Haunted Legends (30 page)

“What else did you find out about this place?” asked Langley.

“A few facts and a shipload of rumours and legends. Some say a welder got sealed into the hull before it was launched—either by accident or because he’d fallen behind paying a loan shark. Some say it was two, or a security guard and a watchdog. One website said that the ghost is of a smuggler who was thrown overboard after he’d cheated some of his accomplices. And there’s supposed to have been a murder-suicide on board, during the war.” She opened the door of another cabin and looked inside: it, too, seemed mostly intact, though it smelled no better than the previous one. “Hard to tell how much of that is bullshit. But since it was stranded here, the ship’s been bad news financially for anyone who’s tried to salvage her. Even when they tried selling her for scrap, they only got halfway through dismantling her when another fire broke out—though I don’t know what there was left to burn by then.” She looked more closely at the door. “Do you think we can lock these? Or bar them, at least?”

“Maybe,” said Langley, “but what if we can’t open them again? How will you get out?”

“Do you think that’s more of a problem than someone getting in?”

“You mean Dugan?” The ex-soldier shrugged. “I don’t think he’ll try anything while there are still so many of us here, and we’re all wired and have cameras—”

“Except him,” Moss pointed out.

“—but if you like, I’ll take the cabin next to yours, and if you need any help, bang on the wall, or scream, or whatever. But don’t get too energetic: this old tub looks like it might fall apart at any moment.” He glanced at his watch. “You still feeling nauseous? It’s lunchtime.”

Moss gagged. “You go ahead and eat,” she said. “I think I’ll just take a nap.”

•  •  •

Beck had given Langley a walkie-talkie so they could ask to be taken off the ship, but had forbidden the competitors to bring any other electronic devices. Langley, who had considerable experience of sitting around waiting for something to happen while in remote areas, had protested briefly about being deprived of his PDA, but had enough foresight to pack a miniature deck of cards and a pocket-sized chess set among the other survival gear in his bug-out bag. He was playing solitaire when the door suddenly opened and the wind scattered the cards around the cabin. He looked up, but there was no one standing in the doorway—nor in the corridor, by the time he reached the doorway and looked outside. If someone was playing a prank, he thought, they were pretty damn good at moving quickly and silently: he wasn’t sure he could have disappeared as effectively, for all his training. He shut the door again, then unhurriedly picked up the cards and shuffled them. He was halfway through another game when the door blew open again, and he wearily repeated the procedure. The rain had begun in earnest again, and he could hear a rumble of distant thunder over the wailing of the wind.

He had started two unsuccessful games (he hated to lose, but refused to cheat) and was coming to the conclusion that the third was going to be just as frustrating, when a frantic clanging and a muffled scream made him sit up. He ran toward the door, the cards forgotten, but the door refused to open. He continued to tug at the handle until it snapped off in his hand, at which point the door blew open as suddenly and forcibly as though it had been kicked, knocking him backwards. He recovered quickly, and scrambled out into the corridor before the door swung shut again.

The door to Moss’s cabin was already open, and he looked inside and
saw Moss, cocooned in her twisted sleeping bag and with her hair awry, arguing with Syverson. “Are you okay?” Langley demanded.

Moss turned to stare at him. “You, too? Yeah, I’m okay, apart from having my beauty sleep interrupted.”

“That wasn’t you screaming?”

“Not unless I did it in my sleep.” She glanced at Syverson. “Did you hear screaming?”

He shook his head. “Clanging—I thought it might be you, banging on the door or the wall, but I guess it was just the wind. Sorry for disturbing you.”

The two men returned to their own cabins. Langley tried propping the door shut with his backpack, but the wind continued to blow it open, and after a few minutes he decided to leave it that way, despite the cold draught. He gave up trying to play cards, and started a game of chess against himself. In a little over half an hour, he heard a metallic thumping again, and what sounded like a cry of “Noooooo.”

He hurried into the corridor again, and wrestled with the door of Moss’s cabin until Syverson arrived. The two forced their way through, and found Moss alone, still in her sleeping bag, and looking decidedly irritated. “What did you hear
this
time?”

“What did
you
hear?”

“I heard banging, but I knew it wasn’t me, so . . . fuck, this is going to drive us crazy before long.”

Syverson grimaced and nodded. “From exhaustion, if nothing else. Do you want one of us to stay in here with you?”

“No,” she said, flatly. “It’s nothing personal, it’s not that I don’t trust you; I just can’t go to sleep when there’s someone else in the room. Especially not if they’re awake.” Her tone became defensive. “It’s not a phobia, it’s just . . . I’ve never been able to do it. If one of you wants to sleep in here while I’m awake, I could cope with that, but not . . . no. And if I try staying awake, here, I’m going to start seeing things. Sorry.”

“What if next time it really
is
Dugan?” asked Syverson.

“My door doesn’t shut anymore,” Langley replied. “He doesn’t have to go past it to get here, but it’s the shortest route. Besides, there’s no reason to think he knows which is the right room; even if he was lucky enough to guess right first time, I don’t think he could get in without one of us noticing him. But I think that once you’ve had enough sleep, Rachel, it’d be a good
idea if we all
did
stay in the same room—preferably one with a door that shuts—while one of us slept.”

Moss hesitated, then nodded.

“I have another idea,” said Syverson. “Rather than just thumping, can we decide on some pattern or something that won’t have us jumping every time a loose hatch or door, or whatever’s causing the noise, bangs in the wind . . . not SOS, but something like that, something with a particular rhythm.”

“Shave and a haircut, two bits?” suggested Moss, drily.

In the end, they decided on the
Star Wars
theme, and the two men walked out . . . but Langley waited outside Syverson’s cabin before returning to his own. “You’re sure you didn’t hear screaming? Or voices?”

“Pretty sure. The banging was pretty loud, though, so that might have drowned them out. Why?”

“I don’t think it was just the wind I heard.”

“Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe in the ghost?”

“No. But I’m not sure I believe
her,
either, not with a million dollars riding on this.” He muffled the microphone he wore around his neck by wrapping it in his fist. Syverson took the hint, and did the same. “And I think the producers want us to believe in the ghost badly enough that they might throw in a few sound effects or other tricks,” Langley continued. “You’ve worked in movies, television . . . what do
you
think?”

“It’s possible,” Syverson admitted. “From what the crew has been saying, the show isn’t rating all that well. Making it more exciting, even if it means faking something . . . I could see the producer trying something like that. We’re not the only ones who have to worry about their competition.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m not going to stand by and let Moss get hurt, but I wouldn’t mind if she quit. I think Dugan’s going to hang on until the bitter end.”

“He must be scared of
something,
” said Syverson. “Going back to jail?”

“Possible, but not easy to arrange,” said Langley, but he looked thoughtful. Not all of the situations Beck had set up had been dangerous: some had merely been embarrassing or repulsive. Dugan hadn’t balked at the strip poker, buying weird fetish porn from a sex shop, cross-dressing (with makeup, hairstyling and waxing), nude karaoke or eating food that even the former commando had found difficult to keep down. He seemed to be both homophobic and racist, but for a million dollars, Langley suspected the biker
might even manage to overcome those prejudices briefly—possibly more easily than Langley would himself. Langley didn’t know what else Beck might throw at them once they’d finished on the
Alkimos
. . . sweatboxes? Water-boarding? Stress positions? . . . and he would have been very happy for this exercise, uncomfortable as it was, to be the last thing they had to endure. “I have an idea, though. Rather than both of us waiting here in case Dugan decides to come after Moss, what if one of us took the cabin next to his, and kept a lookout for him that way? At least until Moss has finished her nap. And whoever stays can take your cabin; mine doesn’t have a door anymore.”

Syverson considered this. “Okay. You want to toss for it?”

“Do you have any coins?”

“Ah. No.”

“ ’Sokay. I have a deck of cards. Low card goes.”

There was a sudden clap of thunder, and Syverson jumped. “Jesus.”

“I’ll go get the cards.”

•  •  •

The camera crew on the hill stayed until after sunset, then drove back to Yanchep for dinner—except for Kelly, the assistant sound engineer, who sat in a tent half-listening to the static-riddled transmissions from the four on the
Alkimos.
She occasionally caught snatches of recognizable speech between thunderstorms, when the contestants braved the cold and emerged from the rusting hulk onto the deck, but for the most part the sound quality was so dire that she doubted any of it was useable. Dugan’s was the worst, possibly because of its time in the water—not that he seemed to be engaging in much conversation, though she did occasionally hear him snore. She was glad the mikes also had their own recording media—not that she could imagine anyone watching reality TV shows for the dialogue. She poured herself another mug of terrible coffee from the thermos, and continued reading the apocryphal history of the
Alkimos
that Beck had left behind. The author claimed that the ghosts were the spirits of people reliving unimaginably horrific or agonizing deaths, trapped on the wrecked ship and conscious of nothing but their last moments replaying in a hellish closed loop. The final chapter described a séance supposedly held on the beach near the wreck by a group of students. Someone or something had moved a plastic cup across their Ouija board, warning them not to visit the wreck.

“ ‘Is the ship cursed?’

“ ‘YES’

“ ‘Is the ship haunted?’

“ ‘YES’

“ ‘Are you the ghost?’

“ ‘NO’

“ ‘What does the ghost want?’

“ ‘SOMBODY [sic] TO DIE’

“ ‘Why?’

“ ‘NEXT TO DIE ON SHIP BECOM [sic] NEW GHOST OLD GHOST SET FREE NEW GHOST HAUNT TILL—’ ”

Kelly jumped as she heard a resounding crash that seemed to echo for minutes, and she dropped the book and scrambled out of the tent. She stared into the darkness, but the wreck was just a slightly darker shadow in the dull gray sea. For a moment, she considered grabbing the walkie-talkie and asking if everything was okay, but Beck had made it clear that the contestants were not to be spoken to unless they initiated the conversation—in which case, they’d failed the exercise and lost their chance at the prize. The radio mikes were picking up what sounded like running, loud enough to drown out any speech except for a higher-pitched sound that might have been the wind but felt more like a scream.

•  •  •

Moss was the first to reach the door of Syverson’s cabin. The crash, whatever it had been, had seemed to come from that direction, though the entire wreck felt as though it was still vibrating. “Andy?”

No answer—at least, none audible over the echoes of footsteps as Langley and Dugan came running through the corridors—and she pounded on the door with the butt of her flashlight. She tried the handle, then was pushed out of the way by Dugan. “What the fuck was that?” He pushed at the door, then stepped back and ran at it. The door swung open, and he stepped out onto nothing more than air. He swore loudly as he grabbed at the doorframe on his way down, and barely managed to catch it with his empty hand. He dropped his flashlight and grabbed the deck with his other hand, but the rusted metal groaned and flaked off as he fumbled for a firm grip. “Shit! Fuck! Help me!”

Langley stared downwards as the flashlight tumbled. The entire cabin—and not just the cabin, he realized, as he shone his own light around, but a
whole section of the ship ending at that wall—had collapsed into the sea. There was jagged debris sticking above the waves, four or five meters below Dugan’s feet; the fall was unlikely to be fatal, unless he landed very badly . . . or if medical assistance failed to arrive in time. He looked at Dugan’s hands—the knuckles tattooed HARD and CORE—then at his own heavy combat boots, and wondered what the biker would do if their situations were reversed.

“If you fell,” he said, just loudly enough to be heard over the thunderstorm, “would that count as leaving the ship, as far as the prize money went?”

Dugan blinked, then looked down. “For fuck’s sake, give me a fucking hand!” He couldn’t see Langley’s expression, or Moss’s—they were merely darker silhouettes against the cloudy sky—but he could tell that neither of them seemed eager to help him. “One of you! Please!”

As though in reply, there was a groan from the wreckage below. Langley blinked. “Andy?”

“
Please!
” Dugan repeated.

“Shut the fuck up,” Langley growled, but he braced himself and grabbed Dugan by the wrist. It struck him, for the first time, just how much he hated the biker, but he also realized that he might need his help if he were to save Syverson. Dugan grabbed his forearm, and it occurred to Langley that this might be a ruse, an attempt to take
him
down, to haul him over the edge. He considered letting go—surely Moss would back up his version of events—and then Dugan grunted, and hauled himself upwards until his head and shoulders were back on the deck. Moss grabbed his other hand, and they dragged him back into the corridor. He lay there for a moment, then sat up.