The Paradise Trap (19 page)
Authors: Catherine Jinks
Marcus realised suddenly that he was in some kind of onboard cocktail lounge. It had its own stage and pool table; there were even a couple of poker machines. The whole place smelled of brine and spilled alcohol.
I shouldn’t be in here
, he thought.
I’m underage
. Then he reached for Jake’s suitcase, which had beached itself on the parquet dance floor.
‘You know what?’ said Newt, pushing the wet hair out of her eyes. ‘I bet
I
know where that lift is.’ Seeing all the raised eyebrows and creased foreheads that greeted this announcement, she continued in a more strident, waspish tone. ‘At Diamond Beach, it was in the toilets. At Ed’s fairground, it was in the dingiest part of the ghost train. At my club, it was in the quietest corner, where you couldn’t hear the music properly—’
‘And at the Crystal Hibiscus, it was in the caretaker’s hut!’ Marcus instantly grasped what she was trying to say. ‘You’re right! It’s always in the
last place
you’d ever want to be!’
‘Which is where?’ asked Holly. ‘I’ve never been on a cruise ship before.’
Sterling and Coco looked at each other. At last Coco said, ‘The engine room. Those engine room cabins are always dirt cheap. It’s the noise, I expect. And the vibration.’
‘Then let’s go straight to the engine room,’ Sterling declared, almost cheerfully. His wife, however, wasn’t so confident.
‘Do you know where the engine room actually
is
?’ she quavered. ‘Because I don’t.’
‘I do,’ said Marcus. When the others stared at him, he added, ‘I mean, I can guess. Most of these cruise ships are pretty much the same.’
‘How do you know?’ Holly’s voice was hoarse; she was still coughing and spluttering from all the water she’d inhaled. ‘You’ve never been on a cruise ship either.’
‘Not a
real
one,’ Marcus conceded. ‘I’ve been on a lot of virtual ones, though.’ Then something occurred to him. Turning to Jake, he said, ‘Unless
you
know where everything is? Because I reckon this whole thing probably came out of your imagination, somehow.’
Jake had anchored himself to a fake-marble pillar. He looked dazed and waterlogged. ‘I-I dunno,’ he mumbled. ‘Maybe . . .’
‘Is this your worst nightmare, Jake?’ Holly pressed. ‘If someone asked you what kind of holiday you’d hate the most, would it be a cruise ship in a storm?’
‘Or would it be a
sinking
cruise ship?’ Newt interrupted. As the deck started to tip again, everyone waited anxiously for Jake’s response. But he shook his head.
‘I try not to think about stuff like this,’ he rasped. ‘I just – I can’t.’
Marcus swallowed. Holly closed her eyes. Sterling licked his lips and Newt growled, ‘In other words, you don’t know where the engine room is.’
‘It’ll be down below the waterline,’ Marcus insisted. ‘We just have to go downstairs and follow the noise.’
‘Then we’d better hurry,’ warned Edison. ‘Because we might not have much time left.’
S
O THEY WENT IN SEARCH OF THE ENGINE ROOM
,
BOUNCING
off bulkheads as the vessel heaved from side to side. Though Marcus was too busy keeping upright to worry much about the ship’s amenities, he did notice that they weren’t a patch on the ones he’d seen in
Cruising for a
Bruising.
Where was the icerink? The driving range? The ten-storeyed atrium? As he and his companions descended from deck to deck, they spent most of their time in dingy, narrow passages lined with cabin doors, picking their way past creeping tides of vomit.
Luckily, Marcus was used to dodging vomit. In
Cruising for a Bruising
, the puke was usually flying through the air; more than once, his avatar had been splattered by a whole row of seasick passengers in evening clothes, projectile-vomiting onto a lower deck. He knew how to clear a path through the computer-generated puddles with a fire hose. He was also very good at avoiding runaway dessert trolleys, popping champagne corks, golf balls on the driving range, galley fires, freak waves, machete-wielding stowaways, high-kicking chorus lines, gushes of scalding steam, and drunken passengers careening around in stiletto heels.
Not that any corks were popping on board this particular ship. But his training stood him in good stead. He had perfect judgement when it came to threading his way through an obstacle course in a heavy sea, thanks to all the practice he’d had; it was like a pilot finally taking off after months spent on a flight simulator. The only difference was that slamming into a virtual bulkhead didn’t actually hurt.
Magic bulkheads were different.
‘We can’t really sink, though, can we?’ Holly asked, as they all clung to a handrail, waiting for the right moment to descend another companionway. ‘I mean, this ship doesn’t exist. How can it hurt us if it doesn’t exist?’
No one answered. Jake was too upset. Coco was feeling too sick. Edison was still coughing up water and Sterling, at the rear of their group, was fending off a panicky steward. ‘Where are your lifejackets?’ the steward was demanding. He had an armful of lifejackets, one of which he thrust at Marcus. ‘Put on your lifejackets and report to your muster station!’
‘That’s what we’re doing,’ Sterling assured him. But the steward wasn’t buying that.
‘Not below, you’re not!’ he exclaimed. ‘Passengers muster on the
upper
decks—’ He broke off suddenly, interrupted by the arrival of a woman in a sparkly evening gown. She banged through the nearest swinging door, wide-eyed and hysterical.
‘We’re going to die!’ she shrieked. ‘We’re all going to die!’
‘Miss? Miss!’ The steward ran to intercept her. ‘You have to put on your lifejacket—’
‘Save me!’ When she flung herself at him, he lost his footing; they both collapsed in a heap.
Marcus, meanwhile, was concentrating on the task in front of him. He had to get downstairs without falling off the companionway – and without tripping on the avalanche of oranges that swirled around its bottom step. The move called for split-second timing . . .
‘
Now!
’ he barked, then rushed to take advantage of that fleeting moment when the ship was more or less horizontal. By the time he’d reached the deck below, it was on just enough of a slope to make the oranges roll away from the spot where he landed. He realised that they must have spilled out of the dry store.
‘Quick!’ he cried. ‘We’re getting close!’
‘Oh God, this place is huge!’ said Holly, who was just behind him. She gazed around in despair at a long, irregular space lined with bins and cupboards and fridges. Many of the cupboards were open, their doors flapping dangerously, their contents strewn across the deck. ‘How are we going to find one little lift?’
‘We could use
that
,’ Edison suggested. He had joined Holly at the foot of the companionway, where a handy evacuation chart was attached to one of the bulkheads. ‘Look,’ he continued, pointing at a red dot, ‘it says we’re right here . . .’
‘But there’s no engine room on this level!’ Coco was peering over her stepson’s shoulder. ‘It’s all galleys and health spas . . .’
‘We have to keep going down,’ said Marcus, just as a giant tub of maple syrup crashed to the deck behind him. It wasn’t easy, wading through a slick of maple syrup in rough weather, but they all managed it somehow. And when a couple of enraged crewmen suddenly charged around the corner, this maple syrup turned out to be a blessing. The two men ended up with their feet in the air, spinning around and around on their backs before crashing into a pallet of tinned tomatoes. Marcus and the others escaped through a minefield of broken glass.
Upon reaching the next companionway, they found its lowest portion wreathed in something that looked a lot like smoke.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Sterling.
‘It’s okay.’ Marcus had faced a lot of virtual fires. He knew the drill. ‘All engine rooms have fire extinguishers. It’s against the law not to.’
Newt gave a snort ‘Uh – hello?’ she spluttered. ‘What law would that be, exactly? The law of Myth World?’
Coco, by this time, was at the end of her tether, wet and cold and bruised and queasy. ‘We shouldn’t be here. We
really
shouldn’t be here,’ she moaned. ‘We should go back upstairs right now!’
‘But there’s nothing up there, Coco. Not for us,’ Holly reminded her. And Edison agreed.
‘We need to get to the lift. It’s our only chance,’ he assured his stepmother.
Jake said nothing. His face was white and drawn, his gaze dull, his jaw clenched. Having taken charge of the suitcase again, he was clutching it as if it were a lifebelt. He gave the impression of someone working very hard not to curl up into a tight little ball.
‘That lift’s not far away. I know it isn’t,’ said Marcus. ‘I mean, just look at the smoke down there. It’s the
last
place you’d want to be. The worse things get, the closer we are.’
He’d hardly finished speaking before the deck dipped abruptly, dropping from under their feet. They all bumped and slid to the bottom of the companionway, yelping and screeching and grabbing at the rail. After finally disentangling themselves, however, they found that no one had broken anything; despite a few sore knees and elbows, they’d survived the fall practically unscathed.
‘This isn’t smoke,’ Holly announced hoarsely, scrambling to her feet as she sniffed the air. ‘It’s steam, thank God.’
‘And
this
is the engine room,’ Marcus decided. ‘It has to be.’ He peered through the whitish haze at a vast tangle of chains, valves, switches, cables, dials, taps and pipes – pipes of every size, from tubes the width of his finger to cylinders as big as factory chimneys. Amidst all the humming, clanking machinery were a couple of red fire extinguishers, a metal walkway, a roll of duct tape, an empty soft drink can, and a sign that read ‘On hearing CO
2
alarm, evacuate immediately’
.
‘Okay. Here’s what we do,’ said Marcus. ‘We look for the bilge pump.’
Everyone gaped at him. Even Sterling said, ‘Huh?’
‘The bilge pump is full of bilge. Which comes from the bilge wells.’ Thanks to
Cruising for a Bruising
, Marcus knew quite a lot about the workings of an engine room. ‘Bilge is slimy black stuff that sits at the bottom of the ship,’ he explained. ‘It’s a combination of water, oil, sludge and chemicals.’
‘So it’s disgusting?’ asked Newt.
‘Yes,’ Marcus replied.
‘And smelly?’
‘Very smelly.’
‘Then that’s exactly what we want!’ Edison squeaked. ‘Something you’d never, ever want to see in a billion years!’
The words were barely out of his mouth when there was a deafening
crack –
and a roaring jet of seawater burst through a tear in the hull.
E
VERYONE SCREAMED
. C
OCO YELLED SOMETHING ABOUT
lifeboats. But Marcus cried, ‘No, wait! This is good!’
‘Are you
insane
?’ Newt squawked. ‘We have to get out!’
‘No, we don’t! This is the worst place on board!’ Marcus looked around, desperate for a glimpse of the lift. ‘It’s got to be here somewhere!’
‘This way, Marcus, quick!’ Even Holly had given up. She tried to grab him and pull him back towards the companionway. Marcus, however, managed to shake her off. He darted towards the stern, past what he knew to be the main engine cylinder-head pistons. Behind him, Holly uttered a howl of despair. ‘
Marcus!
Come back!
’
The water was already surging around his ankles.
He found a lift near the alarm panel, but it was a freight lift; the door was standing open and he could see its scratched paint, its warning notices, its clearly marked escape hatch. Next to it was a break room full of torn carpet and shabby couches. Then came a generator, then a compressor, then . . .
Someone clamped an arm around his chest.
‘
You moron!
’ Jake screeched into his ear, before lifting him clear off the ground. As Marcus struggled, he caught a scary glimpse of Jake’s red face and bulging eyes. Jake was still carrying the suitcase. Behind him, some distance away, Holly was knee-deep in water, waving her arms. Marcus couldn’t see anyone else.
‘It’s gotta be here!’ he pleaded. ‘It’s
gotta
be!’
At that very instant, a steep roll of the ship knocked Jake off his feet. He dropped Marcus, who was carried down the walkway by a foaming green torrent. Gulping and thrashing, Marcus grabbed at the first available pipe. He wedged his body against it – and found himself staring straight at a familiar door that was tucked between the bilge pump and the fuel-oil drain tank.
‘Here it is!’ he shrieked. ‘Here’s our lift!’
But its door was shut. And when Marcus stretched out a finger to push the up button, nothing happened.
‘
Where’s Edison?
’ Marcus shouted at Jake, who was trying to retrieve his floating suitcase. ‘
We need
Prot’s hand!
’
Jake couldn’t seem to absorb this information. He faltered, looking confused. It was Holly who responded, from much further away.
‘I’ll get him!’ Her voice was barely audible above all the rushing, creaking, groaning noises. ‘I’ll get all of them!
Coco! Sterling!
’
She turned and waded back towards the companionway – much to Jake’s alarm. ‘No! Holly! Don’t!’ he begged, forgetting his suitcase as he lunged after her. By now the water was waist-high on Jake, sloshing against doorhandles and lapping at light switches. Marcus’s legs were sucked out from under him by the turbulence. His glasses were snatched from his nose and would have floated off, if he hadn’t seized them. He had to kick his way up the pipe to which he was clinging, vaguely aware of Jake’s suitcase nudging his ribs.
The suitcase had taken on a life of its own. It was caught in a kind of whirlpool that swallowed it up and spat it out and spun it around and finally tossed it straight at the lift button. When Marcus heard a faint
ping
, he couldn’t believe his ears.
He gasped as the door opened.
