Haunted Legends (29 page)

•  •  •

“A haunted ship?” Langley laughed. “After all we’ve been through, you think we’re going to be scared of
ghosts
?”

Beck looked around the room at the remaining four contestants, out of the original thirteen. Langley, ex-Special forces; Dugan, an outlaw biker with a long prison record; Syverson, a stunt performer; and Moss, a professional dominatrix. “It’s not just a question of what scares
you,
” said the producer. “A lot of the audience is going to find this scary, and that’s just as important. More so, even, in terms of the ratings. And even if you all get through this one without any of you dropping out, there’ll be at least one more test after this.”

Syverson looked suspicious. “What sort of condition is the ship in?”

“Oh, it’s a wreck,” Beck replied cheerfully. “About the same sort of shape as the
Titanic,
except it’s mostly above the water. You won’t have to sail it anywhere; just camp aboard for a few days. And nights, of course. We’ll give you sleeping bags, food, water . . . the rest is up to you. Everything else you need to know is in those envelopes.”

Dugan looked sullen; Beck knew that the biker was so badly dyslexic as to be barely literate. They watched as the others opened the bulging envelopes
and looked at the information sheets, photos and maps. “The
Alkimos,
” said Langley. “I’ve heard of that. It’s off the west coast, near Yanchep.”

Moss raised a pierced eyebrow. “You been there?”

“No, but I had friends who went diving near there. They didn’t see any ghosts, and nothing happened to them. Well, not then, anyway.” The others stared at him, waiting for him to finish. “They got divorced, she got cancer, and he tried to kill himself by wrapping his car around a tree . . . but all of that happened years later, a long way from the ship, and it would’ve happened anyway whether they’d been there or not. Right?”

“Aren’t you a little ray of sunshine,” muttered Moss.

“You’ll be driving out there tomorrow,” said Beck. “Langley, you know how to handle an outboard?”

“Sure.”

“Good. You’ll be taking them the rest of the way. Try not to lose anybody, okay?”

•  •  •

The
George M. Shriver
spent most of World War II in dry-dock, undergoing repairs. Crewman reported hearing barking, and joked that the ship was haunted by a ghostly dog, though no one ever claimed to have seen it.

In 1961, after a collision with another ship, the accident-prone
Shriver
was sold to a Norwegian firm and renamed the
Viggo Hansteen.
A few months later, it was sold again and renamed the
Alkimos.
In March 1963, it struck a reef off the coast of western Australia. It was refloated, and towed into Fremantle harbour for repairs, but mysteriously caught fire in May and was almost gutted.

The
Alkimos
was impounded. The unlucky owner paid to have it released, then hired a tug to have it towed to Hong Kong for further repairs. On its second day out of Fremantle, the tug and the ship were battered by huge waves lashed up by an unexpected storm. The towline snapped, and the
Alkimos
drifted back toward shore into another reef.

Several attempts were made that year to salvage the ship; all were plagued by accidents, and failed. The crew of the tugboat
Pacific Star
came closest to success, but were also plagued by mechanical mishaps, and operations were temporarily put on hold when the owner of their company died.

The
Pacific Star
’s captain called in a Catholic priest to exorcise the
Alkimos
before they made their next salvage attempt. A heavy swell lifted the
Alkimos
off the rocks, and the
Pacific Star
began towing it back toward Fremantle. Before they’d gone two miles, another ship pulled up alongside them, the captain was arrested for unpaid debts and the tug impounded. The
Alkimos
was anchored offshore, but another heavy swell snapped the anchor chain and it drifted back toward the shore. Crewmen from the
Star,
stationed aboard the
Alkimos
as guards, reported seeing a man in oilskins and a sou’wester walk across the main deck and through a closed door.

•  •  •

The sea off Two Rocks was choppy, and Moss leaned over the edge of the inflatable boat to vomit. To her disgust and Dugan’s amusement, the wind blew much of it back onto her anorak. The wreck, clearly visible from miles down the beach in good weather, was now obscured by rain. The bow of the ship seemed largely intact back as far as the bridge and the engine room, but the stern end had been stripped down to its skeleton and gutted.

Beck had wanted the four to approach the ship by night, but the network’s lawyers had vetoed this. One camera crew had followed them in a larger boat, while another watched on from a hill near the shore. Beck had tried to squeeze enough money out of the budget to pay for a helicopter to give a better view of the top of the wreck, but was now relieved that this had been impossible: they were running hours behind schedule, and even had they found a pilot willing to fly in such dire and unpredictable weather, the cost would have blown out the budget, and the chances of getting any useable footage were slim. As it was, Langley had reached the wreck before Beck and the second crew were in position, and had had to wait until they were set up for the shot. Moss’s stomach was empty by now, but she was still dry-heaving as they sailed in half-circles around the
Alkimos,
looking for the best place to moor the boat. Radio reception between the boats and the second crew was frequently interrupted by static, and often barely audible.

Beck watched the boats through binoculars, without leaving the comfort of the Range Rover. This, he thought, was going better than he’d hoped. He was fairly sure that neither Dugan nor Langley were going to opt out yet, nor would Syverson, but Moss might still quit. She had a small cult following, but not enough of a demographic to lift the show’s ratings high enough to compensate. It was a pity, he thought, that the stripper-turned-wrestler
hadn’t coped with the spiders as well as she had with carrying handfuls of snakes.

Langley and Syverson had both been given helmet cameras, and were the first to climb aboard the rusting hulk. It had taken them several attempts to get a line attached to the ship, as the swell kept carrying their inflatable out of range, but finally they had a sufficiently secure rope that Syverson was able to abseil up the side and clamber up onto the deck. The feed from the cameras was spotty, and the editor was probably going to demand overtime trying to get the necessary amount of useable vision and sound, but that, Beck thought cheerfully, would give the episode a sort of
Blair Witch
ambience, and anything that went wrong could be blamed on ghosts.

The producer smiled. Word had gotten out among the crew that the series might be canceled, which meant it would have reached the competitors as well. And Dugan, he knew, was desperate for money—possibly desperate enough to kill someone, once it came down to the last two contestants—and Beck was fairly confident that the biker would be one of the last two. The other would probably be Langley, who was trained in the same sort of dirty fighting as Dugan and would be more than a match for him, unless the biker could take him completely by surprise and do enough damage in one blow to gain the advantage. Not that it mattered enormously to Beck. He doubted that Dugan had read and understood the contract well enough to have realized that if any of the contestants were charged with a crime because of their actions during the production of the show, they forfeited any prize money that might be coming to them. It wouldn’t even matter whether they were convicted or acquitted or pleaded self-defense, and if they tried to sue the network later they’d be lucky to get a cent.

He turned to the crew. “How’s it looking?”

“Bad,” said the cameraman, while the sound engineer made a thumbs-down gesture. “Even without the rain and the light levels. At this distance, I can hardly tell them apart. And the forecast is for even worse weather ahead—a big storm front headed down this way.”

Beck pouted. “Maybe we’ll get some useable footage from the helmet cameras. Bill?”

The sound engineer grimaced. “You’re going to need a voice-over. All I’m getting is thumping, crashing, swearing, wind noise, waves, seagulls, interference, and what sounds like a dog barking.”

“A dog?” Beck repeated incredulously.

“That’s what it sounds like. Maybe one of ’em has a dog in their backpack. Or I guess it could be a seal. But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s happy.”

•  •  •

Syverson was the first to haul himself, cautiously, over the
Alkimos
’s railings and onto the deck. Both were slippery from the rain, but neither collapsed under his weight, and he relaxed slightly and turned to Langley. “Area’s secure, capt’n.”

“You hope,” muttered the ex-soldier as he climbed over the rails. He scanned the wreck, the helmet camera panning slowly across the expanse of rusted steel and choppy iron-gray water. Then he shrugged and looked over the gunwale to the boat. “Okay, you can come up now.” He watched as Moss, still seasick, struggled with the ascender on the line he’d just used.

“I thought she’d be good with knots,” said Syverson, obviously amused; then, when Langley didn’t reply, said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You said a friend of yours tried to kill himself. You mean he survived?”

“Sort of. He hit the tree, all right, and went through the windshield, but it didn’t kill him.”

“He didn’t try again?”

“He couldn’t. He’s paralyzed from the neck down. He’s asked the doctors to euthanize him, but none of them will.”

“Jesus,” Syverson breathed. Langley turned to look at him, realizing it was the first time since shooting had begun on
Worst Nightmare
that he’d seen Syverson actually looking scared. Maybe he found paralysis more frightening than death. Then the stuntman chuckled, and Langley glanced back at the boat, which was drifting away from the ship. Dugan had grabbed the line, but seemed unsure whether to stay with the inflatable or swarm up the rope.

“Maybe the ghost doesn’t want him aboard,” said Syverson.

“We should be so lucky. That asshole wants the money too bad to give up.” He watched as the ex-biker made his decision and jumped out of the boat into the sea, still holding the rope—then vanished beneath the waves.

•  •  •

In March 1969, Herbert Voight disappeared in an attempt to swim from Cottesloe to Rottnest Island.

Three weeks later, an escaped convict trying to hide on the
Alkimos
found Voight’s skull inexplicably lodged in the wreckage of the engine room.

•  •  •

Syverson cheered ironically as Dugan’s head—minus his climbing helmet and mounted camera—reappeared above the churning sea. The ex-biker hauled himself hand over hand along the rope until he could brace his feet against the side of the ship, then began trying to climb. He half-swung half-scrambled across the hull toward the other line as though trying to grab hold of it—or Moss, who’d paused halfway up the hull in case he needed rescuing. Langley swore under his breath, and began pulling on Moss’s rope, lifting her out of Dugan’s reach. Dugan swore as his boot slipped on the wet metal and he swung back the other way like a pendulum.

“You want me to give him a hand?” asked Syverson, but Langley seemed to have gone deaf. He continued to haul on Moss’s line until her hand appeared above the level of the deck, when he leaned over the railing and grabbed her wrist. The rail shed wet flakes of rust, but it didn’t break, even when Moss rested her full weight on it.

“Thanks,” she gasped as she flopped down onto the rain-slick deck.

“No worries,” Langley mumbled, and looked down at Dugan, who was still struggling to climb up the hull.

The camera crew had taken their inflatable boat in tow, and were also following the ex-biker’s slow and unsteady progress. Moss picked herself up, then looked around. “What a fucking dump,” she announced. “They couldn’t have found a haunted hotel?”

Syverson smiled. “I guess it’s home until we can afford something better. Of course, you could always call Beck and ask for another room . . .” He tapped the radio mike on the lanyard around his neck. “Testing, testing . . .”

Moss sighed. “Nah, this’ll do. I just hope the toilets work.” She glanced at Dugan as he hooked an elbow over the railing. “Glad you could join us,” she lied.

He scowled at her as he clambered onto the deck, then unzipped one of the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket and pulled out a small waterproof case, from which he removed a pack of Camels and a Zippo lighter. “Okay,” he said, after he’d lit up, a hand over the cigarette to shelter it from the wind and the rain, “what the fuck do we do now?”

“For one thing, you’d better be careful where you throw that butt,” said
Moss. “I’ve been reading about this place. There are still drums of tar or oil or something on board, and one of them caught fire back in the seventies. Spontaneously, they think.”

“Sure it wasn’t the ghost?” asked Dugan, and guffawed.

“I’ll ask him if I see him,” said Langley. “And to answer your other question, I suggest we check out the cabins and see if we can find four that are still reasonably intact. Unless anybody has a better idea?”

No one did, so they splashed their way back to what remained of the boat deck, cautiously grabbing handholds where they could. Dugan laughed as he found a cabin door marked “Wipers,” next to the toilets. “Now that’s what I call a shitty job,” he crowed, then opened the door and looked inside. No light came through the walls or rain through the ceiling, so he swung his flashlight around, then grunted. “I’ve stayed in worse,” he said. “If nobody else wants this one, I’ll take it.”

“Fine,” said Moss. Dugan unbuckled his backpack and dropped it onto the floor with a dull clang. The other three left him there and continued searching. The wind and the rain had eased off enough that they could talk without shouting, though the dark clouds suggested that worse weather was on the way.