Alex Bell - Fighting with fire

‘Sorry, old bean,’ Lex said, not really feeling sorry at all.

‘Oh my Gods, what have you done?’ Jeremiah shrieked, dropping his sword so that both hands could clutch at his eyes. ‘I can’t see! I’m blind!’

‘Well, that’s how these Games work, you know,’ Lex said cheerfully, declining to correct Jeremiah’s misimpression that he had just been attacked with something extremely harmful and possibly deadly.

‘It was only a packet of salty snacks, Jeremiah!’ Tess said scornfully from behind him. She fixed her brother with a withering look and said, ‘Stop being such a baby!’

‘Eh?’ Jeremiah lowered his hands and looked up with eyes that were a little red but, other than that, perfectly fine. ‘Oh. You ass!’ he spat venomously at Lex. ‘What are you walking around munching on snacks in the middle of the Game for? You’ll never win that way!’

‘When you’ve been playing these Games for as long as I have, Jeremiah,’ Lex replied, deliberately flippantly, ‘you become such an old hand that you can eat and play at the same time. Isn’t that right, Jesse?’ He gave the cowboy a stern, meaningful look. No point in telling Jeremiah about the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii if he didn’t know about them already. It would spoil the surprise. And Lex certainly wasn’t going to come out and tell a competitor how to deal with a potential threat.

Jesse nodded and put a crisp into his mouth for emphasis, then remembered the Binding Bracelets and hastily handed the packet over to Lex so that he could eat a crisp, too, and they wouldn’t swap bodies.

Jeremiah shook his head and bent down to retrieve his sword. ‘Well, I think you’re a pair of asses.’

‘I think anyone who’d use the word “ass” as an insult is a stuck-up toff who has no business doing anything more dangerous than playing a game of croquet!’

To Lex’s pleased surprise, Tess sniggered at that, even if she did hastily try to turn it into a cough.

‘What happened to your leg?’ Lex asked, noticing for the first time that part of Jeremiah’s right trouser leg had been ripped away, and there was a jagged gash stretching down his calf? not deep enough to cause any damage, or a limp (more’s the pity)? but enough to draw a bit of blood.

‘Never you mind!’ Jeremiah snapped. Obviously he, too, felt that it would not do to give anything away about threats the other players hadn’t come into contact with yet. It looked to Lex like the handiwork of something with claws? a giant crab, or lobster, perhaps. Unpleasant, but hardly deadly.

‘Well, it’s been fun, but I don’t have any more time to waste standing here chatting with you,’ Lex said.

Jeremiah gave him a haughty, superior look and turned away to continue the Game as well.

And that was where the problem arose.

They were currently standing in a sort of stairwell with two doors leading on to the landing and stairs stretching away upwards and downwards (with a couple of brass octopuses on the banisters). Lex had come from one of the doors and Jeremiah had come from the other. For some reason, Lex had expected Jeremiah to walk straight past him and back the way Lex had just come but it seemed that he, like Lex, didn’t think there was much point in exploring parts of the ship that another player had already investigated. They therefore both went to go up the stairs at the same time.

‘Find your own route!’ Lex said.

‘You find your own route!’ Jeremiah snapped.

‘Look, let’s be sensible about this. Why don’t we both take the stairs but you go down and I go up?’

Whilst Jeremiah and Lex bickered, Jesse held the crisp packet out to Tess. The little girl reached out to take one but then froze suddenly and shook her head, pointing at the Binding Bracelet on her wrist. Jesse shook his own head, impatient with himself for forgetting again. But then he thought of chewing tobacco and he motioned with his hand for Tess to watch. He took a crisp out of the packet, put it in his mouth, sucked the flavour out of it, and then spat the soggy crisp out on to the floor. No body swap. A big grin spread across Tess’s face and she reached for a crisp to do the same.

‘I’m not going down!’ Jeremiah was saying vehemently. ‘There are probably more flesh-eating crabs down there!’

So that was what had taken a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. Lex bet those crabs were nowhere near as horrible as the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii of Scurlyshoo, though.

‘I’m going up these stairs,’ Jeremiah declared. ‘And that’s that. I would strongly advise you not to get in my way.’

So it was to come down to a race between them, then. Lex decided his best chance would simply be to leg it up the stairs as fast as he could. Jesse could follow in his own time? he was a grown man who could take care of himself. Tess, on the other hand, was a little girl and Jeremiah would have to be even more of a jerk than Lex thought to leave her by herself on this terrible ship.

But just as his whole body was tensed ready to flee, something happened that made them all freeze. There was music coming from above. It was some sort of old sea shanty played on a harmonica. The music was out of place down there on the sunken ship? an oddly lonely sound? a sort of distant echo of the long-gone sailors who had once sailed her.

And that was when Lex first realised that, so far, they had not seen a single skeleton. Where were the crew? Even if the flesh-eating crabs had stripped the bodies bare, they surely wouldn’t have eaten the bones as well. There should be skeletons at the very least. Skeletons all over the place, in fact.

‘It must be Lorella playing some trick,’ Jeremiah said firmly as Tess drew fearfully closer to his side, clearly unnerved by the eerie music. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’

Despite this statement, it was clear from the way he looked longingly at the stairs that Jeremiah would now prefer to go down rather than up. Like an amateur, he thought it was better to avoid the obstacles rather than head straight for them. But as Lex was clearly still intending to go upstairs, Jeremiah decided that he’d better, too. They proceeded as a cautious group, for Lex now felt unable to stick to his original plan of legging it up there. Deliberately going towards danger was all very well but running towards it blindly was just plain stupid.

They got closer and closer to the melancholy music until they finally reached the little landing on the floor above and found the cause. A sailor sat there on the banisters with a harmonica in his hand, which he lowered when he saw them coming. They all stared at each other for a minute. The sailor didn’t look like a ghost. Or, at least, he didn’t look the way Lex had always imagined a ghost to look, in that he wasn’t a floating sheet with a couple of eye holes or, failing that, at least transparent. But he didn’t look quite normal either. His skin had a strange greyish look, his eyes were sunken, his hair dry.

‘What are you, sir?’ Jeremiah demanded, pointing his sword at the sailor in an over-dramatic, threatening manner. ‘Speak up! Are you a ghost?’

The sailor looked at him in cold silence for a moment before saying, ‘We’re not dead. We’re a cursed crew. We’re not allowed to die.’ His voice was dry and hoarse, like he never used it. Something about the tone sent shivers up Lex’s spine.

‘Someone on board pissed off the Gods, did they?’ he asked.

The sailor fixed his baleful gaze on him. ‘Aye,’ he whispered, before shuddering and falling silent. It seemed that whatever the crew had done to get themselves cursed in such a way was not a story this man wanted to dwell upon. Which suited Lex just fine, for he couldn’t have cared less.

‘Stand aside and let me pass!’ Jeremiah demanded.