David Stevens
A professor
The Great White Shark is a naturally curious beast, and will test foreign objects by bumping or even biting them. As she fell asleep, the Professor heard a ripple of thumps along the length of the ship’s hull, and thought immediately of the flank of a large shark making contact with the vessel as it proceeded past in a slightly serpentine fashion.
If sleep had not been about to claim her, she might have realised her mistake, and wondered that the sound came not from the hull at all, but from within the ship. Instead she drifted away, anatomical charts of increasingly unreal fishes flapping away behind her eye lids.
While horrified, she was not totally surprised the next morning when, as she wheeled herself to an early breakfast, she encountered in the passageway outside her cabin, the mutilated half body of a liveried waiter.
Thinking it was a breakfast menu, the professor bent from her chair to recover a folded card from next to the remnants of the body. She found however that it was a densely packed page of text which, without her glasses, made no sense at all. Fortunately it was not stained with blood.
A billionaire
Space is at a premium on a liner, and so the secret annex of the owner was not expansive, certainly not as large as his stateroom. One bulkhead was densely packed with ancient tomes. Another was a generous window, concealed by ingenious design, allowing him to view the swimmers in the pool from below, without the need to snatch glances or avert his gaze to avoid detection.
For a long time though, he has had little interest in dangling limbs and clinging swimming costumes. He was more likely to haunt this room in the early hours of the morning, when the pool was emptied of swimmers and the moon was full. Like an alchemist, he would sit in the feeble, thrice filtered—air, water, window—moonlight, and dwell upon his collected sources of arcane knowledge.
Tonight though, he stared aghast. A disaster had struck, beyond the powers of cleaning staff and standard pool filters to repair.
The pool was populated by dozens and dozens of human foetuses, suspended beneath the surface in rows, line upon line of them in some unknown order—surely not Dewey Decimal! – their hearts visibly beating within their chests, their umbilical cords stretching to he knew not where.
And now, perhaps at the command of a dog whistle pitched higher than his old ears could hear, each of them turned in the water to face him, their eyes open and accusing, staring through the façade directly at him.
A writer
The god is spread thinly in the gaps that are left to him. An empty steamer trunk; a void between stateroom walls where some insulation is missing; the room between molecules of water in an evaporating puddle; the pauses between breaths.
The god writes frantically. She has not slept for a very long time. He dares not rest until his story is complete. Left unwatched, its characters may seek to find him again, stalking him until she is left with nothing.
A killer(s)
He indulges his appetites without restraint or discrimination. Everything is food to him, and how he plays with his meal! Big boy makes a terrible mess. The legends of his kills are cave painted eviscerations, the spray from his jowls.
Don’t be afraid. His size has trapped him beneath decks. He has swollen so that the bulkheads of the passageways are his clothing, rasping against his sides. He cannot turn. He can progress only at the pace of growing fingernails. He is a monster, but one that has defeated itself by always winning.
He is rake thin, an aesthete who meditates too much upon his hunger. Delaying gratification, his contemplation of communion has transcended his desire beyond the simple spilling of seed into a body, to the demands of true intimacy, requiring the flaying of skin of others, exposing their nerve ends, all the better for the direct transfer of thoughts and feelings, one soul to another. For example.
The thinnest slip of paper, slid beneath jambs, sills and seals, a blade ultra-slender and precise. The most toxic of poison pen letters, the most ancient of criminal histories pushed beneath your door, the profanest of words now made flesh and taking form, rising to its feet and suddenly amongst you. He slices his story in your skin, carves his legend onto your bones.
Attend the entrance hall and check the catalogue for answers: “in their pocket, carried him here, who?”
An ancient mariner
It was not an easy task to launch a lifeboat from a large moving vessel, especially in fog, but they were experienced seamen, and they managed without capsizing. At first they rolled and shuddered, dipped and bounced in the turbulence of the ship’s wake, but soon they disentangled themselves from the energies binding them together.
They seek to escape the horrors. With whatever it was loose on the ship, they had decided to take their chances on the open sea.
They left history, and were filed away.
As they entered yet another cloud, they were surprised when the prow of the boat struck something solid. The patch of fog passed, and they saw that they had hit a wall. The trompe-l’œil was revealed for what it was, the brush strokes less convincing close up, but still it was an effective painting of a ship receding into the distance, the smoke from its chimneys merging with the dissipating fog. Another cloud passed over them, and when it was gone, they saw the artist had been at work again, the ship now further away.
One of the sailors, a born survivor experienced at overcoming obstacles, screamed in a foreign language, and began to strike at the wall with a gaffer pole. Coloured chunks of plaster flew about them, revealing the white beneath.
Gently, sadly, an old hand reached out to the striking arm. Startled, the seaman looked around, and saw an ancient face he did not recognise. Certainly the man was not wearing the company uniform. The elderly man shook his head in regret.
“Don’t,” he said. “Beyond here be monsters.”
The painting, a little worse for wear, showed the ship now very far away, and the sun setting.
Far above, the flip top closed upon them, and dust began to fall. In the darkness, nobody could make out the artist’s signature in the corner.
A stoker
Separated from the search party organised by the detective, a stoker silently sobs into his hands. Searching for clues within the stores of coal, he found secreted there blackened pages of typescript that were never meant to be located. He now mourns his own fate, prematurely revealed to him in those mis-filed papers. He has learned that the god does not always write in sequential order.
A waiter, re-joined
The waiter is screaming, hanging high in the sky, his arms flailing towards a great expanse of ocean far below him.
There are other people here. Everything is upside down. The people shuffle about, their feet somewhere above them. They do not look up, everything becomes vague up there. Far below their heads, large dim figures move submerged in the ocean. The people do not look down, either.
They seldom speak to him. To learn their tale, he will need to learn to read clay tablets, to trace braille in blown dust. He has time.
He knows that he suffered disaster on the ship. Things feel loose around his mid-section.
He screams some more.
He learns that everyone is always hungry here. Everyone always feels the vertiginous tug, the terror of falling. None of them ever grow used to either of these feelings. It is why they mostly keep their eyes closed.
Occasionally they wish the fear to be gone, to resolve it once and for all, and they seek to leap off and tumble down the miles to crash into the sea. All that happens is that they rock a little, up and down. The sky is no surface to give them grip to push against. When the waiter tries for the first time to end it all, he finds that his upper and lower halves bounce at a slightly different rate, and there is a dissonance about his gut and his hips. Whatever happened to him in the passageway, his re-joining is not complete.
Eyes closed, they shift about.
At some stage, he enquires of a god. He thinks it appropriate. However, they profess ignorance, know nothing of her but his hair. It is about their feet, thick uncut acres of it, great billowing clouds spilled over from somewhere else. It does not tether them, it is just there. Homeless limbs meander about in it, seeking their owners. If a careful eye was to open, it would note thousands and thousands of lost words creeping letter by letter along the lengths of those loose arms and legs, like fleas or lice, awaiting return to their proper repository.
A detective
The detective is still wearing her pirate outfit from the night of the Costumed Ball, the night of the first death. The peg leg is real, the eye patch unnecessary. Still, she finds it a comfort. Its presence on her face is soothing like a tiny blanket, and it serves to block from sight one half of that world she has grown to find distasteful. There is a secret inscribed on the inward side, but it is too close and there is insufficient light for her to read it.
Everyone had assumed that the initial victim, being a man, was engaged in a clumsy dance, and had looked away to spare him embarrassment. When the ship’s surgeon performed an autopsy and found that his lungs were full of seawater and that he had drowned in the ballroom, the detective knew that she faced a wily adversary.
She has examined the corpses and sent out parties to search for clues. She has read the ship’s manifest and log, taken those records apart as though that would make them more sensical. Now she is at the centre of the huddled survivors gathered at the bridge. She draws herself up, gathers her notes and prepares to speak. The people look on expectantly.
“The murderer—the murderer is.”
But of course! They marvel at her perspicacity, and record her utterance for posterity. As soon as it is written down, the page is torn from the pad and folded into a cylinder, then thrust into a pneumatic tube, which bears it away.
The passengers shrink towards each other, packing in tight around the detective. Wheels squeak as the professor joins them in huddling closer and closer, retreating from the edges as though they fear that even the furniture in the room conspires against them. They ignore the obscenity hung behind them.
They stare through the bridge window that has been tilted to remove all internal reflection. Below, in unison, the pool of foetuses join in a silent scream. Above, a mountainous wave storms towards them, vast and black, and full of stars.
A writer redux
The god seldom has the luxury of editing. He has however taken a few units of Planck time to robe herself in a velvet smoking jacket, to recline in a leather armchair, and draw deeply of the fug of tobacco, brine, book mould, ancient wood, gondwanan spices and million year old whisky.
It is not happy with the final image. The alert attention of the rows of silently shrill gaping foetuses, yes. The massive solid darkness about to embrace them, indeed. But those who face it, head on . . .
She begins to draw with her fingers using the materials available. A drop of port, ash from the trays, pork fat from a chop remnant, some unsucked bone marrow. Loose strands of his hair drag remnants of the killer’s work across the page, suggesting noise and grain. The professor, grizzled, always angry, hair short and sharp. leans forward out of her wheelchair, gripping a walking cane like a staff, staring oblivion down. The detective’s eyepatch is replaced by steampunk goggles, her pegleg hidden by a long trench coat. A hint of satisfaction plays across her face. A straight-backed naval officer adds authority to the scene. In the corner of his eye, a reflection of the window; within that, the swimming pool; and in its depths, the face of the billionaire, pressed against his own window. And behind them all, the stoker can be just made out, nailed to the wall, his skin hanging in flecked strips, his mouth open in a scream of lungs and bowels and heart that is not silent at all …
Then the god is gone. Before the neighbours arrive with their hotpot; before the onslaught of villagers armed with torches and pitchforks; before Krakatoa explodes. The only movement is the cylinders hurtling along the pneumatic highway. The pages are left with all of the others, on the many, many shelves receding towards the far-distant vanishing point that is big boy’s wide open mouth.
DAVID STEVENS (usually) lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and those of his children who have not yet figured out the locks. His fiction has appeared amongst other places in Crossed Genres, Aurealis, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Pseudopod, Cafe Irreal, Not One of Us, and most recently in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine and Vastarien.