Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

Abesh made a sympathetic noise.

“I lost her when I was just a little older than you claim to be.”

Abesh had no additional sympathy for that. Perhaps he thought it was worse to have a sister than to have lost one. The only sound was the boat knocking against the ship and the water lapping.

“We were living in Munshiganj when Aila hit. Do you remember Aila?”

“One of the storms?”

Aila had not been a simple storm. Aila had been a cyclone, killing hundreds, leaving thousands homeless. But Samir agreed.

“Yes, one of the storms.”

Abesh shrugged. “I remember lots of storms. They are all the same storm.”

All the same storm .

Samir remembered how the water had rushed into their home. How it had filled the rooms and toppled the mud walls. Remembered how his sister had reached for him before the water took her away. He told Abesh some of this, staring into the Karen May . What remained of his family had fled to Dhaka, already crowded with those running from other floods. Other storms.

All the same storm.

Samir had often looked for Kamala in those crowds.

“Why are you telling me this?” Abesh asked. He had stopped looking into the ship’s shadows and instead looked set to follow Samir.

“Wait here,” Samir told him.

Abesh looked disappointed, but he sat down.

“I’m the only one left,” Samir told him. “I told you about Kamala so that you can remember her.”

He shrugged his bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder and pulled his way deeper into the Karen May .

The foreman had taken Samir to an office made from an old cargo container. It sat on short stilts of recovered scrap but still it sank into the mud at one end. The lean was even more obvious inside thanks to the papers, maps, and notices pinned to the walls.

“Wait here,” the man said.

Samir waited.

The paperwork on the walls all concerned the ship-breaking, of course. Each vessel had its own hanging clipboard of papers, and a large map of the beach illustrated where they were located with barely legible script, circled numbers, and shorthand symbols, like some mystical chart. The trappings of a spell that summoned wealth. Samir read some of the details, though he’d already done his research. Ships were bought by an international broker, and a suitable captain—a good captain—was hired to beach it properly on the narrow strip of mud-beach like someone else might park a car. Then more people were paid to take the thing apart. A ship had a lifespan of only thirty years or so and then they became too expensive to maintain, too costly to insure. With profits dwindling, each ship became more valuable as scrap, with more than ninety per cent of each vessel recyclable. A lot of the material was resold right away: the liquids, machinery, the easily removed fixtures; it all got sold on to salvage dealers. Engines, wiring. Everything. Samir saw a list detailing all the copper pulled from one of the vessels, and the sum beside it amazed him. The steel would be converted into building materials like rebar, tension devices to reinforce larger constructs. Samir thought of the workers standing in bent shapes or taut with the strain of some heavy task, sticking from the mud; they were like exposed rebar themselves, holding the yards together. Profits in excess of eighty-three million taka, depending on the price of steel, were built upon their strength, and at great cost. He had a list of dead men who knew the truth of that.

He turned from the records when the door behind him opened. A large man stepped into the office. Samir knew already that this would be Mabud Kibria. He barely glanced at Samir, making his way to a heavily loaded desk and rifling through the papers piled there. The foreman who had escorted Samir earlier followed.

“This is the man looking for work.”

Judging by the number of clipboards and the red underlines on the map, there would be plenty of work for those who wanted it. India may have dismantled more ships each year, but here in Bangladesh they recycled more deadweight tonnage than anywhere else in the world.

“I’m not looking for work,” Samir reminded the foreman.

Mabud gave Samir more than a glance this time, clearly annoyed that whatever little time he was going to spare had already been wasted.

“I am here to work,” Samir told him. “Rokeya Begum sent me.”

Samir fumbled for a handrail he’d forgotten was no longer there as he climbed. He would start from the top and work his way down. He had to be careful; the handrail was missing, but so were some of the steps themselves. The portholes had been taken from the walls, and in many places the walls were gone as well. Inside the ship was an absence that expanded. Samir walked within a steady decomposing of steel. There were no railings on the deck either. Samir passed mounts for missing cranes. Saw signs for lifeboats that weren’t there.

Out to sea, in the fading light of the setting sun, children were playing in the dieselled waters. They swam around a raft of wreckage, clambering up only to throw their young careless bodies at toxic water and whatever scrap metal might lurk submerged there. Despite what they might have thought, their bodies were not made of steel. Each was susceptible to breakage, all too easily opened up and spilt empty, or filled with fluid instead of breath. Samir had to look away from their play, unable to stop imagining the worst.

Port and starboard, the Bangladeshi beach was an open graveyard. The ships here did not sink, they slumped; rotting, rusting corpses alive only by day with the men who took them apart reducing them to rivetless pieces. But in the dark they looked almost whole again. It was easy to imagine each as it might have once been. Their slow progress across the world’s oceans; the sudden climb and plunging fall over waves the size of mountains. Leviathan, each of them, forging paths that disappeared almost immediately behind them as they fell and rose again. These were cruise liners and tankers and container ships from all over the world. Who had sailed them? What had brought them to the ships, and where had each ship taken them? And what else had each ship carried? Here they were now, these amazing constructions, at their journey’s end. Waiting to be torn apart, they spilled silent stories into the mud, into the sea, like slicks of oil, each sinking or getting dragged away with every outgoing tide.

In the bridge, every monitor and machine, every button, every wire, had all been taken. Samir stood where the windows used to be, imagining himself the captain looking out at a vast ocean and a sky full of stars. Now windows empty of glass framed a landscape that was all mud and lights coming on in the city inland, or from the fires on the beach where workers kept the evening chill away burning unsalvageable materials in old oil drums. Burning asbestos and worse, probably.

Samir retrieved a small bound bundle of sage from his bag and wedged it into a tight corner of metal. He lit it and wafted the aromatic smoke with his hands as he recited a prayer. He was combining his faith with “smudging”, a Native American ritual which cleansed a space of negative energy, and with science; sage cleared the air of bacteria.

He would descend now and wind his way through the corridors until he found the “dark heart” of the ship. It was a suitable metaphor. Much of what Samir did was couched in metaphor. That was how faith worked, and it made the supernatural easier to understand. He had grown up Christian in a Muslim country but he knew all the faiths now. He liked the stories. Stories were useful. Powerful, sometimes.

Inside the ship again, it was difficult to remember the noble majesty he’d imagined from the bridge. What he saw here, in the beam of his torch, was decrepit. There was no engine thrumming life through the body of this giant, and no rhythmic movement of tide around it that he could feel. Yet there was something. Some vibration of life inside, something more than silence. Sounds that rose from its own depths. The sudden clank-spank echo from some unseen place as something fell. The metallic groan of steel grinding on steel, like the drawn-out inhalation of a final breath. From somewhere deep came a steady ticking, like a swinging chain striking a wall in a hidden chamber. And always, everywhere, dripping. Wherever Samir touched, his hand came away wet, red-brown with rust.