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

Rokeya sighed. She had little choice but to let him try, at least. They always had little choice by the time they were requesting his help.

“I want you to free my son’s spirit,” Rokeya told him. Samir knew this already; she was only saying it to hear it herself. “Release him from that terrible place.”

It was likely that the only ones he would be setting free were those left behind. Those who grieved and held on so hard that it hurt. Like squeezing a handful of keys. He would ease them of that, at least.

He looked around the room as he closed his bag on the photographs. There were many pictures of her son. He was well-remembered. This was good. It would help him more than the choddo shaak .

“Tell me about him.”

She nodded again, but said nothing for a long time. “There was an accident…” she managed eventually.

“I know. Tell me about him before then.”

She found that much easier.

The Bengali word for ghost is bhoot or bhut . It is also the word for past. So Samir listened to all of her stories, and he ate all of the vegetables she gave him, and he hoped it would be enough.

Samir had been told once, by a man in Jamalpur, that ghosts could only exist for as long as it took their body to decompose. Samir could understand how such a belief might be born, how it could stand as a metaphor for the grieving process. He could see, too, how it might appeal to those who’d had little time to prepare for a great loss. A transition period in which loved ones could linger but not be trapped, able, still, to pass on to whatever it was that came next. For the brief time he had known Dr Shahid, a missionary he’d met in Dhaka, he had come to recognise a different belief. That the dead remained, in some form or another, for as long as there was someone else to remember them. This was how Christ could still be with us, she’d explained, and Samir had nodded like he was supposed to, and stored the story away with all the others that made up the different faiths he carried with him.

When it came to the Karen May , he was more inclined to believe Dr Shahid’s version than what he’d heard in Jamalpur. He thought of Abesh’s brother, incinerated in a blast; what had remained to decompose in a case like that? He thought of Nasir, Rokeya’s son. He’d fallen through a hatch, plummeting deep into the vessel’s hold. Enough water had flooded the wreck that the fall didn’t kill him, but he broke so many bones on the way down hitting struts and part-walls that he couldn’t keep afloat or swim and the man had drowned before anyone could help him. His body had been recovered. It had been cleaned, shrouded, and buried, as according to Islam. No doubt something of him still remained in his grave, though for many he was already forgotten. Rokeya remembered him for who he had been, Rokeya and Abdul, but Mabud Kibria in the ship-breaking office hadn’t even remembered the name, was reminded only when Samir explained how the man had died. That’s all he was now. A death. Like all the others. Every dead worker had become the method of their ending: the one who fell, the one who burned, the one who suffocated. The one crushed flat beneath tonnes of freed steel. The one thrown and broken by an unexpected blast. Each of them united in that their work had killed them.

And that this ship had taken them.

The ship wanted him too; Samir could feel it. Not Samir specifically, just someone; it had been so long. Nobody would work the vessel anymore. It was the only reason he had been allowed to even take a look. Often Samir would need to convince people to allow him to complete his work, persuade them with a mix of cajoling or something spiritual if they seemed that way inclined—he knew various faiths well enough to talk about them with authority. This time, though, he had been granted permission with little hesitation or reservation. The men in charge were more interested in profits than prophets and didn’t care what had to be done, so long as people would work the ship again. Whether Samir could cleanse the ship or not didn’t matter. So long as they had been seen to try, the workers would be less afraid.

Samir found a suitable spot for his purpose and stopped. He estimated he was near the middle of the ship, both regarding its length and his position between decks. Where he stood, the passage branched off in two directions. Taken with a missing wall opposite, he was positioned at an improvised crossroads. Not exactly the points of the compass, but it would do.

“This is it, Kamala,” he said. He took a final puff from the oxygen canister and readied other items from his bag. “You ready?”

Of all his faiths, his sister was the one Samir believed in most of all. Reciting her name was as much a part of any of his rituals as any sacred text or practised gesture. She looked after him still, just as he cared for her in carrying her with him. She—

From the dark ahead, the opened room, came the tiny scrape of furtive movement. As if a sandal had trodden rust underfoot.

“Abesh?”

But Abesh would be behind him, would be back at the boat by now, and the boy had been barefoot.

From the dark again, another sound. Someone panting, like the breaths between hard sobs. Or the noise someone might make as they suffocated.

Whimpering.

And from over there, a muttering he couldn’t make out. A trailing of words he couldn’t quite hear, quick but quiet, like a desperate prayer or the hasty promises someone made when in trouble.

Samir set his torch down on the floor, leant it within the loop of his bag’s strap, opened both arms to all he heard, and spoke so they might hear him.

He told them about his sister. He told them she liked ice cream and the way birds flew in patterns and how she hated to be called Kami. He told them about how she died too, and how she was forever with him.

This was how he always started.

A standing shape came into the corridor, rolling in from behind a door frame as if detaching itself from the wall there. It was a man. He had a shredded face. His skin was hanging in thin wet ribbons from his brow, cheeks, and from his jowls where the front of his throat was open. Lower, and Samir saw the chest was open too.

“My name is Samir Zakir Hamid,” he told him, and his voice wavered. He could see the broken bones of an exposed ribcage protruding from the man. He nudged his torch so the grisly sight was illuminated clearly and saw amongst those bloody bones rows of metal struts curving from the flesh. Rusted bars, like railings or corroded pipes.

From deep below, beneath his feet, a wallowing groan swallowed its own echo in rising through the decks. It engulfed Samir, heavy but brief, and faded like some distant whale song.

The sudden stench of charred meat announced a second presence. Emerging from further away, clambering up from the floor as if it had knelt there all this time, a red-black man scorched featureless of all but wet glistening limbs and a blackened nub where a face used to be. It took faltering steps towards Samir, guiding itself by bumping into one wall and then the other as it stumbled forward.

“You don’t have to—”

And now there, from between the legs of the first, came another. Drawing itself across the floor with torn arms. A man whose torso marked the end of his body, save for what trailed out of it. He reached for Samir with the hand that wasn’t pulling him forward, the left, then the right, in some tortured dry-swimming crawl.

Samir looked back the way he had come and saw more shadows than had been there before. He nudged the torch with his foot and saw others of those who’d perished here. Brought them into life by seeing them. They had changed, forced into new shapes by what had killed them and wearing scars that disfigured them beyond any Chittagong tattoo, each carrying some aspect of the ship. This one rusted where it should have rotted. This one with struts like splints, another with rivets where eyes should be, or a gaping porthole for a face.