The Last Three Ships

Weird Tales – May 1950

(1950) *

Margaret St. Clair

“… Them last three h ulls, they’re funny at night!”

-

T HE best of it was that it wasn’t the really stealing. Everybody knew that the ships had been moored in the estuary because mooring them was cheaper than cutting them up for scrap would have been. There was a guard and a patrol at night, of course, but both were perfunctory and negligent. Evading them was so easy that it was no wonder Pickard thought of his thefts as a sort of praiseworthy salvaging.

Night after night he scrabbled in the bowels of the rotting Liberty ships and came up with sheets of metal, parts of instruments, and lengths of brass and copper pipe. He had a friend in the boat-building business who bought most of what he appropriated, and at prices which were only a shade below normal. Now and then Pickard had moments of uneasiness—fifteen or so deserted ships at night give an eerie, graveyard effect—but he always dismissed the moments as due to imagination and nerves. The ships were just ships, and there wasn’t anything to worry about, pro-vided you had sense enough to stay away from the last three hulls. Pickard had worked on these one night, and he wasn’t so sure they were just ships.

Business was good. After the first month he hired a helper, a tall, gangling youth named Gene, whom he duly warned to avoid the last three ships. Gene took over with no difficulty at all Pickard’s belief that his occupation was legitimate salvage, not theft, and he suggested a number of worthwhile improvements in the salvaging technique. When they were put into practice, Pick’s receipts increased by nearly forty percent.

Pickard shared the excess fifty-fifty with Gene, and for two months all went well. Pick’s wife got the Persian lamb greatcoat she had been talking about and made two payments on it. Pickard liked the way it looked on her. Then Bert, Pickard’s friend in the boat-building business, began to complain that the salvage they were bringing in didn’t amount to much.

Pick and Gene had a conference. Gene suggested they see what they could get from the last three ships, which were untouched, but Pickard vetoed the idea emphatically. They decided they might be able to make up for the lack of quality in their salvage by increasing its quantity. They worked like beavers a ll week, and Pick’s motorboat had to make two trips to get all the stuff to Bert. But when Bert saw it, he shook his head; they got five dollars less than they had last time.

An argument started on the way back from Bert’s shop. Gene didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t salvage on the last three hulls, and said so repeatedly. Pick opposed him, formally at first and then with increasing bitterness. It irked him to be forced by his conscience to oppose Gene’s doing something that he wished he would do. “All right, then,” Pickard said at last. “Try it yourself t’morra night. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Stay there a coupla hours. See how you like working around on them last three ships.”

Gene pushed his felt skullcap to a defiant angle. “O. K., pop, O. K.” He knew Pickard detested being called pop. “You can just bet I will.”

-

IT WAS getting along toward daylight before Gene came back to where they had moored the motorboat. Pick waited for him anxiously, chipping at his fingernails. He ought to’ve known better than to let a dumb kid like that go on them last three ships. But when Gene came back every pocket was crammed with loot and he was staggering under the weight of a gunny sack he had slung over his shoulder. He showed the stuff to Pick, and Pick had to admit that it was good.

“How was it?” Pickard asked after a minute. “I mean, how was it on them ships?”

“Oh, nice,” Gene answered. There was an odd, almost dreamy note in his voice. “Lots of stuff. I didn’t like it at first. But after I got used to it, it was nice.”

“But—” Pickard checked himself and peered as closely at Gene as he could in the still faint light. As far as he could see, the kid was smiling. Maybe Pickard had been a dope. That one night he’d tried to work on them hulls—there couldn’t have been anything following him. Gene was a smart boy, and he seemed to like it on the hulls.

Gene came back the next night with an even better load, but the night after that he didn’ t come back at all. Pickard waited for him as long as he dared and then, though it was asking for trouble with the patrol, made a hurried, nervous search of the last three ships. What could have hap pened to the kid? Pick would have heard the noise if the patrol had got him. Had he fallen and hurt himself?

Pick’s search, though hasty, was thor ough. No Gene. Only, on the last hull, he found the boy’s felt s k ullcap floating brim up in a sheet of filthy bilge.

Pickard was so upset he couldn’t sleep when he g ot home. He got up at noon and sat around morosely with his hands be tween his knees. Estelle noticed his worry and kept at him until he told her about it. At the end of his account, she laughed.

“He was a jerk, Pick,” she said comfort ingly. “What happene d was he got scared and ran and then was ashamed to come back and tell you about it afterwards.”

“ Yeh . But what scared him?” Pickard swallowed. “I remember hearing,” he said with some difficulty, “about how there was a welder got welded up in one of those ships when they was building them. They launched the ship with him in it. And then there was a man down in the double bot tom and his air hose caught fire. And all like that. Maybe I ought to look for a pri vate job. Them last three hulls—they’re funny at night.”

Estelle snorted. “That’s a lotta horsehair, Pick, and you know it. I sure never thought you’d be chicken. There ain’t nothing there. But if you don’t like them last three ships, don’t go on them. Get yourself another helper, and have him do it.”

Th e new helper quit about four hours after he had been hired, saying he didn’t like night work. Pick didn’t argue with him. He paid him his time and then (Estelle’s remark about being chicken had stung him) went on the last hull by him self.

He stayed there less than an hour. He was a good deal more sensitive than Gene had been. What drove him away was noth ing visible, but an emotion so complex as to be quite beyond his powers of analysis.

He felt tired and a little feverish when he got home, as if he was co ming down with something. He must have taken cold or something on the ship. He had supper with Estelle and then went to bed. It was about eleven a.m. when he had his dream.

-

I T STARTED out mildly enough. He was hunting through one of the last three hulls f or a highly saleable chunk of everdur he knew was somewhere about. As he hunted he began to have a feeling, faint and then stronger, that something pretty unpleasant was lurking on the edge of his vision. Two or three times he turned around abruptly, hopin g to surprise it, but it moved faster than he could.

He kept on looking for the everdur , up and down ladders and in the crew’s quar ters and the engine room. At last, in the bilge of number two hold, he saw the half-submerged chunk of metal.

As soon as he saw it, he forgot he had been hunting it. By the strange equivalence of dreams, it was the bilge, the filthy stink ing bilge, which became the object of his desire. He knelt down beside it, scooped it up in his hand, sick with disgust and self-loathing, be gan to drink.

Pick’s heart was beating violently when he woke. Of all the dumb dreams! What did a thing like that mean? His heart was still pounding abnormally when the noon whistle blew. But after a while, lying with his head resting on his arms, he began to smile unconsciously.

He got up around three and read the paper while Estelle used the vacuum on the Venetian blinds. She kept looking at him and frowning while she worked. As they were eating, she said. “ You going on them three ships tonight, Pick?”

“Y eah.”

“I—” Estelle ran her tongue over her clotted lipstick. “Don’t do it, Pick.”

“Why not?” Pickard answered. His face wore a dim remote smile. “You said your self there wasn’t nothing there.”

“Yeah, I know. But—” Estelle worked a patch of polish loose from one finger nail—“it’s different when it’s you, Pick. You ain’t acting like yourself. We can get along somehow, and I don’t care about the coat. Please don’t go.”

Pickard got up and kissed her. He reached for his cap. “Don’t worry about it, Es ,” he said from the door. He gave her a look, bland and composed, which she was to remember afterward. “It’s O. K. I ain’t scared.”

-

AND the funny part of it was , he wasn’t. He never was scared again. He liked it fine on the hulls. Even when Gene came up behind him two nights later in the hold of the M.S. Trajan and pawed at him with his rotting hands, Pick wasn’t scared. He screamed and screamed, of course, and tried to fight Gene off, but that was more or less a reflex action. Part of him, deep inside, was delighted.

This was a good thing, because it would not have helped him to be scared. He hit Gene over and over again, but he couldn’t hurt Gene; Gene was already dead. And then Pick was floundering around in the bilge—the sickening stinking loathsome wonderful bilge—and screaming automatically, while Gene stood over him making soft blubbering noises with his oozing lips. The other one came forward from where he had been lurking and proceeded with what he had to do. He didn’t stop until Pickard was one of them permanently.

Estelle never did finish the payments on her fur coat. After a considerable interval of mourning she set up housekeeping with a man named Saddler, who had long admired her. The ships went back to their slow job of rusting at their moorings without bothering the taxpayers. And nowadays, if one is so indiscreet as to go poking at night among the decaying hulls as they roll q uietly at anchor in the estuary, he will find that the last three are populated by a small, happily-rotting company, a company consisting of Pickard, Gene, and the welder, who has the honorable position of Oldest Inhabitant.

The End

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The Last Three Ships