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

Their stories were mingling. All who died here found their identities bound together and bound to the ship.

Samir talked about each of the men who had died on this ship, knowing those who approached were some of those same men. And as corrupted as they had been, as disfigured and reduced, they recognised something of themselves in what Samir said. He had a notebook filled with what their families had told him, and he had photographs too, but he relied on his memory, speaking in a rush not because he was afraid—though he was—but as a sort of litany, a tribute given not to appease but to convince. I can keep you alive, his stories said. I will remember you, and you can live on in me. Not here, in this rusting hulk of cold metal. In the flesh and blood of me, where my own spirit is anchored. Where my sister lives. And Christ. And Allah. Ninety-nine gods, and more. Replace this vessel with me. Let me carry you.

“Nasir?”

The nearest dark passenger of the Karen May made a guttural sound, a thick growl that bubbled from a throat choked with water. It reached for Samir with hands black and slick with oil.

“Your name is Nasir. You fell and you drowned.”

He saw it happen in more detail than he had been told, saw it more vividly than was contained in any written report. He saw how quickly and quietly the man plummeted, and how he landed across a beam as yet untaken. Saw him fold over it, heard the crack of spine and the way his feet kicked against metal as he flipped around it, and fell. Saw him face down in the filthy water, drowning in the ship’s black dregs.

The man pulled a fistful of Samir’s shirt, yanking buttons from their threads and tearing one half of the garment almost entirely free. It exposed the crucifix he wore. The blue peacock eye of a nazar boncuğu amulet. The scriptures he’d tattooed across his chest. Whether from one or the sum total of all, Nasir recoiled vampire-like, though perhaps it was simply the momentum of his violence as he staggered back with a wet handful of Samir’s clothing.

“Your name is Nasir, and you lived with your mother, Rokeya, and your father, Abdul, who is too old for physical work but loved to hear about yours. Your mother told me. She remembers your life well.”

What had once been a man came again at Samir, pushed him hard to the wall and went in quick to meet him and—

Was gone.

“And which one are you?” Samir said to the next. “Did you fall, did you explode, did you burn or bleed? Because I remember all of you, now. I wasn’t there when you died, but I’ve heard how you lived and I’m here now; I can take you away with me when I go.”

There was a sharp, high grinding whine of metal from somewhere within the ship. Sheet metal torn and folded. A deep wailing came up from the bowels of the vessel as a foul-smelling wind. A fetid stench, channelled to Samir through empty chambers and corridors stripped down to metal bones. It passed over him like breath, sour and dank. With the buffeting of his clothes, the tousling of his hair, some of those Samir had come to see collapsed back into the steel that had taken them. One fell, and burst into red flakes of rust that were dispersed by that same air. Another staggered into a wall, then a second wall, ricocheting in frantic spinning turmoil before falling against a space where a wall only used to be and tumbling into a dark that swallowed him whole. The ship would regurgitate him when it needed, unless…

“There’s more to remember you by than how you died,” Samir told those who gathered to him, moths to his flame of hope. “There are others who remember you better than this.”

The crowd was dispersing and growing and dispersing, all in flux. Some were taken by shadows, others birthed by them, but there were those who flared, consumed suddenly not by fire but some bright burning light.

“Yes,” said Samir. Memories and ghosts. Each so easily became the other.

Still, many remained. Those whose families Samir could not find or would not speak to him. Those who had no one but those they worked with, who knew them now only as ghost stories.

“Tell me who you were,” Samir said. “Before this place.”

One by one, they came to him. They held him tight in desperation, pulling him hard to support their listing forms as they breathed their stories into his ear. They smelled of rust and oil and mud, burnt flesh, blood, and the bilge of old flooded compartments. Their words fluttered like scraps of wind-blown tarpaulin, and with the last whispered one, so did they.

Samir, exhausted, lowered himself to sit when they were done. His breath came in thin bursts, like he’d run some long race, so he took another full blast from the mask and canister he’d brought with him. Then he began unpacking other items from his bag.

He wasn’t finished.

Some had called the Karen May haunted, and others had called it cursed, when in fact it was merely dying and trying not to. The Karen May had slowed her own demise by creating a new identity. Rather than suffer an undignified death at foreign hands on a dirty shore, she would make others suffer, and she would live.

“You’ve sailed every ocean,” Samir said, fumbling at the clasps in his bag, “sailed all of them so often to know there is only really one. We give it different names. The Atlantic. The Pacific. The Bay of Bengal. We recognise the strength that comes with a name. The containment.”

Samir grabbed handfuls of paper and cast them about the floor in front of him. Maps and charts and travel records.

“You are the Karen May , and you have known the power of the sea.”

He spread rolls of paper and weighted them at the corners with piles of salt, lined the edges with it to hold them. It was used in many rituals, but this was the first time he’d used it to represent the sea. He cast photographs of the Karen May upon them, none of the ones he’d taken, nor those from the ship-breaking office, but pictures of her in harbour, at sea, loaded with crew, with passengers, containers. He splashed water over them, anointed them as if with something holy but using the sea he’d brought in with him in his water bottle. There was an article from a newspaper he read aloud before adding it to the pile, an itinerary, a manifest of documents and statistics and records that he shared, though he mentioned nothing of money or of costs, said nothing of profits. He did not reduce her to that.

Her . Like all ships, she had been given a name and personified. Given life. Why would she not be bitter about seeing it end?

These ocean-going giants were never meant to be broken. They had withstood the world’s most ferocious conditions, crossing oceans that rose like mountains and dropped like valleys, burdened with cargo or passengers and taking them safely to wherever they needed to go. And now they sank only in mud, with the sea behind them. Sliced into sections and repurposed, more savaged than salvaged, and all they’d ever done before was forgotten.

The Karen May was not a graveyard, haunted by those who had died within her. She was a corpse, haunting the shore and doing all she could to be remembered. That was the problem. She was a ghost, existing only for as long as it took to decompose but no one willing to take her apart anymore. Or existing only for as long as she was remembered, but being remembered wrong. Every life she took became a new story and built her anew, created a cursed or haunted ship none would dare venture aboard, prolonging her own destruction by building her into something terrifying.

“We are each of us vessels in the same turbulent sea.”

Samir thought of all people did to stave off their gradual collapse into irrelevance and insignificance. Whenever Samir’s faith faltered, he found another to cling to. And another. That was their beauty, that was their strength. Surely it didn’t matter to God?