‘At two in the morning? Tell, me then, what was it?’
‘Were a dog. A dog as big as a man!’
John said nothing, but raised his brow as he sipped his drink.
‘It was!’ Betty insisted, reacting to his incredulity.
‘And who around here owns a big dog?’
‘A dog as big as a man.’ Tom Barnaby corrected.
‘Ferk off, the both of yer! I ain’t saying it belonged to anyone.’ Betty glowered across the room, ‘Could of been wild, couldn’t it?’
‘Not likely,’ John said, finishing his pint and standing to leave. ‘It was probably old Corbin stumbling home from the pub.’
Aside from Kelly’s burial, there was nothing special about that particular Thursday. It was the same as the week before, when James Little stubbed his toe on the pub steps, and had to have it plastered, or the fortnight before, when Samantha Waeshenbach announced the readiness of her tomatoes. It was a quiet village, and no outside influence had affected them for near a century.
*
Ted Corbin had given up his vigil of stargazing, the clouds had choked the patch of sky he’d been watching, and the few stars that remained were being veiled by the slowly advancing storm front.
He sipped his coffee and stood - Breaker jumped and retreated, wagging his tail again. ‘No, boy,’ Ted warned, ‘I already fed you, now get back inside an’ let’s not have so much of it!’ Breaker blinked and whined, and then turned, tentatively stepping back towards the door and into the lighthouse.
Ted sighed, and tipped the remainder of his drink over the railings, watching the wind whip the drops away as they fell. A flash in his periphery distracted him, and he looked out to sea. Thunder lazily rolled in the air, and another flare of lightning whisked the dark clouds with blossoms of pink and yellow.
As he watched the random lightning and listened to the emphatic thunder, he caught sight of a flicker of lights – electric lights - far away, almost touching the horizon.
His heart leapt, and he backed slowly to the door.
Selina woke with the cool air on her face. She was exhausted.
She felt cold and uneasy. Something was wrong, though she searched her memory and couldn’t think of anything to cause it. Her insides were knotted, her lobes pounded, and her teeth felt as though they had been grinding all night. Something was definitely wrong.
Her joints groaned as she stirred, and for a moment she wondered why she had been allowed to sleep all night on deck. Why had no-one woken her?
Roused by waves and the caw of seagull in the bright sky, she rolled her eyes and opened them. Salt pricked her vision and she closed them immediately. A few minutes more sleep wouldn’t hurt.
A minute or so passed, she watched the bright blood of her eyelids in the dawn. Again she slowly opened them; the light breaking into kaleidoscopic rainbows on her eyelashes.
A sudden realisation struck her, as did the comprehension as to why nothing felt right: she wasn’t on a lounger on deck, the monotonous roll of the ship was missing. She was on solid land!
With a pain in her arm and ribs she rose to her elbows, cuffing sand from her face.
She watched the surf climb the beach before stopping short of her sandy toes. It paused, as though contemplating a life on land, before receding leisurely.
She was overwhelmed by the recollection of the previous night aboard the
Tangaroa
; the thuds from below which had woken her, the siren echoing in the narrow gangways, and the passengers being led to insufficient lifeboats. She experienced again the perception that the ship was sinking, felt the deck listing frightfully as she had stumbled and pushed passed desperate families, crying children, shaking parents, in the hope of finding salvation in one of those small boats.
The rain had lashed upon the deck; lightning had emphasized the breaking hull that burst shards of wood and fibreglass into the dark. Passengers fell and slid as they collided with one another, frantically trying to save themselves and sealing their misfortune in doing so.
Another thud from deep within the old rusting ship sounded, louder than those before, and the vessel almost tore in two, sending the ship – and the souls of three hundred and twenty-four - below the freezing waters with her. The lifeboats hung helplessly from the hull, scattering those with screams caught in their throats to a silent end.
Metal groaned like some tortured whale as the boat disappeared into the storm-whipped waters. It took passengers and crew with it, their mouths petrified in an expression of ‘O!’ as they sank to the depths of the sea floor. None had the strength to fight against the draw of the
Tangaroa
as it descended, and many were lost in the first few minutes, convulsing and praying for breath, before the whim of the tide owned them fully.
Selina sat upright; the thought of those faces made her put a hand to her salty lips. Tears flowed freely as she thought of them. She wept for the dead, for her own survival, and for the irrepressible confusion that rang in her head.
Beside her, glinting in the pastel sunlight was her grandfather’s hip flask. She took hold of it – suddenly exasperated that of all her belongings to survive that it should be this – she ran her thumb over the sand-filled engraving upon the aluminium surface.
‘Carter B. Ravens
A. C. C. S.
Holloway Refinery
2067’
Idly she rubbed at the grit, using her nail to dig grains from the engraving. When the task was complete she reached forwards and rinsed the scratched bottle in the surf.
She wiped her raw eyes and took an exaggerated breath. Getting to her feet she turned to the high cliffs of the bay, she had been dumped in a small rocky alcove on a long expanse of sand.
As she rose, the coolness of the beach seemed to dissipate and the milky sun almost overwhelmed her. She sighed; the cheering heat seemed to push her gruesome memories to a more manageable place, the terrified faces and the freezing waves didn’t fit with warmth and sunlight. They would return, she considered, thinking of spending the night alone with the memory of bodies tugged at by waves.
She squeezed the worst of the wetness from her clothes, basking for a while in the comforting heat. Turning, she sighed: ‘Where in hell am I?’ and took a step closer to the grassy cliffs that swayed in the breeze.
The piercing shout of gull was giving her a headache, and she found herself squinting into the bright, misty sky to see if there was any particular cause for their clamour.
They were gathered at the summit of a rock that erupted from the sand and divided the beach. Watching them hop to and fro, thrashing their wings, and dive for one another, she presumed they fought over some scrap of food. The thought occurred to her then that she might find herself without sustenance for quite a time, and that if there was anything to eat she wasn’t going to let seagulls, of all things, beat her to it.
She made her way toward the finger of rock, her eyes on the grassy cliffs that stretched the length of the seemingly endless beach. There was nothing to pinpoint her location, no signpost or milestone to indicate the language, no landmark that told her anything of her locality. The last time she had cared to know the
Tangaroa
’s location they had been sixty miles off the west coast of Ireland. She had fallen ill that night, and had spent the next week in her cabin, throwing the contents of her stomach into the pungent chemical toilet. She didn’t think this coast was one of Ireland's, for although she had never been to the country, the climate seemed too airless for her assumptions. She hoped that she hadn’t been washed ashore a coast of England, for the pathogen had, by all accounts, and in the west especially, been persistently virulent in recent decades.
This coast, she convinced herself for the presence of seagull, was unlikely to be the west of England, though it may have been the North, or Scotland, or even France. It was impossible to tell.
‘Parlez-vous pas le français?’ Selina called as she neared the rocky peak where, at the summit, the gulls regarded her with bobbing heads.
Hooking her dark and tousled hair behind her ears, she found her footing before losing it quickly on thick green weeds. She grew weary as she drew near the crest, and the gulls contested her company. Only the hardiest of them remained, though the majority made a lacklustre protestation before diving from the rock. She waved the remaining birds from the summit, and clawed herself atop the wet grey stone before catching sight of the bird’s grotesque feast.
A bloated corpse, white and staring, was wedged in a crevice at the foot of the stone rise. She shuddered, and then looked up at the long beach to witness scores of lifeless bodies – blanched, ragged and bent into positions only death could afford. Selina closed her eyes to the sight though the image, she knew, would remain with her for the rest of her days.
For his burgundy trousers she guessed the man in the crevice to have been a crewman aboard the
Tangaroa
. She didn’t recognize him; his head had been repeatedly drawn against the rocky shore, and most of his features had been turned to bare bone and muscle. An eye socket was empty, and the remaining eye stared nonchalantly at the bright, vaporous sky. The tide lapped into the crevice and pooled around his torso and legs, and she turned from him – only to catch a glimpse of a slender limb concealed behind a rock some yards away. She wondered, in a peak of morbid imagination, whether there was a body attached to it.
Looking again at the abundance of beached figures she shook her head and decided she had endured enough. Some way along the beach she saw a wooden walkway leading up the cliff-face and resolved to make for it; it meant passing between the limp bodies but – for the sheer rock face - there was no other route available.
Descending was harder than the ascent, and the sharp boulders punctured her wrinkled toes. Grimacing, she stepped quickly over the corpse, who stared through her as she passed. She winced as her sole grated on a fragment of shell, and then cursed with alarm as she finally hopped on to the sand.
She couldn’t help but now see that the seemingly disembodied leg was indeed attached to a body. It was a woman whom she recognised, though had never spoken to during the long voyage.
Selina cautiously arced around the woman, fearing the face would also be a display of battered flesh, but found her face down amongst seaweed. She wore a tight cream dress cut at the knee; though the waves and the draw of the tide had exposed her thighs as though violated and abandoned. Selina quickly moved forward with a reflexive compulsion to help. She dropped to her knees, the faintest reminder of perfume broke the hot scent of sweat. Resting her ear against the woman’s back she listened for a pulse. She couldn’t hear one, though with the waves on the rocks and the returned gulls picking at the crewman she was hardly surprised.
She placed her fingers gently on the woman’s bronzed wrist and closed her eyes. Her own heart quickened for the briefest of seconds when she felt the faint rhythm of the woman’s pulse.
‘Thank God,’ she whispered, relieved she wasn’t cast-away in solitude.
Taking her by the shoulder, she turned the woman slightly. Apart from a bruise on her temple and a stain of blood about her nose she seemed to have escaped the malice of the rocks. She had soft symmetrical features and a halo of curled golden hair that shone like a web of fairy-lights. Selina had been captivated by it aboard the
Tangaroa
and had often thought her, for all her glowing beauty, to be a lonely woman; always by herself on deck, eating alone in the cafeteria, and escorted only by her shadow.
She squeezed the woman’s shoulder, pinched it and tapped her gently in an attempt to rouse her. For a long while there was no response. Then, just as Selina was growing impatient, the woman stirred, and moaned at the light of day.
Selina blinked, and stopped rubbing. She said, ‘Hello? Wake up, Miss.,’
The woman blinked, and peeped into the brightness. Her watery eyes were glazed, and then quickly became focused on Selina’s pale, freckled face. She was silent and hardly seemed to breathe, then she sighed, and closed her eyes again. She cleared her throat, seemingly comprehending the situation with every passing second ‘Where’s the haul?’
‘The
Tangaroa
sank. We’ve been washed ashore,’ Selina attempted to reply calmly.
The woman’s eyes opened as though she had been wounded and Selina flinched.
‘Where? Where are we?’ The woman coughed.
Selina shrugged, and spoke of her thoughts of Ireland, of France, of Britain. The woman listened to her quietly, her topaz-blue eyes intent and patient. After Selina’s threadbare intelligence had been mined, the woman said that the ship had docked at Dublin before dusk the previous evening, and was bound for Wexford at the rise of the storm. ‘This isn’t Ireland, though,’ she said with a finality that was absolute.
The woman sat up and saw the corpse only yards from her feet. She shook her head in pity, then turned back to Selina, who said, ‘Well, where are we then?’
‘I don’t know, though if the virus is here, then we may as well have drowned. I think I would have preferred it that way,’
Selina didn’t reply, she only stood, and offered the woman her hand. She noticed her nails were cut to the quick, though were strong and shining.
They exchanged names; the woman’s was Priya Cray.
Selina helped Priya to her feet, and she pulled down her dress with an air of embarrassment. She saw the beached bodies and swore under her breath, staring at them with astonishment. Selina rest her hand on Priya’s shoulder, and felt the vibrations of repressed tears. There was a long silence between them, then Priya sniffed and quickly wiped her eyes before stepping toward the beach – Selina’s hand lingered in the air behind her.