he might cry. Lhoon cleared his
throat, embarrassed for his colleague. 'In the freezer. We
shifted it back and closed the door.'

'And the crew?'

'Re-assembled in the crew mess hall. Waiting for Felix to
brief them. Third mate Ernesto Sevilla is on watch on the
bridge.'

'Alone?'

Renato shook his head.

'Got a greaser for company.'

Lloyd Skinner said nothing for a moment, then stood
up and walked to a darkened port hole, hands in pockets
as he stared out into the black night. Lhoon and Cotton
bristled with tension while Pasqual made tiny involuntary
noises from the back of his throat. They were men trying
to keep it together, trying to stay professional and calm in
the face of a situation that their deeper instincts suggested
might be better served by running and screaming.

But if he was aware of these primed bombs of fear
and uncertainty that were wrestling with their fight-or-flight
instincts while perched on his unpleasant furniture, then the
captain hid it well. When he spoke it was as though the other
men were not present.

'Well, I guess we got two choices. We either run for port
without a radio or we stay here and wait for the company's
ship to reach us.'

Cotton spoke and the surprise of an interjection from him
made the captain look round from his ruminations, which
had been directed at the black glass.

'There's a company ship coming?'

Skinner regarded him with interest. 'Why do you imagine
we're have to... First Officer?'

Cotton sat forward, ignoring the barbed question and
the overlong pause before his title, and responded only
by wringing more blood from an already-white hand. Skinner
continued, apparently unsatisfied by Cotton's lack of
response.

'I assumed you realized that our straying from the usual
shipping path had a point.'

'Point being?' said Matthew without any retaliation in
his voice.

'Meeting them at the co-ordinates they requested.'
While the radio officer echoed Cotton's physical anxiety
by nervously mashing a clump of trouser material in his
fist, Renato looked from Cotton to Skinner, his feeling of
exclusion overcoming his fear to prickle him like a nettle.
He cleared his throat. 'When is the ship to make contact,
Captain?'

Skinner looked pointlessly at his watch. The answer was
in his head, not on his wrist. '0500. Just under five hours
from now.'

Renato nodded. He wiped sweat from his upper lip and
looked down at the chart on the low table. Then he pointed
weakly to the coastline. 'We could head for Chicama?'

The captain raised an eyebrow. 'Without VHF? And what
kind of assistance do you think we might get at an ass-end
of nowhere port like that?'

Lhoon looked down.

He knew that if they met the sister company ship, a ship
that unlike the Lysicrates had the lifelines of radio and satellite
communications, plus a fellow crew that would be comforting
in its sheer numbers, things would get a whole lot better.
There would be a helicopter from the mainland before you
could say boo, and the relief of having events handed over to
the proper law enforcing authorities. But that would mean
five hours. That was a long time.

Cotton was looking at the chart now. He waved at it vaguely.
'If we routed back into the shipping lane on the way to a
port, we could use the Aldis lamp to signal another ship.'
The captain raised an eyebrow again. It made Cotton frown
as he continued. 'It's all we've got.'

Skinner looked a little more kindly at his first officer. 'You
know as well as I do, Matthew, there's no guarantee there's
anyone out there right now. We change course without a
radio and the company ship'll never find us.'

When Matthew spoke, his voice had a direction, a resolve,
that was clearly unfamiliar to the other occupants of the
cabin, demonstrated by the way each one turned to look at
him as he spoke. 'We should sail for shore.'

Skinner remained standing. 'You seem very sure'

Cotton bent his head to the floor and clasped his hands
over the back of his neck. 'The boy had his skin removed.
Then he was gutted and there's no sign of his heart. You
reckon whatever did that to a man is going to let the rest of
us just go about our business for five hours?'

There was a glimmer of surprise on the captain's face.
'What... ever?'

Cotton looked up. 'Huh?'

'You said what, rather than who.'

Matthew looked from the captain to the faces of the other
two men who were studying him. His palms grew clammy and
he licked dry lips that had been denied their usual lubrication
for at least three or four hours. Although it was Skinner's last
observation that had rekindled his sweat, he chose to ignore
it. 'I'm just not sure how safe we are, that's all.'

Skinner's face hardened back into inscrutability. 'I think
you'll find that's my responsibility.'

Matthew let out a short mirthless laugh. 'Jesus, Captain.

You saw what was left of Salvo.'

The use of the boy's name made Renato swallow and look
at the floor.

'Believe this, Matthew. All of you. We'll find and contain
the killer in a matter of hours. This is a ship at sea. There is
nowhere to hide.'

Matthew nodded, and kept nodding as he replied softly.

'Guess that goes for us too.'



10


The mess room was not large and there were too many people
squeezed into it, so some of the men stood on chairs to see
the bosun as he spoke. It had the effect of a raked football
stadium, and it gave Esther the opportunity to study every
face in detail as they listened intently to the man talking
briskly to them in their native tongue.

One of these faces was the face of a psychotic murderer.
That was important to keep at the forefront of her thoughts.
Important, because reminding herself of it could keep her
alive. She swept them with her gaze, stopping only when
one of the rapt expressions twitched, or movement caught
her eye as a hand was raised to a face or a head turned.
Some of the faces being rubbed at by anxious hands were
terribly young.

A whole line of gangly boys, ABSs she presumed, stood at
the back, their brown eyes lit with terror. And some were
much older; the engine-room men, whose faces were inexplicably
lined with grime as though this were a steam-driven
vessel instead of diesel.

But which amongst them could have taken a knife and
sliced at that beautiful boy like a butcher? From where she
sat, they were nothing more than a group of hardworking,
under-educated, frightened men. But there was danger in the
oversight of the obvious, and she narrowed her concentration
as the bosun continued.

Felix Chadin sounded as though he were barking, but the
men were hanging on every word, leaving Esther stranded
in her linguistic ignorance. But as he spoke she realized her
gaze had rested on one face.

It was a face of a man in his early thirties, and what had
snagged her subconscious searchlight was not his expression,
or the set of his features, but merely the focus of his atten
tion.

All eyes were locked on Chadin's earnest face, but though
the man's was turned to the bosun, his eyes were looking at
something else. Only occasionally, and only for a fraction of
a second, but Esther caught it once and watched for the shift
of concentration again.

She waited for a beat or two, watching as he listened
intently to the speaker, then was rewarded. The man's eyes
flicked once more to the left, and this time she followed his
gaze to see what was diverting him from the words of his
superior officer.

He was looking along the line of young boys who were
crushed up against the wall, pressing the sides of the coffee
machine like book ends, their bony shoulders grazing each
other in an attempt to get more space. It was impossible from
her angle to tell which one was so diverting the man, but by
watching the flicking of his eyes she narrowed it down to two.
He was looking either at the small, slightly spotty youth who
wore a cheap, soiled blue nylon shirt, or the taller boy with the
grease-streaked face wearing the plain brown coveralls of the
engine room. Both had the characteristic high cheekbones
of their race and the suggestion of latent energy that only
youth bestowed without demanding return, but there was no
question that the engine-room boy was the better looking.

Esther's heart beat a little faster. Her eyes returned to the
man and she studied him with a growing unease. Was he
gay? Would he be capable of murder, perhaps in revenge for
some sexual favours either refused or tantalizingly withheld?
Blackmail? Obsession? What?

The man's gaze had innocently returned to the bosun
and she glanced back at the young lad, trying desperately
to rid her memory of the sight that had met her in the
freezer only hours ago. The picture would not recede and
she screwed shut her eyes against the abhorrence, willing
it away.

She bent her head and ran a hand over her face, then
sucked in a lungful of air, opened her eyes and snapped
back to attention.

He was staring straight at her. It was not the stare of a
bored listener, gratefully distracted by her slight movement.
Nor was it the even the simple stare of a hostile seaman
regarding a foreign outsider with contempt.

The reason that it was chilling her blood was hard to define,
but it was mainly due to a feeling that the eyes that regarded
her so coldly did not seem to belong to the man in whose
impassive face they were set.

They were older. And the age implied by them left Esther
reeling, struggling uncomprehendingly against images of
dust-blown bones and a rancour that would endure eternity.
With an effort of will she broke the gaze and looked back
across at Felix Chadin, her chest shuddering as she struggled
to take the breath she had postponed for longer than was
healthy.

Fen Sahg held his gaze on her face for another long
minute, then slowly turned his attention back to the object
of his more immediate interest.

In the dark, a raft of roosting gulls bobbed on the swell of the
Pacific Ocean. The crests of the waves were occasionally lit by
the deck lights of the Lysicrates, and although Lloyd Skinner,
leaning on the rail of the poop deck, could not see them, they
could see him.

His frame was considerably more hunched than normal,
shoulders held low, head bowed, hands clasped in front in an
attitude of prayer. But he was not praying. He was thinking.

The deck had never been better suited for such a purpose
than now, being silent and still, devoid of a crew who were
busy being briefed and further terrified by their bosun. But
there was an uneasiness about the silence, and after only a
few quiet moments, Lloyd Skinner drew himself up and softly
left the deck to the stillness of the night.

Perhaps the static nature of air and ship played tricks with
the night sounds. Perhaps not. But the fact remained that it
was an unnaturally long time, in fact a good two minutes after
Skinner had gone, and the door of the accommodation block
swung shut with a barely audible thud, that the raft of gulls
startled and dived.

No one had cleaned the blood off the tiled floor, and now
that the freezer door was shut, it had melted. Matthew stood
in the doorway of the storeroom and regarded the violent
smears of red, holding the back of his hand to his mouth. It
was hard to tell now if the abstract-art quality that the blood
had bestowed on the floor had been caused by the struggle
of the boy as he died, or had been spread around in angry
crimson arcs by the seamen handling the body back into the
freezer. Either way, it was lurid and gruesome, and it made
Matthew question why he had come here. But he needed to
see the body again. More importantly, he needed to see the
area around the body.

Outside in the galley was his companion for the trip, a deck
cadet named Jose, who refused to come into the storeroom.

Despite having protested about the two-person rule the
captain had imposed on moving around the ship, Matthew
was comforted by the sounds of Jose only a few metres away,
swallowing back a throat full of snot, fiddling nervously with
cooking utensils, and shuffling his feet.

Cotton took a breath and walked forward, stepping as best
he could around the murderous red pattern.

Slowly and methodically he drove his gaze around the
edges of the bloodstains, searching for any sign of the thing
he dreaded seeing. But the tiled floor was pristine where the
blood stopped, an antiseptic, polished surface unsullied by
the shiny dried trail of slime he had been almost certain
he would find. Cotton rubbed his brow with a finger and
considered the room. Only one set of lights was on. Maybe
he wasn't seeing properly.

'Jose?'

His voice sounded strained and unnatural in the room,
and so did the voice that answered.

'Yeah?'

'Turn on the rest of the lights in here, would you?'

Cotton heard the man shuffle forward. Suddenly the room
was plunged into black.

'Hey!'

Jose shouted back. 'Sorry. Sorry. Wrong switch. I got it.'
The striplights guttered, hummed and flickered back into
life. It was this normal intermittent start-up that made Cotton
glance gratefully at their position on the ceiling; but when he
did, he felt his spine being slowly replaced by ice water.

Between the two lengths of tube lighting bolted firmly into
their fixings, was an area of white painted metal, crossed by
three pipes. Cotton stared up as though being addressed
by a god.

Across the pipes and continuing along the ceiling all the
way to the door into the galley, was a faint red-brown smear,
varnished with the flaking, egg-white shine of a trail.
'Jose?'

Matthew's voice was soft, as if he were speaking in church.
'Huh?'

'Go tell the captain I say we need to close all the holds.'

Jose appeared in the doorway tentatively, trying not to look
in. 'Go? With you?'

'No. Go now.'

Jose shook his head. 'Two people. Remember? He say...'

'NOW!'

The bark made the deck cadet jump, and Cotton waited,
his gaze still firmly fixed on the ceiling until he heard the
man's steps retreat from the galley into the corridor. The
fact that the trail ended in the middle of the ceiling, had
an implication that Matthew was struggling not to visualize.
Garbage bags being dragged had, he realized now, been a
comfortable if bizarre theory. But now he knew for sure that
it was wrong. Because garbage bags could not be dragged
across ceilings. And garbage bags did not drop down from
ceilings on top of victims. And garbage bags most certainly
did not eviscerate and skin young boys.

He ground his back teeth together, clenched his fists and
turned back to the freezer. He needed to see the boy's
remains again, even more now than when he'd entered the
room. But what was he looking for? A calling card? Matthew
closed his eyes and tried to clear his head. The whole thing
was as crazy as it was terrifying, but he needed to concentrate,
to keep his head and think clearly for perhaps the first time
in three years of anaesthetized hell.

He walked to the freezer.

Out of an unbreakable habit, he punched the red light
before pulling on the massive metal handle, and stood back
as the door swung open. As the mist of cold air meeting
warm cleared, what was left of Salvo Acambra could be seen
lying twisted and hard on the floor beside huge drums of
frozen orange juice concentrate. Matthew stepped into the
icy tomb and bent down beside the body. Gulping back his
disgust, he pushed gently at the head to turn it face-up. It
was no longer able to move independently to the body,  the
whole thing being frozen into an immovable block, and so
with a force of will he was surprised still to possess, Matthew
put his hands beneath the torso and rolled it over. The knees,
bent in a spastic rigour, pointed almost comically into the air
as the skinless body rocked on its back and came to rest
in a tortuous position of unfathomable ugliness. Matthew
let go his held breath in a thick cloud, and gazed at the
frosted red mess, searching for something that might help
him understand. It was useless. He was a seaman, the first
officer of a beat-up bulk carrier, not a forensic expert. Gazing
on the horror of this mutilated human being meant nothing
to him, except that the theory that was building in the part
of his brain he would not yet acknowledge suggested that
Matthew Cotton, after all he had been through, was now
finally losing his mind.

Salvo's frozen, raw death-grin snarled up at him. Matthew
bent his head and dug his fingernails deep into the palms
of his hand. The breath clouded from his panting nostrils,
and he screwed his eyes shut against the pain of things that
were threatening to surface in his normally well-guarded
consciousness. They were still screwed shut when the muffled
thud came, and by the time they opened in response to
the noise and the immediate change in air pressure, it was
too late.

The freezer door was closed.

The only makeshift weapons Thomas and Antonio could find
were a short length of chain and a piece of aluminium tubing
that had fallen off the back of a dining chair in the mess
room. They held these armaments close to their bodies as
they progressed slowly along the walkway between the holds,
carrying out their orders to search the ship with maximum
reluctance. The silence, teased by the sea's random breaking
against a static hull, made the two men keep their own voices
similarly low as they spoke.

'Why doesn't Chadinjust lock him up?'

Thomas glanced across at Antonio and shook his head.
'You're fucking crazy,'

'Yeah? Well if it isn't Fen, then who is it?'

Thomas chose to remain silent, staring ahead and lifting
his chin in a manner that stated the subject was not one for
discussion. Such reticence, however, was not going to deter
Antonio.

'You've seen him. You know the kind of stuff he's into.
Ronaldo's shitting himself that he shares a cabin with him.'

Thomas kept his gaze forward and frowned as his com
panion's voice increased in volume and pitch, the flame
of Antonio's indignation and nervousness fanned by the
absence of a sympathetic ear.

'He says there must have been something going on between
Salvo and him. I mean, I can't say I'm surprised, fact that he's
not got a wife ashore, not even a girl or anything...'

'Hey.'

Antonio looked surprised by the interruption of Thomas's
softly-spoken single word.

'If you think he sliced up the boy, why don't you go lock
him up?'

It was Antonio's turn to be quiet.

'Yeah,' said Thomas. 'Exactly. You've sailed with the guy
for four years, just like I have, and you know it's not him.
And like you just said, if it isn't him, then who is it?'

They considered the implication of that thought in silence
for a few moments, long enough to bring them level with
hold number five. The smell from the open holds increased
the further from the accommodation block they walked, and
by this mid-way point it was becoming unbearable.
'Jesus and the Holy Mother,' exhaled Antonio.
'That's getting serious in there.'

Thomas looked ahead then motioned to the open lip of the
hatch. 'We should go up top. Get a view along the holds.'

Antonio held out his arm in theatrical protest. 'Oh, for
Christ's sake. They can see that from the bridge.'

Thomas stopped walking, and looked at his companion as
though he were a stupid child. 'You forgotten Chadin? When
he said we should search every nook and cranny of the hold
deck, he meant it. Now, just a wild guess, but I bet he's going
to ask if we checked along the tops of the hatches, and if you
want to look him in his ferret eyes and say "yes, bosun", when
the answer is plainly "no, bosun", then go right ahead.

'Don't know about you, but I got at least five more voyages
to make before I even make a dent on the payments on some
shitty little Korean car my wife couldn't live without, and
I'm not screwing it up just because of the stench from that
garbage.'

Antonio looked up at the overhang of great metal shelf,
and for a moment his eyes glittered with the flitting sugges
tion of anxiety. Thomas sighed, remembering the smaller
man's aversion to heights, even this unchallenging one, and
softened his voice. 'Besides, if we can view the whole lot of
the hatches from here and say we've done it, which we will
have quite truthfully, it'll save us climbing up onto the top
of every fucking one. Okay?'

Antonio's expression returned to a sulk, then he glanced
guiltily up to the distant blackened windows of the bridge.
'Well, you do it then.'

Thomas sighed, handed his companion his length of tub
ing, and silently clambered on to the metal winding gear
that moved the great hatches back and forth. A hoist and
a push-down like a free climber and he was on top of the
hatch. He leant down and stretched his hand out for the
weapon, which Antonio passed up with little grace before
leaning against a metal support and crossing his arms.

The smell on top of the hatch was unbearable, and Thomas
slapped his hand over his nose and mouth against the assault,
but the urge to retch was hard to fight, and he felt the
passage of hot bile rising. He knelt on the hard metal
and concentrated, fought the vomit back to his stomach,
and won.

'Christ,' he muttered, wiping the sweat from his face with
the hand that had been protecting his nose.

Thomas breathed heavily, took a moment to recover, then
gripping the aluminium tubing, stood up and ran a sleeve
over his wet brow.

'Hey! Antonio!'

The man being hailed moved away from his metal support
to the rail at the edge of the ship until he could see
Thomas.

'What?'

'Don't ever let me moan about hauling coal again. This is
the worst fucking cargo I ever sailed with.'

Antonio made an upward nod of the head, doing little to
mask his lack of interest in his companion's opinion, then
started to wander slowly down the deck towards the holds at
the bow.

The illuminated deck seemed to float not in water, but in
deep space, so dark was the night that surrounded it, and
the absence of a white bow wave only bolstered the illusion.
Thomas squinted along the row of hatch covers as he walked
forward to the edge of the partially open hold. He didn't like
the feeling of the ship being have to.

Perhaps it was the instinctive unease a sailor has for being
becalmed, or merely the frustration felt by any traveller by
land or sea, when forward motion ceases. Whatever the
reason, his unease was exacerbated by the view of the hold
deck, so still and silent and white-lit in the inky black infinity
that surrounded it.

On account of the ship's stillness, he was able to stand
right on the edge of the great rectangular pit, the toes of
his cheap Manila-bought shoes overhanging the metal lip
of the hatch. The random nature of the normal swaying
and pitching of a ship under sail automatically stopped any
experienced seaman from such folly, but having wrestled his
stomach under control he was curious about the nature of
something that could produce such a violent, tangible stench,
and he wanted to look at it in the same way that small boys
want to prod road-kill with sticks.

There was, however, disappointingly little to see. A dark
marsh of irregular shapes and viscous lumps lay still in its
strip of illumination, the everyday objects like portions of
bike wheel or springs from upholstery, taking on an organic
appearance that was assisted by the occasional twitching of
a rat concealed beneath smaller pieces of detritus. Thomas
crouched down, arms on his knees, his weight on the balls of
his feet, mesmerized by the repugnance of it, and glanced up
to look for Antonio in order to express his disgust verbally.

His companion was now at least three holds away, still
in view but out of earshot. Thomas blinked at the figure.
Antonio's small frame was casting a sharp star shadow in the
halogen lights that came from four sides, and as he walked, it
undulated over the pipes and capstans like pieces of trailing
black silk. What made Thomas stop thinking about the trash
in the hold, and the comments he wanted to make about it
to his colleague, was the fact that a larger, but similar shadow
was being cast further ahead between holds eight and nine,
out of Antonio's line of view, but moving quickly towards him.
Thomas felt his pulse quicken and he stood up. With merely
the benefit of the height difference between crouching and
standing, part of the figure that was casting the shadow so
far away up the deck came into view.

It was hard to make out, but for the brief moment dur
ing which Thomas squinted and glimpsed its upper body
passing through the narrow alleyway between the holds, the
impression was of a man dressed like a carnival animal. There
seemed to be a great deal of fussy elements to the figure's
attire, maybe even an elaborate head-dress. It was confusing
and impossible to make out in detail. All the more so since
the speed and gait it moved with was quite unlike a man.
It had an animal swiftness of foot and purpose that made
Thomas call out in alarm.

'Antonio!'

He yelled as hard as he could, but even in the silence of the
calm night, his voice was incapable of rising above the idling
thrum of the engines, or carrying the distance it required
to be heard. Antonio strolled on oblivious, and cupping his
hands to his mouth, Thomas made ready to shout again,
when an unconscious half-step forward in his alarm at not
being heard the first time caused the man-made sole of his
shoe to slip over the edge of the hatch. His leg buckled. His
arms windmilled for a beat like a cartoon animal on the edge
of the cliff, then the reality of gravity that was unfortunately
only afforded to real living beings and not those rendered in
two dimensions, took over and did the rest. It was only a fall of
eight, maybe nine feet, but he landed awkwardly on one knee,
and tipped forward onto a hard piece of wood that gouged
and bloodied his cheek as his hands grabbed for something
safe. As it would have been in quicksand, the best solution
to Thomas's peril would have been to remain as flat and
spread-eagled as he could manage, as well as keeping calm.

But both of these options were fast becoming academic, as
he screamed and struggled in the foul viscous mess that was
closing over him, with every thrashing movement he made
in his panic. Already his torso, to the bottom of his ribcage,
was buried beneath the surface, pinned and pressed by
sharp metal, hard-packed organic material, and long pieces
of sewage-marinated rags. Thomas's screaming was silenced
when more frenzied contortions pressed his face into a thick,
poisonous pool of unidentified decomposition. One gasp,
and fluid that was unspeakable in its consistency, stench
and taste filled his lungs to the point at which no amount
of hysterical, strangled coughing could ever empty them.

His eyes bulged and his mouth made a contorted arc of
retching terror, and as his left arm and shoulder ground
down below the surface as effectively as a screw, it left only
half a face and a flailing right arm visible in the impassive
and wretched casserole that engulfed him.

Two hundred metres away, Antonio stopped level with
hold number eight and cocked his head. Had he heard a
shout? He looked back towards the hatch cover that Thomas
had been climbing on and found he could no longer see him.
He hesitated for a moment, then turned back and walked out
to the edge of the ship once again to get a clearer view of
the holds.

'Thomas?'

His shout was loud, but the lack of reply made him sigh
with the realization that he would have to walk all the way
back to where they had parted.

Part of his weary reluctance to return to his companion
was phoney. For the last few minutes his hand had been
tightening unconsciously around the length of chain he held,
and his footsteps had been getting slower and shorter as he
approached the bow. He would scold Thomas for making
him abandon his part of the search, but beneath the scorn
would be gratitude that he need not continue alone to the
end of those half dark, half brilliantly-lit metal tombs.

He expelled a lungful of air in irritation then started to
walk back towards hold five.

As his shadow crossed the alley between holds seven and
eight, the shape that had been perfectly still in the dark cor
ridor beyond quivered for a moment, then darted away with
a velocity that almost left its misshapen shadow behind.

As Leonardo Becko wept, the bosun and the second officer
of the Lysicrateslowered their eyes. Lloyd Skinner did not. His
gaze remained fixed firmly on the cook's contorted face, his
posture as still as his stare.

A minute or so was granted to allow Becko to compose
himself, then the other two pairs of eyes rose again to
join Skinner in his forthright examination of the cook. No
mention was made of his tears.

The captain continued as though the pause had been to
pour coffee or light a cigarette. 'So what time, then, do you
think you left him?'

Becko sniffed, his eyes still fixed on the cabin floor. One
large hand gesticulated as he spoke, its fingers waving the
memory away in an unconscious Filipino dismissal. 'I don't
know. I say something to him around eleven. Something
about cleaning the stock pot. Then I go. And then I remem
ber I come back, just for a minute to remind him not to use
cheap cream cleaner no more on my chopping board. Yeah.
That was eleven. I'm sure.'

Skinner's face betrayed nothing, not even interest. 'Why
are you sure?'

"Cos I angry I have to go back. That maybe I miss
Enzo! Enzo!'

One eyebrow raised slightly in a questioning arch, as
Skinner looked across at Chadin. The bosun answered as
if the subtle query had been verbal.

'Game show on satellite. You can win a million dollars.'
For the first time Lloyd Skinner displayed a faint tick of irri
tation, though whether it was due to the seemingly pointless
interrogation of a man who knew nothing about a murder,
or the fact that America's great space programme had merely
provided the hardware to bring such entertainments as Enzo!
was unclear.

Enzo! to the stupid and the under-educated, was not clear.

What was clear, however, was that in Skinner's opinion the
interview was terminated. The other men read the captain's
face, and Felix Chadin made restless movements to indicate
he wished to be excused. Watching the cook cry had been
unpleasant, and by the bosun's reckoning, unnecessary.

As Becko glanced up at his senior officers, realizing his
testimony was no longer required, he seemed to grow calm,
and unbidden this time, he began to speak.

'Salvo not like himself, though. Not yesterday. All day. All
day. Crazy.'

Skinner, who had looked away, returned his focus to
Becko. 'Crazy?'

Becko shifted in his seat, nervous again, and blinked in a
startled way as though he'd said too much.

The captain sighed. 'Crazy how?'

The cook swallowed. What could Leonardo Becko tell
them? That a kid from some provincial village hundreds
of miles from Manila, who knew nothing about anything,
save for chopping onions and avoiding work, suddenly knew
everything? And when Becko thought of that 'everything', he
felt the sweat bead around his neck once more. He closed
his eyes, but it merely enhanced the memory of Salvo's
face, grinning at him over the steaming pots as he happily
congratulated the cook on the birth of a baby boy to Becko's
secret mistress, commiserated with him on his wife's depend
ence on painkillers, and his teenage son's over-enthusiastic
fondness for his six-and seven-year-old boy cousins.

What had made Becko's blood run cold was that Salvo had
not delivered any of this terrifyingly intimate information
with the tone of a blackmailer, but rather with a gusto and
fevered excitement, like a born again Christian revealing
an encounter with Jesus. It had paralysed Becko with fear.
How could he have known any of it? He couldn't. That was
the worst thing. The sheer impossibility of it, the eerie and
nightmarish implications of someone having access to such
knowledge, had silenced him, preventing Becko challenging
the boy. Indeed, it had made the cook take two frightened
steps back from his grinning assistant, and ensured that he
avoided talking to him for the rest of the day except when
absolutely necessary.

Now the boy was dead, he could make no sense of it
at all. There was real grief. Becko had liked Salvo. The
fact that he had been frightened by him before he died
did not diminish the affection he had built up for the
kindly, if work-shy, youngster over the seven months they
had sailed together. But he was still frightened. Frightened
of the murderer, frightened of whatever made Salvo know
unknowable things, and now when it came to it, frightened
to tell anyone else these secret horrors. He opened his eyes
and looked as straight at the captain as he could manage.

'I don't know. Just crazy. Like young boys are crazy.' He
hung his head and sobbed again.

Felix Chadin cleared his throat and looked at Skinner
with a plea in his eyes. The captain nodded with barely
disguised contempt, and Becko was escorted from the room
by the bosun and first officer, leaving Lloyd Skinner alone
again with his thoughts, a place it was becoming increasingly
preferable to be.

The oiler who had been assigned to be Esther's companion
seemed as disgruntled by the arrangement as she was. They
sat silently in the crew mess, along with at least eight others,
looking miserably down into greasy cups of coffee. Chadin
hadn't made it clear in this pairing of people whose needs
had priority. When Esther had indicated she wanted to go
back to her cabin, assuming the man would accompany her,
the surly oiler just shook his head once and indicated his
wrist watch, meaning, she'd assumed, it was his shift and he
would be staying on this deck awaiting instructions.

So here they were, sitting waiting for nothing, hoping they
would be safe by huddling together in a pack.

Esther knew she had to get out of this room. It was not in
her nature to sit and wait for things to happen. The man she
had been watching in Chadin's briefing had gone, and there
was a lot to do. She stood up. 'Got to go to the bathroom.'

The oiler looked confused, unsure of what to do. After
all, it wasn't as though Esther were under guard. They were
sticking together for security, nothing more. He couldn't care
less if this girl passenger got cut up. In fact, like most of his
superstitious crew members, part of him blamed her presence
for the disasters that were crippling the voyage. He thought
for a moment, a process that was as visible as a fairground
grab machine picking up a prize, shrugged and looked back
at his coffee.

She walked slowly from the room, then on gaining the
corridor, moved quickly to the stairs that led to her deck.
As she reached the top of the short flight, frantic footsteps
came pounding up behind her. Without thinking, Esther
swung round, knelt to a crouch, hands forward, and braced
herself for whatever was in rapid pursuit. It may have been
an instinctive precaution, but it was a wasted one. The only
threat posed by Jose the deck cadet was one of collision, as
he narrowly avoided tumbling over her as he rushed around
the corner of the stairwell.

He stopped, startled, and glared at her as though she
were mad.

Esther stood up slowly, as though it had been normal to
find her here in this position. She put a smile in her voice.
'Sorry. I gave you a fright.'

The man scowled, recovering from this unexpected
encounter.

She was still blocking the way, and she made no move
to vacate the position. Not completely off guard, but no
longer afraid, Esther wanted to know why the man had been
running. 'What's the hurry?'

Jose considered using the worst Filipino word he could
think of to tell her to mind her own American girl's business.
Instead, he threw her one inscrutable glance, pushed past
and hurried on his way like the white rabbit. She gave it
a beat, then, like Alice, followed behind, out of sight. The
sound of his footfall didn't lead her far. He was heading for
the captain's cabin.

From the corner of the stairwell on the officer's deck, her
back pressed against the cool painted metal, Esther could
hear everything Jose said to the captain. Cotton wanted the
holds closed. Unless he said it quietly, Skinner said nothing
in reply, and she waited silently and expectantly until, with
disappointment, she heard Jose moving off towards the direc
tion of the bridge.

Esther thought about that order, then thought about what
exactly Cotton might have found to make him send a mes
senger so urgently to relay it. In a minute she would search
him out and ask him herself. But first, there was something
she needed to remind herself of in her cabin. Something that
had been nagging at her for a while. She slipped away with
stealth, but more importantly, with purpose.

The two-person rule didn't apply to Fen Sahg. He was
accompanied by three men. All four sat in Fen's and
Ronaldo's tiny cabin, watching each other silently like par
ticipants in a kids' stare-out contest. It was no coincidence
that Fen's three chaperones were the bulkiest of the crew.
Chadin might have publicly dismissed his crews' superstitious
fears that Fen was somehow behind the death, but his
instinct nevertheless told him that all was not well with
the oiler. Fen, however, seemed curiously cheerful about
the company, and sat peacefully on his bunk looking from
one face to another, like an eager interviewee expecting
questions from a prospective employer. He settled on one
face and smiled.

'This beats scrubbing decks, eh, Rapadas?'

The big deck cadet looked back at him sourly. 'Yeah?
Maybe for you. This wasn't my shift. I should be asleep.'

'You can sleep if you want,' grinned Fen. 'We're here to
keep each other safe after all.'

Rapadas snorted and crossed his arms.

Fen was undeterred. 'Anyone worked out what we're all
supposed to be hiding from anyway?'

The ABS sitting on the floor by Ronaldo's bunk shifted
uncomfortably and muttered under his breath. 'Maybe you
should tell us.'

Fen turned his gaze to the man. He was still smiling, but
his eyes were clouding. 'Huh?'

The ABS glanced at his two companions for moral support.
None was forthcoming. The man looked away and stared at
the wall.

Fen spoke again, friendly, uncomprehending. 'What do
you mean?'

'Just what I said.'

The man shifted his eyes from the wall to the floor in
sullen defiance. Fen was quiet for a moment then laughed,
and three faces watched him anxiously. Fen Sahg had no
reputation for violence. He wasn't a drinker, and his slight
build never tempted stevedores or drunken sailors to single
him out for a tussle. If anything, he was regarded as the ship
gossip, a bit of an old woman, always trading tales with men
from other ships, always the first to know when something
bad or scandalous had happened.

No, he wasn't violent or volatile, and apart from the
occasional unwelcome revelations of his Saanti readings,
Fen Sahg scared no one. But the mirthless sound that was
bubbling from his mouth, if not frightening, was certainly
unsettling.

The larger of the deck hands frowned across at Fen.
'What's so fucking funny?'

Fen stopped laughing abruptly. He turned and looked at
the man, who to his credit, held the gaze. If he had expected
to see a lunacy in Fen's eyes that matched his cauterized
laughter then he was mistaken. The man who looked back
at him did not look like a lunatic at all, in fact he stared back
with an intelligence that was far beyond an unschooled oiler
from Manila. '

'What's funny? Homo sapiens. Man. The canker that infects
the planet. Always at his funniest when he's afraid.'

Rapadas was shaking his head, his face betraying sadness
rather than horror. 'Man, you need help. You really do.'
Fen appeared to think about this for a moment, then a
smile spread slowly across a face that was beginning to bloom
with sweat.

'Yes. You're right. For the moment, I do.'



11


Sohn had no intention of waiting around in any mess room
until the bosun decided things were safe. Even when it was
idling, his engine needed constant supervision, and he was
damned if it was going to be abandoned. Chelito Baylan,
the young apprentice fourth engineer, had accompanied his
chief after his defiant insistence that duties should resume
as normal, and together they now moved happily around
the huge cathedral engine, silently tweaking and prodding,
checking and adjusting as they did every day of their work
ing lives.

Sohn was not a man to be afraid of much, except perhaps
an engine failure in a storm, and a poor navigator who
couldn't buy him the time against the weather in which to
fix whatever had ceased to function. His was a world of cause
and effect, a world of moving parts that could break or be
mended, and he had little time for the superstitious nonsense
that was being chewed over by the crew still huddled in the
mess room.

Of course an unthinkable thing had happened on this
normally peaceful and unremarkable ship, and everyone
had to have a theory. Sohn's was as pragmatic as the rest
of his thinking. It was "clear to him that there had been
an unpleasant and secretive feud between Salvo Acambra
and someone on board, his years at sea suggesting that it
was most likely of a sexual nature. The murder had been
grisly and revolting, but he doubted it would happen again,
convinced that it was a matter confined to the victim and
murderer, and more importantly he knew that the culprit
would be discovered in the course of time.

In other words, for Sohn the whole affair was over, and he
cared only that his engines would continue to give him no
cause for concern while they idled at the command of the
bridge.

For this reason, there was nothing in the chief engineer's
physical vocabulary that indicated caution. This huge cavern
of steel was where he was at peace, and despite the circum
stances, this night was no different.

Sohn was standing at the fuel gauge, unconsciously run
ning through mental calculations that his sea-going brain
was quite unable to resist whenever confronted with an
opportunity, when the figure of Chelito moved into his
peripheral vision.

'Yeah?'

The chief engineer mumbled the word as a question, but
when the moment that would normally be filled with a reply
had passed, and there was still silence, Sohn looked round.

The boy was standing a few paces to his chief's left, smiling
and staring at him expectantly. Sohn was not an irritable man,
but it was unlike any of his crew to hang around waiting to
be told what to do, and it irked him. He tried to keep the
annoyance out of his voice and made the assumption that
the boy was still there indicated that he wanted to ask a
question.

'What's up then, Chelito?'

Chelito Baylan merely shrugged, wiped at the dampness
from under his collar with a rag, and continued to smile.

Sohn narrowed his eyes, scanning the boy's face for a
clue to his intention. His irritation grew to something more
volatile at the lack of reply, but he kept the emotion in check
as he tried again.

'The oil? Anything wrong?'

Chelito's smile widened. He shook his head. With an
elegant brown hand, stained with the oil to which Sohn
referred, he gestured at his chief's torso. 'I know you know
it's in there. But do you know how big it is?'

Sohn's mouth dried. He tried to swallow and failed, instead
a croak came from his mouth. 'What?'

'The tumour. Well, actually, tumours. It's going through
you like wildfire, chief. It's this big now, the one in your
colon.' Chelito made the shape of a small sphere with his
cupped fingers.

Sohn took a small step back from the boy, and put his hand
out to steady himself against the cold metal behind him. His
voice was still small and hoarse when he spoke. 'Get back
to work.'

Chelito made a shrugging motion again and continued
to smile. 'I don't mean any trouble, chief. I sure won't tell
anyone you sent your brother to the medical examination
for the life insurance you took out last year. How will they
ever know it wasn't you? They won't. They'll pay up, sure
they will. But you know how you think your wife doesn't know
you're dying? Yeah? Well, get this. She knows. She found the
underpants you peed blood over. She's been watching you
every time you've come home for the last eight months. She
knows, chief.' He smiled some more, turned and walked
away, wiping at his neck and still talking as though to himself.
'Yeah, she knows okay.'

Sohn was now leaning fully against the drive shaft case
ment, the sweat on his brow almost as profuse as his assis
tant's. As though it had been prompted by the horrific
encounter, the familiar pain started to gnaw in his gut,
and he ground his back teeth together, waiting for it to
subside before he could even try to rationalize the horror
of the last few moments.

The chief engineer had learned over the last few months,
that if he concentrated hard, he could usually bear the
secret agony that writhed into life in his lower abdomen at
unexpected and increasingly frequent times, until it eased
off. All he had to do was to focus and stay still. But right now,
although he remained perfectly motionless in a semi-crouch
trying hard to find that focus, all that Sohn could think of
was the madness in his assistant's eyes, the impossibility of
his knowledge, and much more importantly, the size of the
circular shape that Chelito had made with his thin brown
fingers.

'For Christ's sake calm down.'

Chadin was close to slapping the deck cadet, but the
audience of half a dozen crew stopped him as much as
his own professional self control. Instead, he gripped the
whimpering man firmly by the shoulders and tried again to
get him to make sense.

'Listen to me, Antonio. This is really important. How can
you be sure he fell in the hold?'

Antonio gripped one of his bosun's wrists like a baby
wrapping a fist round a mother's finger, and waved at the
hatch cover once more with his other hand. 'He was up
there when I thought I heard him call. I know he was. I
know. I know.'

'For the last time, is there any chance he could have gone
overboard?'

Antonio shook his head, glancing feverishly from the
bosun's face to those of his fellow crew. 'No. No. He couldn't
have. He's in one of the holds. I'm telling you. We got to get
him out.'

Chadin let his hands fall from the man's shoulders and
looked round at the row of open hatch covers.

When he looked back again and met the terrified man's
darting gaze, there was no mistaking the implication and
weight in his next question. 'Which one, Antonio?'

The deck cadet shrank from those eyes and his panting
turned to sobs. He shook his head violently and covered his
eyes with a hand. 'Don't know. Five, six or seven maybe. I
don't know. I don't know.'

Chadin looked at his feet and then turned to the waiting
men. 'Unchain the derricks. And two of you start check
ing the surface right now.' He regarded Antonio as he
continued.

'All nine holds.'

At least the light was still on. Matthew had allowed himself
only one fleeting moment of hypothesis concerning how it
would be in this frozen box if the light was not on, with only
a skinned corpse for company, and then sensibly put the
thought away. The rest of the time had been spent between
the practicality of trying to figure a way out, and a disturbing
speculation on who had closed the door.

The two were not unrelated, since given the circumstances,
gaining a release might not necessarily result in his deliver
ance from danger. Whoever had closed the door had done
it with intent, and who was to say they might not still be out
there? His first and immediate option had been to bang and
shout, but the silence that greeted his noise only confirmed
the non-accidental nature of his captivity.

So now he paced back and forth between the skinned,
frosted remains of the boy and the locked door while he
thought, his breath blasting out in clouds around his face.

Unsurprisingly, the safety handle on the inside of the door
had been rendered inoperative by whoever closed the door
from the outside, simply by slipping the bolt. Matthew was
faced with the reality that the steel door was not an object
that could be persuaded to give way to force, and since there
was no other portal to the outside from the refrigerator than
that immovable metal lozenge, his options had come down
to the only possible one left. Survive the biting cold, and wait
for help.

It had only been around thirty minutes, but already he was
chilled to the core in his thin tropical shirt, the back of his
hair beginning to bead with tiny balls of ice.

It wouldn't be long before someone came back to the gal
ley, surely. After all the crew would have to eat sometime. He
slapped at his bare arms and scratched the ice particles away
from the back of his neck. If his skin was chilled, then it was
matched by the cold band of fear that was tightening around
his heart. Whoever, whatever, had closed the door on him
was out there, freely roaming amongst the crew. And had Jose
persuaded the captain to close the holds? Even if he had, what
difference would it make? There was madness in Matthew
Cotton's soul right now. It was a madness that was making
him believe the unbelievable, and fear the unknowable, in
a way he had never done in his entire life. He knew fear.
He knew one particular version of it better than most. But
not this kind. The half-glimpsed image he had witnessed on
the hold deck had not only stayed with him, it had fleshed
itself out in his imagination, and was haunting him here in
this dimly-lit ice-box as he visualized what might be waiting
on the other side of the door.

Salvo Acambra's deathly grin, leering up at Matthew from
a face that was not so very different from the racks of frozen
meat hanging on hooks above it, was almost comforting in
comparison to the creature that Cotton's mind had con
structed. Against his will, it forced him to contemplate the
ugly death at his feet. But there was nothing to fear from
the dead.

The dead didn't have the power to harm you. The dead
didn't have the power to surprise you, or pursue you. Matthew
stopped walking, stared at the boy's remains and slumped
against a drum of frozen fries. But it wasn't the boy he was
seeing any more. It was someone else entirely. The dead,
above all, thought Matthew Cotton, didn't have the power
to forgive you. He screwed his eyes shut and bit his cheek
to lose the thought.

There was a noise. He opened his eyes. A small and hesi
tant noise, but he had heard it clearly. It had come from the
storeroom on other side of the door. Cotton stayed deathly
still, frozen this time by instinct instead of temperature. He
waited, his breath escaping in tiny bursts from his nostrils.
There was silence, but there was a quality to the silence,
perhaps its timing, perhaps simply the contrast to the initial
noise which had given the impression of being a clumsy
mistake instead of an unselfconscious announcement, that
made him sure that someone or something was listening
on the galley side of the door, as hard as he was on this
side of it.

The temperature in the freezer was such that Matthew
Cotton, dressed as he was, realistically had only a few hours
left before parts of body and brain would start to shut down.
But now there was someone out there. He should shout, bang
on the door, scream at the top of his voice. Of course he
should. But Matthew stayed quiet.

It seemed like an age, but in reality it was probably less
than a minute. As he watched, the safety bolt was slipped
back into its casing, and very slowly the big round wheel that
accommodated the outside handle began to turn.

Matthew let go his breath, and looked around quickly for
a weapon. His choices would have been comedic had it not
been for the considerable lack of comedy that the situation
presented. A tub of fries, a side of beef, cartons of frozen
juice and a stack of frozen vegetables piled high in their
plastic bags. Nothing came immediately to mind as having
the efficacy of a gun. Matthew moved to the frozen meat and
tore at a packet of ribs.

He grabbed the biggest he could he find, holding the bone
like a caveman in a cartoon, and tried to ready himself for
whatever came through the doorway. The metal wheel made
the other half revolution it required to pull the handle fully
down and break the seal on the door, and then stopped
moving. Matthew licked at dry, frozen lips, waiting and
watching as silently as his trembling body would allow.

The freezer door must have weighed at least four hundred
pounds, so the pull that made it bang open was impressive.
The sudden rush of warm air to cold made the atmosphere
fog, and it was a second or two before Matthew made out the
form that had ended his entombment so abruptly.

So youthful a female should have looked ridiculous, standing
as she was with a large meat cleaver held at her shoulder,
but Esther Mulholland did not look ridiculous. She looked
dangerous.

If anyone looked foolish, it was Matthew, pale with cold,
tight with fear, and clutching his barbecue rib. Very slowly
she relaxed her position and lowered the weapon.

First officer and passenger looked at each other for what
seemed like a long time and Matthew watched as conflicting
emotions vied for dominance on Esther's face. Quickly,
visible relief, and what looked just a little like pleasure in
seeing him, gave way to naked contempt.

'One question. Were you locked in, or did ten stiff Jack
Daniels make you think you were in a bar instead of an
icebox?'

Cotton, who had been on the verge of thanking her,
scowled back. 'Never been more sober.'

She nodded. 'How long?'

'Sober, or locked in here?' He threw the rib to one side and
walked out of the freezer, pushing past her without making
eye contact.

Esther ignored the snub and repeated the question to his
back. 'I said, how long?'

Cotton stopped in the door frame of the storeroom,
shivering involuntarily as the delicious change in temperature
played over his skin. His eyes flicked to the circuit breaker
on the outside of the door that made the freezer stay on an
emergency battery even if the power was cut. He put his hand
out and cancelled it, then flicked the big black power switch
to 'off'. Who gave a shit if the meat went off? Salvo wasn't
exactly going to complain if it got hot in there. Help was on
its way.

Until then, Matthew Cotton wanted to make certain that
no one was going to get locked in that death trap again.
He looked to Esther. 'What exactly brought you down here
anyway?'

She held his contemptuous gaze. 'I needed to see the body
again more closely.'

'Shouldn't you be back in the mess room with the crew .
instead of playing Kay Scarpetta?'

She looked back at him without emotion. 'Shouldn't you?'
Matthew leant against the door frame and allowed himself
a sarcastic laugh. He gestured at the cleaver that now hung
loosely at her side. 'Oh yeah, like that's going to keep you
safe from whatever did that to Salvo.'

Esther glanced briefly into the freezer and then back at
him, this time with a change of expression, although one
equally as impenetrable as the last. 'Yeah, you're right. A
bunch of unarmed deck cadets drinking coffee are going to
do that job so much better.'

Matthew watched her face for a moment, then rubbed at
his freezing arms and looked at the ground. 'About thirty
minutes, I reckon. Maybe more. Only thought to look at my
watch after I'd realized there was no way out.'

Esther nodded and they remained silent for a moment,
until Cotton's gaze strayed to the slime trail that still glinted
faintly on the ceiling. Esther watched him without following
the path of his gaze, and when he looked back down at her
and found her still staring at him, he intuitively knew why.
She had seen it too. There was a curious kind of relief on
First Officer Cotton's face as he nodded at her.

'I think we should talk.'

She nodded back and then indicated the open freezer door
with a small shrug. 'I want to look at him one more time.'

If one went, then they all had to go. That was the rule.
And the bosun needed Rapadas to help with the derricks.
Fen had seemed nervous when he heard they were being
called away from the cabin. His eyes darted shiftily around
the room, coming to rest nearly always, the youngest of the
ABSs noticed, on the edge of a shoebox that stuck out from
under his bunk. His mood, however, picked up enormously
when he found they were headed for the hold deck. The
three men who had been keeping Fen such uncomfortable
company in his cabin, were now completely absorbed in the
new alarm that had gripped the ocean's unluckiest ship,
and Fen's unwanted presence amongst them went largely
ignored, free from the confines of the small, hot room.

Thomas had fallen into the holds of trash. None could
articulate the horror that information held for them, and
so their arrival and subsequent carrying out of instructions
was silent to a man.

As they worked, all kept the same thought hidden in their
hearts, a thought that was shared by those who had kicked the
derricks into life, and were already swinging the first one over
the hatch of hold five ready to claw uselessly at the surface of
garbage. If Thomas had really fallen in there, it was already
way too late.

They went about their tasks, and Fen Sahg watched them
with gimlet eyes.

Lloyd Skinner and Renato Lhoon had joined Chadin
on top of the hatch cover of hold five, and two of the
men were staring into the dark pit that lay impassively
below them. Only Skinner kept his gaze higher, looking
out into the blackness of the ocean around them, not like
an anxious seaman checking the seas, but with the air of
a retired industrialist searching for the lights of land from
a romantic cocktail cruise. Chadin ignored his superior
officer's distracted demeanour.

'Like I say, Captain, it's different. If it was grain or salt,
then we could dig and unload the surplus overboard. But in
this...' the bosun gestured with a limp hand '... we run the
risk of not even seeing his body if we find him. We could lift
him and drop him overboard without knowing it.'

Renato Lhoon ran a hand over the back of his hot neck and
looked from Chadin's face to Skinner's. He had no solution.
And more acutely than any time before, he desperately
wanted his superior officer to offer one. This was the time
when he needed Lloyd Skinner to sparkle with insp;ration,
to comfort their fears out of a well of experience and maturity
of leadership. He ached for it, and he stared into the man's
face, waiting to see if he would be rewarded.

Skinner tore his gaze from the invisible horizon for a
moment, and glanced briefly down into the hold before look
ing up at the two men as if seeing them for the first time. He
divided his attention equally between the two faces, before
settling on Renato's. 'Did First Officer Cotton convey any
order to you about closing the hatches with some urgency?'
Lhoon bristled. 'No.'

The reply was unnecessarily staccato, and it was intended
to be so.

Skinner nodded, apparently indifferent to his tone. 'Where
is he now, do we know?'

Neither man answered. The question seemed so rhetori
cal, the manner in which it was asked so casual. Skinner,
unperturbed by their silence, looked back out to sea.

'So what do we do, Captain?' asked the bosun, voicing the
helplessness than Renato was sharing but not revealing.

Skinner cleared his throat and put one hand in a trouser
pocket. 'Carry on.'

Neither the bosun or the second officer exchanged glances.
To do so would have been a two-fold disaster. Firstly, it would
have revealed that they were scared, and neither man would
want that exposed. But secondly, it would have been nakedly
obvious, one to the other, that their unshakeable belief in
duty, rank and orders, the lifeblood of survival at sea, was at
this moment hanging precariously in the balance.

Instead, both gazed across the tops of the hatches and
considered a great many things in their private thoughts,
only a very few of which concerned Thomas Inlatta and
his fate.

The sensation was so powerful, so overwhelming, that any
description of it stood outside the boundaries of language.
But if he were forced to use the inadequate tool of his
vocabulary, then the closest word Chelito could find was
ecstasy. He could not even recall when this state of grace
had begun, or indeed if he had always been part of it. It was
timeless, rendering his own memory of self an irrelevance.

To know everything, to understand all from the complexity
of the atoms that made the matter of the universe, the path of
the planets, the feral thrust of life in every form, right down to
the weak secrets held in the hearts of men, was intoxicating
almost beyond what he could bear.

But his body was suffering. The effort of containing this
new level of consciousness was already having a physical
impact. Chelito sweated profusely as he moved around the
engine room, seeing as much with his mind as with his
watering eyes. Sohn was crouching where he'd left him,
racked with a pain that Chelito knew had only a few minutes
more of attack before it gave his chief some respite.

How he could know such things was the only knowledge
gap in an understanding that seemed to have no limits. It
was simply a fact to be known, just as he knew with equal
certainty that his own body was under strain, that his heart
was pounding to keep up with a metabolism that it would be
impossible to sustain for much longer. And yet the ecstasy of
knowing continued.

He wiped at his neck again with the cloth he clutched, and
tried to catch a fleeting truth that had slowly begun to present
itself as more prominent than the others.

It concerned the one who had granted him this state.
Just glimpses to begin with, and then gradually, more.
It nagged at him, prodding at him for attention in the
cacophony of information that swamped him. And how
well he understood it when he focused. It was so simple,
so obvious.

Chelito was not repulsed in the way the others had been.
He could smell their fear, even though he knew it was the
fear of those who had lived many thousands of years in the
past. They had been so very wrong. His crime was not a crime.

Their punishment a folly. And the consequence... ?

He laughed out loud, a maniac's giggle.

He tried to speak the name of the knowledge-giver, and
found that though it was huge in his mind, he could not
form it on his lips. The boy frowned, tried again and failed.
No matter. The beatific smile returned as he allowed himself
to continue viewing the past, with a complete understanding
of how his own destiny was a part. Soon he would fulfil it,
and what was left of Chelito's simple human ego, the part
that was not godlike, swelled with the pride of having been
chosen. It was because he was beautiful. Because he was
special. Because he was pure.

And then suddenly, there came more of the knowledge-
giver. More than he wanted to see. There was no way to turn
off this stream of enlightenment. It could not be ignored or
filtered out. It was like blood through the veins.

Chelito could no longer be sure if it was the giver, or
Chelito himself who was on the temple steps. But it was
real. He, it, someone, was there, feeling it, seeing it, tasting
and living it. The smell of spices and burning incense was
overwhelming as he was dragged up the rough stone, his
captors not caring if the skin ripped from his flesh. There
was fear in the air. Fear of the sun that should rise in only a
few moments. Fear of the figure whose being he seemed to
be occupying, both felt by himself for the ordeal that was to
come, and from the captors who held his manacled arms so
tightly. But above all, there was the stench of human effluent
from the settlement below the temple, the sewage and rotten
food that he could smell so acutely through the incense, that
he knew was nothing more than a familiar irritant to his
captors.

But it was to be his power. They didn't know that. They
hadn't known at what dark breast he had suckled in the
dense, canopied rainforest: it had been beyond their under
standing. If they had known, they would have taken more
care. Chelito giggled again, hugging himself with delight,
seeing with the giver's eyes, the delicious course and desti
nation of the blood gutter, and knowing for certain, as he
knew all things, that their error ensured that his death would
be meaningless.

Chelito's hand went to his heart. Itwas racing now, bursting
under a pressure that was becoming intolerable. He stumbled
towards a metal bench screwed to the bulkhead, and sat down
heavily. Sweat was pouring from him in a fever and he wiped
at his brow to clear the salt sting from his eyes. The cavernous
room was a blur, but as he scanned its familiar steel buttresses
and painted pipe caryatids, his bleary gaze settled on an
unfamiliar shape. He sat up and blinked.

In the dark space that divided two gleaming pistons was
a ragged pile. His new knowingness scanned it, probing it
to discover its physical truths, its detail, its substance. It was
closed to him.

With an effort, seventeen-year-old Chelito Baylan got to
his feet and walked carefully toward the heap. He peered at
it, curious as to why nothing could be understood from this
jumble of misshapen form, while all around him the rest of
the physical and abstract world was explaining itself, turning
itself inside-out to reveal secrets.

It was nothing special. Just a big pile of garbage. But its
resistance to his understanding perplexed him, and Chelito
took a fraction of a second to scan his chief engineer's
mind to discern whether this trash pile was his. Sohn, the
knowledge confirmed, knew nothing of it. His was a spotless
engine room. He scanned the rest of the crew and finding
no culprit who could have dumped such a pile in the heart
of the ship, he turned back to the more conventional use of
his human senses.

Its odour and decomposition was a plain fact that required
no supernatural sense to experience. But to Chelito in his
heightened sense of awareness, the smell was an unbearable
assault. A thin, viscous slime oozed from its base, and he
wiped at his eyes again to examine what was causing the
discharge. There was a quantity of rotting vegetable matter,
welded by decay to what looked like matted fur and twists
of bloodied rag. Woven between the mash were shards
of metal, glints of steel or tin, dulled and stained, but
contrasting with the soft belly of the pile in their sharpness.
A bone protruded here and there from the dark mass of
discarded matter, and he found himself moving forward with
a hand outstretched, wanting to touch it. With a delicacy
that would not normally be employed in reaching towards
something so repulsive, Chelito put his hand out and made
light contact with the. edge of what looked like a split and
rotten gourd.

The matter beneath his fingers stirred, making him with
draw as though he'd been burnt. Chelito stared at the pile,
then slowly touched it again. There was a shudder beneath
the blackened surface, more powerful this time and Chelito
giggled, sweat dripping from the end of his nose.

It was the kiss to the sleeping princess. He put out his
other hand and laid them both on the top of the mound,
level with his broad shoulders. It might have been only a
fraction of a second, it might have been minutes, the boy's
ability to mark time being so skewed, but however long it
took, there was a balletic elegance to the way in which the
pile of garbage unfolded itself. The matted fur pulled itself
free from the body of wet material with a sucking sound to
reveal something approximating an arm. It was an arm that
terminated in long, ragged pieces of steel and tin, forming
a macabre claw.

It was not animal, though there were clearly parts of
several corpses of decayed beasts incorporated in the neck
and head. But to describe it as part human would have been
equally incorrect. There was a torso of sorts, where red
glistening flesh mingled with the pulp of garbage, and the
white glint of ribs remained visible under a thin wet skin.
Chelito stared at this centre of the creature, fascinated by
a collection of internal organs that appeared to be working
despite their external location. He continued to stare at
them for another reason. This was because he dared not
look at the thing's face.

All he knew, all he felt, all he had ever cared about was
now, this moment. And as the steel shards encircled and
gathered Chelito Baylan close to the oozing body, the boy
threw his head back and released a hiss of pleasure. It
would have been hard to decide exactly when that hiss
turned from ecstasy to agony, as his mouth was quickly
filled with a thick, semi-solid knot of matter that stopped
the sound forever. Nor would it be simple to discern
whether the violent shuddering and writhing of Chelito's
young frame was to do with his spiritual arrival at a place
of enlightenment, or merely a mortal response to the bone
and metal claws that were hungrily slicing and ripping
through him. All that could be said for sure was that while
his death was nowhere near as quick as Chelito might have
elected, it was almost completely silent.



12


Matthew sighed and bent his head over his clasped hands.

'But these are not Peruvians. They're Filipino, for Christ's
sake. Catholic Filipinos.'

Esther was still pacing the cabin, flushed with the lecture
she'd just given him. She wasn't for backing down. 'Yeah, I
know. But if I'm right, that doesn't matter. And how long
did you say you were in dock at Callao?'

He shrugged and looked back up at her with something
approaching disappointment. 'Nearly four weeks.'

She stopped walking and waved a hand at him. 'See?
Enough time. Plenty.'

It was Matthew's turn to pace. He'd heard enough. He
stood up, choreographed a walk that finished at the port
hole, and stared out into the black night. 'You don't know
the crew of a merchant ship very well, do you? No reason
you should.' He turned to face her again. 'But if you did,
you'd know their interests lie a little more in shopping,
gambling and drinking when they go ashore. Signing up
to join murdering sects hasn't featured that large in my
experience.'

Esther set her mouth into a tight line, then picked up her
Dictaphone and shook it at him. 'The boy had been to Lima
recently. Really recently. I'm sure of that now. Now that's
utterly bizarre. This is a tribe that hardly ever show their faces
on the high plateau, never mind catch the frigging bus to a
city hundreds of miles away. Now even you have to admit that
the stuff I translated so far is pretty weird considering what's
gone on here.'

Matthew nodded. It was, as she said, pretty weird. But
the thing he'd been hoping to discuss with her was much,
much weirder. He hadn't expected to be taken back to her
cabin and given a lecture on ancient Inca sun-worship. More
importantly, it had been a revelation to him that of all the
humans on board, many of whom had sailed with Cotton
for a few years, the person he suddenly found himself most
disposed to confide in was this complete stranger of a girl.
It had made him realize how unutterably lonely he was, that
his time on board had collected colleagues, but no friends.
Now, for a reason that he could not entirely define, not even
the obvious one of sexual attraction, he felt he had someone
who was really looking at him when she spoke, really listening
to him when he did. But the relief he felt was mostly short
term and not entirely complete, since Matthew Cotton was
not looking for a soul mate.

All he wanted right now was someone else who believed
there was something not human, not animal, stalking the
crew on this boat. Esther's theory merely concerned the
religious folly and brutality of humans. His was insane, and
she was giving him no opportunity to introduce it.

'Run it past me again.'

She looked at him sharply for a moment, then sighed. 'You
think I'm crazy, don't you?'

He shook his head, and watched her soften.

'Okay.' She put the Dictaphone down and held her hand
up to tick points off her fingers like a teacher. It was an
attractive gesture, and for a brief moment he found himself
examining the feminine architecture of Esther Mulholland
in a way that was neither helpful nor relevant to their
situation. The moment passed as quickly as it came, and
he braced himself to hear her enthusiastic student bullshit
one more time.

'The boy was killed precisely in the manner of an Inca
sacrifice. I mean, to the absolute last detail. They used to
take out the heart still beating, and the skin was removed
carefully in one piece so it could be worn by the priest.'

She fumbled in her pile of books and thrust a picture of a
squat stone statue in front of Matthew.

'There. You see? He's wearing the sacrificed victim's skin,
tied at the back with leather strips. They believed it gave them
great power.'

Matthew glanced briefly at the picture and back up Esther.
'So guess we just need to find the guy on board who's
swabbing the decks with Salvo's skin strapped on like a
barbecue apron. Shouldn't take long.'

She ignored him, and looked down at the picture of
the statue, stabbing at it as she continued. 'Know what
bothers me? These were people who were a lot like us.
Modern Americans, I mean. I'm not talking about a bunch of
ancient savages who would run screaming from gunpowder.
They were practical, inventive, resourceful, pragmatic. They
had one of the wealthiest and most successful civilizations
in world history. They were governed by a feudal system
but the workers were never slave peasants. Work was con
scripted from able-bodied young men in a thing called
Mit'a service and that's how the rulers could build such
incredible temples and irrigation systems and cities. These
were intelligent people, who understood the movements of
the planets and the stars, whose medicine was advanced, and
whose social ideals and political templates are still systems we
recognize today.'

Matthew was staring at her. 'What has this to do with
anything?'

She stared back, then spoke hesitantly. 'I don't think
people like that, a society like that, would continue to carry
out something as barbaric as child human sacrifice for cen
tury upon century.., unless...'

'Unless what?' Matthew was losing patience.

Esther lowered the book and looked straight at him.
'Unless it worked.'

Matthew said nothing. Esther looked down at the book
again avoiding his eyes. 'The sacrifice could be male or
female, but they were always young, beautiful, virgins, chosen
from a favoured family who considered it a great honour to
have one of their children taken for the gods. It ensured a
place in heaven for them all.'

'Aw, come on, Esther...'

'Salvo was a virgin.'

He looked at her quizzically. She held his gaze. Matthew
Cotton put his hands on his hips and gave a low whistle. It
was impossible to disguise the contempt in his voice.

'Well, well. You've been real busy for such a short
voyage.'

Esther snapped the book shut. 'Don't be so fucking ridicu
lous. '

Matthew raised an eyebrow and waited. She hadn't answered
the unspoken question. Esther looked bashful, but not for the
reason Matthew thought.

'He told me, okay?'

'He told you?' Cotton snorted. 'So in between asking if
you wanted tomato or spinach soup, the sixteen-year-old
assistant cook just decided to tell you he was a virgin, the
way he obviously would to a paying female passenger who
has officer status in the junior crew's eyes.'

Esther stayed silent for a moment, then chewed at the
corner of her lip before speaking. 'Can I tell you something
crazy?' Esther looked pleading now.

'You'll have to work hard to make it crazier than that.'

She studied Matthew Cotton's face for a moment, trying
to decide whether it was a face she could trust. The internal
jury delivered their verdict and she sat down heavily and let
her arms fall across her knees.

'One of the reasons the sacrifice victims didn't protest,
resist, even run away - or at least this is what their families
believed- was that when they were chosen they were delivered
into a state of grace by the gods. A state of mind that
made them all-knowing until the time of their death.'

Matthew absorbed this for a moment, unsure of where it
was leading, then inclined his head cheerfully. 'Yeah, well
guess it beats offering them a set of steak-knives.'

She looked up at him, and the lost expression in her eyes
made him regret his sarcasm.

'He came to my cabin with food. Probably only an hour or
so before he died. He knew stuff, like really private stuff. Stuff
that's impossible for anyone else in the world to know.'

'Like what?' To his surprise, Matthew found that he very
much wanted to know those things too.

She waved the question away with a hand. 'That's not
important. What's important was the fact that he couldn't
possibly have known those things about me. Not now. Not
ever.'

Cotton watched her eyes for a moment, trying to read
them, then stepped forward and sat down beside her. She
picked up the Dictaphone again as if it was a talisman, and
asked the question to the tiny machine rather to Matthew's
face.

'So how do we explain it?'

Matthew shrugged, awkward now. 'Maybe you mistook
what he said. His English wasn't great.'

She looked round at him, annoyed. 'Yeah, right.'

He looked away. 'I don't know what you're saying here,
Esther.'

She lowered her eyes. The neither.'

There was weariness in Matthew Cotton's voice when he
finally replied. 'Someone skinned and eviscerated a sack-load
of rats. Someone murdered a sixteen-year-old boy. Someone
ripped the radio out, a crime that's almost worse than killing
a human being when you're at sea. Someone tried to kill
me by locking me in the freezer. On a ship where the main
excitement usually amounts to seagulls mating on the derrick
cables, those facts are plenty weird enough.'

Esther detected something strange in Matthew's delivery.
She looked closely at him though he avoided her eyes. 'But
that's not all, is it? Something else has happened. That's why
you wanted to talk.'

Matthew clasped his hands in front of him. As a pair they
looked like two baseball fans leaning forward in the cheap
seats to view a home run.

They sat like that, in quiet, unhappy contemplation for a
time, Esther waiting, sensing that to speak out of turn might
dissuade him from whatever it was she instinctively knew he
was aching to tell her, until Matthew broke the silence.

'I saw something.'

She looked at him and said nothing, sensing it had taken
a measure of struggle for him to say it. So she waited some
more. It took a while. He clasped and unclasped his hands
until he felt like speaking again.

'Something strange. Hideous. Almost human, but not. I
don't know. It moved real fast. Seemed to me it came out of
the trash in the holds.'

Esther blinked at him.

Part of her wanted to laugh, but a close examination of
that response would have revealed it could more correctly
be attributed to controlled hysteria rather than comedy.
Instead, she cleared her throat and slowly held up her
Dictaphone. 'You speak Spanish, don't you? I think we
gathered that.' He stared at her, and she nodded down at the
slim black rectangle. 'I'm only halfway through. My Spanish
is pretty basic, academic rather than colloquial. But if you can
understand a rougher tongue than the plummy-mouthed guy
on my home teaching cassette then you need to hear this.

All of it.'

'Why?'

'I need to know exactly what he's saying.'

'What's this got to do with what I just told you?'

Esther blinked down at the Dictaphone. 'I reckon we might
both be crazy.'

They hadn't noticed him going, and having witnessed the
grim determination of their faces as they went to work on
the holds, Fen knew they wouldn't notice his absence at all.
That was good. So much to do. So little time.

The accommodation block was quiet now, the majority of
the crew having joined the others on deck for the search. But
there were still voices coming from the mess rooms when he
passed the end of the corridor, and so caution had to be
observed.

He moved quietly down the stairs to the sleeping quarters,
checked there was silence from the two adjoining cabins,
then quickly opened the door to his cabin and slipped in.
Fen closed the door behind him and leant back against its
cool surface with a sigh. He was alone again at last.

A smile played across Fen Sahg's lips as he thought about
how well he was carrying out his tasks. He was so far along
the enlightened path that he no longer had any need of the
Saanti dice to speak with the one who came. He needed only
to concentrate his mind on that portion of his heart that was
already won, and the voice would speak to him, tell him the
truth, instruct him on the necessary liturgy to bring about
that which they both wanted so badly.

He longed for those moments when the voice kindled
that ache of nameless pleasure, which he knew would be
increased a thousandfold when all that had to be done had
been completed. In fact it was tempting now he was alone
again, after so many hours of enforced company, to call on
that private voice and let himself slide into the oblivion and
ecstasy of perfect truth. But there was no time. He had to
collect, and he had to do it quickly before the men on the
deck became alerted to what must surely by now lie below.

He pulled himself up, moved quickly to the bunk and
pulled out the shoebox. He clutched it close to his breast
and fingered the lid. It was tempting to open it and let his
eyes feast on the contents, but he feared that too regular an
audience, however appreciative, might be unwelcome. He
would go and carry out his next task and then perhaps the
one who came would talk with him again. He hurried from
the cabin and took the stairs down to the engine room two
at a time.

The body of Thomas Inlatta was not that far below the surface
of the trash in hold five. But in terms of accessibility it might
as well have been on the moon. The instability of the pile
meant that any disturbance would bury it deeper, and the
random nature of the shapes and textures that engulfed it
would make identifying a human corpse amongst such visual
confusion a most unlikely prospect.

But these difficulties were irrelevant at present, since the
search for Thomas was taking place in a different hold.
While the work went on elsewhere, his body lay still and
undisturbed, bent and twisted like a broken doll, the fists
still tight around tubes of unidentifiable spongy matter, the
face an immobile mask of terror.

The derrick operator starting work on hold two was per
spiring, trying to ensure that the claw on the end of the
crane only lightly scoured the surface as he lifted what he
could from the massive pile. Eighteen pairs of eyes watched
the process, all concentrating hard, hoping to be the first to
spot the shape of a living man hanging from the grab.

Captain Lloyd Skinner, however, was not watching the
work in progress. He was watching his men, and considering
all that had happened to his ship over the last twenty-four
hours, he was doing so with remarkable composure.

His crew glanced at him occasionally from the corners of
their eyes, admiring his collected demeanour, comforted by
the fact their master was still obviously so very much in
control. But then even if Lloyd Skinner had been screaming
inside with alarm, the men on board The MY Lysicrateswould never be privy to a demonstration of that, or indeed, any
other emotion.

He had been nineteen years old when he had first appreciated
the merits of keeping calm, and ever since, he had
worked harder than anyone could ever guess at maintaining
it. But right now, as Skinner stood by the rail, hands on
his hips, eyes closed as the smell from the disturbed hold
corrupted the light salt breeze, the force of will that kept
him so inscrutable was being tested. It was the earth smell
from the hold that made his stomach churn. The odour of
sour soil and decaying vegetation that was thankfully almost
completely absent in a life at sea, an odour that he had spent
over thirty years avoiding. He opened his eyes as his mind
threatened to start rolling its own favourite movie, but it was
too late. It was the smell.

The platoon leader had been only three years older than
him. Ridiculous, of course, but then sanity had abandoned
the entire war by the time he was forced to join it, and
a twenty-one-year-old with the power over life and death
seemed no wilder than anything else.

Maybe some other twenty-one-year-old would have handled
it well, grown, matured, responded to the nightmare and
conquered. Not Mendez. The wisdom and judgment of the
heavy-browed sullen boy was so absent that emotionally, he
could have passed for a toddler. In some respects they were
all children then, but Skinner knew he was smarter than
Mendez, and the indignation he felt at having to carry out
orders of complete incompetence and retributive malice,
grew to a fever that kept him awake at night more than
the mosquitoes or the heat.

He had been anything but calm then. Lloyd Skinner was
hot-headed and full of fury. He hated the war, he hated his
part in it, laying mines in the red earth to kill and maim
God knows who, and he hated Mendez for the simple but
unforgivable crime of being stupid.

At the age of eighteen he had believed in a lot. He'd
believed that men were fundamentally good, that people
could make a difference, that there was a future. All those
beliefs were dead before he saw twenty, and though he would
never allow himself the indulgence to take the dark truth
out and look at it in the light, the fact remained that he
blamed not Mendez, but the evolutionary process itself, the
one that could create the miracle that was the human body
and mind, and then furnish it with the spiritual intelligence
of bacteria. Mendez was, to him, not an individual to hate,
but an example that accurately represented his species.

He had known what would happen. Despite his protests,
Mendez made him do it anyway. Skinner knew, like the rest
of the platoon, that the village housed no one but civilians.
Irritating, unattractive poverty-stricken civilians, who offered
nothing of interest to homesick American teenagers, but
civilians innocent of anything other than lack of education
and silent resentment.

The skinny children spat at Skinner behind his back as they
played in the dust round their huts. They would stare up at
him with their dark, almond-shaped eyes when he looked
back at them, leaving Skinner chilled by the unflinching
alien scrutiny that is the speciality of the child.

Slow, shifty-eyed old men who shuffled from the fields with
thin oxen on ropes, and women doubled over under the
burden of sticks for the fire, or children strapped to their
impossibly strong backs, were the only other inhabitants, and
Skinner would watch them daily, aching to be elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Mendez's order was insane, and Skinner
refused. But the eyes of his superior officer held nothing but
dull, sullen incomprehension when he was challenged, and
the order not only remained unchanged, but was enforced
by the gun that he drew and held to Skinner's head. There
was no law to help him. They were feral. Boys in the jungle
who could do anything and go unpunished. He had looked
deep into Mendez's eyes and knew that the crazy bastard was
capable of pulling the trigger, and so he shut down another
system of belief and survived.

Mendez stood and watched him as he buried the plate-
mines, smoking and drumming the rhythm of an unidentifiable
tune on his thigh. Skinner remembered the feel of the
hot red earth beneath his fingers as he carefully smoothed
the area around the trigger plate, remembered holding the
soil in his fist and glancing up at the waving corn stalks that
had sucked their life-force from it. From the closest hut he
could smell that sour, rancid rotting. A mixture of sewage
and plant life, of hot earth and animals, wood smoke and
the thin, acrid tendrils of impoverished cooking.

Dawson had gathered the villagers, told them to leave. Told
them that the enemy was coming, that the road north was
mined and they would have to evacuate the village. That if
they stayed, they stayed at their own risk. But Skinner knew
they wouldn't go. Mendez knew they wouldn't go.

And then, less than a week later, there they were. Three of
them. A tall, gangly girl, probably about ten or eleven, and
two younger boys, maybe seven or eight. Siblings, obviously.

Skinner had been lying in the shade of a truck, watching
the girl, idly examining the contours of the pitifully thin shift
that covered her body to see if there was the swell of a breast
yet and, finding none, transferred his gaze to the antics of
the boys instead. The girl was in charge of the boys, an ox
and a long, whippy strand of willow, but the stick was being
used more on the two scampering brothers than the animal.
They taunted her, laughing, running behind and in front
of the ox to make her chase them, and although she used
the sharp staccato bark of authority to bring them to heel,
Skinner could see she was playing as much as they were. They
wandered past him, the boys smiling and laughing, pointing
at the ox, and darting into the corn as they headed into the
fields, as the girl stared at him impassively flicking lazily at
the ox's rump. Skinner fell asleep.

The sound of the mine, a dull sound, a deep-noted
'whumph', did not shake him roughly from his dreams,
but brought him gently out of sleep. There was a moment
as he blinked in the daylight, a coming-to, that timed itself
precisely to coincide with the start of her screaming.

Skinner ran. He ran into the cornfield, thrashing at the
dry stalks that barred his way to the road, and when he burst
through on the other side, chaff from the corn was sticking
to him like flakes of diseased skin. The mine had taken one
side of the boy away, but the mess of material that was left
was still alive.

The other two, the girl and the smaller boy, were frozen to
the spot, the girl screaming, the boy shaking and panting.

Skinner stayed on the scrub at the edge of the road, safe
enough, and three others, including Mendez, stood further
back, safer still.

He had laid the mines. He knew where they were. The two
surviving children were in the very heart of the minefield.
He held up his hands to the girl. She turned to look at him,
still screaming, spittle penduluming from her lower lip. His
mind worked fast. He could run back to the camp and get
the detector, but they would have to stay still and calm.

The war was already fucking crazy by the time he reluc
tantly joined it. There had been no tuition in anything, and
so, at eighteen, Skinner was largely a self-trained explosives
expert. He'd been interested in it. The physics of an incen
diary
device was easy to him. The procedure for dealing
with the consequences was not. How did you make children
stay absolutely motionless, absolutely calm, when the torn
remains of their brother was oozing in the dust in front
of them, his single existing arm twitching and flexing like
a beached eel?

Skinner turned to Mendez, and his heart chilled. Mendez
was grinning. He looked back at Skinner and there was a
message in his eyes.

Mendez already had the gun in his hands, and he raised it
as he held onto Skinner's gaze. There had been a moment,
a response to Mendez's action that was so fast that memory
had to be congratulated for logging something so swift. But
Skinner could never forget it. For the mere fraction of a
second as the gun came up to Mendez's shoulder, he was
grateful that his platoon leader was going to do the decent
thing, and finish the suffering of the dismembered boy.

And then, almost before that hope had time to mature into
action, the secret that Skinner had been silently semaphored
by Mendez's eyes was made real.

The first two bullets that thudded into the ground, missed
the mines. The third hit the target, and the world was filled
with the controlled columnar fury of the exploding earth.

He shot three more, like a boy at a funfair trying to win
the stuffed bear, and when it was over, Mendez spoke three
words to Skinner before he lit a cigarette and walked away.

'Dumb little fucks.'

The earth. It was so red. So hot. Five months later, Skinner
had lain down on the hot soil, and breathed in the smell of
the rotting green jungle. The body of Mendez lay beside
him, the hole in his forehead neat and black where Skinner's
bullet had entered, the hole where it had left, not so. The
dead Vietnamese soldier whose gun Skinner had used and
replaced lay a short way off.

Lloyd Skinner had wanted the others to question him, to
prove to him that men were not as stupid as he feared, to
notice the obvious clues that would have pointed to his
guilt. But of course they did not. The execution had been
perfect.

He thought often about the last words he should have
made Mendez hear as he'd held the gun to his head, and
watched with a detached calm as the sullen face had melted
into drooling, pleading primal fear. But it was too late to
change that. What he'd said was written in stone.

'You dumb luck.'

The man watching the operations from the hatch cover of
hold five, shouted instructions that the first grab load was
free of anything human, and the driver opened its claw and
let the garbage tip slowly over the side of the ship. The smell
of earth and rot was unbearable, the odour sticking to his
soft palate, and the captain swallowed back bile. He put a
fist to his mouth in a silent cough, and walked towards the
accommodation block. It was a measure of his presence that
not one seaman questioned whether, given the two-person
rule, they should accompany him.

As second officer, never mind simply as a human being,
Renato Lhoon's thoughts should have been with the mur
dered boy and the possible death of Thomas Inlatta. But
Renato, as he patrolled the corridors of B-deck with a deck
cadet one pace behind, scuffing his feet, was thinking of
neither. He was thinking about the approaching company
ship.

In all his time at sea, he had only ever once been on board
a ship that was given an order to rendezvous during a voyage
with another from the fleet, and the circumstances had been
exceptional. A cargo had to be transferred at sea because of
a paperwork emergency.

It had been irregular, and most likely illegal, but then the
big shipping companies were not exactly renowned for being
upright, honest citizens of the ocean.

What rankled Renato was that, in this case, he hadn't
been informed what the circumstances were, not even by
the usual conspiratorial nod and wink to senior officers that
a loyal company captain might employ to prepare his crew
for something irregular. He still fumed over that exclusion,
even now in their perilous circumstances, when the meeting
was clearly to be their life-line. But Renato was more than
angry and wounded. He was suspicious.

Cotton, of course, hadn't even noticed the irregularity of
it all. But then Cotton wouldn't notice a hairy mammoth
playing a trumpet beside his bed unless Renato woke him
up and pointed it out.

But what if Matthew knew what the captain's orders were
and simply didn't care? It was certainly a peculiar place to
meet, in this odd spot out of the shipping lane, hove-to above
one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean where the
currents were not exactly ideal. Renato could only assume
that he did, and that he had probably been too drunk either
to acknowledge them or to care. But Renato cared. He cared
about having been excluded. He cared so much that he had
made a decision. This extraordinary voyage was ging to be
the last he made as the crutch for Matthew Cotton.

When they next sailed, Renato Lhoon was going to be first
officer and Cotton could panhandle for booze money in a
doorway somewhere.

All he had to do was to prove to the captain that he
was worth the promotion, that Cotton was unreliable and
dangerous, and that Lhoon's loyalty was unshakeable. He
must put aside his disappointment in Skinner's exclusion
of him and work at becoming indispensable, and if this
wasn't an opportunity, then what was? The other ship was
coming, and when it came, there would be no doubt who
was in charge, who had helped contain the horror, and who
had been caught slacking on duty.

He frowned as his thoughts churned, hardly even seeing
the interiors of the cabins he peered into as the deck cadet
threw open each door for inspection. Pasqual's cabin door
was opened and swung shut in seconds, and they moved on
to the next.

Renato stopped so suddenly by the next cabin that the deck
cadet nearly ran into his back. It belonged to the irritating
American girl passenger and there were voices coming from
inside. Renato listened for a moment, then looked back at
his companion.

'It's okay. This deck is clear. Go back to the mess and wait
for me.'

The small man started to protest and was silenced by a
sharp look. He scowled and walked away, making a great show
to his officer of checking round the corner of the corridor as
though waiting to be ambushed by snipers. Renato watched
him go with contempt and then walked cautiously to the
cabin door, and pressed his face close against the metal.

He listened for the voices again, but this time there was
silence. He knew the girl was not alone, and he could have
sworn there had been a deeper male voice in there. He
waited a moment more and then was rewarded. The male
voice spoke. It was Cotton. Renato stopped breathing to hear
better, and was met only by Cotton's muffled exclamations.

The girl was speaking very quietly, but although he could
hardly make out what they were saying, nor make sense of
those words he did hear, the aspect of their conversation
that interested Renato was the tone of it. It did not sound
as though a senior officer was briefing a passenger in his
professional capacity.

Renato Lhoon allowed a contemptuous smile to curl his
lips. Loyalty. Unswerving loyalty to his captain, come what
may. It was to be his future.

He walked on to join the cadet, putting a hand to his mouth
to cough at the stench of the garbage in the holds which had
quite suddenly entered the block, presumably, he reasoned
subconsciously, with the opening of a door to the hold deck.

His step was light, and his mind fully occupied, which was
why he failed to register the ticking noise the soles of his shoes
made, as they dealt with the resistant friction of red-brown
stickiness that trailed along the corridor from the stairs.

The engine room of the Lysicrates was never silent. Even
at its most idle, as now, with the great turbines at rest, the
ambient noise filled the senses with a low thrumming and a
subtle, soft rushing.

Sohn Haro's senses, however, were only just beginning to
return from the journey of pain they had been on for the
last twenty-five minutes. His eyes were filled with tears, and
his face was still contorted by the effort of remaining sane
under such duress. But even though the pain was subsiding,
he was far from sane. How could he be? His fourth engineer
had just performed a conjuring trick, a mind-reading illusion
of impossible accuracy that had left him reeling in a state of
confusion and terror. Until this moment, Sohn's fears had
been very simple.

He knew he was going to die, and only two things worried
him. The first was what was to become of his family. He'd
sorted that. Illegally, yes, just as the boy had so chillingly
pointed out. But it was sorted. The other worry had been
how bad the pain was going to get at the end. It was only
because of his unique position on board, the fact that he
could hide away in the depths of this huge steel cathedral,
that he had been able to hide the attacks from the rest of
the crew. But the agonies were becoming more frequent,
and almost intolerable. He blinked away the tears and tried
the first tentative movements of straightening up. It was
getting better.

He blew sharply out between his teeth, and raised himself
from the doubled crouch to a sitting position against the
bulkhead.

Now, at least, he could think. Chelito would be back at
his duties checking the oil, and in a minute Sohn would be
forced to go and face him again. What could he say? He
needed to know where the boy got his information, but it
had been so personal and impossible for anyone else to know,
that Sohn already knew he didn't want the answer.

He tried standing. It was possible.

Sohn Hart would never have classed himself as a brave
man, but any independent observer would have certainly
have awarded him the title. He treated the management of
his impending death as a duty, and likewise, he was about to
go in search of the boy, to confront his worst fears and dark
unspoken horrors, merely because he felt he had no choice.

The chief engineer wiped his damp face with the back
of his sleeve and, stepping out into the cavernous room,
cast his gaze around the hanging walkways and main deck.
Chelito was not in sight. He walked down the central aisle,
his footsteps clanking on the metal grid, to where he could
see behind the turbines, then stopped, took a breath, and
called out.

'Chelito!'

There was no answer above the familiar mechanical heart
beat that filled the room. Sohn walked on, more cautiously
now, unsure as to why his apprentice wouldn't answer when
called.

'Hey! Chelito!'

There was a small noise, a scuffling and the clang of metal.
Sohn turned his head quickly in its direction. It came from
behind the turbine closest to the propeller drive shaft. He
opened his mouth to call again, and then closed it. If he
could hear that sound, then whoever made it could almost
certainly hear him.

Sohn was old enough and wise enough to guess there
might be danger behind that massive metal tower, but he
was standing doing something few other men would have
done in similar peril.

He was weighing up the relative merits of dying in agony
at home, or being dispatched quickly by a murderer.

The decision took no time.

'Chelito,' he said, very loudly and without fear. 'Come out.

I can hear you.'

There was a studied silence, and then another scuffle, more
urgent this time, as though something was being hurried.

Sohn tightened his fingers into fists and walked forward.
There was a wrench lying on the edge of the upper walkway.
He glanced at it for a moment and instinctively his hand
uncurled and reached for it. The fingers froze a few inches
away. No need. He walked on.

The space behind the turbine comprised of a small corner
that he knew well. It was one of the untidy areas that
he disliked, a perfect den to host a work-shy apprentice
or accommodate the detritus of engineering that the lazy
couldn't be bothered putting in order.

This time, however, as he slowly turned the corner to
face whatever might be present in its arc of shadow, it was
shielding an altogether different tableau.

Since his life had started to be ruled by pain and certain
death, many responses had died prematurely in Sohn, fear
of personal injury being one of them. But there was still
a little part of him that wanted to step back immediately,
to run, to scream, even to fall to his knees at the sight
before him. Instead, he merely stood and looked, his mouth
a tight line.

Chelito's blood had coated every surface for at least a four
foot radius. It had clotted and darkened near the edges of the
mess, but the thick pool around the remains was still arterial
red and oozing. Sohn, staring, was rooted to the spot. He was
not staring at the blood. Nor at the skinned nightmare that
used to be his boy, or the gaping hole in Chelito's chest where
the blackened tatters of ripped organs glistened. Instead, he
was staring into the face of a fellow crew member who knelt
in the gore and stared back at him.

If this was the moment that Sohn had hoped for, when swift
violence would end his suffering, then he was disappointed.
The figure's eye's stayed fixed on Sohn's for a long time, until
the lips began to grow a slow smile that widened to a grin.

Then as Sohn watched, Fen Sahg calmly finished what
he was doing, stood up and walked away, leaving bloody
footprints as he disappeared from the engine room into
the night.

'Stop!'

The derrick swung on.

'Stop the fucking crane! Jesus! STOP!'

Three men waved their arms wildly at the crane operator,
and the arm halted abruptly, sending the grab into a wild
pendulous arc that would take minutes to calm. As the huge
metal bucket swung lazily through the night air above hold
number two, the assembled crew of the Lysicrates stared up at
it, and even given the difficulty of examining a moving object
from a distance with any accuracy, there was no mistaking
what hung from the lip of the grab.

A human leg, flayed of its skin, which had consequently
covered its previously sticky shiny surface with a fur of
detritus, dangled casually from the edge of the bucket, as
though its unseen owner was lying by a river bank and the
watching crew below on the river bed, watching the dipping
foot toy with the current.

There was silence as the cable steadied and came to rest,
and the operator slowly lowered the grab down onto the main
deck. The silence remained as the body that was attached to
the leg slithered into view from the casserole of trash that
surrounded it. No one could have mistaken it for Thomas
Inlatta.

Despite the fact that the chest had been opened crudely,
and judging by the ragged and splintered ribs, very quickly,
it was still recognizably the body of a woman, naked, not
only of clothes, but of skin. Large breasts, fatty and glistening
and flayed, hung from the split torso, the unnatural divide
between them making the picture even more grotesque.

Several crew members, in the crescent of watchers that
surrounded the mess, crossed themselves, but no one moved
forward to retrieve the body from its ignoble and shallow
grave. Perhaps they would have stood in that silent semicircle
all night, staring and immobile, if the uncharacteristically
authoritative voice of Matthew Cotton hadn't cut into the
thick silence.

'It's going to take time to find out who she is. What matters
here is that it's not Thomas.'

The men looked across at him. Cotton was standing with
Esther at the edge of the derrick, his face a puffy and
crumpled mask.

'If he's in there, he can't possibly have survived this long.

We need to close the hold hatches.'

Felix Chadin scanned his men's faces and then turned
back to his first officer. If Cotton's voice had contained an
authority that was normally absent, then Chadin's contained
an insolence that was equally rare.

'Are you crazy? We find an unidentified woman's murdered
body in the holds, and you say we should stop searching
and close them?'

Cotton held the smaller man's gaze. 'That's exactly what
I'm saying.'

'Are those the captain's orders?'

'Mine.'

Chadin let a beat of silence stand between them for a
moment, before he inclined his head slowly up to the crane
operator, and motioned for him to carry on. Cotton took a
step forward, then stopped and looked down at the hand that
was gripping his arm in restraint. Esther looked up at him,
feeling the muscles of his forearm tense as he clenched and
unclenched his fist.

'He's right. You need to talk to the captain.'

There was sense in that. These frightened men were on
his side. The side that wanted to stay alive. Why antagonize
them? But as Cotton watched the grab begin to swing slowly
over the top of hold two, leaving behind its grisly catch on
the deck like an angler dumping his fish, the urgency of his
mission pressed him. He did need to talk to the captain. He
also needed a drink.

But then even men who had been abstainers all their lives
would have been tempted to the bottle when, just as the
crane got back to work, the stone-faced, blood-soaked figure
of Sohn Haro appeared through the door of the accom
modation block, and walked slowly towards the numbed
watchers. He was a small man, but a lifetime of engineering
had made him strong, and the burden he carried in his arms
was presenting him with few difficulties. The difficulty lay
entirely with the waiting group, whose instinct was to run
from the sight of the thing that used to be Chelito Baylan,
being cradled in the arms of his boss like a bride carried over
the threshold.



13


The coffee had long gone sour, but with no galley crew to
service the machine in the mess hall, the three men who
remained there had no choice but to keep drinking it. Edgar
Pasco, an oiler, was being the most vocal about its nauseating
properties, and although his repetitive complaining was irri
tating his companions, they shared his view sufficiently to
overlook it. Besides, they had other things on their minds.
There had been no news from the main hold deck, where
the search for Thomas Inlatta had been underway for over
an hour, and the cadets Raul and Erol were deciding whether
their growing discomfort was anxiety or boredom.

As Edgar lifted his coffee to his lips and prepared to make
yet another comedy face of disgust, Erol took the cue to
speak, simply to prevent the inevitable complaint.

'Isn't someone supposed to come and tell us what's hap
pening?'

Raul Nestor flicked a coin through his knuckles and
shrugged.' Guess if they find him alive we'll know all about
it.'

'Yeah, well you'd think Chadin would want all hands to
help out,' Erol replied sulkily.' Don't see the point of us
being down here when almost everyone else is up on deck.'

Edgar put down the coffee cup and wiped his mouth.'
Think yourself lucky. Have you smelt that trash? Almost as
bad as this coffee.'

Raul crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup into a ball and
threw it at the oiler's head.

Erol was sniffing the air. There had been a faintly bad
odour since they were posted down here, but it was as well
that they stayed ignorant of its source, namely the powerless
freezer in which Salvo Acambra's corpse, unrefrigerated, was
succumbing quickly to the heat of the galley. It was mild
enough to get used to. But now, there was a stronger smell.
Something much worse.

'Talking of which, can you guys smell that stuff in here?'
With nothing else to do they afforded the question a
moment's attention, and Raul shrugged again.' The smell's
going to get in every time they open the goddamn doors.'
Erol screwed up his face. 'Pretty strong for that.'

The other two looked at each other. Erol was right. The
smell was bad and getting worse.

'Yeah. Like that's all we need,' sighed Raul. He shifted in
his chair and ran an exasperated hand over the back of his
neck. Raul was more agitated than his companions might
have imagined. The initial fear that Chadin had ignited in
them after Salvo's murder had dissipated. Raul Nestor was
not convinced they were in any danger at all. Sure, someone
had done what they had done, but it wasn't likely to happen
again with the whole crew on the alert.

The murderer, Raul surmised, rather than planning his
next victim, must be shitting his pants. And anyway the
company sister-ship would be here in only a few hours and
they would be able to radio for help and let someone else
find the killer. Raul wanted to get out of this mess hall and
get on with his free time, which had been eaten into by this
emergency. He knew exactly what would happen. His watch
would roll back round in only five hours and he'd have wasted
all his own time by sitting here with these two dolts instead
of lying back on his bunk with a beer and some motocross
magazines. Raul made up his mind. He stood, and walked
to the door.

Edgar raised an eyebrow.' What are you doing?

'I'm going to find which door's letting in that cargo stench,
and shut the damn thing.'

Before either of others could protest, he was out of the
door and into the corridor. Erol watched him go, then looked
to Edgar. 'Shouldn't one of us go with him?'

'That'd leave one of us alone.'

'So we should both go.'

Edgar inclined his head. 'We're posted in here. Remember
the last time you crossed Chadin by disobeying an order?'

Erol did. They exchanged a look and then got back to the
business of sitting and waiting.

The smell in the corridor was fearsome, so much so that
Raul was forced to put a hand to his mouth as he walked
towards the elevator and stairs. When he turned the corner
into the corridor that housed the junior crew cabins, it was
even worse, but at least the problem presented a solution.

At the end of the corridor the starboard window was wide
open, the screw-down bolts on the hinged side having been
turned fully and then lifted out. The corridor was open to
the night air, or in this case, the fetid stench of rot.

Raul wondered for a moment why the window had been
opened like that, and why it had been left so. It was bad
seamanship to leave any windows or portholes open, and
securing them was second nature to most sailors. He walked
to the offending square of glass, his cheap plastic trainers
making a tacky noise as they passed over something sticky,
and put his head through the opening. A mixture of relief
and puzzlement came over him, as the act brought him not
the stench he had expected to be wafting from the hold deck,
but a sweet reward of salty night air. The window was on the
outer hull of the accommodation tower, and he peered down
the edge of the metal cliff to the sea sixty or seventy feet away
and enjoyed lungfuls of delicious air.

Raul allowed himself a minute more and then stood up
again to close the window, reeling from the smell that was
still as strong inside the corridor.

Reason suggested to him that perhaps a window or door
on the port side might be responsible if the wind was in the
right direction, and that would go a little way to explaining
the mystery of the smell's origin seemingly being inside
rather than out, although he still wondered about why the
window was open. He would close it, and then go and search
on the other side of the ship for the offending source.

As Raul bent down to search for the winged screw that
had fallen from the bolt hole, a noise made him look up
sharply. He stopped, held his breath and listened. There was
a voice coming from one of the cabins. He stood up slowly
and narrowed his eyes, listening more closely. It was coming
from Ronaldo Valdez's cabin. Actually it was technically
Valdez's and Fen Sahg's cabin, since the crazy guy had
been moved in to invade Ronaldo's famous privacy, but
whoever you attributed the ownership of the cabin to, there
was definitely a voice coming from within it. A low voice.

Slowly, Raul crept forward to the cabin door, kept his back
close to the wall, and stopped to listen.

The smell here was so bad that he covered his nose and
mouth again and kept his breathing shallow. There was
silence from the cabin for a few moments and then the
voice again. Raul relaxed. It was Fen. He would go in and
find out what the crazy oiler was doing, but as he put his
hand on the door handle and pressed it down, the wicked
part of Raul Nestor paused for a moment before going
in to hear what Fen was saying and to whom. It was curious.
It sounded as though Fen were talking to an animal, or
a small child. His voice was cooing, soothing, if a little
deferential.

'There. Look, there. How does that feel? Yes? Yes you can
feel that now can't you?'
Then a high laugh from Fen and he resumed his fussing.
'Can I tighten it? Must I... ?'

If Raul had been about to laugh the next sound stopped
him. It wasn't a voice, and yet it was. It made sounds like
words, but no words that Raul had ever heard, or indeed
would ever care to hear again. A low guttural rasp replied
to Fen's womanly attentions, but one that held so much
power behind it, it seemed underlain by thunder. And even
though Raul could not understand the strange language the
voice spoke, its meaning was quite clear. It was telling Fen to
be quiet.

Before he had time to think, Raul let go of the door-handle
quickly. It sprang back up to its horizontal plane with a click,
and as if the metal of the handle had been a switch, the
rumble of thunder that was the voice stopped.

There was a fraction of a second when the stillness of the
night was unbroken even by Raul Nestor's breathing, and
then three things happened very fast.

The first was that Fen Sahg's cabin door slammed open.
The second was that Raul Nestor saw what was inside. The
third was that Raul Nestor screamed, only just managing to
contain the vomit that was rising in his throat, then turned
and ran.

'Well now we know who it is, it shouldn't be too hard to
apprehend him.'

Skinner was on the bridge, doing his duty as captain by
dispatching his bosun to the cargo deck and taking the watch
the moment he'd heard the news about Chelito Baylan. Now
he was leaning against the bank of machines rendered useless
without their radio, regarding Esther and Matthew with the
same calm demeanour as if they were discussing the menu
for tomorrow's lunch.

Esther found her eyes were narrowing, and she opened
them wider in a conscious move to avoid the too-obvious
display of disapproval. She nodded at the captain and kept
her voice soft. 'Do we think that Fen's responsible for the
other body in the hold?'

The captain didn't honour the question with a shrug, but
the tone of his reply implied it. 'I imagine if one is capable
of eviscerating a colleague and ripping out the ship's radio
then one is capable of anything. Who knows how Mr Sahg
chose to spend his shore leave.'

Esther thought she detected a undercurrent of amusement
in Skinner's words and she didn't like it. She got to the point.
'There must be a gun on board for emergencies. We'll need
weapons.'

Lloyd Skinner maintained a steady, unwavering gaze, but
one eyebrow rose in an arc of amusement. 'We, Miss
Mulholland?'

'I can help. I can handle a gun.'

He smiled this time and looked out to the hold deck to
the bizarre and grisly scene that stretched in front of them.
In the halogen lights the cranes were still, and Sohn Haro
sat in a crumpled heap being comforted by a group of men
only a few feet away from the twisted and bloody mess of
Chelito Baylan's corpse. But if such a nightmarish tableau
was registering on the consciousness of the captain, who,
after all, was responsible for ship and crew, both of which
were clearly in unthinkable disarray, he didn't show it.
'Can you indeed?'

His light tone grated. Her voice hardened.

'Yeah. Can you?'

Skinner didn't take his eyes from the deck, but both Esther
and Matthew noted that his jawline tensed as his back teeth
ground together for a beat. The silence that the captain left
hanging was uncomfortable, and Esther believed he meant
it to be so.

She was determined not to be the one to break it. Cotton
obviously was not so attuned to the tension, and after wiping
at a dry mouth he spoke as though Esther's question had
been rhetorical.

'Before we even try and track down Fen, we have to close
the holds.'

Skinner turned to him and examined his face with an
uncharacteristic curiosity. 'What is this about, Cotton? This
obsession with the holds?'

Matthew looked at Esther for support but her eyes told him
she was as stranded as he was. 'For safety. It's important.'

Skinner sighed and looked at his watch, and unlike Esther,
made little attempt to mask his irritation in the presence
of what he now clearly regarded were two fools. 'Several
things are going to happen in the next three hours in
the name of safety, First Officer Cotton. The first is that
I am going to allow the crew, who you may have noticed
are now almost paralysed by fear, a little more time to
debate amongst themselves whether they will pursue their
fruitless task of trying to find a dead man in an impenetrable
cargo, and then I will ask Chadin to gather the entire crew
in the engine room. The next will be that a selected band
will hunt down Fen Sahg, restrain him and bring him to
the engine room to join us, where we will handcuff the
psychotic animal safely to a rail, and wait there until our
sister-ship arrives to put us out of the misery of this mess
of a voyage. Since I'm about to put this plan into action
for the safety of everyone on board, and since the weather
is set fair, with little chance of the holds flooding, don't
you think a delay in keeping at least four men up on
deck to close all the hatches would be rather a waste of
everyone's time?'

Matthew saw his chance.

'We don't know the weather will stay fine. The weather fax
is non-operational.'

Skinner looked at Matthew with rising irritation, but still,
Esther noted, laced with an undercurrent of interest in his
motives. 'How long have you been at sea?'

'Long enough to know it's insane to take risks with the
ocean.'

The captain put a finger to his mouth and tapped thought
fully at the pink skin of his lower lip. 'You never fail to surprise
me, Matthew.'

He looked at Cotton for what seemed an unnaturally
long time, examining him with as little self consciousness
as though he were a witness eyeballing a police line-up from
behind the safe invisibility of a two-way mirror.

'Perhaps,' he continued with no recognizable emotion in
either his face or voice that Esther could place, 'you could
do with a stiff drink.'

Esther glanced at Matthew, who remained staring at the
captain, his countenance unchanged. The captain returned
the gaze until he broke the connection out of what looked
like boredom. As if waking from a reverie, Skinner glanced
back down to the deck, then briefly at his watch again.

'Put it like this. I'm getting everyone off that deck and
down below in the next half hour. If you want to personally
go along nine hatches and close them, be my guest, but I
must insist you join us in the engine room immediately
you finish. I need to know where everybody on this ship
is. Everybody.'

Esther was looking at the captain with impassive eyes, but
her body language was displaying impatience. 'The guns?'

He looked back at her as if she had just entered the room
and he was seeing her for the first time. 'I hardly think
guns will be necessary in apprehending a five-foot-four,
slightly-built man, when we have twenty-seven other men
available for that purpose.'

'Twenty-six,' said Esther quietly but forcefully. She nodded
in the direction of the deck.

'Salvo.'

Skinner ignored her corrective accountancy and his voice
took on that patronizing lecturing quality that never failed
to make Esther Mulholland clench a fist.

'Anyone can carry out acts of great brutality on an
unsuspecting victim. When the pursuers are forewarned
and outnumber the murderer, one tends to find that the
individual who was previously thought to be dangerous is
rendered nothing more than a frightened, scuttling beast.'

Esther was as unimpressed as she was riled. 'There's
nothing more dangerous than something cornered and
frightened.'

Lloyd Skinner pressed his lips together, took a long look
at Esther then drew a lungful of air in through his nose and
sighed.

Esther watched his eyes as he regarded her, and she
found the subtle change that flitted across them as he spoke
uncomfortably enigmatic. She didn't like not being able to
read people, and there was no doubt that Lloyd Skinner's
internal code was hard to break.

'You imagine that as captain of this ship, I'm going to
break open the weapon locker and hand a gun to a hysterical
teenage girl passenger? You think that would indicate sound
judgement?'

Esther kept her eyes on his, and worked hard to make sure
her gaze didn't falter. 'In six months time, Captain Skinner,
I'll be a fully enlisted member of the US military. My job will
be to be fight for my country.'

Something twitched at the edge of Lloyd Skinner's mouth
and for one crazy moment Esther thought he was about to
cry. Instead, his mouth cracked into an involuntary smile that
split his craggy face in two. But it was a mirthless smile.

'I'm sure we'll all sleep safer in our beds.'

He turned away from them to look out of the bridge
window, leaning forward on the sill as if his annoying visitors
had departed, and for what seemed like an age, no one said
anything.

'Captain?' ventured Esther with as gentle a tone as she
could manage.

'Miss Mulholland,' he said, facing away from her.

Esther waited. It had not been a reply, she sensed, but the
start of a sentence. Lloyd Skinner turned around, and unless
she was very much mistaken, the impassive, distracted, distant
man she had been observing over the last two days had been
replaced with somebody quite different. Just how different
she wasn't sure, although the parts of her that automatically
calculated risk and acted accordingly were already taking
readings and sending them off to the lab. All she could say
for sure was that she didn't like the look that was gathering
in the man's eyes.

It was anything but distracted, a million miles away from
being indifferent. In fact Lloyd Skinner had the distinct look
of a predator.

'You ...' he continued in a low and controlled voice
that was silky and smooth but contained an aftertaste of
something exceedingly bitter, '... are starting to get on
my tits.'

Raul Nestor's body and mind had returned to a close approxi
mation of the animal it had evolved from nearly three million
years ago. There was no higher thought going on, no mature
and civilized responses to the immediate threat. Instead,
his entire being was running on the thin, primeval fuel of
adrenalin that controlled his flesh and its flight.

He had half-stumbled, half-sprinted along the metal-floored
corridor that led away from Fen's cabin, gasping for breath
as the spit dried in his mouth.

But even before he reached the elevator at the end, his
peripheral vision had informed him that something was
pursuing him along the pitted and pipe-veined corridor
of E-deck. Something that stank. Something that moved
in a horribly fast and agile way. The same something, he
knew, he'd just seen in Fen's cabin in a scene that defied
explanation to the sane mind.

Raul's darting eyes scanned the only possible escape route
ahead, the end of the corridor that led to the stairs and
the elevator. The outer door of the elevator was shut as
always, but the thin rectangular glass window of the inner
door that revealed itself to those who were familiar with the
appliance informed him that the car was on this floor. In
the fractions of seconds that all this information was being
absorbed and processed, the boy's instincts rather than his
reasoning powers weighed up his options, and decided that a
pursuit either up or down the narrow metal staircase between
decks would not be a chase in his favour. The elevator. He
would make a dash for it. Whether the two metal doors that
were between the empty car and the rest of the world would
offer any kind of sanctuary was still to be tested, but at the
moment it was the only bolt-hole Raul could see. He lunged
the last fifteen feet and grabbed onto the brass handle of
the outer door. Behind him came the noise of his hunter,
a noise that was a baffling combination of scrabbling claws,
the slurping of mud and the rustle of something hideous.

Its proximity made him haul desperately at the handle,
trying to foil the spring that was trying to do what it was
designed to, namely slowing and controlling the speed at
which the door opened and closed.

Raul Nestor was panting and crying like a child as the
barrier to his imagined safety swung back, and let him tear
at the lever that operated the side-opening concertina gate
of the inner door. His fingers groped and clawed, until the
handle gave way and granted him the ability to pull the sliding
barrier back.

He was inside with the concertina gate slammed closed,
before the full horror of elevator design became apparent.
Through the small rectangle of cloudy wire-chequered glass
set into the centre of the metal gate, he could for the first
time see his foe full on. It was only eight or nine feet away,
seemingly unhurried and slowing up as it approached, almost
as if it knew its prey was already caught, and the reason
that Raul could see it so well was that the outer door
was still open. He whimpered, a string of drool hanging
from the corner of his down-turned mouth, and stabbed
at the buttons on the wall panel. The elevator remained
static. Without the hand of a human to force its painfully
slow passage from the outside, the outer door would take
its time to shut, swinging lethargically on its fight spring
until the metal plate at the bottom made contact with the
corresponding one of the inner door. The passenger inside
the car was powerless to hurry the process, since as in
most double-doored elevators, opening the inner gate with
the outer still ajar interrupted the safety sequence. Faced
with what was outside, Raul's intellectual decisions would
never have over-ruled his primeval responses and allowed
him to do anything that would remove a barrier, however
flimsy, between himself and the bad, bad thing that was now
unfolding itself in the corridor. Instead, he pinned himself
to the back of the tiny box, and screamed, as he waited for
the destiny that only the hinges and springs of the outer door
would determine.

With the unhurried pace of a ballet dancer lowering a
raised arm to bow, the door followed its excruciating arc
towards the metal contacts that would make the elevator
move. And within that arc there came two different oppor
tunities to observe what stood outside in the corridor. The
first was, as Raul had already witnessed, the view from the
dirty window in the gate. It had afforded him the muddied
but distinct picture of a thing that was the size of a man,
but enlarged in volume by being encrusted and seemingly
encased in a confusion of matter that was disgusting beyond
the obscene. Although he saw it for only seconds, Raul
took in details of mottled, purple dead flesh pulled tight
around a misshapen framework of bloodied bone, of rusty
tin, of matted fur, yellowed teeth and an unidentifiable
black, dripping mash. But as the door closed, the horror
was momentarily obscured from view as it swung through
the part of the curve that blocked the window. Raul's screams
were still pumping from his throat as he waited for the last
ten inches of open door to be closed. It slowed even further
as it neared its terminus, then with a tiny noise that was
nevertheless sufficiently significant to make itself heard to
Raul above his own screaming, it shut with a click. He
pounded at the panel of buttons on the wall with a fist,
and the car lurched as it started to move. His screams now
mutated into a whimpering from the back of his throat as he
turned his head back to the yellowed grime of the window,
now double-glazed with the matching glass rectangle of the
outer door. Two eyes were staring at him. The face, if the
obscene mosaic of matter could be called a face, was pressed
up against the glass, looking in. In the seconds in which Raul
looked into those glittering black orbs, he read an intelligent
malice, depthless cruelty and contempt, and worse still, an
ancient knowingness that atrophied his heart and stilled the
whimper in his throat. And then, like a miracle, the elevator
slowly slid the hellish picture downwards into the darkness,
and replaced it with the bland moving image of the elevator
shaft's metal wall.

Felix Chadin rose from the kneeling position he had been
adopting for the last ten minutes, and winced at the cramp
that it had inflicted on his legs. He stretched his calf muscles
and glanced down at the chief engineer. When Sohn had first
stumbled onto the deck under his hellish burden he had been
as far from okay as it was possible to get. Chadin looked at
him now and was relieved to see he had recovered. Chadin
shot a look across at Renato, and signalled that he wanted to
talk to him away from the frightened huddle. They walked to
the bottom of the silent derrick.

'We should sail for port.'

Renato Lhoon looked away from Chadin's earnest insistent
face and directed his eyes at his shoes. 'The captain's made
his decision, Felix. The company ship's only hours away.'

'How do we know that? We don't have a fucking radio.'

'I'm sure he knows what he's doing.'

Chadin indicated the heap further up the deck, where
Chelito Baylan and the body of the unknown girl lay together
under a tarpaulin that had been hastily thrown over their
remains.

'Yeah? Like this is part of knowing what you're doing?'
Renato said nothing. He knew there was no port near
enough to bolt to, but he too had been unconsciously
calculating how long it would take them to sail back to
Calao and how they would attract attention with only an
Aldis lamp and hollering, to get a pilot boat to guide them
safely in. But loyalty was to be the thing.

Loyalty was the thing that would make the difference to his
less than satisfactory life. Loyalty would win him promotion by
the next voyage. He'd sworn to himself that it would. Renato
set his face into a mask of impassive authority and looked at
the bosun.

'He's got it under control. I'm going to check on the rest
of the crew, then talk to the captain. Best thing you can do
is keep these men calm.'

Both Renato and Chadin looked across the deck at the
nervous huddle of shocked humanity, and instinctively knew
that when they recovered their senses from the latest atrocity
that it would take some considerable effort to keep these
men from doing whatever they believed individually would
save their own skins. Chadin had never witnessed a mutiny
before, even when he'd sailed with a drunken captain who'd
smashed a tanker into an East African pier, killing two
luckless fishermen in a tethered boat. That had been bad,
but this time he felt the undercurrent of something worse
than the mere rising insubordination of the lower ranks
challenging the authority of the higher. He felt the feral
tang of self-preservation. And not just from his men. Felix
Chadin knew somewhere deep inside, that if it came to the
point at which he might never see his wife and children
again, he himself would abandon any formality of rank, duty
or service and do anything it took to make sure he stepped
off this ship alive.

Chadin looked back at his first officer and Renato read
the thought that had flitted so briefly behind the man's
dark eyes.

'It's what you're paid for, bosun.'

Chadin nodded. 'And the captain is paid to bring back
the same number of men he sailed with.'

Renato Lhoon wiped a hand over his hot brow, wishing
the warm night breeze was a little cooler. 'I'll be back. Tell
the men we're gathering together with the captain in the
engine room.'

He walked away towards the accommodation block and
didn't even stop when Chadin called out.

'And if the ship doesn't come?'

The bosun watched his superior officer's impassive back
retreat and then slowly turned towards the men. Every eye
was on him, because every ear had heard the question, and
almost every heart was wondering the same.

'What the fuck?'

Edgar's hand, which had been in the process of carrying
more coffee to his lips, halted in mid-air at his companion's
half-whispered question. The scream that had pierced the
silence of E-deck had been of a quality that neither Erol
nor Edgar had ever heard, nor would care to again. It was
definitely human, but it conveyed a terror that ripped the
soul and froze the heart.

Edgar Pasco looked with wide, frightened eyes across at
his friend and slowly lowered the cup to the table.

'Shit.'

Neither man moved. They knew to whom the screams
must have belonged. It was an unspoken understanding that
they communicated with their eyes, but fear rooted them to
their seats until it started again, more distant this time, but if
anything even fiercer in its intensity. It continued unabated
as the sound moved away from them, until it became muted
but still audible.

'What'll we do?'

Erol's voice had a tremor in it that indicated he was not
far from tears. Edgar stood up, his eyes wide and fixed on
the open doorway that had brought the nightmare sound
to them.

'We'll have to go to him.'

Erol looked up at him helplessly, then scanned the room as
though searching for a rack of grenades in a mess room containing
nothing more than trestle tables and coffee machines.
'And do what?'

'I don't fucking know.'

Erol glanced across at the open serving hatch that joined
the room to the galley. He pointed weakly. 'We could get
knives?'

Edgar regarded his companion with contempt, annoyed at
how quickly he had become a snivelling girl, then walked to
the hatch and climbed through. He re-emerged a moment
later, and clambered back through the hatch clutching a
cleaver. It did not escape Erol's notice that he had chosen
to climb through the serving hatch instead of walking out of
the door and into the galley the conventional way, and the
demonstration of Edgar's fear gave him a boost that at least
allowed him to stand up on shaking legs.

They moved cautiously towards the door and peered out
into the corridor. It was silent now, but the smell that had
caused Raul to leave to investigate it was overpowering.

'Jesus,' coughed Edgar. He slammed a sweating palm over
his nose and mouth.

Erol gagged back a rising knot of vomit and steadied
himself against the wall, and both men stayed still for a
moment until Edgar pulled at his reluctant companion's
shirt and moved towards the T-junction at the end of the
corridor. There was no more screaming, but somehow its
absence made the tension worse. Senses that both men
wished could be dulled against the onslaught of vile stench
were heightened in anticipation of the dreadful noise starting
again, and they held their breath against both violations as
they approached the corner of the mess room's corridor.
Edgar stopped abruptly, as from his right a soft noise broke
the silence. Erol hung back as the cleaver in Edgar's hand
rose to his shoulder.

Neither spoke, and it seemed to each of them that the
blood beating in their veins was louder than the undercurrent
of diesel engine beneath the floor. The noise came again. It
sounded like shuffling. At almost the same time as a timorous
moan started to be emitted unconsciously from the back of
Erol's throat, the source of the shuffling noise revealed itself
as it appeared around the harshly lit corner of E-deck.

Edgar Pasco did not lower his meat cleaver, because even
though the figure that moved before them was pathetic in its
countenance, it was sufficiently horrific to make him catch
his breath in fright.

Fen Sahg was naked to the waist, his thin body smeared
with blood, a shoebox clutched to his breast as though it were
an infant as he shuffled down the corridor in the direction
of the elevator. He turned his head to look at the two men,
stopped and blinked at them as though they had materialized
by enchantment. Edgar opened his mouth to say something,
but found that words would not come. His mind was still
frantically piecing together the combination of what they
believed to have been Raul's screams, the cessation of those
screams, and the horrific appearance of the MY Lysicrates'
oiler Sahg.

Fen saved him the trouble of speech. Slowly he raised one
thin, bloodied finger and pointed it at the huddling men. His
lip trembled and in his eyes shone a fury that was as terrifying
as the state of his body.

'He interrupted.'

His voice was low but it held enough spite to fuel a war.
Edgar's fist tightened around his weapon and Erol pressed
himself against the wall.

'He interrupted and it made him go.' Fen's finger remained
pointing at them for a moment, then he lowered it as lethargically
as he raised it, held his box tighter, turned from them
and continued on his shuffled journey.

Neither man moved as Fen disappeared from view. Only
Erol made a sound, and it was difficult to tell whether it was
indeed a word or yet another involuntary expression of fear
when he whispered, 'Raul'.

'He was right about one thing.'

Esther, the small of her back against the cool metal of the
tail rail, looked across at Cotton, her troubled expression
broken momentarily by curiosity.

'Yeah?'

'I could do with a stiff drink.'

Esther watched Matthew's face as he wrestled with the truth
of that for a moment, then turned her gaze to the huddle of
men further up the cargo deck being addressed in urgent terms
by Chadin. She was glad he'd broken the silence, and particularly
with that subject. Something big was on her mind.

'How long have you known Skinner?'

He leant forward on the rail, gazing out at the invisible
black sea. 'Two years, four months.'

Matthew had answered too quickly and too accurately for
the casualness of the question, indicating that the time had
already been significant to him for a reason unimparted to
her. She left it.

'How well do you know him?'

Matthew thought about it, bent his head and shrugged.

'As well as anyone you sail with.'

'Do you like him?'

Matthew continued to look out to sea, shifting his position
in a way that told her he was uncomfortable with the topic.
'I guess he saved my life.'

Esther turned back and faced him, though the action
merely afforded her access to the side of his face. 'Can I
hear about it?'

Cotton shrugged again, then spat into the ocean. 'It's not
that interesting.'

'I'm interested.'

He glanced up at her, then back at the sea. She waited.
'I was a captain. Lost my master's licence for drinking
on watch. Couldn't sail again as an officer with any of the
reputable companies. He persuaded Sonstar, not the most
rigorous of companies when it comes to regulations, to bend
the rules. Employed me when no one else would.'

Esther nodded, though not necessarily out of understanding.
'And you couldn't live if you didn't sail?'

'That's right.'

Esther was quiet for a moment, knowing that everything
about his attitude to being here on this ship since they had
first met suggested that this last answer was a lie.

'Why do you suppose he did that, Matthew?'

'Who knows? Maybe someone did him a favour in the past.
Felt he should pass it on.'

Esther cleared her throat. She wanted her next question
to be delicate, but she knew it wasn't a skill that the good
fairies had given her over her crib. 'Isn't a first officer kind
of important to a captain?'

Matthew looked up at her. 'Yeah.'

She'd started. She'd better finish. 'So wouldn't taking on
a drunk then, even as a favour, be absolute folly?'

Matthew stayed leaning, but his hands wrung together.
'You got a point?'

'In the last two years has he ever tried to help you stop
drinking?'

Matthew snorted in derision. 'What?'

'I'm serious. If he wanted to give you another chance, then
presumably he'd want to stop you drinking. Get you sober,
maybe even get back your master's ticket.'

Matthew was looking at her with a hint of anger in his eye.
'I'm not getting this.'

'What I'm saying is, if his plan clearly wasn't to rehabilitate
you, then what was it?'

'Fuck knows, Esther. Maybe he'sjust a nice guy.'

'And is he?'

Matthew looked away for a moment, composed himself,
then looked back again. 'I guess I hardly know him.'

Esther nodded again. Cotton stood straight.

'Don't you think with the kind of shit we're having to deal
with right now, a character assessment of our captain is a
little misplaced?'

Esther was still nodding to herself, sorting through stuff
she couldn't quite figure out yet. 'Maybe. Maybe not.'

They were quiet for a moment until a clamour broke out
from the men up the deck. Voices were raised and Chadin
was waving his arms.

Matthew wiped his mouth. 'I should sort that out.'
Esther grabbed his arm. 'I didn't mean to hurt you there.'

'You didn't,' he lied.

'Matthew. Where does Skinner keep the gun?'

'He won't let you have it, Esther. He's right. There are
regulations about these kind of things. Forget it.'

'I wasn't planning on asking again.'

Matthew Cotton looked at her closely. From a distance the
voices clamoured, shouting each other down. 'You don't trust
him, do you?'

'There's three bodies on board. We can't call for help. I'll
start trusting people when I've got some steel in my hand.'

He blinked at her for a moment. For the last few moments
Matthew Cotton had been feeling something he hadn't
expected to feel again in this life. He knew why she was
asking these questions. They were about Skinner, not really
about him. But something in her voice, the way she looked
at him alerted him to an undercurrent of emotion that he
had found comforting. Her voice had not contained pity or
contempt. It had contained sympathy, concern, maybe even
a tiny glimpse of something else. Cotton couldn't afford to
give it head-time, but there was no denying that a part of
him had been touched by her, by a kindness he hadn't seen
coming. Then his hand went to the pocket of his trousers
where her Dictaphone and its garbled tape still waited to
be translated. The memory of that thing between the holds
flitted momentarily across his inner vision, and Matthew
Cotton weighed his options.

'There's a hand gun in the metal locker in most captains'
cabins. In the passageway between his bathroom and main
office. It'll be locked.'

She gently squeezed the arm she still held. They both knew
where she was headed next.

'And you?'

'I'm going to dig out my best Filipino for "pull yourselves
together" then I'm going to close these fucking holds.'

'And the tape?'

'It's here. What about it?'

Esther removed her hand. 'It might not be important, but
I need to know what that boy is saying.'

He glanced at her, and despite himself, sighed. 'So what
if it's a cult? We know it's Fen. Sohn saw him.'

'And the thing you saw? The reason you want those holds
closed?'

'I don't get the connection.'

She looked at him with an expression that made Cotton
melt. It held trust, understanding, complicity and a fierce
youthful intelligence. 'Humour me.'

He nodded. At that moment he would have done just
about anything for her. No one had looked at Matthew
Cotton like that for a very long time indeed. He cleared
his throat. 'Maybe you should wait for me. You shouldn't
move about this ship alone.'

She smiled. 'Funny. I was going to say the same to you.'
She slipped away leaving Matthew Cotton with the urgent
and very real hope that she was a little more than just a
bullshitting kid.

Renato looked at his feet.

'I think that might make matters worse.'

Skinner kept looking at his second officer with a gaze that
forced the man to look away. 'In what respect?'

'Because they'll want to keep looking for Thomas Inlatta.'
Skinner looked down at the angry gathering of men on
the deck below the bridge. He tapped lightly on the glass. 'I
think, Renato, that if you asked them right now whether their
priority was searching for an almost-certainly-dead colleague,
or saving their skins until the sister-ship joins us, you might
find they change their tune.'

Lhoon looked back up. 'You think we're all in danger?'

'Why do you think I'm going to confine the whole crew
to the safety of the engine room until we catch Sahg?'

The first officer nodded, relieved that the captain was
displaying some patriarchal authority at last. 'I think you
should know that Chadin wants us to sail for port. That's
what they're discussing.'

Skinner's finger stopped tapping the glass. 'What?'
Renato scratched nervously at the back of his neck. 'He
thinks we should head back to Calao. Just in case the com
pany ship doesn't come.'

Skinner turned around slowly, and in place of the mildly
distracted expression that Renato was used to confronting,
and tired of trying to penetrate, there was something else
there. Lloyd Skinner looked focused and dangerously angry.

Something in Renato's face must have alerted Skinner to the
fact he was a betraying an emotion that he had intended to
remain private, for while he watched, Lhoon saw the captain's
feature's settle themselves, with a little difficulty, back into the
repose of an uninterested man.

'Really? And you?'

'I'm here to follow your orders.'

Skinner nodded, searching the man's eyes with a laser of
scrutiny Renato didn't know he possessed.

'Good. Then gather the remaining crew members that
are still below, take them to the engine room and wait for
the rest.'

Renato nodded in compliance, but didn't go. Skinner
raised an eyebrow.

'Captain?'

Skinner didn't reply, but his face told Renato he was
waiting and it had better be good.

'You're absolutely sure about the sister-ship?'

'I'm interested why you would ask me that.'

'It's the company. Even if they gave you a time and
co-ordinates and a reason, they're not, you know, the most
reliable people. They change their plans at a moment's notice
if there's money to be made, and right now they don't even
know we're in trouble.'

Skinner considered this for a moment with, to Renato's
relief, a peaceful expression. 'So you're with Chadin?'

Renato flushed. 'No, no. It's just that, as your officer, it
helps me to understand when I know what you know.'

Lloyd Skinner crossed his arms over his chest and looked
down at the ground. 'Renato, do I look like someone who
wants to risk not only the lives of all my crew, but my
own too?'

The second officer kept his eyes on Skinner until the cap-
rain looked up and met his gaze. 'No,' Renato Lhoon said.

'Then that's all you need to know.'

'I just want to be of more help in persuading the men.'
Skinner sighed. He sounded weary. 'You know as much
as I do. They haven't told me why we're meeting, but shall
we say they were sufficiently insistent that I have no shadow
of a doubt whatsoever that in exactly three and half hours
from now, the MY Elysium will be docking alongside us. I
have, as I explained before, weighed up all the best options,
and believe me, Renato, this is the best.'

Renato Lhoon glowed with pleasure. Included at last in
his captain's confidence, he smiled a smile that he hoped
conveyed a shared wisdom and adult sense of responsibility,
though the truth was that it did little more than reveal
triumph. Second Officer Lhoon nodded once and left.

On the cargo deck below Skinner could see Cotton joining
the throng, and watched as the faces of the men turned
towards him to listen. Lloyd Skinner allowed himself a
moment to ponder once again on how simple it was to
manipulate the stupid, before he finished the small chore
he had to do on the bridge and left.

It was spoiled. The ceremony, the ecstasy of divine service,
the being at one with his master. All spoiled because of
the scum that he sailed with. Fen wiped at his sweating
mouth with the back of a hand, leaving a smear of blood
like badly-applied lipstick. It changed nothing, of course.
Everything was going to plan. Everything was so nearly in
place. But it was only he, Fen Sahg, who had been thwarted
by the foolish interruption to his sacred liturgy. And now
he would have to wait until the real coming, the final and
conclusive part of his duties, before he could bask in the
physical joy that serving afforded him. There was murder
in Fen's heart. When this was done, he would make them
pay for the loss of that moment. Surely he would be allowed
that. Surely.

For now though, he had work to do. The time was nearing
and he knew that the old engineer would already be spread
ing the news of Fen's last chore. But although he didn't want
to acknowledge it, Fen was growing fired. His ecstasy had a
physical price and he could feel his heart beating too loudly
and too quickly under his thin frame.

If only he could join again, feel that energy surge through
him, the energy that came from so long ago, from so much
past pain and long-lost knowledge, then he would be capable
of anything.

He hugged himself when he called back the image of
his master's briefly shared memory, the way he had seen
so clearly why mankind casts away its waste in disgust, its
unwanted things, its dead, its effluent, its sins and its shames,
without understanding the dazzling truth only Fen and his
master knew. The truth that everything is everything else, and
that the things that have been cast away must come back.

He sniffed back a block of rancid mucus, an unpleasant but
unavoidable side-effect of his contact, and shuffled along the
engine room floor towards the small hatch to the cofferdams.
It was already open a fraction, and his bare feet clicked on
the sticky trail that led up to it and through it.

Holding his box carefully, Fen Sahg crouched down and
crawled through the hatch. He had no need of a torch. He
knew where he would find him, and anyway, the route was
already so familiar to him that he knew where to watch for
obstacles, where to crouch low and where he could stand tall.
There was safety in all that darkness. It was not a darkness he
need fear. And as if to prove it, the carelessness with which
he left the hatch door open was not only an indication of how
fired he was, but of how little it mattered if they found him
this time. It was all so near, there was nothing they could do
to stop it. Nothing.

Skinner's cabin was on D-deck, one floor below the bridge,
and as Esther loped quietly up the metal staircase, the foul
odour that had greeted her on entering the accommodation
block grew fainter. It bothered her.

The smell was bad on the cargo deck, particularly since the
derrick's grab had stirred the trash around, but out there the
breeze carried it in wafts and made it bearable. Why would it
be so strong inside?

However, the ventilation and air-flow of cargo smells was
low on her list of problems to solve, so she filed it under
'odd', and kept her wits on the jobs in hand.

The first was to check that Skinner was still on the bridge..
The second was to get into his cabin and somehow force the
lock on the weapon cabinet. Though her trailer park buddies
had given her plenty of opportunity to watch and learn,
cat-burglary and lock-picking were not her best subjects, nor,
come to that, was subtlety, which was why Esther Mulholland
was carrying a fire-axe to do the job instead.

As she tiptoed past the captain's deck to wards the bridge,
she slid the tool behind her back and moved closer to the
wall. The door to the bridge, as always, was wedged open, and
the black windows reflected the room back at her through
the gap. She could see no one. Mindful of the fact that if
she could see a figure in the reflection, then they would see
her too, Esther bent low and ducked down below the height
of the instrument panels. She moved cautiously forward and
craned her neck. There was definitely no one on the bridge.
If the captain was there, he must be out on one of the wings.

This was annoying. She had assumed that she would merely
check Skinner was still at his post, then retreat quickly to his
cabin and get on with it. The fact she couldn't see him from
here meant she was going to have to enter the bridge on some
pretext and risk making him suspicious. For a moment she
contemplated returning to Cotton and making him come up
here to keep Skinner busy, but time was running out. Esther
slid the axe beneath a pipe on the wall, stood up and walked
into the bridge.



[14 ???]


It was empty. A quick glance to both port and starboard
wings told her they too were very much devoid of Captain
Lloyd Skinner.

'Slit.'

She ran to the door again and picked up the axe, but as she
started to descend the stairs a noise stopped her. Someone
was closing a cabin door on D-deck. Esther crept quietly
to the corner of the stair well and peered round. Lloyd
Skinner was leaving his cabin. She ducked her head back
behind the metal wall and waited for the sounds of his
footfall, getting ready to move fast if they indicated he was
about to return to the bridge by the stairs. But he wasn't
walking. He must still be standing by the door of his cabin.
She waited some more, and then cautiously inched her head
to the edge and looked around. Skinner was busy. He was
checking the bullet chamber of a small handgun. Finishing
the job, he clicked it shut, looked quickly at his watch like
a clerk checking his lunch-break, then slid the weapon into
the pocket of his trousers as though it were nothing more
than a pair of shades. He looked up as she dived behind
her cover again, and she readied herself for a sprint. But
his footfall told her that the bridge was not his destination.
She listened as his footsteps clanged down the stairwell, and
she mused firstly at how fearless he was alone in the face
of such carnage, and secondly how bad her timing was. She
was disappointed that he had retrieved the gun; but at least
he had taken her warning that it might be needed to hunt
down Sahg. Why that bothered her Esther couldn't quite
say, except that for a girl who had rarely been without a
weapon since she was twelve, it troubled her it was him
and not her. The times that her own stolen cache of cheap
Weaponry had saved her from serious damage through her
rough teenage years, merely by the fact that she had them
and didn't have to use them, had made her respect rather
than fear the gun. But she'd seen what they could do in
the wrong hands, and Matthew was right. She didn't trust
Skinner.

Not trusting a man who sailed a ship and made poor dinner
conversation was one thing. Not trusting a man who had the
only gun on that ship was quite another. She cursed inwardly
and waited until she heard his footsteps die in the echoing
stairwell, then slid round the corner and approached his
cabin door.

She was an optimist. Maybe there was more than one
weapon. Esther knew that was almost certainly not the case,
but she was using it as an excuse to enter his cabin. As of this
moment, she had suddenly become rather curious to know
as much as she could about the master of the Lysicrates.

She pulled the handle down, looked left and right, entered
and shut the door quickly behind her. Inside, the lights
were on.

Esther looked round the mundane and tidy public living
quarters of a man at sea. On his meeting table between the
hard, unpleasant sofas, a chart was laid out. A few books had
been abandoned on a variety of surfaces and his desk was
an undulating landscape of papers and binders. She moved
towards the more interesting of the suite's three rooms. His
sleeping quarters. The adjoining door was closed and she
opened it cautiously through force of habit. Sonstar's gift
of luxury to its captains was not only a private bedroom
off the living area, but a real single bed, instead of the
bolted-on bunk the majority of the lower-ranking crew had to
contend with. The room was identical to the one she enjoyed
as the honoured passenger, but her eye for observation
picked out a few differences, the main one being that her
bed had a gap beneath it, a space she had immediately
utilized by storing in it her pack and any dirty laundry she
couldn't face. Skinner's bed was boxed in with a plank,
considerably reducing his storage space. But at least they
shared a bed-making obsession. His, like hers, was made
up in military fashion, the sheets fight enough to bounce a
dime on. A quick scout located the cabinet that Matthew had
described, but before she was going to explore that barren
possibility, she wanted to see something, anything that would
tell her more about one of the two most dangerous men on
board. Fen was the more dangerous, sure, but she wanted
to make sure that the gun that could stop him was in the
hands of someone who would use it for that purpose, and
only that purpose. Who was Skinner? Why did he make her
uneasy? Why, more importantly, was she not chasing ter
him offering to help?

There was certainly nothing she could see right away that
suggested any answers. The bedroom was as officiously tidy
as the office.

Two small, framed photos on a bureau beneath the porthole
were the only apparent personal touch, and she stepped
forward to look at them. The first was of Skinner himself.
He looked younger and fitter, and he was standing on the
top of a mountain somewhere, a snow-covered landscape
stretching out forever at his back. He wasn't smiling, but
there was a curious satisfaction in his expression that was not
particularly pleasant, and though she wouldn't have risked
the trailer on it, Esther guessed that the photo had been
taken with a self-timer. The clues were there. One set of
footprints leading to where he stood, one rucksack on the
ground, a single flask and an apple sitting forlornly in the
snow beside the pack.

The other was more the stuff of lonely men at sea. It was
a poor-quality colour picture, an interior. A small boy on a
tricycle grinned triumphantly from in front of a Christmas
tree, as his new wheels tore at the rug. His face was an oval
of pure joy, as he beamed up into the camera, his starfish
hands held out from the handlebars imploring to be picked
up by the beloved photographer. Esther sat down and held
the picture. He was beautiful. Something in her softened as
she recognized Lloyd Skinner's striking features in the boy.
So he had a son. He loved someone. That made her feel her
a whole lot better, though she didn't know why. She sighed
and looked around. There was so little else to see.

A large clothes locker with louvered doors was built into
the wall. Replacing the photo on the bureau, Esther opened
it and revealed a neat line of shirts, and a small half-open case
containing some folded underwear and T-shirts. A glance
back at the photo of the boy made a pang of guilt rise in her
gullet. This was intrusion. Lloyd Skinner had done nothing
wrong except express his irritation at her. An irritation that if
you looked at it in the cold light of day, was not only sensible
and proper, but understandable, given their situation. The
distant siren of warning that had been sounding in her head
when she'd been around him lately was obviously more to do
with her than him. She rubbed a hand over tired eyes. Picking
up the photo of the little boy again, she held it closer to her
face to have one last look before she left this poor man's
privacy intact. She smiled at the boy. It was hard not to. He
had such crazy big shorts on that his legs looked scrawny,
and his cardigan was so old-fashioned it was outrageously
cute. On the mantelpiece behind the tree she could even
make out a row of Christmas cards.

Esther stopped smiling. In the middle was a card with
big numbers. Four big silver numbers celebrating the year
1953. She put the picture back on the bureau beside the
other one.

It was not Lloyd Skinner's son. It was another picture of
Lloyd Skinner.

She felt a chill that was out of proportion to the discovery
that a man at sea should sport only two photos, both of
himself, checked the feeling and walked slowly to the gun
cabinet. It was, as she suspected, no longer locked. Inside
was a weapon's log-book, a small brown folder that required
the user to register the time and date, and explanation of
circumstances regarding the removal of the weapon. Skinner
hadn't got around to fulfilling this part of his duty, but
she read with mild interest that the last time it had been
employed had been a mere caution when a suspicious pirate
vessel had come alongside six years ago.

Perhaps explaining what had happened on the Lysicrates
this time would take more than just a few minutes of form-
filling. She threw it back with contempt.

Esther walked to the middle of the cabin and eyed the
bed again. The guilt had gone, and in its place were wheels
that turned in her head and wouldn't stop turning until she
found out what was bugging her. Right now, it was the bed
that was bugging her. Why would the ship's designers have
provided a normal single bed and then screwed a piece of
cheap plywood over the legs? Ships were like trailers. You
used every bit of space you could find to fold things away, tuck
things under and slide things back. It was how she had grown
up. She dropped to her knees and had a better look.

It hadn't even been done well.

The wood was held in place by two fat screws at the top
corners, and by the look of them the carpenter had had more
than a couple of goes at getting them into the drill-holes. She
looked at it for a moment, then her hand beat her head to the
conclusion they were both coming to: her fingers reached out
and twisted the first screw. It turned easily - it was a screw that
was used to being taken out and replaced. Esther bit her lip
and glanced back at the open door to Skinner's office. She'd
conae this far. She might as well continue. She twisted the
screw out, then loosened and removed the next one. The
wood immediately shifted forward, and it took no effort to
slide her fingers under it and pull it away from the bed.
She smiled when she saw what was there, although not with
satisfaction. Her expression was bitter: she would rather have
been wrong. There was a case in the void beneath Skinner's
bed, a large red Samsonite case. Esther rubbed her hands
together then grabbed the handle and attempted to pull it
out. It was heavy, and although it was an ordinary-looking
suitcase, with a combination lock at the handle, a few airline
transit stickers adhering to its battered exterior, unless he
wore lead diving boots to bed, this sure wasn't where the
good captain stored his pyjamas.

'What you got in here then, mister?' she breathed.

The case resisted its full exposure from the safe haven
beneath the bed, but one tug with her feet on the edge
of the bed pulled it free and she pushed back her hair to
look at it. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with
her conscience. This was not right. So what if he'd hidden a
heavy case beneath his bed? It could be spare parts for his
pick-up truck for all she knew. She had no business being
here, no business invading his privacy. Esther opened her
eyes and looked at it again. Instinct. She had lived her life
on it. It had told her to move quickly, told her to run fast,
that time when the gang of guys from Mottlefield had started
congregating around Sal Norton's mom's trailer. It bad told
her that the guy from the store who had driven her out to
the coast in his dad's car hadn't been planning to show her
the waves. It had told her lots of stuff that had kept her in
one piece. Right now it was telling her that this was a case
she needed to see inside. If she was wrong she would do the
decent thing. She'd explain. She'd apologize. She'd make it
up to him. She was going to open it.

She tried the lock. The combination was set. Barely missing
a beat, Esther picked up the fire-axe and smashed it down on
the battered red handle. It gave way in the most satisfactory
way and with one twist of the mangled plastic she felt the
internal metal hinge snick open.

She lifted the lid like an archaeologist opening a tomb.
The contents made her mouth open and her tongue travel
slowly from one side of her lower lip to the other.

Whatever she had been expecting, it had not been this.

The case had been skilfully divided into two compartments,
The right-hand side, the bigger of the two, was still covered
over with a thin, carefully-fashioned, wooden lid. In the
open left-hand compartment, however, a shaped bed of
foam cradled its treasure.

Esther Mulholland knew a VHF radio when she saw it, and
she was looking at one. It was hooked up to a rechargeable
battery, and nestling alongside in their own neat compart
ment were two spares. She found the on-switch and threw
it. The radio crackled into life.

'You son of a bitch,' she breathed, more baffled than
angry.

Esther switched it off, and frowned down at the treachery
in the case, trying to make sense of it. Then, with the cautious
delicacy of a surgeon opening a wound, she slid her fingers
under the internal wooden lid of the case and opened it.

She blinked. The same cut-and-shaped foam held another
secret, but this time, before her reasoning powers could kick
in, Esther's mind was already automatically running through
the specification of what she was looking at. Five point four
five calibre, sighting range of a thousand metres, magazine
capacity of thirty rounds. Even though the Kalashnikov AK47
assault rifle was disassembled, it would be a poor military
student who couldn't recognize the most popular fighting
weapon in the world. She stretched out a hand and touched
the dull metal of the muzzle, and her eyes narrowed.

This was a serious army weapon, not the stuff of fucked-up
red-neck NRA members, and the chill she'd felt a moment
ago returned, right along with its big brother.

The question was not what in God's name a captain of
a beat-up cargo boat was doing with this kind of military
hardware, nor even where he got it, or how he smuggled
it on board. The big question was what the fuck was he
planning to do with it?

Esther caught her breath, then dug out the component
parts of the Kalashnikov and quickly assembled it, fighting
back the respect she felt for how beautifully maintained the
weapon was. There were four clips ofammo, and she snapped
in one magazine, then took off her sweatshirt, tied it into a
sling, stuffed the others into the home-made pouch formed
by her hood and tied it round her waist. She dug the radio
from its foam, closed the red case and with an effort pushed it
back beneath the bed. Then she replaced the wooden panel,
returned the screws to their holes and sealed it back up.
Slinging the gun over her shoulder with an easy familiarity,
she stood up and lifted the VHF.

Esther Mulholland had no idea yet why Skinner was keep
ing a working radio secret from his crew, nor what he was
going to do with a weapon that could take out the patrons in
the first five rows of a theatre without much more effort than
a squeeze of a finger. But until she found out, she sure as
hell could find a use for them. She had a quick look around
the cabin to check her visit would remain secret for as long
as possible, then left quickly and quietly.

Behind her, the room returned to silence. The man and
boy stared from their photos, the neat bed remained tight
and unruffled, and in the louvered clothes locker on the
shelf above the shirt rail, an undisturbed aluminium flight
case sat awaiting the return of its owner.

The rust in the cofferdams of the Lysicrates gave the stale air
that was trapped there a sharp metallic tang. As a matter
of course it boasted a hint of rancid sea water, a variety of
sour smells of dribbled effluent from a hundred different
cargoes, and an underlying odour of rat piss and decay.
Right now, however, the air was so foul it would have made
breathing difficult. Water dripped from the height of the
void to puddles on the floor fifty feet below, and each falling
drop was celebrated with an echo that kept the memory of
its descent alive for many seconds after the event.

But in the inky black darkness of the narrow steel cloister,
an organic shape that adhered to the bulkhead at least twenty
feet up was interrupting the line of fall for some of those
drips. Tiny globules of brine splashed silently onto matter
that was almost blacker than the night that surrounded it,
yet the shape was immobile, unmoved by the wetness. But
although itwas still, the thing that was the shape was thinking,
scanning, processing.

There was a man coming. It knew who he was. It could
smell him, smell his flesh, a smell that was easily distinguish
able from the dead and decaying, since that undiseased living
tissue was an affront to the thing's senses. It could feel him
approaching through the engine room. There were men
above. It could feel their fear. It knew where the woman was,
and it followed the sensation of her for a moment, feeding
on her passion and fear.

It hung from the bulkhead with its strong grip; sticky,
mutated chemicals that seeped from its foul limbs holding
it securely against the smooth surface. Since the woman's
new emotions had stirred something in it again, it let
the part of its mind that was not on watch sink into a
reverie

Fingers. It remembered fingers. Possibly the most under
estimated part of the body, they received pleasure, or
warned of pain. They implored for mercy, or pointed
with finality at those who would die. The entity that did
not yet have a name, but knew that soon it would have one
that would be etched on the dark half of all men's hearts,
stirred slightly in the blackness. A pool of water that had
gathered in a hollow of its form spilled suddenly to the
soaking floor.

When the echoing splash of it subsided there was no
sound but the distant drip of water falling all along the
black corridor to the bow, and the low thrum of the ship's
engines.

What fingers the entity had reached slowly down to below
its torso and searched out what was forming. A satisfaction
effused its consciousness and at last it allowed memory to
stir. The memory of a man.

The little bitches. Daughters of the Sun. So pious and haughty
in the presence of the high priest. So dirty and scheming in his.
Dark, heavily-lashed eyes flashed. Small, white, even teeth were
cleaned by pointed pink tongues. Firm, rounded breasts moved
beneath woven gold thread, and slim hips that no birthing child
would ever push apart made jutting invitations below silken robes.
Daughters of God. Inviolable high priestesses of the Golden One.
Virgin handmaidens of the life-giver, the Lord Sun. Bitches as it
rose. Whores as it set.

What arts he had learned in the dark forest: how their black-
almond eyes lost their innocence and shone with hungry malice
when they begged him to speak the unspeakable, to do the unthink
able. How their ignorant, insatiable mouths opened to hear of the
squat tribal scum he had been among, the scum who'd thought
they'd commanded those dark forces, but whose purpose they merely
served. It was he who had mastered them and won. A shiver
of gratification rippled through the entity as it called up
slow tortures and creative deaths. How easily they buckled, the
rabble of the forest with their thick brows, gold-pierced flesh and
slack-breasted women. They died like animals. The entity held
the time-locked pleasure of their screams for a moment
like a favoured trinket.

And now time was of no consequence, neither what had
been nor what was to come. Only hate survived the desert
of time.

Everything mankind hated it always cast from itself, little
knowing that it was the very act of trying to cleanse itself of
the hated, the decaying, the diseased and the toxic, that
made humanity so vulnerable to those who embraced these
fruits and found succour amongst them. But to be in flesh
again, to suck on the juices of the dead, and ferment a
hatred that had for so long been without substance, was
to be savoured.

It ran a finger over the bloody organ that hung from a
knot of cartilage and macerated skin, and if it had had the
use of eyelids, they would have closed in ecstasy.



15


'So it's going to be like this.'

Another voice started to protest. Cotton silenced it with a
shout. 'Listen, damn you!'

The man held his tongue, but there was a muttering in
Filipino that told him he would not enjoy this level of
attention for very much longer.

'We close the holds, and then we stick together and make
our way to the engine room for safety, like the captain has
ordered.'

The clamour began again and he held up a hand.
'Think about it. Thomas can't have survived. You must
know that by now. But the company ship will be here in
less than three hours, and if you still feel the same when it
arrives, then we can start searching again when the situation
we have here is under control. Do you understand?'

Chadin scrutinized Cotton's face. 'No. They don't understand
why you want to close the holds while there's a man
still down there. Neither do I.'

Matthew considered for a moment as he looked from face
to face, then put his hands on his hips and took a deep
breath. 'Because I think the ... murderer is using them
somehow.'

Chadin wrinkled a normally inscrutable brow. 'What do
yot mean?'

Matthew thought on his feet. Maybe it was the unusual
clarity of sobriety, or maybe he just got lucky. But whatever
the reason, in the dry place where he usually scrabbled
around just to remember what he'd done the night before, an
inspiration suddenly blossomed like a desert flower. It almost
made him smile. He nipped that bud before he spoke, and
when he did, it was with heavy, conspiratorial confidence. 'I
don't think Thomas fell in by accident.'

Chadin looked at the first officer, then round at his men.
He processed the information for a beat, then nodded, slowly
at first, then more decisively. 'Okay. Okay. But I still say that
we should sail, not wait. It may only be three hours. But look
what's happened in the last three.'

Cotton nodded in return. 'Sure. Let's discuss that. Soon
as we get these hatches shut.'

Chadin barked at the men in Filipino, holding up his own
hands this time to quell their new protests and answer their
questions, and within minutes the hatch covers were being
rolled back on holds nine through to six. Cotton watched
with a relief that had no founding in logic, and rubbed at
his temples.

The job was going to take at least another fifteen or twenty
minutes. He walked to a quiet corner behind hold nine, and
took out Esther's tape. He'd promised, and now was as good a
time as any. Besides, he admitted to himself, he was as curious
as she was.

The cathedral engine was well named. Lloyd Skinner always
felt an inexplicable reverence when he entered the engine
room of any ship. It was the scale of the machine, the
ecclesiastical architecture echoed in the huge turbines, and
the fact that, like the human heart, it never stopped, even
When idling. He stepped through the door onto the walkway
that ran along the top level of the vast space, from where he
could look down and survey the whole room, and coughed
at the thick stench of garbage that hung in the air. Skinner
closed the door behind him, and walked slowly along the
metal gangway. There were three doors in total to the engine
room, and the only other exit or entry was by the elevator.
The unique feature of the engine room, unlike almost every
other large space in the ship, was that for reasons of safety
in the event of fire, all the doors could be secured.

Captain Skinner was checking them all. He climbed down
the ladder to the next level, ensured no one had unchained
the safety bolts on the door to the staircase outside, repeated
it with the final door at the very bottom of the ship, and
then turned and walked towards the hatch that led to the
cofferdams. He stopped.

It was open.

So that, he thought, was how the stench of their cargo was
permeating the engine room. But this was not a question to
which Skinner particularly needed the answer. The more
immediate one was who had opened the hatch.

He put his hand into the pocket of his trousers and
brought out the handgun. Sohn's rechargeable flashlight
hung on its mounting on the bulkhead, and Skinner
unclipped it, turned it on and pulled the door fully open
with his foot.

The smell was most definitely coming from the cofferdams,
and he mentally calculated that on a ship that was
so poorly maintained it was highly probable that there might
be a lesion in the metal skin between cargo holds and
the hull that was letting in not only the odour, but very
possibly physical leakage from the cargo itself. Of course
dangerous deteriorations of that nature were exactly what
he'd entered the cofferdams only thirty-six hours ago to
check. At least as far as Sohn Haro was concerned he
had.

In truth, to Skinner, cargo-leak was of very little importance
right now.

He flicked on the flashlight and stepped into the dark
void, his gun held before him. The echoing drips glittered
in his beam as he scoured the darkness with a rod of light
that showed him nothing but empty space. Skinner moved
forward cautiously. He knew he had sealed the hatch after
his inspection. Perhaps Sohn had opened it again for some
reason, but since that reason did not instantly present itself
as logical to the logic-obsessed mind of Lloyd Skinner, then
circumstances would suggest that someone else had been
involved.

Moving as silently as he could, Skinner progressed along
the narrow passage, mentally counting the iron buttresses
that ran like ribs from the base to the ceiling of the coffer
dams. He stopped when he came to the fifth, and swung the
torch beam to the hull.

He had been breathing though his mouth to avoid gagging
on the stench in this hellish and claustrophobic space, but
on seeing what the beam illuminated, he allowed himself
the luxury of a sigh through his nostrils. His work was still
there, undisturbed. A finger run beneath the smooth metal
of the mine told him the tiny switch was still in the correct
position. He moved the beam to the last twenty feet ahead of
him, where another hatch led to the bow cofferdams, and the
corresponding space that ran all the way back to the engines
on the starboard side. It was closed.

Skinner sighed again, irritated at having wasted valuable
time, turned around and walked quickly, and less stealthily,
back to the open hatch.

On the other side of the bow hatch Fen Sahg listened to
him go, then turned his eyes upwards into the blackness that
revealed nothing visually, but where he knew the split in the
skin of hold number two was being used again, as a tiny
avalanche of garbage tumbled from on high and scattered
on the floor ahead of him. Fen smiled and pulled his knees
closer to his face, glad to be alone in the dark again until his
master returned next time, for good.

It had been more than just his job. It had been his pride
and joy. Which was why Pasqual Sanquiloa would never
forgive whoever had stripped his radio room of its guts
and left him with the husk. When Chadin had assigned
everyone in twos to various parts of the ship, there had
been no question of where he wanted to be, although he
could have done without the company of the gum-chewing
cadet who sat silently in the corner picking his fingernails.
Pasqual had spent the last two hours trying desperately to
find something, anything, that was left of his equipment that
he could build into some kind of transmitter. But the job of
silencing the Lysicrates had been done so skilfully there was
nothing he could do.

Instead he had fiddled with components, and in the
absence of the intelligence reports from the cargo deck
that would at least have allowed him to focus his hatred on
Fen Sahg, sat brooding on who had done this to his precious
domain and why.

Perhaps on account of the private torpors in which both
men were wallowing, neither cadet nor radio officer were
prepared for Esther Mulholland's entrance, and had she
stopped to think how a female passenger with an AK47
across her shoulder might appear to two already-nervous
men, she might have modified it. However, Esther had no
time to apologize for the fright she induced in them, as
she burst through the cabin door and deposited the radio
on Pasqual's table with a heavy thud.

The cadet, Gaspar Libuano, leapt to his feet and backed
towards the wall. Pasqual merely stood up and opened his
mouth in a silent exclamation.

Esther looked at the two men and suddenly understood.

She held up her palms in the universal attitude of placation.

'It's okay. Everything's fine. Everything's cool.'

Pasqual had now shifted his gaze from her gun to the
present she'd brought.

Esther smiled and patted it like a puppy. 'Reckon this'll
come in handy?'

Pasqual ran forward. 'Where did you get this?'

Esther shook her head. 'You so don't want to know. Let's
just say it was an oversight that it wasn't found sooner.'

Pasqual had already switched it on, had the handset in his
fist and was adjusting the tuner.

'It's only short range though isn't it?' she asked as he
got busy.

He didn't look up, but he nodded. 'Line of sight. But we
can send out an SOS, and if there are any ships out there,
then we'll know.'

Esther nodded. 'Well if the sister-ship is near it should
definitely hear us, huh?'

'For sure. For sure.'

Pasqual was grinning. He put the handset to his mouth
and started to make the calls. Esther smiled across at Gaspar
who still looked unsure, his eyes on the gun. She touched it
lightly. It made her feel good. Safe. In control.

'Would telling you that I know how to use it make you feel
better or worse?'

Gaspar, whose English was not great nodded at her, his
eyes sdll wide. Esther shrugged, nodded back and made for
the door. Halfway out she paused, and bit at her lip. 'Listen,
don't go to the engine room if anyone tries to make you. You
should stay here and just concentrate on this for a while.'

Pasqual looked up even though he was talking to the
handset. He nodded quickly, but more in gesture that said
he wanted her to be quiet and go away, than to let her know
he'd heard or understood.

Esther glanced at them both with concern, and left. She
walked quickly but quietly along the corridor of C-deck
towards the stairs. She had to get back to Matthew and the
rest of the crew. They had some big decisions to make.

It was the stealth of her progress that enabled her to
hear the tiny noise. She stopped dead, her hand automatically
swinging the Kalashnikov round to her hip. The noise
came again and she snapped her head round to catch the
direction.

It was coming from the elevator, and it sounded like a
whimper.

Esther walked forward as though on hot coals, stopped at
the edge of the elevator door, and listened again. Someone
inside the elevator car was crying, but it sounded as though
they were trying very hard to do it quietly. She could hear the
shuddering intakes of breath, then the high-pitched whine of
a suppressed sob.

Esther thought quickly, assessed the risk, then flicked off
the safety catch of the Kalashnikov and turned to face the
elevator door full on. From this position she could see
through the murky glass. There was no one there. At least
not standing. A beat of three seconds, then she pulled open
the door and slammed back the inner gate.

Raul Nestor screamed, pushing himself even further back
into the urine-soaked corner of the elevator car. He wrapped
his arms across his head as though to ward off blows and
continued to scream through the strings of saliva that hung
from his lip.

Esther gaped at him. As a portrayal of undiluted terror,
nothing could have bettered the boy's performance.
Cautiously, and with the gun's safety-catch still off, Esther
checked behind her in the corridor, then entered the car,
her glance darting around to catch sight of anything in this
confined space that could have rendered an adult insensible
with fear. There was nothing in there except the boy. She
clicked the safety back on, swung the gun to her back and
crouched down in front of him. As her hand gently touched
his arm, he screamed again and writhed as though she'd
burnt him.

'Shhh. Hey, it's okay. Come on. It's okay.'

One eye stared at her from under the protective arc of
his arm, and his screaming lowered to a pant. He had
been doubly incontinent in the tiny box: the smell was
overwhelming. She had to get him up and out of his own
filth. She put her hands gently under his arms and pulled.
Raul Nestor panted like a dog, but this time, staring at the
open door behind her with eyes that couldn't open any wider,
he allowed her firm and steady grip to get him to his feet.
'Come on. Let's get out of here,' she said softly.
Although it was like dragging a bull into a slaughterhouse,
Esther somehow managed to guide the trembling boy from
the elevator car to the stairs, and down to the door that would
offer the release of the deck's warm briny air.

Contrary to the supposed sea-going experience of Captain
Lloyd Skinner, Esther Mulholland's instinct was not to gather
the crew below. She wanted them on deck, where the bright
lights shone and the only place someone could come at you
without you seeing them first would be if they came from
the blackness of the ocean itself. Esther very much looked
forward to being in that place, because when he did come,
she would be ready.

The trash in hold number two stirred as the thing that moved
within its depths shifted like a nesting bird. A black oozing
tar of rotting vegetable matter trickled over what was nearly
a face, and the mouth opened to receive it. The fire of life ran
through the dead skin that covered bone and the pounded
flesh that stuck to it, and a scimitar of a tin claw that had
been hinged to a framework of tiny rat bones loosened and
fell away.

Like a serpent shedding its skin, the thing that was now
nearly able to think as though it were flesh again breathed
with pleasure at the sensation of change. It listened as it
turned through an arc in the mire, but could no longer feel
the noise of the metal covers grinding over their guides as
the hatches had been closed. The thick protrusion of skin
and matted hair that was serving as a tongue, poked at an
ulcerous hole in the face, then moved aside again to let the
worms that moved through the cleft go undisturbed about
their work.

Such strength in diseased excrement. Such purity in -filth. Soon,
it would be able to enjoy the slow destruction of the scum that ran
over this vessel like lice. Time meant nothing to that which was
not physical, but nevertheless it toyed with how the men in
this time would die.

Would they differ in their agonies from those whose screams it had
left hanging in another age? And now that its cowering human
priest, that pathetic reader of cards and dice, had helped bring about
the final ritual, it was all so close. It was irritated that human help
had been necessary at all, but it had needed the grovelling
shit to gather the fleshly tokens from the sacrifices, to make
incantations and worship over them as it grew in strength.

It would not need him forever. It would need no one. There were
many more human scum ashore who were waiting, already alive to
the fact that their God was being reborn. They were the ones in need.
They needed the dark fire it would bring, the power of filth and the
unchallenged might of malice, and they would not have long to wait.

Soon, if not already, the final human forfeit, the honoured gift to the
dark nature of the Sun, would find itself prepared for violation. Soon
it would rejoice in the coming of its agonizing sacrifice.

It sighed deeply, and a bubble of methane zigzagged its
way to the surface of the hold, and gently puffed foul gas
into the dark space between the ragged surface of the trash
and the sealed ceiling of metal that enclosed it once again.

Renato had never been quite so pleased to see his captain
as now. Erol Gonzales and Edgar Pasco looked round in
fright as Skinner entered the mess hall, and Renato waved
a hand to Edgar to lower the cleaver he was so impotently
brandishing.

'Fen Sahg,' said Renato quickly to Skinner. 'We think he
may have taken Raul.'

Skinner licked at his lips and looked at them all in turn
without emotion.

Renato went on. 'He left the room to check out the
smell from the holds about half art hour ago. They heard
him scream, went to find him, Sahg was there, covered in
blood.'

'And the body?'

Renato was taken back by the brutal pragmatism of the
question. His reply had a harder edge to it than he'd planned.
'We haven't searched.'

Skinner closed his eyes and held the bridge of his nose
between a finger and thumb. Fen Sahg was proving to
be more than just a pain in the ass. He was a problem
that needed dealing with urgently. With eyes still shut, he
contained his fury and spoke as quietly and reassuringly as
he could. 'How many more are below, second officer?'

'Just Pasqual and a cadet. Libuano, I think. In the radio
room.'

Skinner opened his eyes. 'Then get those men down to
the engine room now, and I'll fetch the other two.'

Edgar looked from face to face, then lifted his cleaver
again as he looked back at the captain. 'Raul. What about
Raul?'

Skinner turned to face him, and his gaze travelled slowly
to the cleaver and stayed there until the man let it drop slowly
to his hip again. Skinner's eyes rose to meet Edgar's, and
though he spoke very slowly and quietly, the tone was so
full of inexplicable menace that the three men in front of
him Would have preferred it if he'd shouted.

'The screams you heard. Did they sound like there was
much left to rescue?'

No one spoke. Renato bowed his head, then gently touched
Erol on the arm and guided him towards the door. Edgar
followed, his knuckles white around the wooden handle of
the cleaver. Skinner watched them go, waited for a moment
to compose himself, then left the mess room and headed
for the stairs that led two flights up to the radio room on
C-deck.

They were gone. The stupid bastards had finished closing
the holds and gone. Esther looked along the empty deck
in despair, then led Raul to the edge of the massive pipe
that ran the length of the hold deck, made him comfortable
against it, and crouched down in front of him.

The boy stared up at her with terrified eyes, then glanced
around and behind her like a startled woodland animal.
'Can you talk? What happened to you down there?'

She was gentle, calming, reassuring, but the terror that was
still gripping Raul Nestor had almost completely erased the
scanty rasp of English he possessed. He stared back at her,
uncomprehending. The sea breeze ruffled their hair and
Esther pushed hers from her eyes with an impatient hand.
She breathed in a deep lungful of sweet ocean air, relieved
that the closed holds seemed to be trapping the stink that
she had been enduring in the accommodation block, and
tried again.

'What ... did ... you ... see?' She pointed at her eyes,
then at him.

The international language of mime seemed to get through
this time. Raul's mouth turned down into a tight half-crescent
as he pressed back against the pipe, hugging himself. He
began to babble in Filipino, whimpering and crying, his hands
shooting out occasionally to sketch something incomprehen
sible in the air.

She watched with narrowed eyes, but could make little
sense of anything he was trying to convey, and as Raul
continued his hysterical charade, he became so increasingly
distressed that Esther put out a hand to his arm, patted it
and hushed him into repose again.

Her head was aching. It must have been the foul air she had
been breathing below, but a pain that had its roots in the base
of her skull was growing from being dull and background to
something sharper and more insistent. She put a hand to the
back of her neck and rubbed.

Esther looked out to sea and sighed, thinking about what
to do next, and then glanced back at Raul. Raul Nestor. Raul
Nestor from Batangas, a town south of Manila. Raul Nestor
who wanted to own a motocross bike and win competitions. Who
fantasized about Cameron Diaz and the slightly plump daughter
of the sugar factory foreman where his father worked. Who had a
genetic liver disease he didn't yet know about, that wouldn't make
itself felt until he was in his thirties.

Esther Mulholland blinked at him and knew all this. She
caught her breath and looked away again, feeling her heart
beating at twice its normal rate. It was an illusion, of course.
For some peculiar reason, her head was making sniff up.
How could she know things like that simply by looking at the
boy? She breathed deeper, calmed herself and looked back.
It was just a boy huddled on a deck, trying to tell her what
had frightened him. For a moment or two, she joined him
in his anxiety. Esther didn't like being out of control, and
whatever made her temporarily hallucinate about the boy's
private life was most definitely not being driven by her. But
there was an explanation for everything. She was tired. The
last six hours had been tough.

She rubbed her eyes and scrutinized the boy's face. This
Wasn't getting her anywhere. But it was essential she found
out who or what had frightened him, and how long ago.
After all, it must have been something pretty bad to shake up a
cool nineteen-year-old like Raul. She stood up, walked a few
paces to the rail, and ran through her options. And while
Esther Mulholland's mind laid them out before her, it was
probably too busy to make her ask herself how she knew that
Raul Nestor was nineteen.

Renato Lhoon had not been pleased when his first officer
entered the engine room leading the crew who had been
deployed to the holds. Matthew Cotton was looking unchar
acteristically in charge when he arrived, and that was not
what Renato had expected nor indeed desired. However,
it was a look that seemed fuelled by some inner turmoil
rather than by maturity or a renewed sense of responsibility.
He watched Cotton carefully as he stormed in and started
glancing about quickly. There were now twenty men in the
room, and they milled around the vast metal gallery looking
for places to sit, or stood in small groups smoking and talking
in low voices. Cotton, however, was counting heads, ticking
off crew members on his fingers as he mouthed their names
silently. Renato walked slowly over to join him.

'Counting crew present, or just remembering who owes
you a drink?'

Cotton kept his eyes forward, ignoring the barb, and
continued calculating for a moment. He stopped, his brow
furrowed and then spoke much too quickly, Renato's theory
about this being a man who was far from being at peace
starting to seem self-evident.

'Who are we missing?'

Renato scanned the room but made no reply.

Cotton turned to look at him. 'I said, who are we missing,
Second Officer Lhoon?'

There was no mistaking the deliberate authority in Matthew
Cotton's voice, or the emphasis he gave to the word 'second'.
An internal spring in the dark portion of Renato Lhoon'S
heart wound a notch tighter. He returned Cotton's stare
with a placid and inscrutable face. 'Radio Officer and Cadet
Libuano. Fen Sahg, somewhat obviously, Raul Nestor, who if
Pasco and Gonzales' story is to believed, may not be joining us
at all. That just leaves the captain and.., your lady passenger.'

Matthew glanced over at the oiler and the OS, once again
ignoring the jagged emphasis on Renato's last two words.
'What happened?' His voice held dread.

Renato gestured over at the two men. 'Nestor went out
alone. They heard screams. Then Sahg appears from the direction
of the screaming, covered in blood and crazy as a coot.'
Cotton mashed his mouth with a hand. 'Fuck.'

Now that Cotton was deep in thought, Renato took the
opportunity to examine his face. He wanted to watch how
it changed as he spoke. 'The captain's rounding up Pasqual
and Libuano. Where's the girl?'

Cotton's face did not change. His brow remained furrowed,
his hand remained over his mouth. 'I don't know,'
he replied distractedly and completely truthfially.

Renato clucked in annoyance, though it was unclear
whether it was because Cotton had been irresponsible again,
or because the theory he'd been hatching about an unprofessional
romance between his drunken superior and the
passenger seemed to be wrong. He turned away in irritation.

'Everyone in twos, remember?'

'Yeah.'

'So who let her slip away?'

Matthew shrugged, still deep in thought.

Renato sighed and tucked a loose corner of his shirt into
his pants with the pompous manner of a petty official dressing
for office. 'Then let's hope she joins us soon.'

Matthew was thinking the same. And more besides. She
Would have finished her dubious chore by now, for sure. So
where was she? He needed to talk to her about the tape,
more to stop himself going mad than because he believed
what he'd heard on it. A momentary flitting of fright passed
over him as he suddenly feared for her safety, rather than for
her discovery in an act of theft. The same feeling of dread
he'd felt when he'd listened to the muffled recording of the
words the Inca boy had been saying to an oblivious Esther.

He took in air sharply through his nostrils for a second,
trying to compose himself, but the words came back as clearly
as though the tape were being played right now in public.

'I know who you are . . . I know all things . . . I have been
chosen.., you live in a shiny box.., a trailer. Your father drinks
too much. You broke a bone in your foot when you were six. Fell
over a trailer gas canister running from men who were going to do
something bad to your friend's mother. Your father was too drunk to
notice you were in pain and you limped for weeks, the foot cripplin
your blood growing septic. The trailer owner's wife saved you . . .
took you to hospital. It made you take care of your body after that.
You love your body now.., you treat it like a gift... But it will
be our gift. Our gift to him.'

Matthew wiped at his brow.

'Then we need to find her. We'll both go.'

Renato raised an eyebrow, crossed his arms and shook his
head, daring Cotton to contradict him. 'No way. We're in an
emergency situation here. I'm not leaving the men short of
officers just to find one crazy passenger.'

Cotton nodded slowly, scrutinizing Renato for the first
time. 'Fine. If she turns up, don't let her go again.' He
walked to the engine room door.

'Never sail with women,' spat Lhoon as Cotton passed him.
'Pain in the ass.'

It was a good impression of someone who was merely irritated
by the inconvenience of the task that Cotton was carry
ing out, but it was far from true. Even though Reno Lhoon
found his superior officer's company repugnant, given the
circumstances, it was not for that reason at all that he was
very glad not to be accompanying him.


Skinner's wristwatch told him the inescapable truth, the
same way it had less than five minutes ago, when he'd
looked at it last. Time was not on his side. The fact that
Fen Sahg had become psychotic did not surprise Skinner,
but then the capacity for man to turn to beast had never
surprised him.

What had taken him aback was that he hadn't spotted it coming, and that oversight, more than the deeds the man had
committed, was eating away at Skinner as he walked towards
the door of the radio room. He should have contained the
problem himself, dealt with it when he'd had the chance.
Now things were almost out of control, and Lloyd Skinner
didn't like anything being out of his control. Despite his are,
Skinner's face was a mask of composure when he opened the
cabin door and entered, and only the most intimate observer
would have argued that it failed to remain so when his gaze
fell immediately on a familiar piece of equipment. Pasqual
Sanquiloa looked up excitedly from his task and waved the
handset at him as Captain Skinner closed the door behind
him quietly.

'Saved, captain. A portable VHF!' he laughed delightedly.
Skinner nodded, flicking his eyes quickly to the deck
cadet as he surveyed the rest of the cabin. 'And where
did this appear from?' he asked casually as though loss of
radio contact at sea had been nothing more than a minor
inconvenience.

'The girl passenger. She found it.' He turned to the sullen
cadet and threw him a question in Filipino. 'Where'd she say
she found it?'

Gaspar Libuano shrugged back. He didn't speak much
English and hadn't understood anything the American girl
had said at all. He looked from the radio officer to the captain
and repeated the shrug.

Skinner rubbed his chin then casually put his hands in his
POckets. 'Any contact yet?'

Pasqual shook his head. 'Nothing yet.' He looked up at
the captain with a huge grin. 'I've only just started. Give
me time.'

Lloyd Skinner made an upward nod and returned a wide
grin as he pulled the handgun from his pocket, turned his
head towards the cadet and shot him through the head.
Before Gaspar Libuano's legs had time to buckle beneath
his body, Skinner turned the gun on a wide-eyed Pasqual,
and put the second bullet between his eyes. Captain Skinner
watched the lifeless body of his radio officer fall backwards
against the radio bench, his hips catching the edge of the
metal, making Pasqual Sanquiloa's torso fold neatly over
his thighs before slithering to the floor. The fixed grin left
Skinner's face as he replaced the gun in his pocket, picked
up the VHF, and left.



16


The bolts on the manhole cover were stiff, but a tap from the
monkey wrench loosened them sufficiently to let them turn
the rest of the way by hand. Esther unscrewed the last one,
then stopped and stood back a step.

There was no point in asking herself what she was doing.
That was self-evident. But why she was doing it was a question
that was suspended in dark syrup, somewhere in her head
that was temporarily unavailable for examination. She wiped
the sweat from her brow and lifted the top off the cover. The
smell from the hold below hit her hard, making her reel back
in disgust.

But there was a feeling of a job completed, and she knelt
down for a moment to let her racing heart calm. She closed
her eyes, and with reluctance was forced to admit to herself
that she was not well. She could hardly breathe and her
temperature was soaring. She concentrated for a moment,
clenching her fists, and to her relief the moment passed.
The ocean breeze played at her brow and cooled the sweat,
and she sucked in a lungful of air and stood up.

ESther blinked into the halogen lights of the deck, trying
to remember what she had been about to do. Cotton. That
Was it. She had to go to Cotton and tell him what she knew
about the captain. The gun. Where was the gun? She stared
around desperately. There it was, where she had put it, on the
edge of hold number two where she stood. She snatched it
up, horrified that she had let it part from her company.

She swung the gun over her shoulder and felt her heart
start to race again. Three and a half miles beneath her feet, at the
bottom of the Milne Edward Trench, she could feel the immensity of
the water pressure, sense the movement of the strange sea creatures
that lived there in the inky dark, unseen, and as yet undiscovered

Esther groaned and put a hand to her brow again. What
was happening to her? She was hallucinating. She must be.
How could she feel the sea bed below her, and know what
lay concealed there? She crouched down, closed her eyes
and pressed knuckles to her temples, concentrating hard to
empty her mind of these bizarre delusions, but the world
was still light beneath her tightly-screwed eyelids. Not light
in the way that closed eyes lifted to the sun will still admit
some opaque pink illumination. It was lit with a conflagration
of random, unstoppable knowledge, a visual and mental
cacophony of images and senses that blinded her yet made
her see at the same time. Esther crumpled, falling forward,
forehead to the deck, her palms splayed out before her as
though praying to Mecca. And as she remained panting for
breath in that position, the intimate knowledge of the unholy
thing that was moving stealthily on the ship, was of no more
importance in her white-hot mind than any of the million
other things she was being forced to know.

In his whole time at sea, Matthew had only ever been on a
completely empty ship once, a tub he had captained that was
about to be broken for scrap. Even then, there had probably
been workmen on the hull he'd been unaware of. But like
now, the effect of walking through an entirely deserted
accommodation block had been the same. It was unsettling.

The high metal tower that housed the crew was large, but
is vertical configuration meant that corridors were short, the
staircase was tight, and the cabins barnacled together. On a
busy ship this arrangement was comforting. On top of the
constant engine thrum, this huddled-together warren of
humanity meant that there were nearly always the sounds of
footsteps or voices drifting from around a corner.

The air was full of cooking smells from the galley, and the
incessant ambient noise of radios being played in cabins or
muffled laughter from a card game, made the ship live and
breathe.

But when the Lysicrates was devoid of its inhabitants,
this cosy ergonomic architecture became labyrinthine. For
Matthew Cotton, as he walked quietly and slowly along the
brightly-lit corridor of B-deck, the anticipation of encounter
ing a colleague around a blind corner had been replaced
by something considerably less pleasant. It was the deep,
gnawing fear of encountering something inhuman, some
thing indescribable that he had ached to consign only to his
nightmares ever since he had glimpsed its swift and baffling
outline. But Esther was not in the engine room, and while
he still believed that the thing he had seen was not the stuff
of dreams, Esther had to be found. It made sense that if the
captain had gone to collect Pasqual and his cadet then they
would be in the radio room, and that was where Matthew was
headed. The line of cabins before the radio room were quiet,
and he listened as he approached for the comfort of voices
from within. It was silent. Matthew sighed, already running
through his next course of action as he pushed open Pasqual's
familiar door.

The measurement of time and its passing may be regarded
as an exact science, but to the human mind it is entirely
subjective. Matthew looked at, and tried to make sense of,
the scene in the cabin for what seemed to him like an age. He
would have sworn it was a slow motion turn of the head that
guided his gaze away from the violently-twisted face of Gaspar
Libuano, the black-red hole in the dead man's forehead.
resembling a henna decoration on an Indian wedding guest,
to take in the equally awkward posture of Pasqual's corpse
folded on the floor. All Matthew Cotton could hear was the
beat of his heart and the rushing passage of his own blood in
his ears, a noise more invasive and insistent than the idling
turbines that throbbed below the floor.

Slowly, he stepped back in horror, and even more slowly
carefully and methodically scanned the room for the source
of the slaughter before turning, leaving the cabin, and falling
back against the corridor wall to regain his breath.

At least that was how Matthew Cotton perceived it. In
reality the Lysicrates' first officer was in the cabin for no more
than a few seconds before he stumbled out his hand clamped
to his mouth. But time caught up with Matthew as he leant
panting against the metalwall. He had barely blinked away his
tears of shock before his mind had compared and contrasted
the dead men in the radio room with those who had been
eviscerated, to wonder why they had not died by the same
method, and whether they had died by the same hand.

A gun. Who had a gun?

Matthew Cotton took his hand from his face and looked
both ways along the corridor. 'Esther,' he breathed.

He stepped forward, glanced once into the oblong frame
of the door that housed this new nightmare, and ran for
the stairs.

Resting his hands on top of the shoebox, his fingers toyed
with dice he could feel but not see, pushing them between his
knuckles and catching them in his palm. The men's voices,
far away on the other side of the door, were distant and
muffled, but amplified by the chamber of metal that towered
blindly in. thei
above him. Occasionally Fen would glance up
blackness towards the source of the noise and frown, The,,n.he ]

¢otld bend his head further towards his knees like a sulking
clailcl and ruminate on how much he hated the men who
were talking and moving about in the warmth and light of
the engine room. As he blinked in the inky black, for just a
moment part of him wondered why.

They were his colleagues. He laughed with them, ate with
them, drank with them, shared stories and experiences, and
he had never, until now, been excluded or shunned by them.
But as fast as the thought began to sow regret in his heart, the
emotion was overwhelmed by the delicious knowledge of the
master he now served. The one who demanded his complete
loyalty, and in return gave Fen glimpses of the passion and
ecstasy that the dark powers were capable of bestowing on
the faithful.

The crew of The Lysicrates and their pathetic mortal pur
suits were of little consequence in comparison. No matter.
Soon every last one of them would be dead, and only
Fen would be alive, and alive in a way that although he
could barely comprehend it intellectually, he understood
fully with his heart.

There was only one more sacrifice to make. The most important
one. The girl. Another cloud passed over Fen. He was jealous.
She had been chosen so long ago compared to the brevity
of his service. If only he could have been chosen, but then
Fen was no virgin. Fen had no claim to the kind of purity
either of body and soul that the girl seemingly had. Inherent
goodness. That was what the darkness needed as fuel for its
fire, and Fen was flawed too deeply to be absorbed into that
divine entity as the final, vital part of its new self. It had
been in the midst of one of his too-rarely-granted moments
of knowingness, that Fen had unwillingly seen into the girl.
Her purity was not one of conventional religious piety. It
wa a deeper, less superficial good, a simplicity of spirit that
Would be overlooked by any human eye searching for an
incorruptible goodness. She was moulded so irreversibly with
a desire to do the right thing, to help and heal, to defend and
protect, and above all, to love and forgive. It was that which
must be adulterated to finish this, but Fen longed for it to
be him.

To be utterly contaminated, destroyed and consumed by
that which was all-powerful, all-knowing, was a desire that
burned in his veins like an advanced addiction. He breathed
sharply through his nostrils, mulling on the perversity of
his longing, and was rewarded by a familiar stench. Fen's
head swung round quickly to face the deeper darkness
of the cofferdams. He wasn't expecting his master to stir
yet. There were still things to do. He had expected to
wait where he was until it was time to help prepare the
girl, and that meant sitting here, patiently hidden until
he was called. But now the stench told him that he was
no longer alone in the darkness. Fen stood up, confused,
feeling the bulkhead behind him in the darkness for support.

He waited, his mouth drying as it hung open, his breath
stilled to hear the approach of the thing he both dreaded
and adored. He wanted to call out his master's name, but
that name was not available to him when they were not joined
in thought, and since the approach seemed stealthy, not
pre-arranged, Fen knew in his heart they were not about to
be joined now. He tried to contain a rising fear, and scoured
his memory for even a syllable of the name, but none came. If
he could just talk to his master, then his fear would melt. But
why was he not being spoken to? He was always summoned,
called by that voice that lived inside Fen's skin. But this
time, there was silence. Silence, that was, except for the a
slick ticking noise and faint rustle that Fen recognized with
a sinking heart.

His fingers closed around the shoe box. Fen cleared
his throat.

'Hello? Here. I'm here.'

The echo of dripping water far along the cofferdams was
the only reply.

Fen swallowed and fumbled at the lid of the box. 'It's here.
leady. I have it safe.' He waited for a moment, his breathing
momentarily stilled to listen more acutely, and this time was
rewarded with a sound.

Its base suggested a hissing escape of gas from something
wet, but the main thrust of the noise was a rasping, staccato
retch. Something was laughing. As Fen Sahg turned his head
towards the source of the noise, his eyes still blinking blindly
in the impenetrable black, that mysterious branch-line of the
senses that man calls instinct informed him of something he
would rather have not known. The inhuman laughter was to
be the last sound he would ever hear.

Death came not from his side, but from above. It came in
the shape of bone and talon, of teeth and metal, and of a
stomach-turning, putrid mesh of matter. There was no time
to run, not even to fall and beg mercy. But as he screamed,
the force of the scream making his nose bleed and his eyes
protrude, Fen Sahg was at least rewarded with the memory
of the creature's chosen name.

But what use was it now, as his heart was ripped from his
chest and his face devoured, to know that He Who Remakes
The World, was no longer in need of a priest? That the leather
doll, blackened by the blood of the body parts that Fen had
been storing so carefully in its grotesque open belly, was not
now an essential part of the glorious dark coming, and had
always in fact been nothing more than a pagan symbol of
devotion?

Such knowledge was of no use at all. All that mattered was
that the thing that sat on top of the writhing Fen Sahg, in the
inky black that echoed with the oiler's screams, was nearly
complete, and was very, very hungry.

He sat perfectly still, handset clutched in his fist, staring
at the radio. The distorted hissing was still unbroken by
communication, but Lloyd Skinner was not a man to make
hasty judgments undl all avenues had been explored. He
looked at his watch and tried again.

'Lucky Lad, Lucky Lad, Lucky Lad, this is Fishing Fancy.'
His eyes never left the VHF as he released his thumb
from the handset. Captain Skinner was not nervous. He
could not be betrayed. The company might think itself
more powerful, but they should know that he was the dan
gerous one, the one who called the shots. If there was
any emotion that was currently overriding his inner calm,
then it was one of irritation that everything was still not
quite in place, that there were still crew members loose
on board who had not been dealt with or secured. And
the biggest irritation of all was the fact that the girl had
his gun.

His jaw moved almost imperceptibly at the thought as his
back teeth ground together. Other than that he was still
and watchful, and when a voice mumbled through the fuzzy
crackle from the speaker, Skinner's eyes betrayed nothing at
all. He pressed the handset once more.

'Lucky Lad, Lucky Lad this is Fishing Fancy, go again, please.'
The voice on the radio was indistinct, but even through the
aural mire it was with some interest that Skinner discerned
that it was American. So there was a company man on board
amongst the South American peasant fishermen. Why? To
stop them getting big ideas later? Perhaps, but Skinner didn't
think that was the only reason. His mind, tuned for survival,
quickly adjusted its plans accordingly.

'Fishing Fancy this is Lucky Lad. Go to channel 23,' Skinner
returned and waited.

'Fishing Fancy, we have you in sight. Are you finished
fishing? Ready to come aboard? Over.'

With his mouth a thin, tight line, Skinner breathed in
through his nostrils, the only physical concession to relief
that any observer might note. 'Catch not quite complete. I'll
contact you again in thirty minutes. Over.'

Skinner waited a long time for the reply. He didn't like
that. The delay suggested someone formulating another plan
of action, changing their minds. He was about to press 'talk'
again when the radio crackled up at him.

'We'll wait. Over.'

Skinner put the handset back and stared ahead into space
for a moment, making plans of his own. He picked up the
gun from the table in front of him, opened the chamber and
slotted in the two bullets that would render it full again. There
were still four people who were not in the engine room. Six
bullets. Four people. It was more than enough. He snapped
the gun shut, stood up and went to finish his business.

The raolecular structure of the metal handrail opposite derrick number
four was weakening. It would last another six months and then a
small hairline crack would appear. Black, black stench. Power in
fear. The smell of young girls' sex. Pain. That stain on the main
deck, the one that was two inches in circumference, was blood that
had been spilled by a deck hand ten weeks ago when he snagged
his arm on the untwined metal shard of a cable. There were three
whales a mile and a quarter away. One had an ulcerous hole in its
side. It was dying. Ripping flesh and snapping ribs. Their faces as
they pulled the heart out. Smiling, smug, triumphant faces. Efren
the electrician used to catch bats as a boy by stringing a net across
his open window. Chelito Baylan had locked Cotton in the freezer.
He'd wanted to stop Cotton from finding out anything that would
spoil his own sacrifice, end his state of grace. Their eyes, the young
virgin's eyes, now that they realize what lies on top of them, they brim
with a mixture of fear and pleasure. Tenghis Maholes has a faulty
heart valve. Skinner is near. The paint below her feet was stolen and
sold to a company man in Hong Kong called Ingles. The remains of
a Spanish ship lies crushed at the bottom of the trench beneath the
Lysicrates. The water pressure has crushed the soft gold of a cross on
its deck into an unrecognizable shape. Rough stone steps scraping
the skin from his face. Faeces, sour vomit, the mix of effluent and
cooking.

'Stop... Oh God, please stop!'

Esther fell forward, her head cradled in her arms. She
was soaked with sweat, and she wiped furiously at her face
to clear the salt from her eyes as she tried to breathe air
that was too hot and thin with lungs that were working
too hard. She had only made it as far as the crew cabins
on B-deck before this new attack of madness had felled
her, rendering her helpless as she struggled to cope with
the mental and physical assault. But holding her head was
not blocking the relentlessness of the unwanted visions. Nor
was crouching in a foetal position helping to slow her heart
or improve her breathing. She was fighting panic, fumbling
desperately for some control of her mind, when suddenly in.
all the mess of information a tiny memory flitted by like a
petal on the wind. Esther's mind reached up and grabbed
at it. Bad dreams. Real bad fucking dreams. Apart from the
gift of life and an unsupervised childhood in which she could
pretty much do what she pleased, Benny Mulholland hadn't
given his daughter much. But one thing he had given her
was a trick to stop those night demons, and after a couple
of successful attempts of employing his advice she had always
used it, both sleeping and waking. It worked just as well, she'd
discovered, to shut out other stuff. The pain of schoolyard
humiliation, the agony of a stitch during a twenty-mile run,
or just getting through a young girl's broken heart. And so
Esther had used the trick all her life. Now, it had come back to
her in the mire, and she could hear Benny's voice, thick with
a drunk's whisper, telling her how to make the bad things
go away. Imagine a snowplough, he'd said that night in the
trailer, when she lay sobbing after dreaming her recurring
nightmare of the dark man in a cloak who was trying to eat
her soul. Remember, he'd said, those big mothers ofsnowploughs
we used to see up in Pennsylvania before we moved south ? Remember,
honey ? Big yellow and black stripes on them. Huge throbbing engines
behind that snout of steel. Remember how they used to drive through
any old shit like it wasn't there? Well, just imagine you got one of
those can do your bidding, and when you say the word, it drives on
up to all that crap that's in your head and just pushes it clean out
of the way.

Esther was concentrating hard, her eyes tight, wrinkled
slits. The plough in her head revved and coughed, and slowly
started to move forward and push..

The coffee machine in the crew mess was burning the bottom of
the empty jug.., push.., a percentage of the plankton beneath the
hull was contaminated by radioactive waste that had been dumped
at sea six hundred miles west .... push... Thomas Inlatta 's body
lying in the hold already had maggots in the mouth and eyes...
push... Matthew Cotton had switched.., no, she didn't want
to see that one any more.., push push push...

Esther sat up with a gasp. Her head had cleared momen
tarily. The feeling was like having something that had been
stuck in your throat suddenly dislodge. She could breathe
again.

A tear-drop of sweat fell from Esther's chin onto the floor,
and she wiped her eyes as she slumped back against the wall.
It was nearly gone. All the hallucinations. All the madness.
All the impenetrable fog of knowledge that her sick mind
was making up. Nearly gone. Nearly. But not completely.

Esther moved the gun off her knee, and pushed it away
from her. Sitting with her back against the bulkhead like a
resting border guard, and staring forward into space, she let
her mind cautiously examine the thing that was still there. It
was a memory. Was it hers? It was dark, but now that the rest
of the stuff was temporarily held at bay there was something
delicious about it, tempting, familiar but forbidden. It was
hard to resist. Too hard. With the delicious abandon of falling
asleep, Esther Mulholland, very much awake, started to allow
the thought to drift into the forefront of the consciousness
she was holding hostage.

Hot sun touched her face. The breeze carried village smells. Dogs
barked. There was pain and humiliation. She clenched her fists,
pushed the plough forward again. The pain stopped. For the
first time in years, Esther allowed a large, salty tear to spill
from her eye and roll down her cheek. What was happening
to her? The two things she valued most in life were her health
and sanity. Now she seemed to be losing both. She had work
to do. The people on this ship were in big shit, and yet here
she was, sitting on the floor of an empty corridor fighting
with the urge to let some fever-induced piece of madness
take a hold of her. And, Jesus, it was insistent. She could
still feel the effort of holding all the other stuff back, but
the dream-thing, the imagined memory was beckoning like
a release. She knew that if she just gave into it, she could
stop listening to everything else. Everything else would be as
nothing compared to this. She was a curious person and all
curiosity would be satisfied if she could just let it in. Esther
had fought long enough. She was exhausted. Her mortal
mind registered with dissatisfaction that her weapon was
lying feet away from her grasp, but then her mortal mind
was not in charge here any more. The immortal one was
so much more appealing. She let her arms go limp, and
her eyes stared forward into the middle distance, glazed
like a drug addict being administered morphine. Slowly, the
pupils rolled back in her head, leaving her open eyes white
and sightless.

How beautiful he is. How the half-light of dawn catches the
contours of his young, toned body. The other priests watch him
enviously as he prepares, dark hatred in their hearts that he is almost
more beautiful than the sacrifice they are about to make. Tikhua, the
apprentice, ties the skin of a former sacrifice around his master's body,
his trembling hands trying not to touch the firm brown flesh lest his
excitement shows. But with a smile that is lewd, suggestive, dark
and irresistible, the master allows his own excitement to be visible. It's
impossible not to when the skin of someone so exquisite as the boy they
had offered is being fastened tightly around your own living body.
Cuzna, the head priest, looks across with disgust at his assistant's
erection, but talking is not permitted at this stage. From the time of
the vows being spoken, when the priests crossed the threshold of their
robing room, silence must be observed until the heart is removed.

The screams and pleading of the boy will be the only sound on
the air in Chanquillo this day. The villagers know that death and
a shamed family awaits anyone who will not silence their dogs and
their children as the chosen one is dragged up the stone steps of the
great temple. So there can be no speaking, even here in the privacy
of this small square room. He will keep the rebuke for later.

Now the sun has dimmed. But it's hot. Fiercely hot. A rainforest.
Raucous birds scream murderin the canopy. A million insects chirrup
under their green cloak of invisibility. The smell of cloying green life
assaults the senses of the civilized priest, but makes little impact on
the bestial humans who live amongst it. There's advantage in that
awareness. Those ugly, squat savages don't recognize the power of
their own rituals until he comes. If Cuzna had known where he
had been for two years, they would have taken his life the moment
he had returned. But they will not know. His lie will be that he had
journeyed to the temples in the far north provinces to complete his
service to the Sun God. But why would he go to such a mundane
place when he has heard from a traveller that the true God was here,
deep in the forest, amongst the decay and the green diseased growth,
that strangled the life out of evev'ything in its path on its way up to
the sun ? Here is where his destiny lies, amongst the ignorant savages
who show him where the dark power is before they die screaming, as he
safices their useless carcasses to that deity that pulsates in the earth,
under the faeces and blood that squirts from the death he makes in
its honour.

a hot, dry afternoon. The boy to be sacrificed, an elfin, honey-skinned fourteen-yearold from the southern province, is in the Sun
God's final knowing state of grace. He babbles and sweats. His rant
is disjointed, feverish, but Tikhua who guards him, now himself a
fully-ordained priest, sits patiently listening in reverent awe to the
Chosen One who knows all things.

The secrets and truths are beyond the young priest's imaginings
and his mouth is open as he drinks in all the child has to say. It is
Tikhua's job to listen, remember and relate the wonders that will be
spoken until the final hour. He enters the stone room. Tikhua looks
up in greeting, then quickly back at the boy. The ranting increases
and they listen together. The llamas belonging to the high priest
are loose. The plants growing on the stone below the temple
can cure blindness. The marks on the moon are great holes
the size of villages. They are made when rocks from the void
of space hit them. An eagle two villages distant is carrying
a serpent in its talons. The ocean that breaks on our land's
shore is deeper that the mountains are high. The priest in
this room is a priest of the darkest, most vile arts. He has
magic far beyond the power of the Sun God's priests. He
is in love with the blackness in men's hearts, with filth and
depravity, with everything man despises. He hides from the
Sun. The widow of Metikua is going to die of brain fever.
There is a way to move blocks of stone the size of temples
and marry them so that the hair of an infant cannot be passed
between the joints.

Tikhua is already looking up at him in horror when he strikes.
The blade cuts through his throat with little effort, and then for the
sake of mild curiosity he pierces the young priest's eye to see what the
viscous burst orb will look like on his cheek as he dies. The boy stares
at them both, his uncontrollable stream of consciousness silenced for
a moment by the murderous act, and utters only a tiny strangled cry
as he is held down and has his tongue cut from his mouth.

Later, still hot in the room. Cuzna stands over Tikhua's body
and clenches his fists, angry and confused at the betrayal. A little
behind the high priest, he, the happy murderer, stands nursing the
self-inflicted chest-wound that is proof of the struggle he had with the
mad young priest who had tried to silence and kill their sacrifice.

He enjoys the feeling of blood on his own taut brown breast and
rubs it in around his nipple with a sensuous rotation when the high
priest is looking elsewhere. His sttny is being believed. He's safe. The
boy cannot now betray him on the way up the steps to the temple.
Without a tongue to tell it, all the knowingness in the universe is
of little value.

The cool of the evening now. The warm air drifting in through the
stone aperture of the window. The smell of these forbidden quarters is
overpowering. Is it the smell of sex or death ? To him it is life. Cloying,
perfumed, dangerous, charged like the air before thunder.

No Handmaiden of the Sun can be looked at by any human, not
even the high priest. Their extraordinary, childlike beauty can only
be held as distant memory by the families who had been so honoured
to have their daughters chosen, since these most highly-respected
fifteen-year-old virgins now belong solely to the Sun God. Their
quarters are nothing less than a fortification, though in truth
such precautions are unnecessary. No man would dare try and
pass through their door. Such violation would incur a penalty too
terrible to contemplate.

But then since his return, he is no ordinary man. What ordinary
man would have these girls licking at him like dogs as he lies on their
finely-woven woollen mats and chews on the dream-making root he
took from the jungle? What ordinary man would have these spoiled,
bored bitches writhing and begging beneath his body, unsure whether
they want more pleasure or pain ? The rules of this Sun God are not
for a man who has no need of gods. There are, after all, no rules
for a man who is a god.

A cold dawn. So very cold. They believe that the sight of the
handmaidens' torture and death will be a fitting appetizer to the
pain he is to endure. His head is bound fast to a pole, his eyelids
propped open with splinters, but it takes at least a thousand beats
of the heart before his body and his smile betray that he is not
experiencing distress and remorse, but excitement.

They rip his genitals from their root with the hot pliers that work
gold. The gaping red-black hole between his legs oozes a thick trail
of gore as he is dragged up the stone of the temple steps. The task is
to stay conscious, to try and call what he can from the dark to save
himself. But the pain is too much. His skin is flayed on the granite
as they pull him slowly up towards the altar, and as he falls in and
out of consciousness the part of his mind that needs to be clear is
occupied with the agony of his body.

Dogs are barking. People are roaring and shouting abuse. Childre
scream and bawl. The silence that would normally surround the
dawn of a sacrifice is rent by the fury of the crowd, but as his body
is pulled up the last step to the altar an inner quiet takes hold of
him. The pain has passed that line of intensity where the mind can
no longer register it. There is a numbness, a stillness, an acceptance
of death that is curiously soothing to his torn flesh. And with it comes
a clarity of understanding that is born directly from the disciplines
of both his old religion and his new. As the blade pierces the skin
of his abdomen, he turns his head to catch the smells that waft up
the heights of the temple from the squalid village that huddles in its
shadow.

There is no ceremony in his execution. It is revenge, hatred and
jealously that makes the Sun God's priests tear at his body, makes
them hungry to pull out his heart. And since there is no magic in it,
he is not granted the knowing state of grace that their younger, purer
sacrifices enjoy in their last hours. The state that makes the young
and the beautiful long to be chosen. But while his heart still beats
there is a secret, more powerful ceremony taking place in his soul.
His incantations are silent but spoken with the mind. How can they
know that his liturgy is already taking place, since the blood and the
pain, the hatred and the pleasure of killing are already present? All
he needs is the filth to mix with his blood.

The dark tendrils of thought he sends out see what is to happen
and he hisses with pleasure, even as the blade opens his torso to the
first rays of the rising sun. The gutters are already trickling with
his blood.

All he must do is stay alive long enough until his precious body
fluids mix with the shit and the piss, with the decomposing stew
of dead rats and rotting vegetables, with the babies' vomit and
the women's stinking menstrual rags, discarded as they are in the
sewers that swallow up the blood from the temple. He makes silent
incantations as the waste products of these scum that call themselves
human await the first touch of his blood. The blade is under his
ribcage now. They snap the bones off making him jerk with a new
agony, but the trickle of blood is gathering momentum and he is still
alive. It is only yards from the first pool of decay and effluent that
lies in the sewer at the base of the temple's blood gutter.

It happens at the same time, as though his ritual decreed it. Cuzna
inserts his thin brown fingers beneath the heart and as slowly as he
can, to maximize the suffering, rips it from the ragged, gary chest
cavity. And as the last artery tears, the first trickle of blood joins
with the stagnant grey pool of sewage, marbling its oily surface with
a roseate vein. His back arches, and he lets out a cry that thunders
in the air and fills the hearts of those who hear it with an unnameable
terror. It is not the agonizing cry of a frightened, dying man. It is the
triumphant bellow of a war, or, and it hisses to a silence as his body,
minus its heart, collapses lifeless back onto the cold stone.

Esther let out a wailing cry as her body slammed back
against the wall, her hands groping at the air as she tried
to recover her senses. Her body was slick with sweat, her
heart pounded in her ears, and her temperature raged. She
whimpered, panting, as she tried to calm herself, staring
around desperately to assure herself she was really here,
on this ship, in a real place, a real situation, a place where
things made sense. Except they didn't. She was soaked with
SWeat and terrified of her own visions.

She leant forward and let the contents of her stomach spew
out. The floor beside the pool of hot vomit felt cool against
her forehead, and she stayed there, pressing the skin against
the white painted metal for a long time.

It was strange that the time passed in that position was not
calculable to someone who knew everything, but it was true.
After the violence of her sickness, it could have been minutes,
hours or days to her, but when Esther finally raised her hot
head slowly and carefully from the floor, she was faced with
two unpleasant facts. The first was that her body was not
just soaking with sweat, but that the heat between her legs
was due to a wetness she had only ever experienced in the
fevered fantasies of adolescent desire. What kind of sickness
had gripped her that would make her so aroused by visions of
death and torture? But that was far from the worst of it. The
other rude awakening was standing a only few feet away from
her, and even without the unwanted power of an all-seeing
eye, Esther would have taken little time to know that it meant
trouble.

'You look a little worse for wear Miss Mulholland,' said
Lloyd Skinner quietly, the gun in his hand trained steadily
and confidently at its target.



17


'Jesus and all the fucking saints.'

After Felix Chadin's whimpered profanity, there was nothing
but a profound silence. All the men were still looking towards
the metal door that led to the cofferdams. They waited,
breath withheld, and then it came again. The scream was
bestial in its intensity, in the way it conveyed a wordless
horror of being trapped, terrified, and insane with agony.
But what made it unbearable to the assembled group of men
being forced to listen, was not just the way the echo of the
metal cathedral that contained the horror was magnifying
the volume, but the fact that the scream was most definitely
human.

Renato Lhoon had moved a step closer to the closed door.
He stood poised on one foot like a dancer, his body frozen
with horror and indecision.

'Do something, for fuck's sake.' It was a thought spoken
out loud by a lowly deck cadet to the second officer of
the ship, but the men were agitated, their fear cancelling
out their hierarchical reticence to challenge an officer's
decision-making. Lhoon looked at their faces, clenched and
Unclenched his fists, then moved to the door.

The catches that held the metal barrier in place were loose
enough to be unbolted by hand, and he managed two until
a new and more desperate series of screams stopped him
momentarily. The noise stopped and then a moment later
resumed, this time as barely audible groans. Whatever was
happening to the suffering creature beyond the door was
either ceasing or the perpetrator of its pain had succeeded
in its task.

It took Renato only a few more seconds to open the rest of
the catches, and he stood up straight to face the frightened
men at his back.

'Gonzales. Get the flashlight.'

He paused as the man ran to comply with the order,
looking around with a poorly-masked air of helplessness
that did not suit a man in charge. Sohn Haro, who had
already anticipated what that searching gaze was hoping to
find, stepped forward and put a heavy long-handled spanner
into Renato's hand.

'This is all we've got.'

Renato looked down at the inadequate weapon and then
back up at his men. 'Felix, you stay with the men and get ready
for anything. Jose, Vincent and Roberto: you come with me.
Stay at my back.'

The three young men exchanged glances, then moved
forward reluctantly as Gonzales returned and handed the
flashlight to Lhoon.

The silent, dark cave of the cofferdams offered no clue
as to the origin of the screams as the four men entered the
blackness, and the overpowering stench of the trash in the
holds made two of the four retch immediately they crossed
the threshold.

Hand over his nose and shining the beam of light forward,
Renato called out. 'Hello!'

His voice echoed and returned to him without answer. The
light revealed nothing but diamonds of water glinting in the
beam as they fell from the high ceiling, and the low metal ribs
that crossed the floor every twenty feet prevented a clear view
of what might be lying ahead of them. They had no choice
but to move further into the blackness. Slowly they walked
along the wet floor, stepping carefully over the first rib, the
cadets glancing nervously back at the rectangle of light they
left. Far down the darkened cloisters of steel, a distant sound
made them stop. Itwas a rustling noise, the noise a big animal
might make behind a barrel in a barn.

Renato held up his hand as though preventing a rush
forward, though in truth it was a rush backwards that was
more likely. They listened, but no sound came. The second
officer stepped forward a few paces, gingerly lifting his leg
over the next metal rib, and since his gaze was directed
forward into the blackness, eyes wide and unseeing, it took
a moment to comprehend what his shoe was making contact
with when he placed his foot down on the other side.

There was not much left of Fen Sahg. The flashlight picked
out the few bones that could be seen, split and broken into
shards, and what flesh had been left in the pile adhered to
those pitiful remains.

Two blood-soaked strips of rag were the only reminders of
the humanity of the gory pile that lay tucked up behind the
metal girder. Renato drew his breath in quickly and leapt
back. 'Get back to the engine room.'

The men behind, confused by his action, his order and
the thin, reedy quality to his voice, didn't move.

Renato turned. The beam of light turned with him, sweep
ing the floor and illuminating for a second a foot that was
clogged with blood and cartilage all the way to the ankle.
'Now!'

They ran, stumbling, gasping and falling in the wet.

It took so little time to reach the light and heat of the
engine room, yet to all four men it seemed like running
a marathon. Renato could feel the weight of the darkness
between his shoulderblades as he scrambled back along the
narrow metal corridor, and as he gained the safety of the
light he turned quickly and glanced back into its depths
before falling out into the room full of waiting men. The
darkness looked back at him from its charged rectangle of
black and he slammed the door shut on it with a grunt.

Renato Lhoon slumped down against the wall and lowered
his head to his knees, fighting for both breath and calm.
The semi-circle of faces that surrounded him waited until
he regained enough of both to look up and address them.
Lhoon wiped his mouth and blinked up at them. 'There's
nothing we could do. We need to go and get the captain.'

There was silence, but Becko glanced across at Felix
Chadin and Sohn. It was a strange response to his sug
gestion.

'What?' asked Renato, looking at the men's faces.

Sohn Haro spoke quietly and without panic, but Renato
knew the engineer well enough to know that furrow of the
brow. 'All the doors are locked. The elevator's switched
off.'

Renato clenched his fists in suppressed rage. 'Well, fucking
unlock them then.'

Sohn kept his gaze on his first officer's face. 'From the
outside.'

'Where did she go?'

Matthew Cotton's Filipino was good but Raul Nestor was
still staring at him as though he were talking Chinese Man
darin. Matthew bit back his impatience and resolved to try
again with a little more tact. The boy was clearly traumatized
and he wasn't helping by barking questions at him. He leant
forward to put a hand on Raul's arm. The boy's body jerked
away from the intended touch and he whimpered.

'Okay, okay.' Matthew held up his hands in placatory
surrender. He glanced around the deserted deck as the boy
hugged himself, still analysing the horror he'd uncovered
in the radio room. The same thought kept coming back to
him, regardless of how ludicrous the implication was that
accompanied it. The men had been shot. Esther went to get
the only gun on the ship.

'It's made from garbage.'

Matthew turned back to the boy who had spoken the words
in a whisper.

'What?'

Raul was looking up at him with wide conspiratorial eyes.
'From garbage. It's only halfa man. No. No that's not right.
No, it's not even half a man. It's...'

Matthew looked at him closely, holding his gaze encouragingly,
but the corners of Raul's mouth were already starting
to turn down, his eyes beginning to dart from side to side as
if searching for the monster, and worse, his precious words
were drying up. Matthew put a gentle hand beneath the boy's
chin to lift his face, and this time his touch wasn't resisted.
'It's okay, Raul You're safe now. You can tell me. Listen:
it's safe.'

Raul gulped back a sob and looked back at Matthew. 'It's
not half a man because.., because...'

'Shhh. It's okay. Slowly now. You can tell me.'

'It's made from garbage and... people.'

Matthew blinked. 'People?'

Raul nodded fiercely. 'Bits. All stuck together. Bits of
garbage and bits of people.'

Cotton nodded sagely as if he knew exactly what Raul
meant. 'And Esther. Sorry. The girl passenger. Did she see
it too?'

Raul shook his head. He looked scared and angry at the
same time. 'She's with it. She let it out.'

'What do you mean?'

Raul beckoned for Matthew to come closer as if the huge
empty deck was full of listening ears.

'I heard her talking. I understand a little English. She
passed out. Right here. Was lying on the deck saying all
kinds of stuff. Even about my mother.'

Raul was obviously pretty far gone. His eyes were bulging
and his words were spoken breathily, but Matthew listened
patiently hoping this stream of nonsense would stop long
enough for the boy to tell him where Esther had gone.

'Yeah?'

Raul nodded rapidly. 'And she called it a name. Said it
was in the hold. Hold number two.' He giggled, a horrible
sniggering sound that was made worse as he put his hand to
his mouth like a child. 'She was rubbing her own tits when she
spoke about it. Got them out her T-shirt and everything.'

Matthew had had enough. He nodded politely then slowly
stood up. Raul grabbed his hand and pulled at him, the
giggles abruptly silenced and replaced by the down-turned
mouth again.

'Don't leave me. Where can I go? It's out.'

Matthew adopted a calm and fatherly voice. He had no
time to deal with this deck cadet's mental condition. Raul
was alive. That was good enough for now. They could get
him help for his shock when the other ship arrived, but
right now he had to get away and find Esther. Taking the
boy down to the safety of the engine room would also take
time he didn't have.

'Everything will be okay now, Raul. I'm going to help,
do you understand me? You just stay right here and don't
m owe. '

The boy was starting to sob again. 'But it's out. I smelled it
go. I smelled it.' He pointed vaguely to hold number two.

Matthew sighed despite himself. 'The hatches are closed,
Raul. Nothing can get out.'

Raul was shaking his head and crying. 'She opened the
manhole.'

Matthew looked at the boy and then across at the hold.
Leaving Raul sobbing into his chest, he turned and walked
slowly across the deck to the edge of the hatch. The cover of
the manhole was lying at an angle against the edge of a metal
pipe, rendering the circular black hole open to the night air,
emitting a stench that was almost unbearable. The rim of the
hole was sticky and red-brown, and leading from it a familiar
trail ran behind the holds behind Raul, glinting in the lights
until it disappeared in the shadows of the derricks.

Paul Nestor sobbed for a few more minutes, hugging
himself as tight as he could against a breeze that chilled him,
then wiped his eyes and looked up. Matthew Cotton was not
standing over the manhole any more. The first officer had
gone. It was the second time that night he'd been left alone by
someone he'd thought could help him out of this nightmare.
With a numb but insistent realization, Raul Nestor accepted
that no one would help him now. No one, in fact, could help
any of them. The thing he'd run from was coming for them
all. Paul stood up on shaky legs. He thought of its smell,
the way the poorly-joined pieces of flesh had glistened with
blood and sticky, clear fluid. He thought of how powerful it
had looked, how quickly and easily it had moved under its
frame of muscle, metal and bone. And he thought about
how it would feel when the substance that made up its vile
body would touch him, how it would crush him and tear him
and bring about the inevitable death he had only escaped so
temporarily.

Raul Nestor walked to the edge of the deck and looked out
into the night. He gripped the tail rail with both hands and
with one smooth, athletic movement hauled himself up and
over it. The Pacific Ocean below registered nothing more
than a small and insignificant splash, before the freezing currents
that swirled up from three and a half miles beneath the
Lysicratescurled around the nineteen-year-old boy's thrashing
body and silenced the panic of his grunts.

If only she could stop sweating. If only she could reach the
AK47. The captain couldn't either. It was too near her hand.
He would pick it up once he'd killed her. That was the.
safe thing to do. The pragmatic thought squeezed itself
in between the knowledge that there were weevils in the
sack of grain in the galley that Becko had bought cheap in
Calao and that eight tiny adjustments would make Rudolph
Diesel's famous engine one hundred percent efficient. Esther
struggled with the snowplough but the load was too much too
push away. Skinner was talking, but the concentration it took
to hear his words, to clear her head to all but the immediate
danger, was immense.

'...were you doing in my cabin?'

Esther gasped for breath, the sting of vomit still burning
her mouth. 'I went to get the gun.'

Skinner's eyes did not leave his target once, even though
the gun that could do considerably more damage than the
one he held in his hand was still feet away from them both
and very prominent in his peripheral vision.

'And Cotton?'

Cotton. His wife was called Heather. His daughter was called
Molly. The AK4 7 is exactly four feet six and quarter inches from
her grasp. The floor it's resting on has a screw lodged between the
supporting girders that is weakening the structure. A man called Ho
Lung dropped it when it was being built.

'I don't know where Cotton is.' She wiped uselessly at her
soaking face.

'But he knows what you found.'

If you can'tfight this, thought Esther in a tiny space her sane
mind found for a fraction of a second, then use it. She looked
up at Skinner and focused on him. 'You killed a man. A man
called Mendez. Shot him at point blank range.'

Skinner's face remained impassive but his eyes shone with
something feral and dangerous. It was working.

Esther's mind filled with images of Skinner. The difficulty
now was controlling them, sifting them for knowledge that
was useful. She spoke in grunts and gasps, her eyes closed.
'You had a dog when you were seven called Ernie. You're
mildly allergic to dark chocolate. It gives you migraine. You
planted bombs on the Eurydice to sink it at sea. It was all
planned from Hong Kong. The company gave you a quarter
of the insurance money. Three million dollars. You've spent
some on a ranch in Mexico. But you think you need more.
You never understood why Proust's In Search of Lost Time
is a classic. You think it's the self-indulgent ramblings of
a pathetic mummy's boy. It's bothered you all your adult
life. The ranch has windchimes on the back porch. They
make you think of your childhood. You think you're getting
seven million for this job, for sinking the Lysicrates, since
you'll be officially dead. But the man from the company
on the fishing boat a mile away is called Charles Lee. He's
planning to kill you when the Lysicrates goes down and you
try to climb aboard. He's going to shoot you while you're in
the life raft. There's a can floating off the side of the fishing
boat with some tomato puree in it. The incendiary devices for
sinking this ship are on the wall of the cofferdams. The radio
detonator is in an aluminium attache case. Charles Lee likes
British football and has a tiny fracture in his pelvis. His wife
is the daughter of a Chinese judge ... no stop. Stop.' She
gasped, concentrating again. 'The company are paying him
a million dollars for the job. We're above the Milne Edwards
trench because no one will be able to investigate the wreck
at that depth. Kelly, the woman you have sex with in Mexico
has aborted the baby you made. It was a boy.' Esther groaned
with the strain.

Skinner's voice was hushed, reverent with a terrified awe.
'Who the luck are you?'

Esther blinked through screwed up eyes, gasping for breath
after her effort. 'The Chosen One. First handmaiden to be
Consumed by the Dark Sun.' She spoke the words without
thinking them first, and when they left her mouth she
looked up at Skinner with almost as much fear as he was
regarding her.

They regarded each other in silent horror, each privately
digesting the impact of the words she'd been spewing out.
If evidence was necessary to reveal how deeply Skinner was
disturbed by Esther's soliloquy, then he provided it at that
moment. In an uncharacteristic moment of unguardedness,
Lloyd Skinner looked away.

With an effort that she dug from the very depth of her
strength Esther leapt forward, lashed out, caught his leg
and brought the captain down. He made no noise except
a gasp, but his strength was daunting while they wrestled for
control of the gun that was still loosely in his hand, though
the fact that his wrist was held by Esther's sweaty grasp made
it impossible to use.

'Drop it. Both of you.'

The struggling couple looked up though Esther already
knew who was holding the AK47 in his inexpert hands, had
known he was approaching, knew what was in his pockets and
in his heart. From his undignified position on the corridor
floor, Skinner quickly assessed the threat from First Officer
Matthew Cotton. The safety-catch was off the gun. One stupid
tug on that sensitive trigger and Cotton would blow them
away without even having to try. Skinner let go the handgun
and sat up. Esther put out her hand to retrieve it but Matthew
barked at her.
'Leave it.'

'Matthew...'

'Leave it and stand up, both of you.'

The gun stayed on the floor. Skinner and his troublesome
passenger stood up slowly, both of them fixing Cotton with
glares, but for very different reasons.

'Matthew, be careful. You don't know how to use that. The
safety-catch is off.' Esther struggled to stop saying all the
things she knew about the gun, about Matthew, about the
peruvian fishermen on the nearby boat who were planning
what they would spend their share of the company money on,
but in fact were also going to be killed by Charles Lee. She
struggled some more, pushing the crap from her mind.

Matthew looked from face to face. His voice was broken
with emotion. 'They're dead. Shot. Through the fucking
head. Now why would anyone shoot two innocent men?
Huh? Why would anyone do a fucking insane, evil piece
of shit like that?'

Skinner's eyes were steady, fixed on Cotton. 'Look at her,
Matthew. She's gone crazy. I found her running from the
radio room. It's drugs. She didn't tell you, did she? That's
what she's been doing in South America. Look at her. Look
at her, for Christ's sake.'

Esther was shaking and sweating with the effort of trying
to keep the wall of excess information at bay.

She opened her mouth to warn Cotton, but the only
thought that came to mind concerned the body of Raul
Nestor which had been carried nearly seven miles away
already by the strong undercurrents. A shoal of fish were
cautiously investigating it as it tumbled slowly in the cold
water, She closed her mouth and eyes and tried again.

Skinner put out pleading hands. 'She's carrying a load of
heroin for the Mafia. It's seriously organized. I caught her
using a VI-IF radio she had hidden along with that weapon.
There's a fishing boat a mile away that's due to pick her and
the stuff up. Pasqual must have got in the way of their plan.
But we're in luck. I reckon she's been sampling the produce.
Overdosed and gone crazy. Give me the gun. I know how
to use it.'

Esther's eyes snapped open. Suddenly her mind was very
clear indeed. 'He's coming,' she breathed, looking around
with an expression of love and wonder. He's coming, she
thought. He can smell me. He can hear me thinking. Another
thought nudged her from the place that was still Esther and
only Esther. She knew how to turn off those thoughts that he could
hear so clearly. She was special. Not like the others. More like him.
But why would she want to do that ? She wanted him. She wanted
him very badly. She kept her thoughts open and loud.

Skinner's eyes remained fixed on Cotton, never wavering,
even as the smell in the corridor increased. Matthew was
staring at Esther, the barrel of the AK47 waving around errati
cally as he shifted the weight from one foot to another.

'Who's coming?' His voice was still emotional, but there
was a knowing fear in it that Skinner picked up on and
didn't like.

Esther looked across at Matthew, her face in repose for
the first time since she had been discovered on the floor by
Skinner. 'He Who Remakes The World.'

A tick at the side of Skinner's eye twitched into life, and in
the face of this madness he licked at dry lips and concentrated
on keeping his voice low and calm. 'She's out of it, Matthew.
Give me the gun and let's deal with her before she goes crazy
again. Enough people have died.'

Matthew Cotton ignored his captain. He stared in des
pair at Esther's peaceful face. 'Esther. Who killed those
two men?'

Esther's hands had gone to her breasts. She began to
stroke herself with subtle but slow sensuous movements.
'Am I beautiful enough, do you think?'

Matthew Cotton groaned at the profound insanity that had
overwhelmed the determined, decent and practical features
of the friend he had parted from less than an hour ago. His
face contorted with grief and he wrestled his emotions to stop
tears from welling.

But even had he given free reign to those tears, they could
have easily been interpreted as a response to the stench that
was now filling the corridor so thickly it was making it hard
to breathe.

Matthew's eyes darted around in search of the invisible
threat, but this brief inattention to his targets was not suf
ficiently total to make Skinner think of tackling something
as volatile as the Russian semi-automatic. The captain made
no move. He would wait. Timing was everything in the fine
art of staying alive.

Matthew looked quickly to both ends of the corridor,
deciding that the stairwell and elevator offered a better
escape than the route to the other cabins. He gestured
with the gun, a motion that made Skinner draw in a sharp
breath.

'Move. To the stairs. Quickly.'

The captain, eyeing the handgun still lying on the floor,
turned and did as he was told, Esther doing so equally
obediently but with considerably less purpose in her step.

It was only a few yards to the end of the corridor where
the ceiling opened up from the claustrophobia of the line of
cabins. Skinner reached the landing first and halted to await
instructions.

Matthew Cotton had no idea what he was planning to do.
His captain was no murderer. Lloyd Skinner had been his
saviour. Despite the malaise that was affecting her it was hard
to believe that Esther Mulholland could really have taken that
gun and felled his two crewmates with such cold-blooded
intent. But people were still dying on this ship. Raul's equally
mad testimony had frightened him, and finding the manhole
opened as the deck hand had said had dented his trust in
Esther. Something he couldn't explain made his flesh creep
and his heart fall when he gave it head-time, and here he
was training a lethal weapon on his companions' backs as
he marched them away in search of an escape from nothing
Worse than a bad smell from the holds. He stopped when
they all reached the door of the elevator and tried to gather
his fevered thoughts.

He'd felt Esther and Skinner watching him as he bit a lip
and thought about the next move. If he had been Esther,
trained to watch and wait, trained her whole life to notice
the small things people did that spoke of the bigger things
they were about to do, then perhaps he would have been
quicker to act. He would have noticed that two of the four
eyes that regarded him were gradually drifting from his face
to look at something else.

But by the time Matthew Cotton had noticed that Esther
was looking at the ceiling above their heads, and that a drip
of something sticky and red-brown was trickling down the
white-painted wall of the stair well it was almost too late.

It dropped like a stone onto the floor between him and
his prisoners, and although there was no more than a split
second, a fraction of a heartbeat, in which to look into its
face, Matthew felt that he had gazed on that horror for
most of his life. Black eyes that seemed like the eyes of a
blood-thirsty crowd rather than an individual bored into his
soul. A patchwork of a face, hideous in its mess of flesh and
seeping putrescent sores, housed a grin that was too wide,
had too many sharpened teeth, shattered bone-pieces and
metallic glints in it to be considered being called part of a
mouth.

The pressure required to pull the trigger of the AK47 was
infinitesimal. Even as the gun exploded into its maniacal,
juddering delivery of bullets, Matthew was already regretting
having trained such a monstrously violent and efficient
weapon at two of his friends. The stinking, diseased blood
that splattered from so close a target blinded him for a
moment, but even in those unseeing, gasping, gagging
moments, he found his way somehow to Esther's hand,
grabbed her reluctant body to him and was pushing her
through the open door to the main deck, the gun still firing
behind him as he ran forward.

He ran and pushed as far as he could go, stumbling along
the sides of the deck until he reached the last hold before
the bow. Only then, in the shadow of the hatch cover did he
stop and look at the woman he had propelled from death to
the night air. Like him, she was covered in a cocktail of sticky
brown blood, effluent and bullet-torn bits of long-dead flesh.
But unlike him, Esther Mulholland was crying. He put out a
shaking arm to comfort her.

She pushed it away angrily, gasping in a sob. 'You bas
tard.'

Still mad, he wanted to believe. Still sweating. Still shahing.
Still no idea what was going on. But Matthew Cotton knew he
was mistaken. Of the two of them it was he who was the more
ignorant, and as he looked at her contorted face the part of
him that housed his intuition and instinct nudged him to
pay attention to that fact that when she spoke to him it was
with a malice he had not imagined her capable of.

'You fucking stupid prick.'

Matthew opened his mouth to reply but there was nothing
to say. Esther looked away from him with contempt, her eyes
softening when they were no longer focused on her human
saviour's face.

'He needs me.'



18


Skinner held the small gun to his chest. His nails dug into
the palms of the other hand as hard as he could push them.
It wasn't enough. He wanted to feel something physical,
something to ground him in reality, but it would take more
than an insignificant, self-inflicted pain to clear his head of
the things he had just witnessed. With his back firmly against
the locked door of his cabin, he panted through gritted teeth
and struggled to regain the composure he prided himself on
mastering, no matter what the circumstances.

Everything in Lloyd Skinner's world had just changed. He
was a man who fed hungrily on information, who acted on
knowledge he gathered secretly and constantly when the
attention of others around him was elsewhere. It had kept
him alive, but more than that, the power it gave him by
always being alert, always watching and planning, always
being quietly in control of every situation, was what he
lived for. There was nothing else. There was no love in
Lloyd Skinner's life. People could not be sufficiently trusted
to love. Nor was there anything material he desired. The girl
was only half right: he had plenty of money. The seven million
this job was to have paid was important merely because he
could get it rather than because he needed it.

But the memory of all those impossible revelations the
girl had unveiled and the nightmarish sight of that mon
strous creature were the two things that could not be logi
cally stored, processed or understood by any of the many
mental mechanisms Skinner had at his disposal. Unless he
could come to terms with them both, they threatened to
unhinge him.

He let his tense body slide down the door until he was
on his haunches, and with an effort closed his eyes and
forced himself to see the thing again. He had only seen its
back as it had dropped from God knows where in between
them. But even that had been bad enough. The matted
hair or fur or whatever it was that covered its patchwork
skull had been moving with parasites. But the worst thing,
the thing that had made him want to scream even now,
was that the skin that was tied around its uneven torso,
skin that was bruised and purple, that looked as though
it had been recently flayed from a human body. He had
been staring in horror at the neat knots that held the
hellish apparel in place when Cotton had let the AK47 go.
Skinner was no stranger to what his beautifully-maintained
and cherished weapon could do to solid flesh and bone,
in fact he had never stopped being fascinated by it. But
the eruption of rotten material, stinking flesh and pus that
had exploded over him from the beast, was too much to
bear. It was still covering the front of his shirt and the
tops of his trousers, and although its stench was urging
him to vomit with every intake of breath, he was still too
shaken to touch it as he would have to in order to remove
his clothes.

The single factor that was keeping him sane was that
Skinner's instinct for survival had not deserted him when
he'd needed it. Despite the bewildering horror of the 
situation by the stairs, the animal in him had seen the moment
of escape and taken it. Instinct had made him run back up
the corridor, grab the forgotten handgun on the floor and
run. And here he was. Alive. What else mattered?

His eyes opened and a new sense of resolve started to form.
So, as Shakespeare had suggested, there were indeed more
things in heaven and on earth than were dreamt of in Lloyd
Skinner's philosophy, but that didn't mean they couldn't be
put to work on his behalf. The girl had frightened him with
her supernatural knowledge, but now he was regaining his
calm he realized that having heard it was nothing short of a
miracle. He now knew things that could not have been known
by any mortal man. He was in control again. But he had to
get off this ship. Everything had gone wrong, and there was
nothing left of the previous plan that made sense.

Now, there simply had to be a new one. He knew, of
course that the company would try and have him killed.
How could someone with as much dangerous knowledge be
allowed to live?

He had, of course, planned to clear the fishing boat of
all its occupants and contact the company later from a safe
and secret location when it was time to transfer the money.
He had expected resistance, but now he knew the specifics
and that knowledge was outstandingly powerful. If she was
right about everything else then she was right about this too.
But Skinner had only the pathetically inadequate handgun at
his disposal. It would be hard to win against the opposition
he suspected the fishing boat contained. That had to be
rectified. He was, of course, going ahead with the sinking
of the Lysicrates, but even when he got his AK47 back, how
could he survive going aboard the fishing boat when there
was a marksman waiting for him with the advantage of height
and cover?

Skinner thought of the Lysicrates' life raft, how part of it
could be covered with canvas stretched over metal hoops.
The company assassin would not know what Skinner looked
like. It would be dark. It was simple. There needed to be two
of them in the life raft. One, a decoy sacrifice out on view;
and him, hiding, alive and waiting for his chance to board
unseen and pay back the compliment.

All he needed, apart from the weapon he was looking
forward to retrieving, was the willing and unknowing stooge.
Someone who trusted him, believed whatever he said, who
would do anything for him.

Skinner smiled. He stood up slowly, cautiously, unbuttoned
his shirt and slid his soiled trousers to the floor. It would
take him only minutes to change. Then he would calmly
pick up the attache case, leave the cabin quietly and go
and fetch Renato Lhoon. His second officer was about to
get the promotion he desired.

'Look at me!'

Cotton's thumb and forefinger were digging into the flesh
of Esther's jaw as he held her reluctant, sulking face a couple
of inches away from his desperate one. Her skin was slick with
sweat and he could hear by her shallow breathing just how
fast her heart was beating. Matthew was frantic.

Esther, when she spoke, revealed she was not. 'He's still
alive, you know. So is Skinner.'

Matthew wanted to sob. He controlled his voice and kept
a hold of her face as he brought his even closer. 'You have
to listen to me now. Really carefully. I know a bit of you can
still hear me. So, concentrate. Concentrate really hard.'

Esther replied by talking softly, almost in a dream. 'Heather,
your wife. Her father was Scottish. She liked to wear men's
Woollen kilt-socks in bed in winter.'

Cotton held her face fast, though his heart had leapt with
a pain that threatened to topple him.

Esther smiled, not unkindly. 'You're not really a very good
alcoholic, are you? You don't even like drinking. You just do
it to forget the accident. Molly already had a tooth when she
was born. You called her Popeye because of it.'

'Stop it,' said Matthew weakly.

Esther, though her head couldn't turn, swivelled her eyes
away from his to look beyond his shoulders. 'There's a min
eral deep under the sea-bed off the coast of Greenland that
we haven't discovered yet. It's going to change everything
when we do.' She laughed. 'Wow. Big time.'

Matthew wrestled back control of his senses and talked
over her as she tried to continue. It silenced her. 'I listened
to the tape, Esther. They wanted you as soon as they saw
you. They made all this happen. That thing. It wants to rape
you, kill you, take your heart and your skin. The boy was
talking obscenities in Spanish that would have him jailed
in any civilized country. He was telling you they're a sect
of pure Incas that believe in the return of some disgraced
occult priest who'll make them powerful again.'

He felt a sob at the back of his throat well up again.
'And it's true. Can you hear me? It's fucking true!'

She blinked at him, and for a moment he saw her behind
those opaque eyes. Her voice was tiny. 'Help me.'

Matthew let go of her face. The marks where he'd held
her were red and angry. His voice was not much stronger
than hers, and the night breeze nearly carried it away. 'I
don't know what to do.'

Esther looked at him. His kind, battered face was contorted
with pain, and it was a pain she now understood completely.
Panic rose in her throat and she used it to get busy. Her
snowplough was revving up and she was pushing as hard
as she could to clear the debris of thought, trying to clear
a space where she could be Esther Mulholland and not just
a receptacle for the white noise of facts. But harder than
silencing the knowing was the insistence of her desire. She
was awash with it. Aching to be touched, to be consumed and
defiled. Aching for something that her conscious mind knew
was beyond obscenity, but had drilled itself into her soul. Her
eyes screwed shut in concentration. 'Matthew,' she gasped.

He held her hands.

'It's coming again.'

Cotton whirled his head round, searching for the imminent
danger- 'Where? Where the hell is it?'

Esther shook her head, sweat spraying from her as she did.
She had no strength to search in her mind for its location. All
she knew was that it was getting near and that the part of her
that thrilled to its approach was the part that was taking all
the energy to resist. Push, push. The plough shoved at the
blackness, making a tiny white space where she could think,
remember, be herself.

'You can ... stop this.'

Matthew turned to her again, his hands tightening on
hers. He spoke rapidly, panic-stricken. 'How? Quickly. Tell
me how.'

Her eyes opened and as she gazed earnestly up at him he
knew he was looking at her when she spoke, and not at the
mad person who had spat at him for shooting a monster.
It was as well he did know, because if he hadn't recognized
Esther in that soft, pleading face, then the words she spoke
so gently would have been taken as nothing more than
another gross obscenity. But they were not meant to be
obscene. They were merely an order from someone who
was temporarily very sane indeed.

'Fuck me, Matthew.'

Every face in the engine room turned to watch the door as it
opened slowly, and as Captain Lloyd Skinner appeared from
behind it, every face registered visible relief. The captain was
calm, unruffled, with the familiar, quiet, self-assurance that
sent a warm wave of comfort through his crew that was almost
palpable. The fact that Skinner was far from calm, that on
discovering that the body of the thing Cotton had blasted
apart less than ten minutes ago was no longer lying at the
top of the stairs, he had felt a fear unlike any other he had
known, was not something that Renato or his men would
suspect. The captain had regained his skill of inscrutability,
but in the face of the problems that lay ahead its maintenance
was taking its toll.

Skinner walked toward the group of men, looking around
until he caught sight of Renato Lhoon. 'Is everyone safe?'

Lhoon stepped up to meet him, and the men, having been
silenced by fear when the door had started to open, started
talking amongst themselves again.

Renato looked grim. 'We were locked in, Captain. Every
door.'

Skinner nodded. He moved closer to the second officer to
ensure they were not overheard. 'There's been trouble out
there, Renato. It's under control but I'm going to need you
firstly to keep the men calm, then come with me to help
contain it.'

Renato raised an eyebrow but it was impossible to mask
the small glow of pleasure he was experiencing in being so
needed and valued. He kept his voice as conspiratorially low
as the captain's. 'A man is dead in the cofferdams. We think
it may be Fen. There's not much left to be able to tell.'

Skinner felt his mouth drying. The mines. Was someone
messing with his mines? Shit. An anger and uncharacteristic
panic rose in his throat again that he quickly contained.
'What happened in there?'

Renato shrugged. 'We don't know. We heard screamsi:
Terrible screams. I went in with three of the men. We only
found.., remains.'

'How long ago were the screams?'

'About twenty minutes.'

Skinner nodded. So that's where the thing had been before
they'd been attacked. He allowed himself the weakness of fear
again to wonder where it was right now, then suppressed the
terror with the pragmatic thought of the job in hand. The
rest of them could worry about its location when he was safely
off this tub, and that was what mattered now. The important
factor was that it didn't sound as though his explosives had
been discovered in that search for the screaming man.

Men afraid of the unknown would be unlikely to notice or
question the innocent looking circular steel objects stuck to
the hull. The captain cleared his throat and adjusted his body
language to alert Renato to the fact that the next exchange
was delicate, and must be received calmly to avoid any panic.
Renato's eyes registered understanding, and he responded
in kind, walking a few paces away with Skinner as casually as
he could.

'The strain got to Cotton.' Skinner looked saddened. 'I can
only imagine he's been drinking for hours, but the girl made
it worse. I didn't check her before she came aboard. This is
partly my fault. But it seems she's a drug addict, obviously a
courier. I should have guessed as much. They've been doing
some drug together, God knows what, but the outcome is
they've both gone apeshit, and somehow they're armed.' He
shook his head. 'Don't ask me how.'

Renato's eyes were wide with horror. 'Shit.'

'Shit is right, Renato. Now here's the good news. She had
a short-wave VHF radio with her, obviously there was going
to be some pick-up of the stuff she's delivering. I've managed
to get it from her and hailed a fishing boat that's less than a
naile away. You and I need to launch the life raft and get to
the captain of that boat. I'll explain why when we're aboard.
But the important thing is to get that gun off Cotton and the
girl. I can't stress enough how dangerous they've become.

I'm going to need your help.'

'They locked us in?'

Skinner nodded. He looked at the floor and then back at
Renato as if weighing up whether to tell him something or
not. It was a brilliantly subtle performance.
'They did worse than that, Renato.'
Renato Lhoon stared at him.

Skinner continued his acting masterclass by allowed a tiny
flit of emotion to cross his face -just enough to indicate a
controlled grief, but not enough to undermine the calm,
reassuring authority he was displaying. 'They shot Pasqual
and Libuano.'

Renato put his hand to his brow and looked round quickly
to the men to check that no one was looking at them. His
pulse was quickening as he absorbed this fresh batch of
unspeakable news. 'My God. My God.'

'Let's stay calm. You come with me and we'll hunt them
down. Make sure the men stay here for their safety, and this
whole thing will be sorted out as quickly as you and I, as the
senior officers, can manage.'

Renato looked at his captain and nodded.

Skinner held his gaze. 'I'm making you officially first officer
of this ship from now. Tell me now if that's a problem
for you.'

Skinner enjoyed watching Renato trying to mask his glee
and assume an air of a man accepting a heavy burden,
marvelling at how easily stupid men could be manipulated,
but he kept his face impassive as the new first officer shook
his head sagely and replied, 'No captain. I'll accept that duty
and do the best I can.'

'Good. If you start by addressing the men for me, I'll just
check the cofferdams.'

Renato put an unwelcome hand on his arm. 'Be careful in
there, Captain.'

Skinner looked at him and for a fraction of a moment
his mask slipped before he could repair it. Renato had a
brief glimpse of a face filled with contempt. He withdrew
his hand.

It took only a few minutes with the flashlight to ensure that
the mines were still in place and then Skinner hurriedly and
gratefully closed the metal door for the last time.

Renato was finishing his talk to the crew: '...and that's
why we must stay here until it's safe to leave. Felix and Sohn
are in charge until we get back. Keep the doors closed. No
one leaves. You hear me? No one.'

The men shifted about uncomfortably until the captain
spoke.

'We're nearly out of this mess. Thanks for your support and
for keeping so calm in the face of all this horror... Renato
and I won't be gone for long and when we come back, this
thing will finally be over.'

Lloyd Skinner had a soothing and mature timbre to his
voice and the men nodded and settled.

The captain let Renato go first. It seemed polite. In reality
it was simply a precaution. That way if the thing was still at
large it would have something to work on be pounds re it got to
him, and secondly it meant that his new first officer didn't
notice his captain slipping the bolt back on the engine room
door as he closed it behind him.

The seagull on the roof of the bridge was asleep when its
head was pulled from its body. Even if it had been awake,
its reaction time would have been no match for the claw-like
hand that tore it apart and crammed it into a gaping, hungry
mouth. The ripping of this new flesh was nothing more than
a delay, but it had its penalties. Repair needed sustenance.
The bones of the gull crunched between sharp teeth, and
the thing that moved the jawbone to pulverize it looked down
with an unfathomable hatred in its narrowed black eyes, and
the stench of clean living humans in its wide nostrils, on the
place where its destiny was being withheld.

'Matthew. Please.'

Matthew still had his back to her, the gun in his arms like
a baby, his head bowed. 'Don't talk to me. Just leave it.'

Esther was groaning with the effort of keeping her mind
intact. 'I can't.., it's the only way. I'm still a virgin. He...
needs it to be a virgin. Please. This madness in my head will
stop when you.., please.'

Matthew Cotton turned and looked at her, his face a stony
oval of misery. 'How can I Esther? How can I do that?'

She groaned again. 'I don't know. You have to... you have
to try.' It was getting too hard to push the mental mess back.

She closed her eyes again and grunted.

Matthew looked at her sweating, contorted face and closed
his own eyes. He had to do something. Was she right? Was
this all he could do? He walked a few paces out from the
shadow of the crane and breathed hard in the night air. It
was sweet. The ocean breaking against the hull of the ship
was as delicious as the breeze, and he listened to its frothy
sound as though it were music.

He stared out to sea, searching his heart for a solutionl
trying to shut his ears and his heart to the sounds of the
suffering girl behind him. Then he saw it. A light, there was
a ship out there. Matthew's heart stopped.

'Esther. There's a ship.'

She groaned again. 'I know.'

'It's the company ship. We're going to be saved.'

'It's not. It's... it's a fishing boat. It's here for Skinner.'

'What?'

'He's going to sink the Lysicrates. Sonstar are splitting the
insurance money with him.., oh God, I can't keep this up.'

Matthew was breathing quickly, his brain filling in blanks,
questions he hadn't asked but that had been there all along
being answered faster than he could collate them.

'Esther. Try. Tell me.'

'The boat's for him. He killed Pasqual and the cadet
because I gave them his radio.' She groaned and held her
head.

Matthew turned back to the dark sea and scanned along
the invisible horizon until his gaze swept past the accommodation block. There, it halted. A tiny movement in his
peripheral vision made him swing his eyes back to the bridge.
Something had moved up there. Something on the roof. As if
it was his ally, the breeze immediately brought a whiff of rot.
Faint, but enough to remind Matthew Cotton that he had a
decision to make.

The boy on the tape that Esther had given him had been
young. She had said so. But the things he had described,
the importance of the virgin in their vile ceremony was
something he could hardly bring himself to think of. He
stood, heart in mouth for a beat waiting to catch another
glimpse of movement. None came. He fought back nausea
and won, but whether he was imagining things or not, it had
been enough to rekindle his terror.

Matthew gulped in some more air, rubbed his face and
turned back to the trembling girl in the shadows. He stood
over her for a second, then knelt and touched her face lightly.
'This is madness. It's not the way I'd hoped this would go,
Esther.' He bowed his head, shame and fear in his eyes. 'I'll
try,' he said softly. 'You have to help me.'

She opened her eyes and looked up at him with a mixture
of gratitude and affection that started to melt something in
Matthew Cotton that had been cold for a very long time.
'We haven't much time.'

She sat up with an effort, and still looking at him unflinch
ingly, took his hand, placed it on her firm breast, then lifted
her face to his and kissed him. Matthew closed his eyes and
felt the softness of her lips as her tongue prized his tight lips
gently apart. His head was reeling. Part of him stood apart
from his body laughing at him. Look at you, it roared. In fear
of your life and yet a young girl kisses you and death seems less impor
tant than the stuff that's already happening in your pants. His heart
had increased its beat again but this time it was not from fear.

Esther withdrew her mouth and he opened his eyes to look
at her. She was struggling now, desperate to say something.

'I want to tell you something. Need to tell you. Before I
lose this gift.., this curse.., whatever the luck this madness
is. I... don't know if you get to remember this stuffor not...
so in case it all goes when I'm ... well you know, there's
something you have to know.'

Matthew blinked at her. His desire had been aroused
embarrassingly quickly. What was the delay?

She wiped at her face and looked at him.

'Molly.'

Matthew's desire melted. He clenched his back teeth.
Esther continued. 'You never knew if she would have
recovered or not ... when you ... when you gave them
permission to turn off the life-support machine. You never
knew if she could hear you, if she knew you were there but
couldn't speak. You've never been able to live with that, have
you? You've been wanting to die too.'

Matthew stared at her. Molly. His darling baby Molly. He
saw her again, was powerless to stop the picture coming back
into his mind again after all these years of keeping it out. He
saw her four-year-old body twisted and stiff from the brain
damage the lack of oxygen from the fire had inflicted on
her, as it raged through their modest but much-loved house
and took the life of her darling mother. He could see Molly's
lifeless eyes staring grotesquely in opposite directions as the
ventilator breathed for her, and a glucose drip kept her flesh
alive. Molly. Molly McKenzie Cotton. The girl that could sing
all the verses of 'New York, New York' and not know why it
was funny to hear it sung in such a little helium voice. The girl
who didn't like to wear shoes in the yard in case she stepped
on a bug and killed it. The girl who wanted her daddy to get
a job on shore because she and Mom missed him so much.
Molly. The most beautiful girl that had ever lived. Before he
could even open his mouth to speak, great hot tears began
rolling down his cheeks. They were tears that had not fallen
for five years, and as they fell it felt as though his soul was
being skinned.

Esther was gritting her teeth again. She groaned and then
drew in a deep breath. 'You need to know this ... she
wouldn't have recovered, Matthew. She was gone. She was
gone before they got her in the ambulance. The bit that
was Molly died as a fireman called William Legget passed
her body to the paramedic. She died then.., at that precise
moment, 2.34 a.m. and she was happy in the last few seconds
of her life. Her feet and legs had burned, but there was no
pain at the time she died. The burns had gone too deep. She
was thinking about a plastic paddling pool you used to blow
up for her in the back yard, of how much she liked the fish
design on it and how cool the water felt on her hot feet. She
died believing that you and Heather were holding her hands,
dangling her legs into the cold clear water. All those weeks in
the hospital. Those long twelve weeks. She wasn't there ...
just her body. You ... you did the right thing. She loved you.
They both did. Molly's at peace now.'

Matthew Cotton opened his lips a little then closed
them again, and then from nowhere that he recognized
a wail erupted in him that tore his mouth open and
threatened to burst his heart. And although the noise
was like that of an animal in agony, it was a noise that
was long overdue.

Esther's mouth turned down as she watched the man's
pain, and tears fell down her own cheeks. She lay back and
groaned. Why had she done it? The Dark One was so near.
Matthew's arousal was her last chance and she had thrown it
away for no other reason than because she had the chance
to help heal his broken heart.

She had no more strength. Esther gave up her fight and
immediately the hot lava of knowledge flooded her head and
made her gasp with the combined pain and ecstasy of it. The
Snowplough had run out of gas. She was his again, he was
COming to claim her, and there was nothing she could do.

:!!

There were too many things to think about at once without
panic drying his saliva, and so Renato Lhoon tried to focus
on them one at a time. He had barely recovered from
the shock of what the flashlight beam had picked out in
the cofferdams, when Skinner hit him with this. Renato
was struggling. They had reached the bridge safely, and
Renato stood quietly in tortured thought as Skinner trained
binoculars on the pin-prick lights of the fishing boat less than
a mile away.

Cotton a murderer? Renato rewound the memories he
had of Cotton at his best and worse. There hadn't been
a single incidence of Cotton getting loaded that Renato
hadn't been party to, usually since it was Renato's paid
duty to scoop him up and get him to bed. There had
been plenty of shore incidents too, but without exception
Matthew Cotton's drinking bouts resulted in nothing more
than some routine melancholy philosophizing before he
quietly passed out. In all the time he'd known him, Renato
had never seen one single display of violence or aggression
from the sad drunk, even in the face of extreme provo
cation. But drugs. Everyone knew they made you crazy.
The difficulty was that Cotton never took them. He'd been
offered plenty, particularly when they were ashore in some
of the seedy drinking dens Cotton ended up dragging them
to.

But unless Matthew had the supernatural power of decep
tion to hide such a habit from him, even when the power
of speech and standing up had deserted him, Renato had
only ever observed a sad loser of a man who drank until his
tank was full and then slept. Cotton wasn't looking to alter
his mind. He just wanted to be unconscious. Why would he
change the habit of the last few years and take something that
made him go mad? Was the girl a factor? Perhaps, but that
seemed as crazy as the idea of Matthew Cotton messing with
mind-altering chemicals. Like most seamen, Renato had seen
plenty of drug couriers. The good ones, the ones who didn't
use, were harder to spot.

But the low-life ones, the junkies paying for their habit by
risking their freedom, often tried to use merchant ships and
were usually foiled by their gaunt, dull-haired appearance
and shifty, rodent-like behaviour that was a give-away to all but
the most unobservant of crew members. They rarely got passage
unless the captain was taking a cut. Esther Mulholland,
in stark contrast, glowed with health. He thought of her
taut, muscular body jogging around the deck, of the way
her thick hair shone and how the whites of her eyes were
almost blue with the clarity that sleeping soundly brings.
You didn't get to look like that by injecting smack. Even if
she was a courier she most certainly wasn't a user. So what
the hell had happened? It didn't make sense. How could
two such unlikely people get out of their heads enough to
commit a pointless, motiveless double-murder? But then, if
he stopped for a moment to think about the other things
that he'd witnessed on this ship in the last twenty four hours,
Renato realized that virtually nothing made sense any more.
He rubbed a little too hard at the back of his neck, trying to
find something in all this confusion and horror that could
make him feel safe again.

'Captain.'

'Mmm?' replied Skinner, refocusing his binoculars.
'Is the company ship near?'

'Yes. I guess it's very near.'

'Can I know now why we were asked to meet it here?'

Skinner kept looking through the binoculars, his face
stony, his hands steady. 'To be honest, Renato, I have no
idea. I simply do as I'm instructed. Given our stricken circumstances
1 ' "

et s just be grateful we were.'

Skinner was not particularly cautious in his reply and didn' t
even cast a glance to his companion to see how it had been
received.

This unusual oversight was because his attention was elsewhere.
The binoculars were no longer trained on the fishing
boat, but on the shadows of two figures that he could just
make out behind hold four. Slowly Skinner lowered the
binoculars from his face and turned to face Renato. 'They're
on the deck.'

Renato's eyes widened but he said nothing. He didn't need
to ask who.

'Now listen. This is going to take guts, and if you aren't
up to it just say.' .

'I'm cool.'

Skinner nodded in approval, a duplicitous and double-
edged nod since what was receiving the captain's approval
was that Renato was as far away from cool as it was possible to
get. That was just fine. 'We need to go down there. It's our last
chance. I firmly believe they might run amok in the engine
room where the men are unless we can stop them. Have you
any idea what a Russian AK47 can do to a group of human
beings in a confined space?' Skinner let himself think about
that for a moment with longing, then continued. 'Here's what
to do: I think I can approach unseen from behind using the
starboard side of the holds while you walk right on up and
confront them. They'll be distracted. They're not expecting
to see you. If you think you have the balls you can keep them
busy, reason with them while I come up behind and get the
gun away from them.'

Renato listened solemnly. None of that made him nervous.
Far from inspiring fear in him, he was actually fighting to
make himself afraid of two people he didn't believe were any threat at all. He nodded, glad that the plan was so
straightforward.

Skinner held his gaze as though summing him up.
Renato waited. There was clearly more.

'There's something I think you should know before you
talk to them.'

'Yeah?'

'When I found them in the radio room, just after they'd
killed Pasqual, they claimed they didn't do it. They were wired
bt they both claimed innocence.'

Hope started to grow in Renato's heart. No matter how
hard he tried to imagine Cotton as a drug-crazed, cold
blooded killer, it still wasn't working. Maybe he wasn't. That
would be good. He hated Matthew for being Matthew, for
keeping him back, for treating him like a lackey, hated him
enough to want to do him down, to take his job. But the
kind of hate he would have to kindle for the person that
killed his two crewmates would be quite a different thing.
Renato cheered considerably and visibly. 'Well, maybe they
were telling the truth. I mean did you actually hear the shots,
did you actually see...'

Skinner interrupted. 'They said.., it was you.'

The captain's slight hesitancy was perfect. Renato's mouth
opened a little.

'What?'

'Cotton said they'd caught you. That you had a gun. That
you'd shot them both because they knew it was you who'd
been behind all the killings.'

'But hat s insane.'

'Yes. It's insane. But it's best you realize how completely
out of it they are, that they'll say anything, the first thing that
COmes into their spaced-out heads, before you go down there
and deal personally with that insanity.'

Renato took a moment to work out a way over this new
mental obstacle course. He expelled a mouthful of air and
put his hands on his hips.

Skinner turned his attention back to the deck.
'Captain?,
'Yes?'

'When they said that stuff. About me being a killer. Did
You believe them?'

Skinner smiled an internal smile, the secret smile of a
tiger gazing through long grass at an innocent and trapped
animal. Good question, Renato. Fucking great question. Renato
was proving to be the perfect patsy. It was almost too easy.
Skinner arranged his face into a mixture of regret shame and
resolve and turned back to face him. 'Forgive me, Renato, but
for a while, until I realized you were in the engine room, tha!
it was impossible, the answer was.., yes.'

Renato's eyes registered alarm and confusion. 'Captain...
Keeping his voice and face as reassuring as he could, he
put up a hand to stop Renato before he could protest an
innocence both men knew to be true, but for very different
reasons.

'They're persuasive, Renato. Chillingly, calculatingly believable.
That's why I'm warning you. If they think you can do
them harm they'll say anything to escape. They're so far
gone it shouldn't be hard to disbelieve their lies. They're the
lies of the mad. Humour them as much as you can without
putting yourself at risk, and concentrate on removing their
weapon.'

Renato looked out of the black windows to the hold:
deck. He nodded. Mad. It was all mad. But it needed to
end. He was a first officer now, and he was crucial to the whole
thing.

'Let's go.'

How could he describe the pain? There was no physical
impairment, no fleshly agony or slow methodical torture
that could come close to thesensation that scoured Matthew
Cotton as he lay on his back on the cool metal deck of the
Lysicrates. His chest threatened not to be able to contain i
swollen searing heart for much longer, but the rest of hi
body felt nothing. Flesh, bone and blood had been distilledl
into torment.

'Molly.'

He groaned the name with a throat that was raw from
wziling and wrapped his arms over his face.

Esther lay beside him, the gun clasped between them
like a baby. Her sweat-soaked clothes stuck to her body as
though she had been hosed down, and with closed eyes she
spoke sporadically into the night, a garbled and senseless
soliloquy that seemed to alternate between expressions of
joy and pain.

Renato stood at some distance taking in this bizarre scene,
his fists clenched and his heart beating in his throat. Any
doubts he might have had about the captain's interpretations
of events were put to rest. Esther Mulholland and Matthew
Cotton looked utterly degenerate.

Renato glanced up the deck to the holds at the bow where
Skinner had taken his circuitous route, but there was nothing
to see yet. He was on his own, and he had little idea of what he
was going to do or say. A groan from Esther kick-started his
resolve again and Renato Lhoon walked forward. It seemed
as he stood over the couple that the captain's plan was
unnecessary. The evil-looking weapon that lay on the deck
between their limp bodies was there simply to be picked up.
Renato wiped a hand over his mouth, looked up quickly to
the dark shadows of the holds, then bent down carefully and
stretched over the softly groaning Esther Mulholland.

Matthew Cotton's hand shot out and gripped Renato by
the wrist. He fell forward onto his knees beside Esther and let
out a gasp of pain and surprise. Cotton's grip was particularly
firm, making Renato wince, and the ferocious nature of his
expression suggested that he had no immediate plans to
release it.

'Leave it.' Cotton spat the words in Renato's face.
'Okay. Okay. Easy, Matthew.'

Esther opened her eyes and squinted up at them. She
Siled the relaxed smile of a Californian surfer, and pointed
at Renato's contorted face. 'You shouldn't have hit your wife
that time in the kitchen. She doesn't love you any more. She's
just scared of you now. And anyway, she was right about the
money for your son's schooling. There was none missing.
None at all. You just added it up wrong.' She closed her
eyes again and laughed, not unpleasantly. Then. Fuckwits,
all of them.'

Renato stared at her, the pain in his wrist forgotten.
Matthew picked up the AK47 with his free hand then
hauled the kneeling Renato back into a standing position
before pushing him roughly away. 'Stand back. Hands on
your head.'

Renato Lhoon did not know whether to be more shocked
by the fact that his shipmate was training a gun on him, or
that a paying passenger had just related news of his private
life to him that it was impossible for her to know. He tried
to breathe normally, to regain his composure, and to start
the process he placed his hands obediently on his head and
looked back at Matthew.

Cotton was in bad shape. His puffed eyes were swollen
from crying and his face was dirty and tear-stained. When
he spoke he had a catch in his voice. 'What the luck are you
doing, Renato?'

Cotton looked too mad, too unsteady with the gun in his
hand for it to be sensible to upset him further. Despite
wanting to run screaming from this loony duo, Renato tried
to keep his voice calm. 'I just wanted to help out, Matthew.
You know. See if you needed help.'

Matthew stared at him as though he had only just noticed
it was Renato. 'What?'

He was clearly confused. Renato tried again. 'Are you okay,
Matthew? Is anything wrong?'

Matthew took one hand off the gun and pressed his fingers
to his brow. 'Where are the rest of the crew?

'Safe, Matthew.'

'I said, where the fuck are they?' he shouted.

Renato took one hand off his head to make a patting
motion in the air. 'Sorry. Sorry. They're still in the engine
room. Everyone.'

'We have to get them up here. Keep everyone together.
skinner. Where's Skinner?'

Renato had been wondering the same thing, but before
he could answer a shadow flitted between the derrick and
the hold behind Cotton. He was there.

'I don't know Matthew. I came to find you.'

Matthew Cotton looked at his prisoner properly for the
first time. It was no monster. It was Renato Lhoon, the man
who had been saving Matthew's skin for years. The man
who picked him up out of his own vomit, who put him to
bed, who covered his back when he fell asleep on watch or
did any of the dozens of moronic, irresponsible, dangerous
things he did when he was loaded. It was his friend. Why
in God's name was he pointing a gun at his head? Matthew
lowered the weapon and let it hang by his side. Slowly and
with great caution, Renato did the same with his arms.
'I'm sorry, Renato. I'm all fucked up.'

'No problem, Matthew. We all are.'

'Pasclual and Libuano are dead.'

'I know.'

'It was Skinner.'

Renato stared at him. The accuracy of the captain's
assessment was astonishing. He had been on the verge
of believing that Matthew was coming to his senses, that
he was no threat, and yet here were the crazy lies starting.
What had the captain said? Humour him, pretend to
believe him until Skinner could creep up and surprise
hina. Renato didn't need to feign horror. He was still
reeling from Esther's piece of news, still seeing his wife's
bloodied and broken face in the kitchen two years ago. He
tried to keep his mind on Cotton. 'Skinner? Jesus, that can't
be possible.'

Matthew got down on his haunches, gun over his knees.
His head was bent forward in exhausted submission. 'This is
his gun, Renato. Guess it comes in handy if anyone objects
to going down with the ship. But know what? Our murdering
captain isn't our worst problem. We've got more than one
monster on board.' He laughed and looked up at Renato.
'You think I'm crazy. I reckon I might be, but we saw the
fucker. Looked right in its eyes. The one that's been doing
the slicing and dicing. I blasted it and ran. Didn't stick around
to see what shape it was in.'

Without looking at her, he indicated Esther with an affec
tionate flip of the hand.

'Our oracle here is saying it's still out there, and know
what? That's good enough for me.'

Skinner was only five feet behind him, low and danger
ous, the handgun held up close to his shoulder. Renato
tried very hard to keep his eyes on Matthew in case he
should look up and follow the gaze that was fixed on what
was behind him.

Cotton groaned and mashed at the back of his scalpaag in.
Both hands were on top of his head, off the gun. 'I know.
You think I've gone apeshit. The whole thing is fucking out
of hand here. Help me, man. I can't see any of us getting
out of this in one piece.'

The butt of the handgun swiped the back of Matthew
Cotton's head with a force that sent a pink spray of burst
blood vessels from his nose as he crumpled, unconscious ....

Esther half-opened her eyes and looked impassively up at
Skinner. She had, of course, been expecting him.

Lloyd Skinner snatched up the AK47 and despite the
amount of new information that Renato's brain was being
required to process, it nevertheless registered some subtleties
about the process that made him uncomfortable. It bothered
him that instead of throwing the handgun to Renato, the
captain slipped it into his own shirt. But what bothered him
more was the way in which Skinner was handling the semi
automatic. It was with a visible familiarity. Renato quickly
reminded himself of Skinner's past in Vietnam and dis
missed it.

But since the fluidity with such a specialist weapon as
Skinner was displaying was not exactly an appropriate skill
for a captain of a old tub that hauled iron ore from one
dead-beat country to another, his subconscious mind did
not dismiss it. Renato drew in a large breath of air through
his nostrils and turned his attention back to Esther, who was
looking at Skinner without interest.

'You threw the ring your mother left you into the sea. Just
off the coast of Nigeria. Emerald surrounded by diamonds.
That was the last thing of theirs that you owned. It's thirteen
feet below silt now.'

Skinner pointed the gun at her. His face had lost its
composure. 'Shut the luck up, you freak.'

Esther laughed and closed her eyes. 'The combination
on the aluminium case in which the mine detonators
are hidden is contained in the dog-tag numbers round
the handle. They're not your dog-tags. They belonged to
Samuel Denton Mendez, the man you murdered. His family
thought you tried to save him. They sent you them after
the funeral. You keep them because you like to remind
yourself about stupidity and hate. You reckoned that your
positioning of the mines will sink this ship in less than ten
minutes. Know what? You're better than you think. It'll
take less than eight,'

She looked across at Renato as if he'd just joined them,
her eyebrows arched in surprise.

'He's going to kill you.'

Skinner moved quickly across to her and pressed the
barrel of the gun against her temple. 'I said, shut the
lack up!'

Renato took a step forward, his hands out. 'Lloyd, please.'

It was a name Lhoon never used, and it made the captain
look up. Skinner took very little time to realize how he looked
and he wrestled his facial contortions back into the calmer
fafade of a trustworthy human being.

'I've had enough of this drug-crazed shit to last me a
lifetime.' With a glare at Esther that was shielded from his
first officer's view, he lowered the gun and stepped back to
Matthew Cotton's slumped form. 'We need to get this psycho
secured down below with the men. The crew can take care of
him. Take his arm.'

Renato bent and wrapped Cotton's arm over his neck. Big,
well-fed American bones always weighed heavily on Renato's
slighter Filipino frame, and although he was used to guiding
the drunken Matthew along corridors to his cabin, the one
thing he had never managed to achieve was to carry Cotton
when he was completely unconscious. The difference in their
builds was simply too great. When that happened Renato
would either drag him somewhere safe or leave him until
he could at least bear his own weight. Although he knew
it, the situation here was pretty different from the simplicity
of a passed-out drunk, and so Renato gave it his best shot,
grunting to get the body upright. It had never worked before.
It wasn't going to work now.

'I don't think I can manage him on my own, Captain.'
Skinner made an irritable noise between his teeth, transferred
the gun to his other hip and grabbed Matthew's
left arm.

She moved quicker than either man would have thought
possible. Before Skinner could drop Cotton and point the
gun, Esther was already well shielded by the row of holds
leading to the accommodation block.

'Fuck.'

Skinner narrowed his eyes. She was gone. He took stock
for a moment and then made the decision that Esther
Mulholland was old news. He had both the guns. Cottor
was out of the picture. She could go tell the world its fucking
weird secrets for all he cared. It was time to wrap this thing up.
He motioned to Renato, and together they dragged Matthew
Cotton along the deck to join the others.



19


As its powerful jaws worked on the piece of Pasqual's upper
arm it had chosen to consume, a finger poked lazily at the
last two lesions in its own skin that were still to close. It was
a finger that consisted mainly of bone, but the fleshy lumps
that spiralled around the digit were growing on to it rather
than peeling off, giving it the pallor of a wound that had been
coated in yellowing, waxy fat. The thing that crouched over
the half-eaten body of Pasqual Sanquiloa was almost ready,
but its gratification in that state had been sullied. Hatred
boiled in its borrowed veins as it ate. This was not how it
had planned the moments before the final consecration.
Scavenging to repair itself was not fit for a creature that was
to become a god. The mix of magic. That was the weakness. It
had been too tempting to use both the mastery of the powers
of the Sun God priest that it had once been, and those more
pungent ones bestowed upon a dark master of the soil that
it would soon be again, to bring about the unholy glory of
this living, breathing state. But soon the darker of the two
would dominate. The toying finger moved down to the long
penis which hung from a blood-encrusted, scabbed crotch.
It stroked itself and closed its new eyelids as it stirred the
organ. But not yet. Not yet.

The thing swallowed Pasqual's flesh and moved its face
closer to the corpse to choose another morsel. A hand that
was still partially constructed from the metal of an oil drum,
ripped at the soft throat and deftly removed a piece of muscle
the size of a small pigeon breast. It could feel her. It had
called her and she was ready. But there were complications
that fermented in the dark hollows of its soul. It bit into the
red wet muscle. The food was also giving it little pleasure.
This was scavenging.

To have any kind of piquancy, flesh consumed had to be
from creatures that were still living, still suffering, aware of
what was happening to them.

It chewed mechanically on the tasteless dead sustenance
and ruminated on the irritations of ceremony. The hand
maiden was no different from the other offerings. All sacri
fices were granted a knowingness by the Sun God's magic that
even it as a priest, as maker and bestower of the gift, could not
be privy to, and barely understood. That had always torn at its
soul when it was a man. How dare the prey be more aware
than the hunter, even though in their innocence they could
do nothing with it but sweat in an ecstasy in preparation to
die, spouting their uncontrolled verbiage for anyone wise
enough to know, to listen, and act on the morsels that fell
from such a random and unpredictable table? His darker
side would rectify that. It had other powers now, other
gifts that were far in excess of the simple gift of knowing
too much. Had it not foiled death itself? When had the
Sun God performed such a miracle? Soon, not only would
it possess that same gift of truth possessed by the sacrificed,
but it would have a timeless, changeable, endlessly powerful
and agile body that could sustain the physical demands that
Such knowledge laid on a mortal frame. But until then it must
be wary. The man who was with her, the one who had dared
to tear its flesh with the weapon that shot fire, he had already
Caused it harm. It was not to happen again.

It stopped chewing. The flesh on its back that had skin
prickled with electricity, and the flesh that had not yet
fused with skin oozed instead with lymph. It was the most
primordial of warnings. It craned its neck round, an animal
disturbed at the feed. She was there, standing in the doorway,
hands at her side looking at it with longing and love as it
crouched over the corpse. It gazed back, drool spilling from
the corner of its gaping mouth. But its pleasure was under
mined. She was here. It was time. But since it had not yet
called her, it had not been searching for her clean, repugnant
smell as it ate, not scanning with its senses to know where she
was. His handmaiden was here, but there was a brooding and
hungry rage in its soul that it had not felt her approach. Her
smell always told it where she was, but how could she mask
her thoughts so successfully as to approach unannounced?
For that, amongst many other things, there would have to be
retribution. The grin widened at the thought and the chewed
remains of its hasty meal fell to the floor with a soft slap.

His headache was worse than any hangover Matthew had ever
experienced. For several minutes he lay perfectly still, teeth
bared in agony, breathing hard as he fought back nausea
and tried to work out where he was. There were low voices
all around him, and as his vision returned he realized he was
looking at the shiny curve of a turbine.

Matthew took a breath and pushed himself into a sitting
position. Sohn Haro was sitting on a bench next to him, and
Cotton rubbed the wound on the back of his head and looked
at the engineer.

'What's going on, Mattu?'

Matthew coughed, the reverberation shooting white-hot
rods into his skull, and then looked solemnly at the man.

'You tell me.'

'They say to keep you here prisoner. That you done bad
things up there.'

Matthew straightened up further and held his forehead,
trying desperately not to cough again. 'They're lying.'
Sohn nodded. 'So what going on?'

'Stuff that would make me sound crazy if I told you.'
Sohn shook his head. 'I know you ain't crazy. I think I going
crazy when Chelito tell me some things before he die. Things
I can't tell nobody. But I not crazy. You neither.'

Matthew looked at the little man's wizened face with relief
and affection. He looked round at the other men who were
sitting in groups around the room, at Felix Chadin trying to
retain his men's trust and calm. Some of them looked up at
Cotton, but it was not with hostility. They looked scared.
'Do they think I'm a killer?'

'No.'

'Why not? I'm sure Skinner did a good job of persuading
them.'

Sohn looked out into the big room that was more his home
than anywhere else on earth. "Cos you don't say to someone
like me to keep a man prisoner. Don't say "keep him here
real careful and no one leave the room". You don't say all
that if you tell the truth, and then lock the doors from the
outside.'

'Shit. They've locked us in?'

Sohn nodded. 'I tell the men it's okay. Stop them panicking.
But I reckon it ain't all right. Is that so?'

'That's so. We're fucked.'

Sohn sighed as though Matthew had said the soup on the
lunch-time menu was finished. 'Something got Fen. Got him
in the cofferdams. We hear it taking him.'

Sohn shook his head remembering the horror of those
Screams. 'Maybe it come for us next.'

Matthew closed his eyes as he thought about how Fen
might have met his end at the hands of the thing he'd
glimpsed so briefly. It had left its repulsive image forever
adhered to his soul. And then he opened them again.

'When did that happen?'

'About and hour ago. Seem like a lifetime.'

Matthew looked across at the door that led to the coffer
dams and then back out into the room. He was thinking
hard. Thinking about the manhole cover to hold two that
Esther had unbolted and left open. Thinking about how
that escape route was clearly for the monster to leave the
hold by. Thinking that if it could come and go only from
the hold, then how could it cross the engine room to get
into the cofferdams with the room full of crew members?

'There must be a hole in the hold.' He said it softly, as
though to himself.

Sohn looked at him wearily. The blow to the head Matthew
had received was not doing him any favours. Sohn's voice
was gentle when he replied. No one was in good shape.
It was the least he could do to humour him. 'What hold,
Matthew?'

'Hold number two.'

'Yeah? Captain checked the cofferdams two days ago.
Don't think there's no holes. Don't worry now.'

Sohn wasn't getting the point. And why should he? He
knew something strange was up but he didn't know how bad
it was. If the beast could make its way through the garbage
in the hold down through a hole into the cofferdams, then
maybe a man could do it in reverse. If the manhole cover
was still off. If he could find enough air to breathe in forty
square feet of stinking trash.

Matthew stood up.

'Sohn. You got fire-fighting equipment down here?'

'Sure.'

'Breathing apparatus?'

'Sure. You know we have.' Sohn pointed a finger at Cot
ton's chest. 'You responsible for checking it.'

A wave of hot shame broke over Matthew's face. Sure. He
would have been responsible. And he would have been blind
drunk when that check was supposed to have been done. 'I'm
going to need it, Sohn. A flashlight too.'

Sohn looked at him. 'What for, Mattu?'

'I'm going to get us out.'

The engineer looked around the room at the remaining
crew of the doomed Lysicrates, felt a stirring from his own
death sentence deep in his belly and winced. Sohn thought
about how much he wanted to see his squabbling daughters
again, his hard-working wife and his untidy yard full of
machines that needed fixing. How he wanted to die in his
own bed and not gulping freezing water in a sealed metal
room that was headed for the ocean floor. He nodded.

'Thank you, Mattu. That would be good.'

Being a man possessed of highly-tuned iwtuition and watch
fulness, it would have been unlikely that Skinner could have
missed the evidence of Renato's doubts. He watched him
sizing up the situation, his anxiety as naked as a child's,
and once again Skinner despised the stupidity that made
Renato's mental processes so visible that an observer could
practically see rusty wheels turning. The captain was going
to make very sure that his newly-promoted first officer didn't
leave his side until it was time for him to do his party trick
of climbing aboard that fishing boat. tie walked a step
behind Lhoon as they made their way in silence to the
bridge.

There was such comfort in having his own gun-strap over
his shoulder and the barrel by his hip. Part of him wanted
that thing to come again. It would feel good to blast it open
with twenty rounds and see it get up after that. But there
WOuld be plenty of time to use up his ammunition. There was
a Whole boatload of ignorant peasant fishermen who needed
to be removed quickly and without fuss. It was going to be a
busy night.

They reached the bridge and Renato walked over to the
long bank of windows, crossed his arms and looked out to
the hold deck.

Skinner watched him carefully as he picked up the hand
set of the VHF and hailed the fishing boat. He hadn't wanted
to do this in Renato's hearing, but there was no way the man
was parting from him. He would just have to be careful with
what he said. They were being careful anyway. Just in case
another unseen boat was picking up their transmissions. It
might not look good at the wreck enquiry if some passing
sailboat could quote a conversation about how the plans
were coming along to sink a bulk carrier. No, he was sure
no confidence would be breached.

'This is Fishing Fancy. Calling Lucky Lad.'

Renato stayed still, staring out at the tiny lights of the boat
that was being hailed. There was a delay and then a reply.
'This is Lucky Lad. Go ahead Fishing Fancy. Channel 23.'
Skinner retuned. He glanced at Renato and cleared his
throat. 'Fishing completed. Ready to launch and come
aboard. Over.'

There was a longer delay than the first and then the crackle
of the American voice. 'Looking forward to welcoming you,
Captain. Over.'

Renato turned round and faced the captain. Skinner shot
him a winning smile that was undermined a little by the grip
he kept on the handle of the AK47. 'Nearly there Renato.'

'Why are you not using the Lysicrates name, Captain?'
Skinner sighed, thinking fast, then using a tone of conspiracy
held his new second officer with a stern look. 'Can
I trust you, Renato?'

Lhoon nodded.

The captain nodded back. 'I didn't just come across the
fishing boat. It has a company man on board. He has the
orders from Hong Kong concerning why we're meeting
another boat all in order and legal and I'm sure it will be
explained, but it's company orders. I don't know why any
more than you do. I guess the skipper will make everything
clear when we get aboard.'

Renato looked doubtful. 'And the fishing you just completed?'

Skinner controlled the urge to pin Lhoon to the wall
with bullets and instead sighed. 'Sonstar are sticklers for
procedure, Renato. You know as well as I do that if the two
senior officers leave the vessel we have to make sure there
are officers on watch and in charge. The fishing code was to
tell them that had been done without alerting any listeners
to the fact.'

'But there's no one on watch.'

'I think, given the circumstances, that will be forgiven when
we tell them what we've been through.'

'Is someone from Sonstar on that boat?'

'Yes,' replied Skinner truthfully, then added, 'We need to
go now.'

Renato leant forward onto the instrument panel and bent
his head. 'Captain. I'm having a really bad time with all this.

Can you.just give me a minute to get my head together?'

'We don't have a minute, Renato.'

Renato rubbed his eyebrows. 'Can I ask you a personal
question?'

Skinner tightened. 'If it's relevant.'

Renato looked as deeply into Skinner's eyes as he could.
'Did you really take your mother's ring and drop it into the
sea, just where the girl said?'

Skinner looked down at his feet and when he looked back
up, he had softened his eyes. He gazed steadily back at the
man with the kindest and most compassionate expression
that was in his repertoire. It was a good one. It was full of
sadness and stoicism. 'I never knew my mother, Renato. I
was raised by Jesuits in a orphanage in New Jersey. Those
gentlemen of the cloth took great delight in telling me that
she was an alcoholic, abandoned single mother who choked
to death on her vomit in a one-roomed apartment above a
real estate office in Queens. The only thing she left me was
a desire to stamp out religion and save drunks.'

Renato swallowed. 'I'm sorry.'

'The girl is crazy. Don't let it get to you.'

Renato held his gaze. 'She was right, though. About me.'

Skinner was getting bored with this. 'So maybe she heard
talk from the crew. Who knows?'

'There was no talk. No one knew.'

'Then I can't help you. I don't know how she could have
guessed such a thing.'

Renato hesitated. 'Tell me, then, that she wasn't right
about other stuff.'

Skinner kept his eyes soft though his heart was made
granite. 'She wasn't right. She's out of her head.'

Renato looked at him for a beat, then nodded and moved
across the floor to join him. Skinner gestured for him to go
first and Renato looked askingly at him again. The captain
answered the unasked question. 'I need to cover us both.
In case.'

Renato said nothing, but walked on. Skinner let him go
then picked up the VHF radio and placed its carrying strap
over his shoulder. Renato looked at him. 'Shouldn'twe leave
that here in case the crew need it?'

Skinner was stone. 'You think it's good seamanship to be
at sea in the lifeboat without communication?'

Renato said nothing, but moved to the door.

Skinner watched the back of Renato's head as he exited,
then fbllowed him. The man who followed was a man who for
the first time in years was thinking about his parents. Lloyd
Skinner was remembering his mother's tight-lipped refusal to
listen to him as she sat on her cheap brown sofa, the television
remote in her hand, changing the channels all the time as he
spoke, as he tried to find some words to describe his war to
her, his face streaming with the last tears he ever shed. He
remembered the round, grey face of his father poking from
the kitchen doorway, hiding in there with a beer, hoping
that the atmosphere would change sufficiently that he could
come back in, sit down and get on with his bovine life in
front of the TV. The TV that in the sixties never showed
the pictures of what their son had been through. Of what
he had become. Of what it had done to them all. And he
remembered the ring.

The one she'd thrown weakly at him seven years later from
her hospital bed, gasping from under her oxygen mask that
if he wasn't some kind of a faggot why didn't he go out and
marry a nice girl? The same ring he'd thrown to the strange,
fat African fishes off the coast of Nigeria.

Like everything else on board the run-down, beat-up piece
of scrap metal that was the Lysicrates, the fire-fighting appar
atus was not exactly state-of-the-art. But as he moved slowly
through the dark, dank tunnel of the cofferdams, Matthew
Cotton could not stop himself touching the mask and cylin
der that hung on his back on the webbing harness, as though
they were an enchanted sword and shield.

The dripping, echoing vault was like a dreamscape in the
beam of the flashlight. Darkness that seemed interminable
stretched before him, but Matthew walked as quickly as the
physical restrictions would allow. There was no time for fear,
even when his journey took him over the hideous remains of
Fen Sahg, a dark ugly mess that Cotton kept the flashlight off
as he stepped over it with haste. He carried on quickly with a
shudder. A sweep of the beam as he passed along the high
sides of the hull revealed that each hold wall had its own neat
steel cylinder attached to it. He had to admire the captain's
thoroughness. It didn't take a genius to work out that a hole
blown in every hold simultaneously would take this ship to the
bottom in minutes. Particularly given the kind of cargo being
Carried. Matthew couldn't think of a better cargo to absorb
water quickly than uncompacted trash. How could Matthew
have thought that the captain's acceptance of such a volatile
and illegal cargo had been misguided or haphazard? It had
been meticulously planned.

There was no point in Matthew trying to remove or defuse
these devices. He knew nothing about explosives. The best
he could do was to get out of here and stop the person who
did from detonating them. If anything, though, Skinner had
done him a favour.

It made it easier to count the holds by their marker mines
as he progressed towards the bow. If Matthew thought that
it would be hard to find hold two and its split side, then
he needn't have worried. Already by hold four the smell
in the confined space was enough to tempt him to put on
the foul-smelling rubber mask that would exclude it. But no.
There was at most fifteen minutes of air in the cylinder, and
God knew if he could get through what he had to face in that
time. He took a breath through his mouth and closed off the
breathing through his nose to stop himself being sick.

A few more yards and he was there. He swung the beam
up the wall and there about nine feet above his head was
what he'd been looking for. A ragged gash in the side of
the hold wall caused by nothing more sinister than rust had
been widened by God knew what into a roughly oval opening
around two feet by four feet wide. On the floor beneath was
a pile of stinking, putrescent trash that had fallen from the
hold's wound, and as he looked up, smaller bits of unidentifiable
matter were continuing to fall at random. It simply
looked like a gash in garbage bag. It looked impenetrable,
disgusting, solid. But worse. It was nine feet up a smooth
metal wall.

Matthew stood looking up at the hell-hole for a moment,
then stepped back and stretched out his arms. He could
easily touch both sides of the cofferdams at once. That
meant that if he could wedge himself against one wall with
his shoalders he could push himself up like a climber in
a chimney. For a moment he shuddered at what he might
encounter in that hole full of seeping mush, but there was no
choice. Well, there was. But the Matthew Cotton that might
have quietly welcomed death was gone. Esther had given him
back Heather and Molly. He could think about them again.
Most importantly, he could think of his darling Molly and
not skewer himself on that spit of uncertainty as to whether
the most beautiful girl in the world had died at her father's
whispered agreement to a consultant, and a shaky signature
on a consent form. If he was going to die now, it be would be
trying to save the woman who had given him back his past.
He owed Esther that. It would be trying to save all those men
back in that room who had no idea yet what Skinner had in
mind for them. He looked up at the hole once more then,
since he would have no hand free to do so once he had
pulled himself into that hole, he tied the flashlight handle to
his shoulder strap, slipped the mask over his head, tightened
it and began to breathe sweet air.

The push up the wall was good in theory but an ordeal in
practice. Legs that had once been strong and athletic had
lost their tone an age ago when drinking replaced running
as Matthew Cotton's favourite sport, and as he forced his body
up, snagging his sweating back on shards of rough iron, part
of him wondered if he would make it. He stopped, trying to
keep his breathing shallow, not to use up too much air, and
then with one more push, he was level with the bottom of
the hole.

There was nothing about it that suggested an entry point.
atthew imagined the weight of several hundreds of tonnes
of trash pressing down on this one point and his stomach
monstrous thing had come and gone
flipped.

But
the
rough here. He was sure of that. Asad even if that thing
vas more powerful and more agile, it was only slightly bigger
than him. He had to trust that it could be done.

Cotton took a deep suck of air and with one swift move
ment, before he had any more time to think, grabbed the
ragged metal edge of the hole and swung his legs up and into
the mush of trash. A small avalanche of material tumbled OVer
his head, slapping him wetly and adhering to his body as he
tried to contain his panic and stay still until it subsided. It
stopped and, with his arms aching with the strain, Cotton
pushed and corkscrewed his feet deeper into the solid pile.
He found enough purchase behind the lip of the opening
to wedge his legs, let them take his weight and relieve the
pressure on his arms, and he used the moment to stop and
take stock. The task seemed ridiculous. How could a human
being burrow its way through such an impossible obstacle?
He was mad. He closed his eyes for a moment, a tangible
fear threatening to choke him.

Death was everywhere on this ship. It was potentially
and immediately ahead of him, a grotesque, ugly, crushing,
choking death of the kind that had taken Thomas Inlatta,
But it was also waiting back in the engine room, offering
a choice between being mown down like trapped rats by
Russian hardware, or being left to drown as the Lysicrates
dived for the bottom. Matthew Cotton gritted his teeth and
an anger started to burn in his breast. It was anger that had
lain dormant for years and the release of it made him cry out
with fury. He kicked at the garbage with a strength he didn't
know he possessed and with a primal scream that came from
the depth of his lungs his foot lashed out at the solid lump
and broke through into a space.

Matthew stopped and panted. He moved the leg around,
pushing it further into the hole. It still touched nothing. A
frenzied scrabbling with one hand ripped at the garbage and
within a minute he had exposed a hole big enough to get
shoulders through.

Matthew stopped and breathed normally, then, manipulating
the flashlight on his shoulder with difficulty, he pointed the
beam into the blackness of the hole. There seemed to be a
tunnel off to the left, but it had an end. Whether that was
because it merely stopped or because it then cornered and
climbed again, Matthew couldn't be sure. But he had already
made up his mind. He pulled his foot clear carefully to avoid
any more falling debris and, wedging his knee against the
metal edge of the gash in the hold, pushed himself up and
into the macabre tunnel.

It was a surreal experience being inside the rubber mask.
Two round circles of glass were his windows on the scene
around him, and the sound of his own breathing in this
confined space was almost deafening. The tunnel was of
an irregular shape but it was big enough that his shoulders
could fit in and allow him to move forward without rubbing
the sides. It was a gradient that climbed in shallow incline
and then steepened, but at the moment it was not too
troublesome to crawl in. The main difficulty was keeping
his head. The sides of this fragile and repulsive environment
were crusted, oozing and pockedwith things he recoiled from
as his hand pressed on them. But the end he had picked
out was approaching and he concentrated on navigating his
way safely. It was taking all his force of will not to think of
the weight and nature of the material that was piled above
him, of what would happen if this frail ceiling loosened and
collapsed. To give such a horror head-time would make
him scream with claustrophobia. He had to think of this
repugnant tunnel as a routine and secure way to the surface,
keep that thought to the fore and try to save his air. Matthew
shuffled forward a few more feet to where the light hit an end
to the Passage and stopped. It was not the end. He turned
Over to put the weight on one shoulder and shone the light
up what was almost a vertical chimney.

His heart sank. Already he was completely disorientated.
The tunnel had been climbing and he thought it was heading
for the bow, but he couldn't be sure. Could he climb up
this nightmare vent without falling and bringing the whole
thing down? Where the fuck would it take him? He knew the
manhole led from the Australian ladder on the starboard side.
of the hold. But what if it just led to the surface and he was
trapped beneath the huge metal plate of the hatch covers,
unable to find his way to the ladder at the edge that wou.lxl
lead to the manhole?
Matthew licked his dry lips and craned his head back the
way he'd come. It had been solid enough to take his weight
and the disturbance of his movements. He had to trust that
the vertical ascent would be the same. For one horrible
moment he let in the unthinkable. What if the creature
that made this route decided to use it again? After all, he
had no idea where it was. That was too much to bear he
closed his eyes, took another sweet breath, pulled himself
up and started to climb.

The footholds were not hard to find. He could either
gently move his foot from side to side until it pushed into
the putrescence, or perch a toe on the edges and corners
of the various hard objects that protruded from the wall,
hoping that they would take his weight. The worst was the
handholds. When he was in luck his hand would make
contact with something relatively dry. But more often his
fingers would close around something with the texture of soap
left too long in water, a cold slime that oozed between
his fingers and ran beneath his shirt and down his arm.

Matthew grunted with the effort but despite the desire to
stop and rest, the only way to survive it was to keep going.
Two pieces of metal, like the ends of copper pipes, stuck out
prominently in the beam of light to his left and he pushed
up towards them to see if they could be stood on. The pipes
were jutting from an open cavity in the wall, exposed by
having been dug around in the way a ribcage is explored
by vultures. But from where he was perched a foot or two
below the hole, Matthew thought it did not have quite the
same quality as the passage he was ascending. It looked more
ragged' as though something smaller had made the gap. He
slowly pushed up, lifted his head level with it and turned the
beam in. There was a beat while he registered what he was
looking at, and then the moving black-brown shiny mound
of fur swarmed at him, pouring over his head and shoulders
before rambling into the dark void below as the rats fled their
nest in panic. Matthew screamed, the sound inside the mask
being amplified a thousandfold, and let go his hold on the
side of the wall. The other hand instinctively reached out
and flailed for something to save him, coming to rest on
something solid in the mouth of the hole. He turned to it
with wild eyes. Matthew Cotton was holding the half-eaten
remains of a human arm.

He threw the horror from him, gagged and retched and
fought back the vomit back, scrambling wildly up the chimney
of waste like an ape stabbed by a spear.

Matthew was gasping and gagging, and his hands, lacking
all caution now, tore at the wall's surface, causing great falls
of trash that battered on his head like hail. He could no
longer see where he was going, but the encounter with that
nightmare-creature's larder had nearly finished him off. A
frenzy of horror, claustrophobia and terror had overtaken
him, and when Matthew's hands made contact with the
solid roof of trash, his wits were nearly gone. There was no
connecting tunnel. He was at the top with nowhere to go.

Matthew panted like a dog, an involuntary whimpering
coming from the back of his throat. He stopped his mental
and physical thrashing, and tried to calm himself and work
out what to do.

It Would be folly to try to punch a hole in the ceiling. He
had no idea how near the surface he was. If he was not near
then there was still the very real possibility of bringing the
Whole thing down. Matthew's eyes darted from side to side
in the half-moon beam of light that illuminated the foul,
irregular shapes of his prison walls. Where was he? In the
centre of the hold? To the port or starboard? He closed his
eyes to think and took in a deep suck of air. His lungs failed
to fill. There was no air left in the cylinder.

Matthew Cotton opened his eyes and faced the fact that
he was about to die. It wasn't true, he decided in that split
second that seemed to last for ever, that your life flashed
before you. His childhood was not revisited, nor his high
school years, his apprenticeship at sea, or any of the mess
of the stuff that made Matthew Cotton who he was.

Instead, for one blissful, fleeting, honeyed moment, he
was sitting quietly, propped up in bed at home on a Sunday
morning. Heather was drinking tea beside him reading a
paper and between them Molly lay in the crook of his arm
watching cartoons on the TV at the foot of their bed, laughing
at the antics of a pig that was driving a car too fast. The sun
was slanting in through the bedroom window and striking
Molly's hair. He gazed at its shine, smelling the woolly smell
that hot, clean hair makes, and feeling the shuddering of her
little body as she giggled and squirmed. Her chubby finger
pointed at the screen.

'The pig's going to crash into the pumpkin stall!'
Matthew was laughing. He could keep on laughing, stay
in bed with Heather and Molly if he just gave in. Why
didn't he?

He breathed the smell of her hair again. It didn't smell
like hair any more. It smelled bad. It smelled like rotten
dead things, like excrement and maggot-riddled meat, like
the effluent running from an abattoir. Matthew opened his
eyes. He ripped off the suffocating mask and his lungs were
suddenly full of burning, acrid gas. His hands scrambled in
the trash to his right and he pulled frantically at the viscous
mess. Skin tore from his fingers, his nails snapping back to the
quick, and the sharp points of things he couldn't see ripped
deep gashes up his arm. And then his fist hit hard metal.

Lungs burning, tears streaming from his eyes, he pulled at
the wall of trash with the last strength he had. It gave no more
resistance. There was no more trash. His hand had reached
a rung of the Australian ladder.

He gripped the round iron bar and pulled his body towards
it. His leg snagged on something and he ripped it free, leaving
a bit of his flesh with it. The madly-swinging flashlight beam
revealed that enough room had been excavated to the side
of the ladder to allow him to climb.

Almost passing out, Matthew Cotton gripped the ladder
and climbed with the speed of acrobat.

Five rungs later his hand hit the riveted edge of the
manhole cover. His arm went out to the lip. It was open.
With his vision going, his head swimming and his chest on
fire, he made one last effort and jack-knifed his body up and
through the hole.

Cotton's head burst from the top of the small round
aperture in the deck. He pulled his upper body into the
night air, his mouth gaping like a beached fish. Still half
in the manhole, he slumped forward and spewed up the hot
bile from his stomach.

His eyes were red and streaming, his flesh was torn and
bleeding, and his body burned inside from his navel to his
throat. He felt he was going to die. But Matthew Cotton was
not going to die. Not yet. Matthew Cotton was alive.

Heather and Molly would have to wait.



20


It made sense now. Perfect sense. There had always been
a part of Esther that wondered why she had never wanted
to have a man become part of her, enter her, take her,
consume her. There had been plenty who had wanted to.
But she was not interested in the casual, squalid affairs the
men of her trailer-park life offered. In her mind the sex act
had become synonymous with entrapment. She had watched
her few girlfriends fall pregnant, ending up tied to some
deadbeat who gave them a couple more kids before leaving
for something better. Sex in her young life had boiled down
simply to that act of abandonment, and Esther Mulholland
was never going to be abandoned. She was always in control.
One day, she knew, the act of sex would be a joyously
liberating and intoxicating experience and nothing about
it would tie or bind her to the life she had struggled free
from. In that sure and certain knowledge, her abstinence
had felt like no more than a minor discipline; no more
taxing than eating properly or exercising. If she felt like
it, she masturbated when she was horny, and made sure
she never fell in love. It wasn't nearly as hard as the conabined
forces of Hollywood and women's magazines might
suggest. Esther was not screwed up about her body, her
sexuality or her virginity in any way at all. It was simply no
big deal.

Until now. Now, as she gazed on the naked form of the
most beautiful man she had ever seen, she realized that it
had been for this moment that she had been waiting. She
had already forgotten his name, but his eyes glowed with a
recognition that needed no such mortal formalities.

He stood around six feet tall, and his smooth, brown face
was as angular as if sculpted from bronze. Dark eyes stared at
her from beneath a wide, curving brow, and his long, thick,
shining, black hair was tied back with a golden clasp at the
base of his powerful neck.

He took a step forward and Esther let her hungry eyes roam
over his body. She had looked at pictures of such bodies in
her teens in a porn magazine a gay friend used to steal from
a store downtown. But even if the physique of the man before
her resembled those perfect, wide-shouldered, huge-cocked
creatures, there was a purity, a delicate fluidity, to the lines of
his body that made such comparisons almost blasphemous.

Esther could barely breathe. Her desire was overwhelming
as she stepped towards him. He smelled of spices, incense,
the thin, subtle, woody odour that wafts in a forest clearing
after a campfire.

To give herself to this man was nt entrapment. It was
liberation. She was already part of him. She knew what he had
been through, had seen his life, understood the triumph in
his heart. Only one tiny small voice in her own soul protested
that she should not proceed. It told her to listen to the
things she knew, the special things that this intoxicating
state of grace was telling her. But the blessed silence that
had descended on that racket of unwanted knowledge since
she'd entered the cabin was like having pain relieved. That,
and the Combination of her desire, smothered and silenced
the protest.

He spoke.

'These are the words you will pray as I take you. Say
them.'

She watched his sensual mouth make shapes, his tongue
move as he formed strange and alien sounds. Esther listened
and repeated them. Her skin prickled and the sweat on her
body dripped as she spoke. They were not words her human
understanding could decipher. They were grunts and hisses,
guttural rasps and whispers, and although their sound was
ugly and disturbing, the passion they aroused in her made
her almost unable to speak at all.

As he watched her mouth as she made the best approximarion
of the sounds she was able, she could see that his
desire was as fierce as her own. As she spoke the last syllable,
Esther removed her clothes and unbidden lay on the cold
metal bench of the radio room, her knees open and hanging
over the edge.

There should be ceremony, she thought as he came to her. i
But there was none. There was just the act itself, and the
grunted, delirious repetition of the words he'd taught her as
he took Esther Mulholland without resistance.

'Get in.'

Renato had already pulled out the safety pins and undone
the two cleats to release the lifeboat that sat on the starboard
side of the accommodation block, but Skinner was glancing
around anxiously as he waited to pull the lever that would
let the davits fall down and swing the boat over the side.
It was perhaps anxiety that had made the captain bark the
order, but whatever the reason, it grated on his new first
officer. There were already a number of things that were
making him reluctant to follow any more orders before he
had time to think. But the captain was pushing along this
venture with a haste that did not seem logical to Renato.
Even the choice of the starboard lifeboat was peculiar when
the fishing boat was lying off the port side and the wind
suggested to any seaman that the port lifeboat would be a
more obvious choice. And the celerity of Skinner's actions
was perplexing. After all, there seemed to Renato to be
no immediate danger. Whoever had massacred Fen in the
cofferdams was still locked in there. There was no way out.
Now that Fen was cleared and the rest of the crew accounted
for as either dead or alive, he felt a certain amount of relief
that the culprit could only be a stowaway. Renato himself
had made sure that door was sealed: the bastard could die
in there for all he cared. Cotton was in the engine room
under the protection of the crew, and only a drugged girl
- who could do little harm without a weapon - was at large.
So what was the hurry? What the hell had a Peruvian fishing
boat to do with Sonstar's commercial plans for the Lysicrates
and her cargo or in hailing help for her crew?

But the question that burned at the front of Renato's mind
was what the girl had said about Skinner. Since her casual
reference to the existence and purpose of some aluminium
flight case, Renato could not get it out of his mind. What
mines? Which ship to be sunk? He had tried everything he
could think of to find a rational explanation for Esther's
intimacy with his own domestic secrets, and he could find
none. Why would her mind-reading party-trick be confined
to him? Renato Lhoon was forced to make an admission to
himself. He was afraid. Everything they were doing made no
sense. He had no clear explanation at all about what was
going on. He cleared his throat and avoided Skinner's eyes
by looking casually out to the dark sea.

'I'm nervous leaving the Lysicrates with the girl still loose.
Can't the skipper of the fishing boat board us instead?'

Skinner examined Renato carefully. He was already bored
with this charade, longing to end it quickly, but now was no
time to lose his cool. It was never time to lose your cool when
there was still risk. History had taught him that. He sighed. 'I
got my orders Renato, and all I can think about is doing this
quickly, finding out what the hell is going on, then getting
back on board and getting my men home safely.' He paused
for effect. 'Right now, they're all that matters.'

Renato turned back from his pretended interest in the
ocean and looked at his captain. There had been such sad
sincerity in Skinner's voice, such a note of lonely regret at
his obvious disbelief that he felt a sudden hot stab of shame.
He revered this man. He had admired him, had longed to
be noticed by him for years. Now, because of an inexplicable
incident involving a woman he didn't know, and the drunken
exploits of a man he knew only too well, he was doubting his
captain. Now was the time he should be trusting him. Now
was the time when his career could really be in the balance.
He had to bury those doubts and do as he was told.

Renato nodded in agreement then put his hands over the
edge of the big fibreglass boat and pulled himself in. Skinner
handed him the radio but not the gun, pulled the hydraulic
handle and the davits shuddered into life, lifting the boat
from the deck. All the time Skinner scanned the deck as
though he expected company. Renato moved into the boat
to make checks that were second nature to a man who'd been
at sea most of his adult life. He lifted the panel in the middle
of the boat to expose the small diesel engine, and made sure
it was primed. He wiped a hand over his nose, moved across
to where the first-aid and survival kit were stowed, crouched
and busied himself with his silent inventory.

The davits clanked to a stop, fully extended, so that the
boat hung out over the side of the Lysicrates.

Skinner was looking up at the chains supporting the boat,
which was fortunate for Renato Lhoon. Because at that
moment, the expression on the new first officer's face was
no longer one of trust and obedience that was temporarily
keeping him alive. It was a face that registered horror and
despair, and most importantly, naked fear. But for now it was
concealed and that was good. Renato would have to work
hard to think before he stood up again and faced the man
with the gun.

For now though, he stayed perfectly still and simply stared
at what he had found tucked in neatly beside the first-aid
box. An aluminium flight-case with a set of battered dog-tags
clipped neatly around the handle.

The physical pain of the penetration was a sensation sec
ondary to the white-hot explosion of the lock imprisoning
Esther's mind. With her eyes closed in ecstasy, she felt him
enter her, felt the bursting of that membrane more precious
to him than it was to her, and the thin trickle of blood down
her thigh. Her body arched back and she hissed in pleasure
and release. The solid bank of insistent, feverish knowledge
had gone. There was just her body, and the deep, satisfying
ache of their act.

Since the moment she had entered the cabin there had
been no Esther Mulholland. There had simply been desire,
and the desire had grown darker as she had approached him
and invited him to touch her. Before he had even penetrated
her, she had been aching for pain as well as pleasure. She had
wanted to feel what he had felt when he had been violated,
and when his fingernail, sharp as a blade, had traced a teasing
arc beneath her left breast, she'd longed to press it deeper,
make it cut her, rip her.

But now, this second, her virginity was gone and with it
the killing burden of her overloaded brain. She threw her
head back even further and luxuriated in a long inhala
tion of air.

And then Esther Mulholland gagged.

Her body jerked as she gagged again and coughed. Her
nose and mouth filled with a stench more foul than she had
ever endured. Bile rose in her throat. She twisted under the
flesh skewer that held her down in order to release the vomit
that was filling her mouth.

Esther groaned as she retched. Her streaming eyes came
open. Her head was twisted sideways, away from her lover. As
she blinked away tears, her focus returned. She was looking
at a deck cadet. Or more correctly, the corpse of a deck
cadet. She had never been introduced to him but Esther
accessed somewhere in a strange, dream-like part of her
memory the fact that he was called Gaspar Libuano, that
he was twenty-one years old, and that Skinner had shot him.
But this truth was not the crammed, bulldozing fever of
knowledge that she had been suffering before this release.
It was a simple, uncluttered memory of a fact she had learned
during that madness.

Everything had stopped moving, gone still. The man inside
her was still. The stinking, fetid air in the room was still. And
most importantly, Esther's heart had stopped as she struggled
to figure out where she was and why she could remember
something that she hadn't known in the first place. More
urgently, what the hell was happening to her? Slowly, her
head turned back to face the only other living creature in
the room. The one that was inside her.

The noise that came from her was too deep to be a scream
and too high to be a bellow. It was a vocal eruption of terror
and revulsion that was beyond the control of the human
being that emitted it.

The thing that was still joined to her towered over her body,
its blistered, suppurating face wearing a leer like a slash in a
carcass.

Esther thrashed, howling and screaming in a frenzy of
primeval terror, bursting blood vessels in her throat.
A stabbing in her chest held her firm. She looked down. A
metal claw growing from a disfigured, half-fleshed hand was
pressed against her heart.

The creature spoke, but this time even if her screams had
allowed her to hear the words, Esther Mulholland would
not have been able to understand them. They were no
more than a series of rasping, phlegm-filled grunts, words
that came from no language a human being ever could or
should speak. But though the vocabulary was unknown, the
meaning of the sounds was clear. The monstrous creation
was mocking her.

Esther's eyes, crazed with terror, fell on the part of them
that was still joined.

The pieces of flesh, skin and cartilage that hung together
and had entered her body were so clearly not alive, so clearly
harvested from dead men that at that moment Esther thought
she would go mad.

The black, beady slits of hatred that were its eyes closed in
pleasure as it pressed the shard of metal through her breast
with a small and skilful twist.

The next moment was one of such confusion that she had
no mental tool to understand it. All was insanity. All was
death and terror. But as she watched, her mouth still open
and expelling her screams, half of the creature's head was
sliced away. She watched as a clean, rectangular blade arced
over the top of the matted, fur-patched skull, and descended
through it, removing everything from halfway through the
left eye down to the collarbone. Even in her catatonic state
of terror there was fascination in the revelation that the skull
had contained more than one brain. Bits of the grey matter
that had been assembled in the borrowed skull fell away as
it reared back with a screech, pulling its metal and flesh
Weapons free of Esther. The slime of the liberated brains
caught on the fur and hair protruding from its torso and
slithered downwards as it clawed at its own body, and fell
screaming to the floor.

Matthew Cotton had not aimed Becko's meat-cleaver as
Well at he might, but it would do. For now. Esther leapt up,
adrenalin all but replacing her blood, her face deranged
With animal fright. Cotton grabbed her wrist and hauled
her from the bench, dragging her to the door as she gagged
and vomited once more down her bloodied, half-naked
body.

They were gone before it could raise its half-head, leaving
it writhing in a black-brown fluid that pooled around it like
an oil slick. And as it thrashed and floundered, its pain and
fury was witnessed only by the dead eyes of two corpses, in
the room where men came to make calls to shore and tell
their wives they loved them.

Sohn Haro wondered how long it would be before the
other men knew what he knew. None had tried to leave the
engine room, but when they did he was wondering how he
would be able to contain their panic. He glanced across at
Felix Chadin and noticed that even the fearsome bosun had
let his authoritarian demeanour slip. He looked as scared and
confused as his men. It had been a long time since Cotton
had disappeared through the door to the cofferdams. Sohn
knew how much time he would have with that air cylinder
if he really had tried to find a way ont through the holds. It
was already way past that time. If Cotton was dead then wa
to become of them?

He got up from the bench he'd been sitting on and walke
to the open door of the cofferdams. What was in there? Fen
Sahg lay in there, unattended, left like a fallen animal. No
should be left like that, he thought. He wondered
become of his body and those of all the men in his care
they lay in the deep, dark, cold ocean. Was Matthew
incarcerated in some broken section of the holds? There
no answer to be had from the echoing tunnel of black before
him. The answer was in his soul. Cotton had not found a way
out. Why should he have? He was, after all, nothing much
more than a pleasant but hopeless drunk. Sohn's short-livel
belief in the man who had never showed the slightest hint of
leadership in all their years of friendship, died in his hear

The men in the engine room were still talking. Their voice
reverberated around the huge room and the sound of their
lumanity plus the heartbeat of his idling engine soothed
Sohn for a moment. He closed his eyes and leaned his head
against the dark doorway to nowhere.

The noise changed gradually, before he noticed it. Men
were talking more animatedly. There seemed to be a tuss of
some kind. Wearily, Sohn straightened up and looked round.
Standing at the top of the metal stairs, on this side of the open
door to the outside world, was the hopeless drunk, the man
with no leadership.

Matthew Cotton's face and body were cut and torn, his
clothes splattered with dark blood. His eyes searched the
men's shocked faces and found Sohn's. There was no reason
to smile and neither man did, but the rebirth of hope was
lighting the engineer's face even more effectively.

'We have to get out of here,' said Cotton. 'Right now.'

'Put it down.' The captain's voice was steady.

Renato's, when he replied, was not. 'What is this? What the
luck is going on?' He held up the flight-case as best he could.
It was very heavy and the lifeboat was still swinging gently on
the davits.

Even though Skinner was on deck and his officer was
over the side on the boat, their faces were almost exactly
level with one another. Skinner looked deep into Renato
Lhoon's eyes.

'Just put it down. Carefully.'

Renato shook his head like a child. He was close to tears.
'No. I won't put it down, captain. What's in it? Why should
I be so fucking careful?'

Lloyd Skinner slowly raised the AK47 from his hip to
his shoulder and pointed it at Lhoon. He flicked off the
Safety-catch with a considerable flourish. 'Because if you
don't put it down, you'll die.'

Renato screwed up his face in misery and fear, but his grip
remained fight on the case. 'I'm going to die anyway. You're
going to kill me. Just like she said.'

Skinner said nothing. His gaze was unwavering.

Renato lowered the case and hugged it to his body. He sat
down heavily on the raised fibreglass bench that ran athwart
the boat, and a whimper escaped his throat. He wiped at his
nose and glared at the captain, real fury jockeying for space
in his eyes with fear. 'Why me? What have I done? Huh? Have
I ever let you down? Ever fucking betrayed you?' He bent his
head and shook it over his chest, the case held tighter to him
than before as though it were a thing of comfort.

Skinner was doing some mental calculations. Renato was
going to have to be executed now, there was no question of
taking him to the fishing boat. But he had to get him to drop
the case. One stray shot into that irreplaceable container and
the last tattered remains of Skinner's plans were nothing
more than straw in the wind. The smell from the holds was
not helping matters, making him feel mildly nauseous as the
night breeze carried the stench to him in warm, loathsome
wafts. His patience was thinning. 'No Renato. You've never
betrayed me. That wouldn't be possible. That would require
intelligence, analysis, a mental prowess capable of operating
at a level slightly above helping you decide which underwear
is clean.'

Renato looked up with hatred in his eyes. 'Why Cotton,
then?'

Skinner's voice was flat and sarcastic. 'Because he's such
a talented, sober, responsible, indispensable first officer.'

'You're an evil shit.'

'Just put the case down.'

Renato stared at Skinner with defiance, shuffled his bottom
to the back of the boat and propped himself up on the edge
of the stern. If he fell backwards now, he would fall into,the
sea and so would the case. 'Come and get it.'

Skinner sighed through his nose, his mouth closed in a
tight line. He cocked his head to one side. 'I'm interested to
know how you imagine you're going to stay alive, Renato.'

Renato held his gaze. 'By keeping hold of this, you bastard.'

'And when I simply come aboard, take the case and then
shoot you through the head?'

'You come aboard and I'll drop it over the side.'

'After which, of course, I'm free to splatter what little brain
you have over the lifeboat at my leisure.'

Renato blinked at him.

Skinner almost smiled. 'Ola dear, dear. The reasoning
powers of the incurably stupid don't extend much past the
present do they?'

Renato's mouth twitched, turned down and he stifled a
sob. He bent his head to the case, his forehead touching
the handle, and began to pray loudly in Filipino.

Skinner was irritated. The position the fool had unwittingly
adopted was just about the most effective he could have
chosen to foil any chance of Skinner getting a clean shot.
He waited, thinking. Clearly Renato would be doing the
same, although whatever he came up with would doubtless
be pathetic. The smell from the holds was strong enough
now to bother Skinner. He stifled a cough.

Renato looked up suddenly. Skinner studied him. In less
than a second it was clear that the best the terrified man
could offer was to be no more than a feeble attempt at a
vaudeville trick. It started with Renato's frantic eyes looking
straight at him with the hatred it had last registered. Then, as
Skinner watched with some amusement, Renato's eyes began
tracking an imaginary moving object behind the captain,
his face melting into an expression of dread that even
Skinner had to admit was impressive. Renato's eyes were
Wide with terror and his mouth hung open, a thread of
drool descending slowly from his lower lip to his chest. A
deep, shaking sob made a groan creak from Renato's gaping
mouth, as one trembling hand came slowly up to point at the
imaginary foe at his back.

Skinner couldn't help himself. He shook his head and
laughed. 'You dumb fuck.'

The imaginary thing that Renato had been tracking bit
through the back of Skinner's skull, severing his spine and
windpipe just below the jawline. The AK47 that had still
been gripped hard in his fist, burst into life. Four of the
wildly-sprayed bullets caught Renato in the shoulder, sending
him and the precious case flying sideways into the boat and
onto the floor.

Skinner's body twitched as the creature's powerful arms
held it in place, the front of the captain's face still intact and
twisted into a grotesque silent scream.

He Who Remakes The World fed hungrily on the man's
living flesh, tearing at it and cramming it into the enormous
mouth with the claw that was not busy tearing at the next
morsel. Already the gash that Cotton had made had begun
to close, but the damage was severe. It would feed well and
quickly. And then it would hunt and kill. It needed more
than just human flesh to heal its wounds. It needed to be
whole, to be powerful, to be fully risen again. It needed that
whore's heart.

The sweatshirt, pants and sandals were almost exactly the
right size for her, which said a lot about Filipino men and
American women. Cotton had grabbed them from the first
cabin they had passed, and Esther had let herself be dressed
meekly, offering up her arms like a child as he pulled the
sweatshirt over her head, and holding her face up to his as
he wiped a wet cloth across her hot, sweat-streaked cheeks.
The clothes felt good. Warm, clean, soft and comforting.
She hugged herself in the corridor outside the engine roora
where only a few yards away on the other side of the door,
Cotton was gathering the men. Esther crouched down with
her back against the wall, reluctant to enter the large room
and face the crew.

Right now, she was simply trying to remember who she
was. Not in the crazy sense, not in the way in which amnesia
denies a person access to their own name. She was trying
to renaember who that girl was, the one who used to be
strong, driven, morally-assured and invincible. She had been
damaged. She didn't feel the same any more. But this loss
of identity was not a blanking-out process, not an attempt to
forget the demented nightmare that she had just starred in.
There should be no confusion concerning her role in that.
She had been violated by hell itself, and she had escaped.
The confusion was to do with shame, and it was a shame so
profound that she was writhing in discomfort as she forced
herself to articulate it internally. Esther Mulholland faced up
to the truth that a deep, dirty dark part of her still recalled and
responded to a desire for the man that had been created in
her mind. She was sane, she was bred tough, and she would
recover from the horror of the thing that she had woken to
face and broken free from. Recovering from the corruption
of her own appetite would take longer.

She knew the truth. It had been an illusion, of course, but
she knew for certain that the man she had ached for had
really existed. That face, that body, that low animal lust had
once been as real as she was now.

But what kind of buried sexuality did she possess that she
found his lascivious evil and perverted hunger so attractive?
That was not a part of the girl she knew as Esther Mulholland.
But then again, maybe it was. She made a decision that it must
be buried again, because remembering the sex was still too
pleasurable, and the combination of that plus the horrific
memory of what had been really happening, could lead only
to insanity.

She lifted her head and breathed deeply. The ache between
her legs was getting in the way of her thinking. It was stirring
the wrong emotions. Because there were two things that she
was focusing on, things that could temporarily blot out the
nightmare and bring back the girl she was, and she didn't
want them interrupted. The first was the student in her,
her craving for knowledge. With a struggle she pulled
herself back to her college studies. Esther had read with
fascination and scepticism about the state of grace allegedly
bestowed on sacrificial victims, pondering as she had plodded
through translations of unreliable Spanish accounts of the
victims' revelations on what primitive, hallucinatory drug
the unfortunate youngsters must have been forced to take.
But now she knew the truth. Incredibly she had been there,
survived it, and more wondrous than anything else, she could
remember if not all, then a great deal of what had been
revealed to her. Some of it was useless. She had no wish to
remember the childhood details of the Lysicrates' crew. But
some of the other things.., it was nothing short of a miracle.
It was hard not to wonder if such events had occurred before,
if some victims in the same state had escaped the knife and
lived to put their remembered knowledge to some use. She
concentrated hard on this, the dark nightmare of what had
just happened to her trying to win through and distract her.
But with effort she dragged her tortured mind back to the
shiny light of revelation. She closed her eyes and thought
not of nightmares that could command flesh, but of the
baffling line drawings at Nazca that only make sense when
seen from several thousand feet in the air, the accuracy of
the Inca astronomical interpretations, and their impossibly
finely-reasoned stones. It worked. She was excited. Thrilled.
Even though what she had learned was going to be taken more
seriously by a shrink than by a professor of anthropology, she
knew truths that no other living human being shared. That
would always be hers, and it was one of the most amazing
things that had ever happened to her.

But the second thing that was keeping the night at bay was
even stronger. It was an emotion that she always conquered,
always denied, recognizing its destructive force as well as its
temptations. It had been growing and gathering momentum
as she sat and thought, and this time she was not
blocking it.

It was hatred.

She opened her eyes and looked up as Matthew came
back through the doorway. Matthew was not surprised to
read the darkness in Esther's face, but what alarmed him
was the urgent, predatory undertow of that expression. He
would not care to be the one who had incited it. He put out
a hand and offered it to her, and the softness of the fingers
that wrapped so gently around his own was a million miles
away from the black intent so visible in her eyes.

The noise. If he lived, although that seemed unlikely, he
would never be able to get that noise out of his head. Renato
lay as still as he could, almost blinded by the searing agony
in his arm, and listened to the crunching and wet chewing
noises that animals made when they fed. He had heard
that noise before as a child. His uncle, who had kept pigs
in an undersized pen in his yard, had once thrown them
a dead cat. Despite his revulsion, the ten-year-old Renato
had stood and watched the ugly, stinking beasts consume
the mangled corpse, listened to the crunching of the cat's
bones and the wet slurping the pigs made as they chewed.
Now he was hearing the same noise. He clutched his ruined
arm, concentrating hard on controlling the urge to vomit
or pant for breath, and considered his options. The thing
he had just seen, the thing that was still there, that he was
listening to, should not exist. Such demons were impossible.
But then since the Lysicrates had sailed from Calao everything
in Renato Lhoon's world had changed. Nothing was as it
should be, and now he was going to die. The question was,
should he wait and die as Skinner had done, or take the
opportunity and the very last of his strength to push himsei
overboard? He knew that in his condition, his shoulder torn
apart with ragged bullet-holes, half his upper body paralysed
with pain, and wounds bleeding profusely, the fall alone
would probably kill him. And if not, the dark, cold currents
of the ocean below would soon finish it.

Renato's eyes screwed up tight and tears squeezed from
under the lls. He didn't want to die. He started to pray again,
but the prayers died in his heart. The God he worshipped was
not a god who created such abominations. His God was an
ordered tool, conjured up and used to ease the burden of
sin, or to fill the abyss of human ignorance with repetitive,
meaningless chanting and liturgy. Such a god was of little
use in the face of the inexplicable terror that chewed its
way through human flesh on the other side of his flimsy
fibreglass shield.

He tried to draw a full breath but a combination of the
fear of discovery and the foulness of the air prevented him.
Renato gulped a shallow mouthful of air and realized at
moment he would be unable to take his own life. Such a
course was not open to him. Everything in him wanted to
live and the only course of action on offer was to wait and
see how long that would be allowed.

He pulled up his good arm, pressing the shoulder against
one ear and curving the arm over the top of his head to cover
the other ear with his hand. It blocked the sound. Like a
frightened child, with eyes and ears closed to the world that
was too real and too bizarre to deal with, Renato lay very still
and waited for death in his home-made silence.

As the line of men and one woman filed up the stairs of
the accommodation block, the silence was unnatural and
unsettling. Matthew had cautioned them to keep quiet but
without telling them why, and they walked behind him like
frightened schoolchildren, the only noise being the shuffle
and clicking of their shoes on the sticky metal floor. At
Cotton's request Sohn Haro and Felix Chadin, as the most
senior crew members, walked at the rear, and as they climbed
the stairs Sohn thought about his first officer and what he had
just endured to get them this far. There was so much more to
all this than Cotton was telling them. But something in Sohn
had calmed since Cotton's return, and it was not simply the
obvious relief of their escape. It was the feeling that someone
he trusted utterly was back in charge.

He lifted his face to the stairwell where the stench of the
trash was increasing as the men climbed, and decided that it
was good to have a man like Cotton back again from wherever
he'd been these last few years. It was good to have a man you
would follow anywhere.

It seemed an age. The breeze rocked the boat as gently as
a cradle as the blood oozed slowly from his wounds. Renato
took in air in shallow snorts, the quietest he could manage,
and listened to the blood rushing in his padded ears. The
boat shuddered and swung with a new weight. Renato did
not need to look up to know it had been boarded. There was
little point in his silence now, and with eyes still closed Renato
Lhoon let out a howl of terror, pain and abandonment that
liquefied his heart. When the first touch to his arm came he
jerked and scrambled as though electrocuted, and only the
slow realization that the touch was like the grip of a human
hand made him cease his struggling, open his eyes and face
his fate.

Renato was staring into the face of Parren Sionosa, who
was making cooing noises and patting a calming motion
in the air with his free hand. Behind him were the stony,
shocked faces of two more crew members. Renato gulped and
gasped for a moment then, open-mouthed and wild-eyed, he
began to cry.

No one had touched the guns that lay amongst the bloody
remains of Captain Lloyd Daniel Skinner. Only Esther stood
looking impassively at the gore that was spread around the
deck, her gaze unflinching as she took in the ragged body
parts that still adhered to clothing, and the shattered bones
that had been snapped unevenly like wet twigs. The handgun
lay blood-soaked in the middle of the mess where it had
dropped from Skinner's pocket, and the AK47 had spun
off to the edge of the deck, still flecked with the strips of
skin that had been torn from Skinner's trigger finger.

While men attended to Renato's wounds as best they
could, Cotton continued his hurried evacuation of the rest
of the shocked and terrified crew into the lifeboat. Apart
from himself and Esther there were eighteen souls left alive
on the Lysicrates. Since the lifeboat took thirty-six there was
blessedly no need to launch the other. But even a tub like the
Lysicrates had more life-saving space than it could ever use.
Apart from the port-side lifeboat, there was an emergency
life-raft at the stern, a small capsule that could be launched
explosively in one movement and inflated on contact with
the water. In theory they were in good shape for getting off
this nightmare. In practice, Matthew Cotton wondered where
in the whole world they could go to be safe now that hell
had opened its gates.

Several of the younger crew were crying with fear and Sohn
and Chadin did their best in conquering their own terror in
order to calm them. Manuel, the third engineer, was the last
to be herded on board the swinging boat and Cotton turned
to put a hand out for Esther.

She was still staring into the mire.

'Come on. Let's go,' he said softly.

Esther looked up as if from a dream. 'Go where?'

'Just get in the boat, Esther.'

His voice was gentle, full of kindness and sympathy, but
his body language betrayed a frustration that was nearing
breaking point.

Esther looked at the men on the boat and then back to
the bloody mess on the deck. 'And you think you'll be safe
from it just because you're on a different vessel?'

'Yes,' lied Cotton, moving closer to her so that the men
couldn't hear their exchange.

She shook her head. 'It'll hunt us all down.'

Cotton glanced back at the boat. No one, thank God, was
listening. The men were all in their private hells. 'How? We
just leave this boat and then blow the fucking thing out
the water.'

Esther smiled sardonically. 'Sure. It'll just stay right here
while we do that.'

'You're saying this bastard can swim?'

'I'm telling you that not only can it swim, if it wanted to
it could drop three miles to the ocean floor, walk along the
fucking sea bed and meet us in Calao.'

Matthew scanned her to see if she was serious. She was.
'I've been in its head, Matthew.'

'We can get to shore. Get help.'

Esther looked at him and her eyes told him that the girl
that had boarded this ship had aged a lifetime. 'You saw it,
Matthew. You know I'm right.'

He nodded. 'I've no choice. I need to try and save these
Illell.'

'I have a choice.'

Cotton put his hands on her upper arms. He felt the
hardness of her muscles beneath his fingers. 'Esther. You
need time to recover.'

Her eyes hardened. He removed his hands. Esther held
his gaze though her own was softening a little. 'No. You
need to listen to me now, Matthew, and you need to listen
Carefully.'

He said nothing and she nodded as she took his silence
to be One of complicity.

'The combination on the flight-case that you'll find on the
boat is 4014. It's on the dog-tags. It's part of Mendez's serial
number. When you open the case you'll see two small metal
panels and a key in a pocket between them. When you need to
detonate you pull the aerial out to its full extent, put the key
in the hole above the right-hand panel. Turn it clockwise until
you hear a click, then press both black buttons on the panel
simultaneously. A light will come on and start flashing red. It
gives you thirty seconds to abort, which it does automatically
unless you proceed. Press both buttons again simultaneously
any time within the thirty seconds to detonate. If you miss
the chance within the thirty seconds you have to remove the
key and start again.' She looked at his crumpled face. 'It's
simple. It's not a particularly modern device. It's just what
he was comfortable with. But you need to be no more than
one mile away for the radio signal to be fully reliable.'

Matthew's mouth was dry. He croaked, a catch in his voice.
'You still know impossible things.'

She shook her head. 'No. I just remember some of the
impossible things I knew.'

Matthew's gaze was hungry, and Esther knew exactly where
that hunger lay. She looked down before he could ask her
to tell him things she had no wish to know, no business to
remember. Instinctively he understood her reaction, and
clearing his throat he took a moment, fought back his tears
and regained his composure. 'Why tell me this? You can
detonate Skinner's mines as well as I can once we set sail.'

She looked back up. 'I'm not coming.'

'The fuck you're not.'

It was Esther's turn to take Matthew by the arms. But her
grip was not for his comfort. It verged on the painful. 'Listen,
Matthew. You just said it. You said you've got no choice. You
have to try and save these men's lives. If I come with you, that
thing is not going to stop until we're all dead. We can't kill
it. We can't outrun it. You've seen that.'

'Then what can we do?'

'We can contain it.'

Cotton looked away, hand over his mouth, shaking his
head as though his denial would make it all come good.

Esther spoke quietly, but there was fire beneath the calm.
'Right now, all it wants is me.'

Matthew turned back and looked at her with an emotion
she hadn't seen before. 'It can't have you.'

She returned his gaze for a moment then let her hands fall
to her side. She turned from him, walked across the deck and
picked up the AK47. Pulling the strap over her neck, Esther
bent down and fished the handgun from the gore and wiped
it on her sweatshirt, leaving a bloody smear. 'It's not going
to.' She handed him the gun. 'You might need this. Just in
case your company man on the fishing boat decides to take
his chances.'

He looked down and took it. When he looked back up
again she had tears in her eyes.

'You get these men three quarters of a mile away from this
floating death-trap. You radio a constant SOS and don't let
that fucking fishing boat near you. I reckon it'll disappear
pretty sharp anyhow when it realizes that Bluebeard is out of
the picture. You give me fifteen minutes' grace, and then no
matter what, you blow this fucking thing out of the water.'
He started to shake his head again.

She put a hand up and touched his lips with a finger. 'You
have no choice. I have no choice.'

'I do have a choice. I can stay.'

She shook her head. 'You've saved me once, Matthew. I
can't tell you how badly I need to save myself.'

He looked at her, struggled with the urge to throw her in
the boat, then gently took her in his arms and held her.

Esther's body was rigid, unresponsive, and her inability to
return his embrace made it impossible not to think of the
reasons why her declaration was so horribly true.
'Go,' she said in a small muffled voice into his chest. 'And
start the clock from now.'

The heart. That was all it needed. She had performed well.
Even as she had spoken the words it had taught her, it had
felt that final surge of power so near it could almost taste the
final journey back to whole flesh. The fury it was containing
at the painful and damaging interruption was boiling in its
blood, threatening to erupt into unplanned violence. But it
was not a creature of unthinking reaction. It had not been so
as a man, and neither would it be in this new and temporary
identity. It hung in the shadow of the bridge wing, clinging to
the underside of the metal lip, and sniffed the air through the
holes in its face it used as nostrils. Her scent was so strong it
was practically visible now. She smelled alive. It ruminated on
the order of the actions it would enjoy after it had performed
this last delicious task.

It tracked her easily and purred at the back of its throat at
how that clean smell of living, self-repairing cells, of healthy
growing hair and fingernails, would shortly be replaced by
the nourishing, cloying and sensuous odour of her death.

She didn't even watch the boat depart. As soon as she had
helped lower it to the water, Esther was gone from Matthew's
sight. Ernesto started the engine and the boat chugged away
from the towering cliff of rusting metal that had been their
home for so many years. Already the bosun was busy on the
VHF calling for help and Matthew watched the lights of the
distant fishing boat and wondered how long it would be
before they started to grow even more distant. He sat with
the flight-case on his lap, fingering the battered dog-tags that
were fastened around its handle. What in Christ's name had
he agreed to do? What kind of man left a young girl alone
to fight for the lives of nineteen strong, healthy men, even
a girl with an AK47 and a rage in her heart that could tear
down buildings? He knew she had a plan, but that flimsy
hope didn't excuse his madness. The possibility of opening
this doomsday box seemed very remote to Matthew Cotton.
tie looked up at the retreating ship and frowned. As the
lifeboat turned to port and chugged around the stern a
dark shape caught Cotton's eye. He watched it go and then
quickly scanned the boat to see if any of the men had caught
a glimpse, but they were engrossed in their own survival. It
was as well. How, Cotton wondered, would they have dealt
with the thing that must all along have been silently watching
their evacuation only metres above them? Something very
dark, very fast and very agile, its movements a cross between
a rat and a lizard, that had just scuttled down the side of the
accommodation block, onto the deck and out of sight.

She couldn't use what was left of Skinner. It had been
watching them all the time. She knew it, had felt its eyes
boring into her. They were joined now in a way that would
not please it if it knew, but that in itself was only of minor
use. The trick now was speed. Esther burst through the door
of the accommodation block and ran down the corridor of
B-deck, her heart already starting to pound with adrenalin.
The radio room was on the next deck up and she slowed
as she approached the stairwell, only too well aware of
the variety of planes the bastard could come from. The
safety-catch had been off the gun since she'd picked it up,
and her finger stayed poised on the trigger. But there was
no possibility of Esther firing in error. This is what she had
trained for. Not just at camp, but her whole motherless,
loveless, hard, uncompromising life. She kept low, glanced
around and proceeded up the stairs as quickly as she could
while covering her back. At the top of the landing the
Corridor ran both to the right and left.

The radio room was to the right, but the left-hand cor
ridor afforded a view past rows of cabins that culminated
in a large black window. She moved forward, then halted.
Esther turned quickly. It was fleeting, but her reactions were
sharper than they had ever been. She saw the dark, damaged,
hacked-open face appear briefly at the edge of the glass, and
before the foul torso could follow it on its course up the
metal cliff outside, she let go a round of bullets that made
the window explode.

'Fuck you!'

Esther was gone before the glass had settled, not waiting
to see if her handiwork had yielded results. She ran on, the
gun held at an angle that could shoot behind her, and burst
into the radio room. There they were. The corpses of two
innocent men, one intact, one half-eaten, lay sprawled on
the floor of the cabin. Esther put a hand to her head, trying
to block out the stuff she remembered about them from her
brush with supernature. This was not a time to dwell on the
personal details of these men and their families. Those men
were gone. All that remained was this mess of skin and bone
and flesh, the stuff that already had the sweet odour of decay,
the way that bodies in heat always have. What she was about
to do was not to defile them, but to avenge them. She took
a deep shuddering breath, and with her shooting hand still
reassuringly around the trigger and her face towards the
door, she dipped her other hand into the slime that had
once been Pasqual Sanquiloa's body. She would have liked
to have closed her eyes in disgust as she smeared her face
and body with the internal juices, faeces and unclotted blood
of the man who lay before her. But closing her eyes for even
a second now would be suicide. Instead, Esther Mulholland
kept her eyes open, and only the slight, down-turned tremble
of her mouth wotfld alert an onlooker to the fact that the girl
inside this warrior, painting herself for battle, wanted to run
screaming as far away as she could get from the stink of death
in which she was bathing.

Hatred was life itself. But that truth was only part of the dark
secrets it had learned in the timeless, indifferent, pumping
heart of the jungle. It had been hatred that had kept it intact
and brought it back from the brink of the abyss, but right
now it was hatred distilled into revenge that was charging
its stolen blood. The bitch had missed its torso with her
weapon, but a bullet had torn away a piece of flesh from
its newly-repaired neck.

It hung from the metal wall on one arm and fingered the
wound. A memory came back from its days as a humble,
mortal priest, and it chewed it over as it squirmed under
the impossible healing process that was fuelled only by its
dark prayers and ritual.

The man that it had been had found such variety, such
fulfilment and pleasure in killing, when he slaughtered those
base savages in the deep, green, diseased world of the forests.
The best had involved a mother and her two-year-old child,
and it cursed itself that no such pain could be inflicted on
this childless whore. There was no pain abroad in the human
world that could match the agony of a parent watching its
child die slowly. What else would do? It could consume her
as she watched or, more entertainingly, it could make her eat
herself. It could do so many things. Hatred, far more than
love, was the very core of invention.

It swung through the shattered window into the corridor
and took a moment to let the flesh of its neck join once
more. Then it lifted its head and followed the heady scent
of her living flesh along the corridor to the cabin that had
temporarily been its larder.

It was just a distant, indistinct crackle of a voice but it was
enough to excite the quiet tension on the boat. Felix Chadin
had taken his orders from Cotton seriously, despite their
baffling nature, to ignore any hailing from the boat in sight
called Lucky Lad. It hadn't been necessary. Not long after he
had started to put out a distress call, the boat had not only
remained silent but had moved off and was now almost out
of line of sight.

This new transmission was from something they couldn't
see yet. A container ship, Chadin thought from the garbled
voice. But whatever it was, it was less than eight miles away.
It meant safety.

Chadin looked up towards the Lysicrates, and despite the
grim nature of their situation, felt the urge to smile. Sohn
Haro, however was not smiling. He stared down at the open
case on his lap, the key to the detonator already inserted
in one of the holes. The piece of paper that Cotton had
torn from the log-book aboard the lifeboat was clutched in
his hand. It was thorough of Matthew to leave it with Sohn
before they turned back and dropped him on the Lysicrates,
but he wondered if any insurance inquest would genuinely
accept this scribbled note as evidence of the chief engineer's
diminished responsibility. After all, Cotton, as acting captain
now that Skinner was dead, was asking him to do a crazy
thing, a murderous thing. What sane captain would ask his
engineer to sink nearly twelve million pounds worth of steel
in a part of the ocean that could never be explored? What
captain would ask him to sink it with that captain and the
girl passenger still on board if they didn't get off in the next
fifteen minutes? And all Sohn Haro had to prove to a tribunal
why he would do such an insane thing was a torn piece of
paper signed by Cotton reading, '_I_, Matthew Cotton, acting
captain of the MY Lysicrates, order Sohn Haro, chief engineer of
the MY Lysicrates to detonate the mines planted by the late
Captain Lloyd Daniel Skinner, thereby sinking our vessel, in order
to preserve the lives of the remaining crew members.'

Insane. Clearly. And yet Sohn Haro had every intention of
following his orders. The ship contained evil and death on
a scale that he neither understood or cared to understand.
The eighteen terrified men on board this lifeboat would
testify to the madness that had overtaken the ship in the last
forty-eight hours and Haro was not afraid of any tribunal. He
was afraid of other things. He was afraid of what was on that
ship with Cotton and the girl, and he was afraid that they
would never get off before he turned the key and pressed
the buttons as instructed. Because, make no mistake, in
exactly fifteen minutes from now, that was exactly what he
intended to do.

The dark power from having taken her was already burning
in its veins. The neck wound had closed fully in a matter of
minutes. It moved cautiously along the ceiling of the corridor,
and as it moved it allowed itself the delicious savouring of the
joy to come, when it would unite with its new disciples on the
mainland that it could smell nearby. There was so much
to teach, so much suffering to inflict that would build the
momentum of the Dark Sun's destiny. It would remake the
world, and the world would be its to command.

It stopped above the door to the radio room. Her smell
stopped in this room, and her last frantic thoughts had come
from here only minutes before, garbled waves of panic and
rage and revenge beating as loudly as a drum from the brain
it would soon enjoy scooping from her skull. It had halted,
however, because those thoughts had also stopped.

A blackened tongue darted from its over-wide mouth and
licked at bared, pointed teeth as it thought. Her involuntary
mental noise had been quieted once before. In this very
place, when it had been feeding and she had approached
unannounced. How had the bitch done that? It ruminated
about that irritation, about how she must have learned that
secretive cerebral control from the state of knowledge that
it so jealously coveted but would have for itself so soon. And
then it sniffed the air again. There was no doubt that she was
in there. Her scent stopped. She could think herself invisible
if she liked, but its visceral senses would always find her. It
shuddered with the pleasure of what was about to come, then
dropped lightly from the ceiling, and slithered through the
cabin door.

Cotton had left the handgun with Sohn. What use would
it be here? They had plenty problems of their own in the
lifeboat. Renato needed help fast, and it sure wasn't going to
come from the Peruvian fishing boat whose hull would not
be painted, Cotton was quite certain, with the words Lucky
Lad. He had watched the lifeboat chug away again, a hand
held up to Sohn, every face in the boat turned upwards to
him, and his heart had grown twenty pounds heavier. But
there was no time for delay. He had to find her.

The boat had put him back on board near the bow, and he
ran along the side of the holds, the deck pounding under his
feet. Esther had given Matthew the greatest gift in the world.
It was so precious, so unexpected, that the joy of it made
him want to cry. As he ran, with the sea air blowing his hair,
Matthew Cotton knew that for the first time since Heather
and Molly had died, he wanted to live. He wanted to grieve
properly, with dignity. He wanted to take full advantage of his
new self-granted permission to remember them both. And he
wanted to unfreeze his heart and mind, those organs that had
atrophied almost beyond recognition.

Now all he neededwas the chance. Living meant not dying.
That might be hard. But he was going to try.

' Come to me. Come to me, you sick fucking trash-bag. You nothing.
You nobody. You worthless, powerless shit. Come and try to get what
you need.'

Esther was not saying this. Esther was thinking this. Think
ing it as hard as she could, in that place in her head she had
discovered that joined them together. The place that also told
her so many things about her violator, things it would rather
she didn't know now that she was still alive to use them. As
she thought it, her eyes never left the door of the location
in which she had now installed herself.

She was crouched for the moment, her right hand tight on
the gun, her left hand digging around inside Salvo Acambra's
corpse for anything liquid she could find. It was fully thawed
and smelled almost sweet, in the peculiar way that human and
chicken flesh share in their decomposition. The dripping of
the blood and water from the hanging meat behind her in the
warmed walkqn freezer was an appropriate accompaniment
to her grotesque task. Esther Mulholland was unrecognizable.
Her hair was a matted helmet of blood and gore, her
face obscured by a red-brown mask of dried, muddy goo,
and her entire naked body was covered with a mixture of
fluid and matter that was unspeakable in its repugnance. The
result made a figure that was barely human. Only the whites
of her eyes blinked clear from the dark, putrid skin she had
created over her own, as she continued to concentrate on
her thoughts and not what her hand was doing.

'Come to me, He Who Remakes Nothing. He Who Cannot
even Remake Himself. Come, you low animal, you failure, you
fucking joke.'

And if the slight frown on her brow that was folding the
crust of feces on her head and threatening to flake it was an
indication of worry that these thoughts were not sufficiently
focused, then Esther need not have worried. Her thought
process was working fine. It had heard. It was coming. In fact
it was very nearly there.

' Vulcan. Vulcan, Vulcan, this is the MY Vulcan calling Lysicrates.
Do you read?' Several men cheered, but the sound was halfhearted,
empty of any real joy. There was still too much fear,
too acute a memory of the horror they had left behind.

Felix Chadin the bosun, blinked at the VHF and looked
across to his superior officer. Sohn Haro held up a stalling
finger.

The Vulcan was closer now, but what to do? It would be
as well not to reply until the deed had been done. The
ship would come for them. It could probably already see
the Lysicrates, lit as it was under the glare of its two dozen
halogen floods. How would the captain of the Vulcan react
when he watched that long strip of light extinguish as the
ship up-ended and slipped beneath the ocean's surface?

Sohn shook his head to the bosun, and licked his lips.
Their reply would have to wait a few minutes. He looked
down at his watch once more, and then at the detonator on
his lap. He crossed himself to a god he no longer believed
in, then slowly held the tip of the aerial between his finger
and thumb, and pulled it out to its full extent.

To be still, completely still, in both mind and body, was a skill
that was beyond most humans, even the greatest martial arts
teachers in the world. But to be still in the face of the horror
that had entered the storeroom beyond the open freezer
door was to call on a strength that transcended mere ability.
Esther stopped breathing. Only half of its deformed, unholy
body was visible from where she waited, but it was enough
to skin her soul. It was on the ceiling. She could see the long
tendrils of fluid and drool falling from its body like syrup
as it moved silently across the top of the door-frame. The
stench was overpowering, but Esther's nostrils were already
assaulted to the point of insensitivity by the violence of her
own adopted odour. She watched it as it moved with the
cautious reptilian gait that hinted at abnormal speed and
power, and kept her breathing for later.

Keeping that part of her mind that was the unwanted
conduit blank was taking its toll on her reserves. Everything
in her body and soul wanted to scream, wanted to run. But
she knew it was working. She could feel it when it probed for
her. But the best evidence that it was working was that she was
still alive. For now. She screwed her eyes shut for a moment,
trying to keep her concentration, trying not to let her fear,
her hatred, her humanity, leak from this protective shell she
had created. She opened her eyes. The blackened shapes of
its limbs were no longer visible. She allowed herself a tiny
sharp inward breath, as silent as the movement of grass.
But even as she took it she knew it had not been silent
enough.

The freezer door frame filled with the bulk of a million
nightmares, the darkness of its form blotting out the white
strip-lit room beyond. There was no light in the freezer
since Cotton had cut the power all those hours ago. It
was dark, wet, dripping and foul. It moved a step into
the huge metal box, and then Esther's heart moved into
her throat. A sound came from it that was the very belch
of hell. It sounded like ancient gas escaping from a burst
and rotten carcass. It was laughing. Triumphant. The human
figure that huddled against the very back of the freezer had
tried to make itself tiny, wedged as it was behind two huge
sides of beef that had been taken from the row hanging
down the centre of the freezer. The arms, wrapped in a
sweatshirt, covered its head like a illustration for the brace
position on an airline safety card and it was staying very still.
The creature that laughed could smell the death-smell from
the huddled figure, and it understood immediately what she
had done to conceal herself so expertly, to mask her scent. It
lowered its body, maggots falling from the furred portion of
its back as it crouched, and moved slowly towards the object
of its desire, towards the last beating heart that would fuel
its black ambition.

Its massive misshapen shoulders brushed the hanks of
rotting meat as it moved, sending them swinging gently on
their books like the chimes of a glockenspiel.

It would remake the world. It would remake it as it wished, calling
to its bosom all the legions of darkness it knew were waiting for
its dominance. It pulled itself up to its full height, flexed its
claw fingers and widened its gaping jaws into a crescent of
slavering hatred.

'Fucking whore bitch,' it gurgled through phlegm and
bile in a guttural language that its subject would never
understand, although the meaning could not easily be mis
interpreted.

There may be seconds, or fractions of seconds, between
apparently seamless events that can never be calculated,
although their presence is not just important but crucial.
In this instance, although the next minute seemed to Esther
to contain one single event, it was in fact subject to a
number of things that parted into just such tiny, immeas
urable divisions.

The first thud of the mines exploding in sequence from
hold number one rocked the entire interior of the freezer,
and as it shook and trembled, Matthew Cotton called out in
alarm from the doorway to the storeroom.

'Esther!'

As the creature turned, Matthew's call was returned by
Esther with a wail of despair and anger. But not from the back
of the freezer. There could be no human reply from there
because there was no human to utter it. Only the body of
Salvo Acambra lay huddled behind two sides of meat, dressed
in a sweatshirt and pants. The cry came from considerably
further back, near the open door of the freezer.

'Noooooo!'

Esther dropped down from the meat-hook that had con
cealed her, the one that had been going to be her sav
iour, that was now no longer of any use since Matthew
had blown her plan. And then she let go of everything
the AK47 had to offer. She aimed first for its genitals
before bringing the gun up to its head, watching wide-
eyed, her teeth gritted, as its penis splattered into mush
as the bullets burst its body apart. As it juddered mania
cally under the hail of lead, screeching like a hundred
stuck pigs, the ship heaved and lurched tipping the floor
beneath her.

Esther turned and scrambled for the door, the gun still
firing behind her. It moved faster than a snake sta'iking.
Esther screamed in agony as the claws tore at the naked
flesh of her leg, the gun firing directly into its skull. Cotton's
hands grabbed her wrist and pulled, hauling her through the
door as she left behind a strip of leg flesh the size and length
of a neck tie.

She fell across the threshold of the freezer, firing randomly
into the freezer and as she collapsed onto the rapidly-sloping
floor, the creature's upper body, torn beyond recognition,
dervished through it after her, screaming and bellowing
in pain.

She had nothing left. Her hand loosened on the gun.
Cotton pulled her to her feet, and with his hand around
hers squeezed the last life out of the Russian automatic.
The force of the bullets made the monster jerk back in an
explosion of blood, and with the only thing they had left, the
combined weight of their two bodies, they svcung the huge
metal door back and slammed the lock in place. The door
dented into a hideous relief as the nightmare on the inside
beat against it.

Matthew grabbed Esther. She was bleeding profusely, the
bone on her leg visible where the flesh had been torn from
it. Already the floor in the storeroom was at an angle that
made running a challenge, but he dragged her out and into
the galley corridor as the Lysicrates creaked and groaned in
its death throes.

Getting the door open to the deck was almost more
than Cotton could manage, but he wedged it with a fire
extinguisher and dragged the barely-conscious girl through
like rag doll.

The fear that hit Matthew Cotton as they gained the main
deck was different from the nauseating terror he had been
conquering below. This was the real and palpable fear of
every seaman. It caught his throat and made him heady
with a whole new injection of adrenalin. The entire bow
of the ship was already underwater, the white foam of waves
breaking over the top of the hatch covers.

He fastened his arm under Esther's and stumbled for the
stern. The life-raft was there. Her head was floppy on her
chest but she was taking her weight, staggering along beside
him. Even so, their progress along a tilting deck towards
their only escape was an Everest expedition to a man out
of condition. His feet slipped constantly, making them both
stumble, and the lurching and creaking of the breaking ship
made his guts churn. A suddenjudder made them fall heavily
against the rail and Esther gasped in pain as her leg-wound
made contact with the metal.

'Shhh,' he calmed her without conviction as he scooped
her up. 'We can make it. We're there. We really are.'

Twelve more metres of tortuous, angled clambering and
Matthew arrived at the inner rail of the stern that separated
them from the life-raft capsule. He laid Esther gently against
the rail, her body wedged against the metal supports to stop
her rolling down the slope of the deck, then leapt over and
got busy. It took a man who had once been a captain only
seconds to launch it, and as he watched it catapult out from
the deck and onto the ocean below that was further away than
it should ever be, he found himself making one last internal
prayer. Its rubber roof bobbed about fifty feet below. It was
a long way down.

Matthew wiped his hand across his face then turned,
climbed over the rail and lifted Esther gently over to the
very edge of the ship.

Esther looked up, her eyes opaque with pain. 'We fucking
got it, didn't we?'

He nodded. He looked at this revolting spectacle, this
woman encrusted in filth and excrement, caked with the
juices of the dead, and he bent his head and held her face
to his shoulder.

'Yeah.'

He closed his eyes for a moment, then looking up with
a resolve that shone behind tears, moved them both to the
gap in the rail, held her in front of him, his arms beneath
her armpits, his hands locked around the front of her chest.
Then, with a huge intake of breath, Captain Matthew Cotton
jumped.

The darkness that swallowed up the sea when the last halogens
of the Lysicrates dipped and died beneath the foam
of the Pacific was useful in some ways. It concealed the
tears that were running down Sohn Haro's face, and the
wide-eyed terror in the eyes of the men, who had now
focused their attention on the pin-prick lights of the container
ship Vulcan that was sailing full power ahead towards
them.

It also hid the face of the man who lay on the roof of the
tiny rubber life-raft, a naked, bleeding, filth-encrusted girl
held tightly beneath him to conserve her failing warmth,
as he stared up at the cold white stars and willed her to
live.

The dark could be healing. It could hide and soothe and
soften the edges of truths too abrasive to stand in the cold
white light of day.
But three and a half miles below the two tiny vessels that
carried the last surviving crew of the MY Lysicrates, was a
darkness that neither soothed nor comforted.

It was a darkness in which the very notion of light was
crushed before it ever reached such depths, in which the
cold was a solid entity, apart and different from ice, and
in which nothing that ever fell there could ever hope to
return.

But enveloped now in its crushing embrace was a darkness
and a cold that was even deeper that the sea could conjure.
And it would wait.

It had, after all, forever.