Stefán Máni - The Ship

Very good , he thinks, as though he is responsible for it all, that things are exactly as he requested, that nothing in the assembly room disappoints the guests or upsets them.

Off and on the room seems to fill with the sound of chatter, light laughter and the clink of glasses, then he turns around and looks at first one table then another. But the moment he looks over his shoulder the voices are silenced and the clinking of glasses dies out between the echoing walls.

Or was it the screech of metal and rattling of chains?

At the front of the assembly room is a cognac lounge. Heavy leather chairs around uncovered circular tables of dark wood, a thick carpet on the floor and the aroma of cigar smoke, although no-one is smoking. He walks up a broad staircase leading to a doorway with heavy wooden double doors opening into the bright room.

Beyond the door is another room: a vast, stinking space – dark, cold and empty. At first he can see nothing – it’s as if the bottomless dark absorbs the light – but little by little pictures appear in the darkness, like large fish that stick their colourless bodies up out of black water.

He sees eyes that are dark pits, gaping mouths and skin stretched like a rubber sheet over fleshless bones, and the people are singing a song as lifeless as the whining of wind in a half-open window. They stretch thin arms up in the air and all those emaciated arms turn into a leafless forest of arms in the bottom of the hold; the song changes into drawn-out lustful moans; these living pictures of the dead are fucking each other down in the deep, and their nightmarish faces – which had, at first, run together into one terrible mask of hunger – have now become fitful distortions of the face of his daughter, who thrashes about and fucks herself in a rotting stew of cold flesh that engenders flesh and –

He hears a heavy thud, turns and sees a man lying face down in the middle of the Golden Gallery. It’s Stoker. He is dressed in evening clothes and beardless, his hair newly trimmed. His fingers twitch and he blinks his eyes. His head is open and a thick bloody soup oozes from the rug and into the opening that little by little closes again – Daddy!

He feels cold fingers pull at his clothes. He loses his balance and falls backwards, down into the darkness. He stretches out his arm and manages to grasp the brass doorknobs on the two doors with both hands but he isn’t able to lift himself up; he can’t keep his balance on the edge of the abyss. His arms grow longer and longer, he holds onto the brass knobs and closes the double door like a trapdoor behind him. The slit contracts, the light dims, he tumbles into the dark void.

He falls into the plinth course; he hears heavy metal pulled aside, hinges screeching, and a moment before he lands on the hard metal floor someone calls.

SATAN!

00:03:03

The noise of the bells is maddening…

With his right hand, Jónas takes hold of the railing on the right-hand side of the stairs that lead up to B-deck and then the boat deck. He takes a deep breath and tries to control his trembling muscles, then he bends his right leg a little before he hops up to the next step.

He is wearing nothing but a white nightshirt; he is trembling with weakness and suffering torments of pain. Sweat pours off him and the bandages on his left ankle and left wrist are swelling from the rhythmic beating of his arteries; his left side itches all over and his broken limbs send a continuous message of distress. The fingers of his left hand hold the four aluminium sheets of paracetamol-codeine in a deathlike grip. One sheet falls onto the step below him and two steps above another sheet drops from his numb fingers. Only two sheets left, and one is beginning to slide…

One step, then another, and another…

He has to be able to do this!

When he finally makes it to the top of the boat deck stair he can hardly stand. The fingers of his left hand are holding weakly to the final aluminium sheet, snot and blood run from his nose, and his gums, skin and eyes all itch.

‘ Further, further ,’ Jónas cajoles himself, hops to the side and leans his left shoulder against the wall at the top of the stairs. Just rest a little, one second, only to…

Ási and Rúnar’s cabins are wide open and they are lying inside on their backs in their own blood. Shot to pieces. Stone dead.

‘What’s going…’ Jónas says and blinks. The paralysing din of the bells wreathes this horrific scene in an aura of unreality, but after staring at the corpses of his shipmates for a few second, the second mate realises that this is stark reality.

The men on the ship are being killed.

‘Good God!’ cries Jónas. He hops one short step forwards towards the bosun’s cabin, but when he hears someone running up the stairs, he hops with all his strength over to the door leading out to the platform at the back of the wheelhouse, on the port side.

There he pushes his back against the door and holds his breath, while a man dressed all in black with a machine gun strapped over his shoulder studies the corpses of Jónas’s shipmates for just an instant before running up to D-deck.

Who…? Is everyone dead?

Jónas takes hold of the doorknob with his right hand, opens the door and hops out under the open sky. He grabs the railing with his right hand and hops backwards along the iron floor.

Above him the emergency flare sways slowly down, like a dwarf sun setting.

When he reaches the lifeboat he has to hop up two more steps – first up to the raised platform back of the boat and then up to the boat’s stern, which points forty-five degrees up into the rose-red night sky.

His sweat-soaked nightshirt is stuck to his clammy skin, a cold wind blows up his bare legs and his right leg has gone numb from the hard, cold steel.

When Jónas finally reaches the stern of the lifeboat he realises that the fingers of his left hand are not holding anything. The last sheet of painkillers is gone.

No!

He opens the door aft on the boat by turning two handles up, then he lifts up a heavy door with his other hand while he struggles to keep his balance on one foot. This is all so difficult that he mostly just wants to give up, to sit down and cry, but since he’s got this far, he has to go the whole way. He has to!

The door falls to the side and the open boat lies before him. If Jónas should lose his balance and fall in through the door, he’d fall all the way to the bow, the boat slants at such an angle.

But Jónas makes it through the door, manages to close it after him and climb up to sit in the helmsman’s seat, which is higher than all the other seats in the boat and is the only seat of the eighteen that faces forwards and not backwards. On top of the boat is a raised section with four windows, two facing forwards and one to each side. The first mate fastens the five-point safety belt, turns the current onto the controls and starts moving a long rod back and forth.

With every movement of the rod the boat lifts up a few millimetres and slowly a short iron hook comes loose from a thick joist on the bottom of the boat. When the joist has risen above the hook the boat is free, and then it drops down off the davits and straight into the sea, which spurts dozens of metres in all directions.

The blow is so heavy that Jónas B Jónasson loses consciousness.

00:02:33

‘SATAN!’ shouts Stoker as soon as he manages to open the forecastle.

‘Huh? What?’ says Satan and his fumbling hands reach for nothing as he suddenly wakes from a deep nightmarish sleep. ‘Who’s…’