The Wheel of Darkness (32 page)

But again there was no reply.

A
T HALF PAST ONE O’CLOCK
R
OGER
M
AYLES FOUND HIMSELF
leading a fractious group of Deck 10 passengers to the final lunch shift at Oscar’s. For over an hour he had been answering questions—or rather, avoiding answering them—about what would happen when they got to Newfoundland; about how they would get home; about whether refunds would be made. Nobody had told him shit, he knew nothing, he could answer nobody—and yet they had exhorted him to maintain “security,” whatever the hell that meant.

Nothing like this had happened to him before. His greatest joy of shipboard life was its predictability. But on this voyage, nothing at all had been predictable. And now he felt he was getting close to the breaking point.

He walked along the corridor, a rictus-like smile screwed onto his face. The passengers behind him were speaking in raised, querulous voices about all the same tiresome issues they’d been talking about all day: refunds, lawsuits, getting home. He could feel the slow roll of the ship as he walked, and he kept his eyes averted from the broad starboard windows lining one side of the corridor. He was sick of the rain, the moaning of the wind, the deep booming of the sea against the hull. The truth was, the sea frightened him—it always had—and he never enjoyed looking down into the water from the ship, even in good weather, because it always looked so deep and so cold. And endless—so very, very endless. Since the disappearances began, he’d had a recurring nightmare of falling into the dark Atlantic at night, treading water while watching the lights of the ship recede into the mist. He woke up in a twisting of sheets each time, whimpering under his breath.

He could think of no worse death. None.

One of the men in the group behind him quickened his pace. “Mr. Mayles?”

He turned, not slowing, the smile as tense as ever. He couldn’t wait to get into Oscar’s.

“Yes, Mr.—?”

“Wendorf. Bob Wendorf. Look here—I’ve got an important meeting in New York on the fifteenth. I need to know how we’re going to get from Newfoundland to New York.”

“Mr. Wendorf, I’ve no doubt the company will work out the arrangements.”

“Damn it, that’s not an answer! And another thing: if you think we’ll go by ship to New York, you’re sadly mistaken. I’m never setting foot on a ship again in my life. I want a flight, first class.”

A murmur of agreement rippled through the ranks behind him. Mayles stopped and turned. “As it happens, the company is already lining up flights.” He knew of no such thing, but at this point he was ready to say anything to get these clods off his back.

“For all three thousand passengers?” A woman with rings on every wizened finger pushed forward, flapping her bejeweled, liver-spotted hands.

“St. John’s has an international airport.” Did it? Mayles had no idea.

The woman went on, voice like a buzz saw. “Frankly, I find the lack of communication intolerable. We paid a lot of money to make this voyage. We deserve to know what’s going on!”

You deserve a boot up your prolapsed old ass, lady
. Mayles continued smiling. “The company—”

“What about refunds?” interrupted another voice. “I hope you don’t think we’re going to
pay
for this kind of treatment—!”

“The company will take care of everyone,” Mayles said. “Please have patience.” He turned quickly to avoid more questions—and that’s when he saw it.

It was a
thing;
a thing like a dense massing of smoke, at the angle of the corridor. It was moving toward them with a kind of sickening, rolling motion. He halted abruptly, paralyzed, staring. It was like a dark, malignant mist, except that it seemed to have a
texture
to it, like woven fabric, but vague, indefinite, darker toward the middle with faint interior glints of dirty iridescence. Shapes like bunching muscles came and went across its surface as it approached.

He was unable to speak, unable to move.
So it’s true
, he thought.
But it can’t be. It can’t be . .
.

It moved toward him, gliding and roiling as if with terrible purpose. The group stumbled to a halt behind him; a woman gasped.

“What the hell?” came a voice.

They backed up in a tight group, several crying out in fear. Mayles couldn’t take his eyes off it, couldn’t move.

“It’s some natural phenomenon,” said Wendorf loudly, as if trying to convince himself. “Like ball lightning.”

The thing moved down the hall, erratically, closing in.

“Oh, my God!”

Behind him, Roger Mayles registered a general confused retreat, which quickly devolved into a stampede. The confused babble of screams and cries faded away down the hall. Still he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He alone remained rooted to the spot.

As the thing approached, he could see something inside it. It was an outline, squat, ugly, feral, with madly darting eyes . . .

No, no, no, no, noooo . . .

A low keening sound escaped Mayles’s lips. As the thing drew nearer, he felt the growing breath of wetness and mold, a stench of dirt and rotting toadstools . . . The keening in his throat grew into a gargling flow of mucus as the thing slunk by, never looking at him, never seeing him, passing like a breath of clammy cellar air.

The next thing Mayles knew, he was lying on the floor, staring upward at a security officer holding a tumbler of water.

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came save a sigh of air leaking from between his vocal cords.

“Mr. Mayles,” the officer said. “Are you all right?”

He made a sound like a punctured bellows.

“Mr. Mayles, sir?”

He swallowed, worked his sticky jaws. “
It . . . was . . . here
.”

A strong arm reached down and grasped his jacket, pulling him to a sitting position.

“Your group came tearing by me, hysterical. Whatever it was that you saw, it’s gone now. We’ve searched all the adjacent corridors. It’s gone.”

Mayles leaned over, swallowed unhappily, and then—as if to exorcise the very presence of the thing—vomited on the gold pile carpeting.

C
APTAIN
M
ASON!”
L
ESEUR JAMMED HIS FINGER HARD AGAINST
the intercom button. “We’ve got a Code Three alert. Please answer me!”

“Mr. LeSeur,” said Kemper, “she knows very well we’ve got a Code Three. She activated it herself.”

LeSeur turned and stared. “You’re sure?”

Kemper nodded.

The first officer turned back to the hatch. “Captain Mason!” He yelled into the intercom. “Are you all right?”

No response. He banged on the hatch with his fist. “
Mason
!”

He spun toward Kemper. “How do we get in there?”

“You can’t,” said the security chief.

“The hell I can’t! Where’s the emergency override? Something’s happened to Captain Mason!”

“The bridge is hardened just like an airline cockpit. When the alert is triggered from within, it locks down the bridge. Totally. Nobody can get in—unless let in by someone on the inside.”

“There’s got to be a manual override!”

Kemper shook his head. “Nothing that would allow entry by terrorists.”

“Terrorists?” LeSeur stared at Kemper in disbelief.

“You bet. The new ISPS regulations required all kinds of anti- terrorist measures aboard ship. The world’s largest ocean liner—it’s an obvious target. You wouldn’t believe the antiterrorist systems on the ship. Trust me—you won’t get in, even with explosives.”

LeSeur sagged against the door, breathing hard. It was incomprehensible. Had Mason had a heart attack of some kind? Lost consciousness? He glanced around at the anxious, confused faces looking back at him. Looking to him for leadership, guidance.

“Follow me to the auxiliary bridge,” he said. “The CCTVs there will show us what’s going on.”

He ran down the companionway, the others following, and opened the door to a service stair. Taking the metal steps three at a time, he descended a level, pulled open another door, then tore down the corridor, past a deckhand with a mop, to the hatchway leading into the aux bridge. As the group entered, a guard monitoring the security feeds within looked up in surprise.

“Switch to the bridge feeds,” LeSeur ordered. “All of them.”

The man typed several commands on his keyboard, and instantly a half dozen separate views of the bridge appeared on the small CCTV screens arrayed before them.

“There she is!” LeSeur said, almost sagging with relief. Captain Mason was standing at the helm, back to the camera, apparently as calm and collected as when he had left her.

“Why couldn’t she hear us over the radio?” He asked. “Or the banging?”

“She could hear us,” said Kemper.

“But then why . . . ?” LeSeur stopped. His carefully attuned shipboard senses felt the vibration of the huge vessel change ever so slightly, felt the sea changing. The ship was turning.

“What the
hell
?”

At the same time, there was an unmistakable shudder as the ship’s engine speed increased—increased significantly.

An ice-cold knot began to harden in his chest. He glanced down at the screen displaying the course and speed, watched the sets of numbers ticking away until they steadied on a new heading and course. Two hundred degrees true, speed gradually increasing.

Two hundred degrees true . . . Quickly, LeSeur glanced at the chartplotter running on a nearby flat-panel monitor. It was all there, in glorious color, the little symbol of the ship, the straight line of its heading, the shoals and rocks of the Grand Banks.

He felt his knees go soft.

“What is it?” Kemper asked, staring closely at LeSeur’s face. Then he followed the first officer’s eyes to the chartplotter.

“What—?” Kemper began again. “Oh, my God.” He stared at the large screen. “You don’t think—?”

“What is it?” asked Craik, entering.

“Captain Mason has increased speed to flank,” LeSeur said, his voice dull and hollow in his own ears. “And she’s altered course. On a heading straight for the Carrion Rocks.”

He turned back to the closed-circuit television screen showing Captain Mason at the helm. Her head had turned ever so slightly, so that he caught her in profile, and he could see the faintest of smiles play across her lips.

In the corridor outside, Lee Ng paused in swabbing the linoleum corridor to listen more intently. Something big was going on, but the voices had suddenly ceased. In any case, he must have misunderstood. It was a language problem—despite diligent study, his English was still not what he wished it could be. It was hard, at the age of sixty, to learn a new language. And then there were all the nautical terms that weren’t even listed in his cheap Vietnamese-English dictionary.

He resumed pushing the mop. The silence that came from the open door to the auxiliary bridge now gave way to a burst of talking. Excited talking. Lee Ng edged closer, head down, swinging the mop in broad semicircles, listening carefully. The voices were loud, urgent, and now he began to realize that he had not misheard.

The mop handle fell to the floor with a clatter. Lee Ng took a step back, and then another. He turned, began to walk, and the walk became a run. Running had saved his life in desperate situations more than once during the war. But even as he ran, he realized that this was not like the war: there was no place of refuge, no protective wall of jungle beyond the last rice paddy.

This was a ship. There was no place to run.

C
ONSTANCE
G
REENE HAD LISTENED ATTENTIVELY TO THE
acting captain’s announcement over the public address system, greatly relieved to hear the ship was finally diverting to St. John’s. She was also reassured by the stringent security measures that were being undertaken. Any pretense that this was still a pleasure voyage had been dropped: now it was about safety and survival. Perhaps, she thought, it was karma that some of these ultra-privileged people had a glimpse of life’s reality.

She checked her watch. One forty-five. Pendergast had said he wanted to sleep until three, and she was inclined to let him. He clearly needed the rest, if only to pull him out of the funk he seemed to have fallen into. She had never known him to sleep during the day before, or drink alcoholic beverages in the morning.

Constance settled on the sofa and opened a volume of Montaigne’s essays, trying to take her mind off her concerns. But just as she began to lose herself in the elegant French turns, a soft knock came at the door.

She stood up and went to the door.

“It’s Marya. Open, please.”

Constance opened it and the maid slipped in. Her usually spotless uniform was dirty and her hair disheveled.

“Please sit down, Marya. What’s going on?”

Marya took a seat, passing a hand over her forehead. “It is out there.”

“I’m sorry?”

“How you call it? An asylum. Listen, I bring you news. Very bad news. It’s going around belowdecks like fire. I pray it’s not true.”

“What is it?”

“The acting captain, they say—Captain Mason—has locked herself on the bridge and is steering the ship toward rocks.”

“What?”

“Rocks. The Carrion Rocks. They say we will hit the rocks in less than three hours.”

“It sounds to me like a hysterical rumor.”

“Maybe,” said Marya, “but this one, all the crew believe it. And something big is happening up on the auxiliary bridge, many officers coming and going, lots of activity. Also that, how you say, that
ghost
has been seen again. A group of passengers this time, and the cruise director as well.”

Constance paused. The ship shuddered through another massive wave, yawing strangely. She looked back at Marya. “Wait here, please.”

She went upstairs and knocked on the door of Pendergast’s stateroom. Usually he responded immediately, his voice as clear and collected as if he’d been awake for hours. This time, nothing.

Another knock. “Aloysius?”

A low, even voice issued from inside. “I asked you to wake me at three.”