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

Throughout the ship, Samir inhaled the thick smell of the saltwater mud sump it sat in, breathing in the sharp odours of steel and copper and whatever else remained to oxidise. He could smell oil and some pungent chemical that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He fancied he could feel the odours on his skin, and the dark he moved through, too. He rolled his sleeves down against it.

Samir explored. He found a galley stripped of its sinks, seeing only rectangles in the metal where they used to be. He cast the beam of his torch over holes where once there were pipes. He found sockets and vents in a long line—a laundry room, maybe, or somewhere for computers or some other kinds of machines, all of it gone now. Yet for all the absences, the atmosphere was still oppressive. The passages were tight, and stepping through doorways stripped of their hatches seemed to take Samir into closer confines instead of opening up into empty vacant spaces. He was walking a labyrinth of steel that seemed to narrow around him.

He needed some air. What he was breathing was thin, like others had exhaled it countless times before, leaving little for him. It was metallic and sharp like blood. And though what he breathed in seemed thin, the air around him seemed dense. A thickening of atmosphere that pressed against him. He had experienced such contrasts before, such oppressiveness and shortness of breath, but even in Dhaka it had never been as severe as this. He took a small canister from his bag, fixed a plastic piece that would cover his mouth, and pumped a deep fresh breath from it. Another.

Stepping aboard the Karen May had been like stepping into the inhalation before a scream. Some had told him the ship was brooding, waiting for someone to come aboard, and he’d felt that. Now he felt like he walked poised on a pendulum at the highest point of its swing, waiting to plummet.

He descended walkways that hadn’t felt footsteps for months, maybe a year. The sound each step made was strangely muted, stifled before it could echo fully. Surprised to find a handrail at one section, he had taken it, only for it to come away from the cancerous sheet metal. He dropped it in surprise and it made only the briefest noise in falling. Even with the torch beam cutting a way ahead of him, Samir felt like he barely had any presence of his own. Like his passage through the dark was a temporary unseaming of the shadows he walked through, shadows that sealed up again behind him, and for a moment he couldn’t shake the impression of having been swallowed whole. Like Jonah in the body of Leviathan.

The thought brought him comfort. The whale had swallowed Jonah to protect him from a storm.

All the same storm.

As if to mock Samir’s train of thought, the ship released a sudden low groan and, on the tail of it came a soft stuttered sound. Like someone sobbing in the dark.

“Peace be with you,” Samir called. It came back to him only in part, a repetition of peaces—

Pieces?

—and then a sudden scream. Shrill, and brief, like wrenched metal.

“Samir?”

The voice came quietly.

“I’m here,” Samir said. He set his bag down and swept his torch behind, and up, and down. It showed him only narrow passageways like ventricles and walls red with rust, and he thought again of being held inside the body of a beast, only now he thought of the other Jonah, the one sailors thought bad luck. He took another puff of air from the canister and flinched at the hiss of it. Thought he heard it come back to him, closer than it should have been, and sharper. A gasp of sound. He swept the torch behind again and was startled when a shape pulled away from the wall. A body peeled from the gloom, dark but for the wide eyes and the teeth suddenly grinning.

“You frightened me!” said the boy.

“Abesh!”

The boy spoke again before Samir could admonish him fully.

“I want to see my brother.”

Samir sighed. “He’s not here.”

“Then where is he?”

“He’s with you.”

“But what if he’s here as well? Like the others?”

Previously, Abesh had feigned to not believe the stories. He had scoffed at the idea of a haunted wreck and, according to Mabud, was not only unafraid but actually keen to work the ship, though nobody would work it with him. Now, though, it seemed the stories had convinced him, at least partially. Only partially, because still the boy was unafraid.

“Will you help him?”

Samir nodded. “I will help him. Now go. Back to the boat. It’s dangerous here.”

Abesh did as he was told. Samir only stopped him when he heard a quick rasp and saw the sudden flare of flame that came with a lit match. The boy held it aloft to light his way but dropped it, startled, when Samir yelled at him.

“Dangerous!” he repeated, and handed the boy his torch. He had another.

“You’ll help him?” Abesh said again, shining the beam close enough to Samir to see his face. “You promise?”

“I’ll do all I can,” Samir said.

He watched the child carry the light away until it was gone.

Rokeya Begum had served Samir choddo shaak almost as soon as he’d arrived at her house. It was a vast dish, made up of fourteen different vegetables, but he was hungry and thankful for the meal and did not care that this was not the right time to eat it, that this was not Bhoot Chaturdashi . She had prepared it thinking of how it might help him, but he ate only to satisfy his hunger. He would welcome the protection, but he had other wards, other charms. Symbols of his faiths, which were all the stronger for being plural.

He had in his bag a selection of photographs he’d taken of the ship after speaking with Mabud Kibria at the breaking yard. He’d zoomed in on the vessel after downloading the pictures to his laptop, and had printed several copies of what he’d found. He retrieved them now, as he ate.

“Please, look at these. I took these this morning. What do you see?”

Even enlarged, the pictures showed little more than the ship. Presented in a state of partial deterioration, it held shadows like blemishes, and looked in places as if the picture had not developed fully. There were many dark spaces. But if you looked long enough…

“Faces,” Rokeya said. “I see faces.” She pointed. “There. And there. And—there are so many of them.”

Samir noted how she would not touch the photograph. Didn’t poke them when she pointed, hadn’t picked up a single one, just looked at where they lay on the table amongst the dishes of food. “Are they all…?” But she didn’t finish her question. She looked at Samir and said again instead, “So many.”

“Your son?”

She nodded.

“Where?” He tried to hand her one of the pictures but she recoiled, albeit subtly; she half-stood and leaned across the table to fetch him more water.

“Will you help them?” she said, refilling his glass.

Samir gathered up the photos.

“I’ll do all I can.”

“Muhammed Goswami said you helped him. In Dhaka?”

Samir touched the scar on his face but turned the gesture into a rub of his beard, remembering. “Yes.”

It had been difficult, but yes, he had helped.

“You are Christian?”

“I am.”

Less than one percent were in this country, but Samir had been taken in by missionaries after Aila and though they hadn’t forced any of their teachings on him, he’d learned from them anyway.

“Christian,” she said. “Not Muslim.”

“Muslim too.”

What did it matter, he felt like asking. God is the ocean, and religions are the ships that carry us.

But of course, it did matter.

He drank some of his water. It tasted salty. “I can help.”