by Kevin Andrew Murphy
September 15th, 1946
‘AND THEN,’ PADDY O’REILLY continued, whisky tumbler upraised, ‘we thundered down the mountainside, clutching the canopy poles of our elephant’s howdah, a hundred angry Kali cultists behind us, waving their knives and their crimson Thuggee sashes!’
‘My darling Timothy Patrick Xavier,’ the beautiful Chandra Ratri intoned in her Bengali lilt, ‘there were no more than fifty,’ she laid a delicate brown hand upon his freckled forearm, ‘and half were from the temple of Ganesh.’ Her fingers squeezed gently but firmly, flashing a diamond-encrusted wedding ring, ‘and most were my relatives and not,’ she shook her head, making the maang tikka pendant on her forehead sway, the pigeon’s blood star ruby at its heart winking above her bindi, ‘cultists,’ she added emphatically, pouting her coral-painted lips up at him from where she sat nestled in the silk damask loveseat.
‘Forgive my Fenian poetics, my lotus,’ Paddy gazed down, emerald eyes pleading, ‘I meant “worshippers”.’ Paddy’s name and colouring might be Irish, but his accent and demeanour were decidedly American.
Chandra turned away, her tawny topaz eyes flashing. ‘I will consider it,’ she pronounced, then took a sip of her cocktail, still unmollified.
Brigadier Kenneth Foxworthy sweltered in the armchair nearer the fireplace, puffing his pipe as he observed the couple with considerable amusement. They had retired to the far end of the Queen’s Salon for post-prandials. Foxworthy wished he could remove his dress jacket, but it would be unbecoming of an officer of His Majesty’s Army. Yet the O’Reillys’ company was worth some discomfort: the Irish American animal trapper and the Bengali princess or priestess or some such were easily the two most engaging dining companions he’d found and a distraction Foxworthy desperately needed.
‘We Bengalis do not forgive so easily,’ Chandra chided Paddy, setting her cocktail on the coffee table. ‘Nor forget. I am the elephant’s daughter.’ She smiled then, flashing teeth white as ivory. ‘I will require a kiss.’
Paddy leaned down, paying his fine honourably, while Foxworthy hid his smile with another sip of excellent single malt. Then suddenly the whisky sloshed out of his glass and into his face as Paddy stumbled forward, barking his shins on the table. Chandra’s highball glass tipped over and shattered, filling the air with the scent of cognac and champagne.
‘Merciful Kali!’ Chandra exclaimed. ‘What was that?’
A purserette ran up and threw a bar towel over the mess. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she reassured Chandra, ‘just a patch of rough water. Another King’s Ruin?’
‘That, my lotus, was not “rough water”,’ Paddy told his bride as soon as the purserette left. ‘That was trouble.’
Foxworthy agreed: the Queen Mary had slowed, suddenly and precipitously. And if they’d felt the lurch here in first class, the stable centre section, Foxworthy did not like to think how it had been felt in cabin class at the stern, let alone tourist class in the bow.
Foxworthy exchanged a glance with Paddy. The animal trapper nodded curtly, saying, ‘Brigadier, perhaps you might speak with the commodore while I check on my tigers?’
Foxworthy removed his pipe. ‘You have tigers on board?’
‘In the kennels,’ Paddy explained. ‘A pair for the Hyde Park Zoo, but young so I was able to reserve the St Bernard crates. Hyde Park New York, not London.’
‘Ah,’ said Foxworthy, ‘last I saw tigers, I was a boy.’ Well, living tigers. The bombing of Berlin’s Tiergarten had been horrid. ‘But a sound plan.’ Foxworthy rose, looking up at the American. Paddy was a strapping fellow, standing half a head taller than him for all that Foxworthy stood an even six foot one. ‘Reconvene here once we have our intelligence?’
Paddy nodded as Chandra rose. She was no delicate flower either, only appearing dainty in comparison to her husband. ‘I shall remain. Gossip has five hundred tongues and a thousand eyes and the monkeys chatter most when they visit the watering hole.’ She indicated the bar, her diamonds flashing. ‘I will listen with the ears of Ganesh.’
‘Very good.’ Foxworthy puffed his pipe and left the honeymooners to their parting kiss while he went to see the commodore.
Foxworthy wondered what the trouble might be. The Atlantic, while not particularly calm now, was not notably rough either. He knew that just four years ago, in ’42, the Queen Mary, in her zigzagging to evade Nazi U-boats, had hit one of her escort vessels, the Curacoa, slicing straight through. Over three hundred died that day, and all the Queen Mary had felt was a bump. He’d read the reports. And once, while transporting over sixteen thousand American soldiers from New York to England, she had been struck by a rogue wave so great she had almost capsized.
But that was almost. If she’d capsized, it would have been the greatest maritime disaster since the Titanic. It wasn’t.
That dubious distinction was one Foxworthy was all too familiar with, to his everlasting shame. It had been only a year ago, in Lübeck. The day before, the British Army had taken the city without resistance. That day, in a show of force, the RAF sank three ships in the harbour.
In between the sinking of the first vessel and the second, one of Lübeck’s citizens somehow made her way through the gauntlet of junior officers to beg him to stop the bombings. Her son, the woman had cried, was aboard the Cap Arcona. Foxworthy rebuffed her pleas: the Cap Arcona had not surrendered, and, like the Queen Mary, she had been a luxury liner. She could hold battalions. If she disgorged them, the battle for Lübeck would be bloody.
The woman swore only her son and a few other soldiers were aboard, but by the time she told him who else it held, it had been too late. He’d watched the bombs drop.
The Cap Arcona was no troop transport but a floating prison, packed with inmates from the concentration camps. The SS Thielbek as well. And the Deutschland was a hospital ship, her funnels painted white, a red cross on the side. Seven thousand innocents perished at British hands that day.
But the war was over, and the Queen Mary was not perilously overloaded with troops, just fully booked for the last days of summer with everyone from American soldiers returning home with British brides to the wealthy resuming their former pastime of taking the ‘shuttle’ to enjoy the splendours of New York. Which meant over two thousand passengers and one thousand crew at risk.
Foxworthy rounded through Piccadilly Circus, the nexus of luxury shops at the heart of first class, and took the stairs up to the bridge. He hoped he was overreacting, but six years of war bred a certain wariness. Men who relaxed ended up dead, often taking many others with them.
When he arrived at the bridge he found the door closed, but activity could be observed through the windows. Commodore Ford was talking animatedly, his great head looking down at one of the junior officers. Foxworthy was unable to get Ford’s attention, or anyone else’s for that matter, but it was bright inside and dark out and they were deeply engaged. He rapped sharply, then waited, puffing his pipe.
It had gone out.
He took out his lighter. It had been his father’s, carried through the trenches of the Great War, adorned with Edward VII on one side, Britannia on the other, the lighter’s sides formed from two pennies from almost half a century ago.
The flint wheel spun expertly beneath Foxworthy’s thumb, steel striking stone, a cascade of sparks catching the wick alight. He clenched the amber bit, puffing until the tobacco caught and he was able to pull in a proper draw, savouring the taste of Ye Olde Signe, his favourite blend, a parting gift from his sweetheart, Alice. He wished he could taste her lips instead: Lady Alice Camden, with her chestnut-brown curls and cornflower-blue eyes, whom he would see again at the end of this deplorable journey, whom he could at last ask to be his wife …
Then another pair of blue eyes caught his and he snapped to attention.
‘Good evening, Brigadier Foxworthy,’ said the crewman. He was young, athletic, of medium height, with a public school accent and a peculiarly rich voice. ‘Lieutenant Waters. I am afraid the bridge is off-limits to passengers at the moment. ‘Commodore Ford—’
‘—can speak for himself,’ said Commodore Ford, patting the young lieutenant on the shoulder. ‘That will be all, Waters.’ Waters made his exit and the commodore took his place, looming in the doorframe. ‘Brigadier Foxworthy, this is not the most opportune—’
‘I’ve noticed,’ Foxworthy said. ‘How may I be of assistance?’
Commodore Ford stared down at him. ‘Help prevent a panic. We don’t want wild rumours circulating.’ The commodore glanced around, then said in a low tone, ‘The port of New York is closed. Reports as to why are confused to say the least. We may need to divert to Baltimore, but for now we’re idling the engines.’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ He waved a large hand as if he were shooing invisible flies. ‘Reports of a bomb but then that the dropping of the bomb had been prevented. A small aircraft colliding with a weather balloon. And some mention of Jetboy.’
‘Robert Tomlinson?’ Foxworthy asked. ‘The boy pilot? Wasn’t he found last month on a desert isle having tea with Amelia Earhart?’
‘I hadn’t heard about Earhart.’
‘It was in the Daily Mail so take that with a grain of salt.’
The commodore rubbed his temple. ‘I feel positively brined at the moment.’
Foxworthy took a puff on his pipe, the meerschaum carved with the face of Charlemagne or some other ancient king (though it might be Hades for all he knew). ‘So what should we let people know?’
‘Just say that there’s a spot of trouble with the propellers. Nothing to worry about, just disengaging the engines while we run some tests. Gives us time to sort out the radio reports.’
‘Very good.’
‘We’ll get things sorted out straight away, I have no doubt. I appreciate your discretion, Foxworthy. And please, be my guest for tea tomorrow at the Veranda Grill. You and the charming Mr and Mrs O’Reilly.’
‘I would be honoured.’ Foxworthy gave a small salute.
‘Thank you, Brigadier.’ Ford shut the door and went back to talking with the bridge crew. From the quantity of gold braid present, Foxworthy could see that he had assembled his entire staff: the staff captain, the chief officer, the chief engineer and two more engineers below him, the purser, the chief steward, even the ship’s doctor and surgeon.
Back in the Queen’s Salon, the band was playing ‘Begin the Beguine’. Purserettes circulated with trays of canapés, oysters à la Russe and the like. Foxworthy accepted one, ordered a fresh Scotch, and reclaimed his former seat by the fireplace, below the huge gesso frieze over the mantel. It depicted two unicorns engaged in mortal combat, one adorned with gold leaf, the other with bright silver, done in the deco style still popular when the Queen Mary had first been launched ten years ago.
He did not see Paddy, but spied Chandra, chatting with a bevy of society ladies before excusing herself and retaking her place on the loveseat. ‘That was very interesting,’ she remarked. ‘One of them overheard the maids saying some criminal had released a gas over Manhattan that’s causing mass hallucinations!’
‘How would a maid know that?’
‘Her husband works in the radio room.’
‘Hallucinogenic gas?’ Foxworthy shook his head. Probably something cooked up by IG Farben. He imagined Nazi sleeper agents waking around the globe, committing unthinkable acts to avenge the loss of their Führer.
Chandra sipped another King’s Ruin. ‘Did you learn anything from the commodore?’
‘Nothing so lurid,’ Foxworthy admitted honestly, ‘but he asked me to quell any wild rumours to prevent panic.’
Chandra nodded. ‘Hallucinations are how rakshasas play their tricks.’
‘Rakshasas?’ Foxworthy repeated.
‘Tiger demons,’ Chandra explained. ‘They weave their deceptions from maya, the flames of illusion.’
‘Ah.’ Foxworthy sipped his Scotch, considering. As entertaining as Paddy’s wild adventure tales were, he couldn’t wholly believe them, for despite Paddy and Chandra’s gay banter, there was no way they’d escaped the ghastliness of the past few years. War had not been limited to Europe. The Japanese had invaded Burma, and between the refugees, the famine in Bengal, and the policies of the Raj, he had it on good authority that three million had perished in the region.
Three million. It was not six million, but there was a certain level of atrocity that the human intellect might comprehend, but the heart never could. It just became meaningless rows of figures, beads clicking on Death’s black abacus, the brutal calculus of war.
‘Did the famine completely pass you by?’ Foxworthy asked bluntly, for there was no delicate way to put it.
‘Of course not.’ Chandra’s topaz eyes turned sad. ‘But famine is no stranger to Bengal. One wishes to speak of babies born, not children buried, weddings, not funerals. I am a priestess of Kali, and I have seen more than my share of death.’ She smiled defiantly and took a sip of her cocktail. ‘My father thought Paddy was a rakshasa, with his tall tales and flaming hair, but I do not care if he is. Not all rakshasas are wicked, not all lies are unjust, and Paddy smuggled rice upriver to our village, saving it.’ She took another sip. ‘We had a fabulous wedding feast.’
‘And then?’ Foxworthy asked.
‘Oh, it is much as he told you.’
‘Your elephant went storming down the mountain pursued by the combined worshippers of the temples of Kali and Ganesh, who are also Paddy’s in-laws?’
‘I am a high priestess, forbidden to leave the temple complex. I was abducted like Sita.’
‘You eloped.’
‘That would be sacrilege.’ Chandra glanced around, taking a nervous sip of her cocktail. ‘I hope Paddy is not having trouble with the tigers …’ Her tawny eyes turned to Foxworthy, settling on the Crown and Bath stars on his epaulette as she raised a raven eyebrow. ‘So, what takes you to America, Brigadier Foxworthy?’
Foxworthy exhaled smoke, felt it burning against the Scotch, and rasped, ‘Just meeting some colleagues in Washington.’ He sighed. ‘Plus I promised myself I would see New York, maybe find a betrothal gift for Alice, my intended. She’s in London.’
‘Were you raised in London?’ asked Chandra.
‘No, Aldworth. Tiny village in Berkshire. Doubt you’ve heard of it. Nothing noteworthy, but for a fair quantity of elf shot. Legend says it was shot by the pixies. But in truth, it’s just Neolithic flint arrowheads. Had quite a collection as a boy.’ He gave Chandra a wry smile. ‘Never met an elf, though. Though there is a statue of a dwarf at the church. And of course the giants.’
‘Real giants? Paddy hopes to catch a yeti one day, but Aldworth has real giants?’
‘In the fourteenth century. Now they’re all stone like the dwarf.’
‘Like Scandinavian trolls?’ asked Chandra. ‘Did they come with the Vikings?’
‘Close,’ Foxworthy laughed, ‘the De la Beche family came with the Normans. Philip was seven feet tall and served as valet to Edward II along with a dwarf. Their statues are in the church, along with the stone effigies of Philip’s giant sons, each of them bigger than the last: John Long, John Strong, John Never Afraid, and John Ever Afraid, the biggest of them all.’
‘Why was he afraid if he was so big?’
‘Because,’ Foxworthy related softly, ‘it costs a lot to feed and clothe a giant, so he made a deal with the Devil for worldly wealth, with a stipulation in his contract that when he was laid to rest, the Devil could come for his soul, whether he was laid inside a church or out.’ Foxworthy blew a smoke ring. ‘So John Ever Afraid arranged to be buried in the wall of the church.’ He blew another smoke ring. ‘But in Cromwell’s time, some Roundheads decided the Aldworth Giants were pagan idols so smashed them all – except for John Ever Afraid, who they took as a trophy to Cromwell himself. When they stopped to rest and set the statue down, the Devil appeared, for the wording of John’s contract had finally been fulfilled. He’d been laid to rest outside a church. The Devil took John Ever Afraid to Hell – and the Roundheads with him!’
‘Sláinte!’ roared a voice behind him. ‘Another round for the shanachie!’ Paddy joined Chandra on the loveseat, giving her a kiss. ‘So, what’s the news?’
Chandra shared the fruit of the gossip tree, then Foxworthy related what he’d been told by Commodore Ford, both the official story and the few details he’d been allowed.
‘Jetboy?’ Paddy guffawed. ‘Oh, that’s rich. Heard that too, down by the engine room. This poor ugly mug named Harry said he’d heard whispers about a plague that turns people into monsters. Germ warfare from the Nazis.’
The Veranda Grill was the Queen Mary‘s most exclusive club, situated in the stern on the sun deck – usually only open to first-class passengers with a months-long waiting list, but this day was unscheduled and Commodore Ford could admit whomever he liked. Today his guests included Foxworthy, Paddy and Chandra, and the Fisher family of the Fisher Family Theatricals, hailing from Cheapside and consisting of Francis Fisher, his wife, Edwina, and seven children, ranging from the younger Francis, the eldest at twenty-four, to Bertram, the youngest, at ten. In between were Muriel, Alfred, Colin, Jillian, and Robert.
A grand table had been set up before a colourful mural depicting circus performers: dancers and acrobats, harlequins and clowns, an animal tamer with a tiger and a black panther jumping through his hoop, a green-faced witch with her pointed hat and wand and a Caribbean sorceress tossing a cockerel into the air, a grey-faced fakir and a pantomime horse, an African serpent charmer dancing with her boa, a statuesque ringmistress marching in high-heeled boots bearing a beadle’s ceremonial staff as her swagger stick, and Marie Antoinette herself fluttering an ostrich-plume fan, a mouse peeping out of one side of her wig.
The Fisher family had taken to this naturally, dressed in their theatrical finest, with Chandra and Paddy seated at the far end of the table near the animal trainer and his leaping leopard, while Foxworthy was seated beside Ford at the head of the table near Marie Antoinette, next to Mr and Mrs Fisher, and opposite Lady Ermengarde Arkwright, the dowager of something or other. She was old enough to dictate her own fashion, wearing one of those stoles so popular in the twenties composed of at least a dozen ermines, heads, tails, and all, their beady little eyes replaced with beads of jet.
It was a fine day, broken only by a transitory patter of sea mist or light rain from a passing cloud, but Commodore Ford looked anything but happy. ‘Brigadier, if you thought last night was madness, you would not believe the insanity coming over the radio today,’ he confided to Foxworthy in a hoarse whisper as they were being seated.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’ve informed the crew, of course. We don’t need to tell the passengers anything other than it’s a spot of engine trouble. Extra caviar and champagne does wonders, and for those who find those insufficient, discounts on future trips. But we’ll still need to keep pootling about until the New Yorkers come to their senses and open the port.’
Lady Arkwright, oblivious to the captain’s mood, was nattering on to Chandra, Paddy, and the Fishers. ‘I was on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary, you know. Hard to get tickets, but you can always weasel something if you know the right people. And oh, don’t those look lovely!’ her ladyship exclaimed, as the waiter set an ornate silver epergne on the table, its trays laden with strawberries, cream puffs, jam tarts and fairy trifles topped with gooseberries.
Mrs Fisher, seated beside him, screamed.
‘Francis!’ she cried. ‘Francis!’ Referring not to her husband, but her son. Young Francis Fisher was dressed in his army uniform, a proud young Tommy just returned from the war, and had been in the action of reaching for one of the trifles on the epergne when his hand touched the silver. That hand was now silver as well, shining like a mailed gauntlet. The Brigadier thought for a moment that the man had suffered an injury during the war and was using a costly prosthetic, when he looked at Francis’s face and saw that his face was silver too, every eyelash and feather of hair perfectly sculpted, like the Silver Swan of Barnard Castle. But unlike the famous automaton, Francis sat frozen and unmoving, lifeless as a silver statue.
Then Lady Arkwright screamed as well, her false teeth falling from her mouth, forced out by the sharp fangs of a mustelid. Her eyes turned jet black and the wreath of dead winter weasels about her throat came to life, screaming as one, waving their tiny claws as they writhed to escape but could not, fused to her like the tangled tails of a rat king or, perhaps, ermine queen, savaging her ladyship’s own clawed hands as she reached up to touch them.
Mrs Fisher fainted dead away or fell dead, Foxworthy was not sure which, slumping to the floor, while her husband began to choke, gooseberry-green froth bubbling from his mouth. The froth coming from Commodore Ford’s mouth, however, was red, the colour of blood that Foxworthy was all too familiar with. Then blood began to issue from his ears and his eyes, pouring from his nose.
The waiter standing nearby, poised in shock with a jug of iced tea in one hand, suddenly turned as thin and translucent as a saint’s icon from a stained glass window, then fell backwards and shattered, the tinkling of broken glass muffled by a sound in the distance like a bomb going off. Then a great wall of water slammed into the restaurant, gushing through the windows and doors as the customers continued to transform and die, to writhe and change, or stand or sit stricken with horror, still human for the moment.
The wave subsided, only the edge having reached the table at the back of the restaurant, and Foxworthy stood up as Mr Fisher dissolved into green sludge stinking with the anise reek of absinthe. Paddy was standing and Chandra as well, staring at the horror that had replaced Robert Fisher. The thing still wore the tatters of the boy’s clothes, but his body had become that of an ape with a dozen arms and a gorilla’s face. Hairy tarantulas with twice as many legs as they should have began crawling from the gorilla-shaped husk.
Of the remaining children, Jillian still sat in her chair, her mouth agape with horror, while little Bertram had fallen dead like his mother. Muriel lay on the floor, twitching and writhing, caught in the throes of death or transformation, while Alfred and Colin, one fair, the other dark, had drawn together in fright, fused into one being, but not one that could live.
Chandra held up her hand, blood pouring from her finger around her wedding band as she cried, ‘Aiyee! It is the curse of Kali!’ But it seemed, in fact, the curse of Ganesh, for her delicate hands were puffing up and swelling, turning grey and growing larger until they resembled the stumpy legs of a baby elephant, the left one cruelly scarred and weeping from where her wedding band remained embedded. Her face retained some semblance of its former self, but the whole of it was covered with rough grey hide, the setting of her maang tikka pendant fused with her flesh, its ruby star winking on her forehead.
Paddy struggled to support her as she wept with pain. He remained unchanged, as did Jillian. ‘Help your family,’ Foxworthy ordered her. She was only thirteen and a girl, but there’d been younger soldiers before, that damnable Jetboy at twelve, and Jillian Fisher had lived through the Blitz. ‘Remain here. I’m going to check outside.’
Outside, chaos reigned. A puddle of blood slicked the deck, spilling from a skeleton in a woman’s coat and mixing with seawater. People lay writhing and contorting into things that were not people or not alive and mainly both, twisted corpses strewn everywhere, but Foxworthy’s attention was drawn to the starboard bow where those passengers and crewmen who remained alive and human, for the moment, had gathered.
The rogue wave that had slammed into the Veranda Grill had swept many overboard, not all of them dead or dying of whatever evil had overtaken the Queen Mary, but all of them surely drowning in the Atlantic if they did not get aid. All except one, for the wave was still there, but frozen like aspic or some fanciful moulded jelly as big as an iceberg and shaped like the head of Neptune, his kingly beard trailing off into streamers of froth and foam, his eyes twin vortices of phosphorescent sea fire.
Yet in the blue of those giant watery eyes, Foxworthy thought he recognized the young officer he’d encountered on the bridge the night before, Lieutenant Waters. As King Neptune gazed down upon the human and inhuman flotsam he’d created, two smaller waves, their crests curling like fingertips, swept passengers and corpses back towards the ship.
Both passengers and crew were tossing lifebelts over the side, lowering lifeboats, some dying as they did so, but apart from the nightmare transformations, it was a dance Foxworthy knew from the battlefield. Blind panic transmuted to the stone-cold certainty of doing what needed to be done. ‘Someone get a rope!’ Foxworthy cried, but the seas were too rough, the passengers slamming fatally against the side of the ship except when Neptune or Waters, or whomever the watery monster was, pushed people away.
Then a miracle occurred.
A blond crewman stood at the railing, stretching his arm out and crying vainly for some figure floating towards the horizon. ‘James!’ he cried and ‘James!’ again and a third time ‘James!’ But then his arms stretched out, further and further, extending like twin telescopes until his hands reached his friend, the farthest of those being swept out to sea, and grabbed the drowning man by the collar as he bobbed and gasped for air.
The crewman pulled back, his torso telescoping as well, spiring taller and taller like a ship’s mast until it towered over the smokestacks of the Queen Mary herself, his back braced against the wall of the promenade, his feet against the railing, as he hauled the drowning man onto the deck. James coughed up water, but did so quickly, seeing as he had three heads. But he was alive, which was what counted, and his saviour, the telescoping crewman, had done his duty and gone on to pluck others from the waves.
Foxworthy found his hands drawing out his pipe on habit, for he felt a desperate craving for a smoke, to calm his nerves and allow him to think. The danger looked ever so slightly more under control, but the madness still unexplained, and at this point he didn’t care if the face on his pipe were Hades. He shoved the king’s crown full of tobacco, and then, with trembling hands, took out his father’s lighter. His fingers, usually so adept, fumbled at the flint wheel, and his father’s lighter, carried through two wars, slipped from his fingers and skittered across the deck, tails up, Britannia with her trident and shield spinning anticlockwise, an ill omen if ever there was one, then disappeared over the railing.
Foxworthy almost swore, but a gentleman never swore, especially a middle-class boy desperately working for promotion. Nor did one flash a two-finger salute, no matter how much he might like. And so he did as he had trained himself to do, holding his wilful fingertips back with his thumbnail, forcing his fury and rage, his hurt and horror, into a painful but secret gesture of regret and consternation.
There came a snap! as his rebellious fingers broke free.
It stung and it felt as if he’d cracked his thumbnail, but then he looked. His nail had become as grey as the flints he’d hunted as a boy, his thumb as well, and from the tip, in the place of blood, oozed a tarry black substance like bitumen. But it was burning, with a literal flame. And Foxworthy still desperately wanted that smoke.
Not questioning the nightmare logic of it all, he held his thumb to his pipe, drawing the flame until the tobacco caught, then sucking in. He was pulling too fast, the smoke scorching hot, but the fire soothed his lungs and it was, in fact, what he needed. Foxworthy examined his thumb, which was still burning like an oil lamp. He snuffed it out against his jacket. It extinguished like any ordinary flame, leaving a scorch on the wool, but he was more concerned for his thumb. The bituminous blood scabbed over, hard and black on the grey stone, but though the greyness had spread down his thumb and was progressing to his palm, his thumb was still flexible.
He turned to the three-headed crewman who had got to his feet and was exchanging glances with himself in a shell-shocked daze. ‘You, sailor,’ he barked, ‘James, is it?’
There was an instinctive posture to a trained military man when he heard a commanding officer’s voice, no matter the branch of service. ‘Yes, sir!’ the three-headed man cried from all three of his mouths, saluting, his hand only raised to his rightmost head upon his ridiculously broad shoulders, his uniform rent asunder.
‘I’m a brigadier in His Majesty’s Army, and I’m taking this as an act of war and declaring martial law. So, name and rank?’
‘Seaman Gully, sir!’
‘Commodore Ford is dead. Who is the next ranking officer?’
James Gully’s heads swivelled, looking in all directions. ‘Maybe Eddy?’ said the leftmost, pointing out to the watery bulk of Neptune. ‘Lieutenant Waters,’ the right corrected him. Then the middle head, still wearing his sailor’s cap with the CUNARD band, said, ‘All the officers save the Commodore were on the bridge, sir. We were all swept overboard.’
‘Then barring any new information to the contrary, I’m declaring myself captain of this vessel. Is anyone manning the bridge?’
All three of Gully’s heads looked in unison, then all of them shook. ‘No, sir. But Commodore Ford set us on autopilot. Our course is set on a very slow circle in order to conserve fuel.’
‘We’ll need to loop back faster to sweep for survivors.’
‘Should we radio for assistance?’ asked Gully’s left head.
‘Good God, man, no!’ Foxworthy cried. ‘I don’t know whether this was caused by Nazi gas, an alien plague, or Madame Blavatsky going to Atlantis to reopen Pandora’s box with the Thule Society, but we dare not expose other ships. Just go find any men fit to helm the bridge, and when you have enough, loop back.’
‘Aye aye, Captain …’ the three-headed man trailed off, staring.
‘What is it?’ Foxworthy had seen soldiers tongue-tied with shock before, but never one with three tongues who still couldn’t spit out what he was trying to say. ‘Out with it, man!’ Foxworthy snapped his fingers impatiently then watched as sparks flew and a chip of stone broke off his thumb, flying off like a flake of Neolithic elf shot, but burning with fire as it lodged itself in the woodwork five feet away.
He then saw what all three of James’s heads were staring at: his whole hand had turned to stone, not just his thumb, like a sculpture expertly flaked from flint, still betraying the sharp edges and tiny traces and ripples left by flint knapping. ‘It’s flint …’ Foxworthy realized.
‘Aye aye, Captain Flint!’
Foxworthy saw no reason to correct the three-headed sailor. ‘To your work, seaman,’ he whispered and stalked off, hoping Paddy was still alive. The animal trapper was a resourceful fellow and more importantly, not yet dead.
Paddy was not in the Veranda Grill, so Foxworthy headed for the purser’s desk. On the carpet before it lay a gigantic speckled egg, big enough to hold a man. The desk itself lay abandoned save for the corpses of bellboys and one thing that resembled an enormous nudibranch, its colourful frills and tentacles lying limp, its mouth gasping where it had struggled out of the skirt and stockings of a purserette’s uniform. ‘I’m sorry,’ Foxworthy told her softly, but when the thing extended a plaintive but poisonous-looking fluorescent-orange-spotted violet tentacle, he snatched the guest book and retreated.
Paddy and Chandra had taken the Windsor Suite. Foxworthy’s new hand at least worked for knocking. Paddy opened the door, looking sick with worry but still human.
Foxworthy held up his hand. ‘Yes, it’s happening to me too.’
Chandra lay on the bed. Her shapely brown feet that only yesterday had been learning the foxtrot, today were the ungainly grey feet of an elephant. ‘The curse of Ganesh has touched you as well …’ she sobbed.
‘Yes,’ Foxworthy agreed, ‘but my hand is not elephant hide but flint.’
‘Then it must be the curse of Kali.’ She held up her left arm with its elephant foot, the wound weeping from where her wedding band had cut through warped flesh and bone. ‘The Divine Mother’s wrath has cursed New York and now struck us here!’
‘Chandra, if we do not take control of this ship, we will be doomed. I need you to lend me Paddy.’
‘Don’t I get a say in the matter?’ Paddy asked.
‘Not if you want to save your wife’s life and yours into the bargain.’
There was a silence broken by Chandra. ‘He is right, Paddy. Go help him.’
Paddy nodded, then bent to kiss Chandra until she finally pushed him away with her elephant feet. ‘Go, my darling. Go. Save us both.’
Paddy nodded and ducked out of the cabin. Foxworthy followed, not ducking but feeling the doorframe was nearer. In the hallway he asked, ‘Am I taller?’
Paddy glanced at him. ‘Maybe, but I think you have bigger problems. The stone’s spread to your neck.’
Foxworthy felt with his still-human left hand, finding that what Paddy said was the truth. ‘Bugger,’ he swore. He shook his head then led the way onwards. His right eye burned and then his left as the petrification swept over them, but his vision sharpened to crystal clarity so he didn’t complain. They made their way back to the bridge past vistas of surreal horror, worse than anything he’d seen in the death camps save in their sheer multitude.
The only sight that truly disturbed Foxworthy beyond what he’d already seen was what he glimpsed in the first class children’s playroom. There, among the twisted bodies, stood a pretty rocking horse with a real horsehair mane and tail, but rocking by itself, with no child riding it. But then he realized the rocking horse was looking at him with a child’s brown eyes, pleading, weeping, rocking faster and faster as it tried to follow them but could not because its horse’s hooves were fused to curved runners bent from human bone.
By the time they were back at the bridge, the petrification had become complete and Foxworthy not only stood taller than Paddy, but his knife-edged flint feet had cut themselves free of his shoes and his uniform was ripped at the seams.
Gully, the three-headed midshipman, snapped a salute. ‘Captain Flint!’
‘At ease,’ Foxworthy said … or tried to say. His voice was gone, and only a stony whisper escaped his lips. He looked down at the motley crew that Gully had assembled. Well, looked down on all but one. Gully’s rescuer was there, his torso still three feet longer than it should be, with his left arm hanging down to his knees and his right arm hanging to the ground. His head was identical to James’s three. The two were identical twins … or at least had been until this afternoon, and quite young. ‘Brothers?’ Foxworthy assumed, his voice hoarse and whispery.
James Gully pointed his thumb up at his telescoped former twin and his side heads nodded while his central head said, ‘Yes, sir. That’s John.’
Foxworthy surveyed the rest of his men. Along with the twins were four other crewmen and two gentlemen from first class. One of the first class gentlemen had skin and hair striped vibrantly blue and gold like a tropical fish while the other appeared untouched. Suffering the opposite horror to James but still having his shirt ripped open, one of the crewmen had no head but a giant face upon his chest, exactly like one of the monstrous men found in foreign lands in medieval manuscripts but never seen until now.
The other three crewmen appeared fully human, and in fact, the mechanic in the grease-stained overalls was almost impossibly handsome, tall, with Grecian features, wavy golden hair, and a figure so finely sculpted that it made even a mechanic’s rags look fashionable.
‘Ugly Harry?’ asked Paddy. The Adonis nodded sadly. ‘Damn,’ Paddy swore, ‘at least someone found a prize in the bottom of Pandora’s Cracker Jacks.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Handsome Harry had a gorgeous voice but a thick Cockney accent. ‘I’ll never find a woman who’ll want me. My face may look nice now, but I’m a freak. My navel’s disappeared. I ain’t got no nipples neither.’
‘You’ll find women who can overlook those flaws,’ Paddy reassured him.
‘No,’ Harry moaned wretchedly, ‘I’m sexless as a doll!’
‘Considering the alternatives, you are still very lucky,’ Foxworthy told him, ‘but let us compare horror stories when we are not in danger of dying.’ He glanced at John Gully. ‘Has everyone been rescued who went overboard?’
‘Yes, sir.’ John Gully sounded exactly like his brother James.
‘Who’s tending to the wounded? Has the ship’s doctor survived?’
‘The doctor and the surgeon are both dead, but a couple of the nurses are fine, for now, sir,’ John Gully reported. ‘They’re tending to the victims.’
‘Some on the wireless said it’s an alien plague,’ his brother’s leftmost head told him, then the right one added, ‘It’s all over New York.’
‘Sir,’ added the middle head.
Foxworthy exchanged a glance with Paddy, but everything that could be said in their defence did not change the fact that they’d been wrong. ‘What’s the chance it’s a Nazi gas?’ he asked. ‘Do we have someone on the radio to find out?’
‘Everyone in the radio room’s dead, sir. It’s like the Blitz.’
‘My family survived the Blitz, but they didn’t survive this,’ said a girl’s voice as Jillian Fisher stepped onto the bridge. ‘Bertie just died. Muriel too. Mama died at the start.’
‘All of them, Jillian?’ asked Paddy.
‘All of them, Mr O’Reilly,’ said the girl. ‘There are horrid spiders that used to be parts of Robert, but they’re just spiders. Frankie’s a statue, but not alive.’ She glanced up. ‘Brigadier Foxworthy?’
‘That’s Captain Flint,’ James corrected, but Foxworthy nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
‘What do I do now?’
‘Go and help the nurses. I’ve no time to play nursemaid and we need to get the radio working.’
‘I’m clever with mechanical things,’ she offered. ‘I’ve taken apart a crystal set.’
‘I could do with some help,’ Handsome Harry admitted.
‘Then you have your assignment,’ he told her, then asked John Gully, ‘Do we have enough fuel to return to England?’
The rightmost head checked a gauge. ‘Barely, sir,’ he reported, ‘but we could make it with the currents.’
‘Then let’s do so,’ Foxworthy commanded. ‘This is Mr O’Reilly. I’m deputizing him as my second-in-command. I feel an urgent need to sleep, and if I do not return in the morning, he is your captain.’
‘Aye aye, Captain Flint!’
When Foxworthy woke, he found his grey legs dangling off the bed that he’d broken. When he stood up, he was hunched over against the ceiling, like Philip de la Beche crammed into his crypt. He stood over seven feet, if not closer to eight. His uniform lay shredded.
He was also craving Scotch, and saw no reason to deny himself given the circumstances. He tore open his steamer chest. The bottle of Glen Grant Alice had slipped him as a parting gift tasted like nectar and he drained it. Then he realized he’d bitten off the bottleneck too. But the shards didn’t cut his mouth, only felt like a mouthful of boiled sweets, but tasting savoury, like lobster lozenges as they melted.
Foxworthy regarded the broken bottle with horror, but still swallowed. Then he belched, a small gout of fire shooting out of his mouth like a dragon. Or a demon. Or John Ever Afraid returned from Hell.
He glanced at the dresser mirror. His face still looked like his face, if larger, but sharper, more chiselled, as if a brutalist artist had hewn his portrait from solid flint, down to the waves of his hair. His eyes, always deep-set, were now pits to the fires of Hell, flames dancing in their recesses. But when he rubbed them in horror, he found he still blinked, and that his eyeballs were now made of some transparent mineral, like isinglass in the windows of a stove.
His teeth were like diamonds as he took another bite of the delicious bottle. Then he stopped himself. ‘Oh Alice,’ he whispered, ‘what will you think of me?‘ He flung the bottle away, glass smashing against the panelling. Then he gritted his teeth, sparks flying from his lips like spittle. ‘Kenneth Foxworthy,‘ he told himself, ‘you are a man, not a monster.’
His reflection mocked this lie, the mask of Hades looking back at him, but Foxworthy refrained from doing anything so childish as to smash the mirror … or eat it.
Instead he regarded the rest of himself, the jagged points of knapped flint that formed his chest hair yet still felt soft when he smoothed it down with stone fingers, the other details, great and small, transmuted from flesh to the pinnacle of the flint knapper’s art. If he’d come upon himself in a gallery, he’d have thought the sculptor madly talented and the statue’s nudity unremarkable. But he was not art, he was a man, and the ruined bed once used by Churchill still had a bedspread of good English brocade. Foxworthy slit a hole in the centre with the flint knives that were now his fingers and donned it as a short kaftan, pinning the sides with his army pips, refusing to eat them like fruit pip sweeties no matter what they smelled like.
He did refill his pipe. The smoke tasted even better than before, and smoking it made him feel like a man, which was something Foxworthy desperately needed as he hunched out of the door and went to explore the ship of horrors of which he was now in command.
‘Captain Flint!’ The man who greeted him on the bridge was not familiar to him. He looked like James Gully, with only one head. For a moment Foxworthy assumed the twins were actually triplets and he was speaking with a third brother … until the man’s legs grew at least two feet, his trousers becoming knee breeches.
‘John Gully, I presume?’
‘Or “Lookout” if you prefer, sir. I can see as far as a telescope too, and when I stretch out people are saying “look out” so …’
He looked sheepish.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Two days, almost three. We—’ He paused, his throat catching. ‘We thought you were dead, sir. Seaman Lawrence died. Wheildon too. And Mr Philips … we … we had to kill him … it …’
The cadet didn’t say whether this was for mercy or self-preservation. ‘My name is actually Brigadier Foxworthy, but I suppose “Captain Flint” will suffice.’ He sighed. ‘Any good news?‘
John nodded. ‘Don’t know how she did it, but Miss Fisher got the radio working.’
‘That little girl?’
‘Said she was clever at mechanical things.’ He gave a weak grin. ‘Have you eaten anything, sir? We’ve had to pull everyone from the kitchens to keep the ship running, but we have cold rations: apples, cheeses, dried sausage—’
‘I do not seem to need food any more,’ he interrupted. The foods as the boy listed them made Foxworthy feel nauseous. ‘Where’s Paddy? I mean, Captain O’Reilly.’
The stilt-legged boy bit his lip.
‘Is he alive? Did something unspeakable happen to him?’
‘He’s likely to die,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘and so am I.’ Jillian Fisher came onto the bridge, her grave expression heightened by the dark circles under her eyes. She’d changed from her girl’s party finery to a young woman’s green velvet dress a few sizes too large.
Foxworthy reached out his hands but then stopped when he saw the stone knives that were his fingers. But John Gully dropped to his normal height and lower, his stilts compacting to stumps, and he hugged her. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s not.’
Foxworthy felt helpless. ‘I don’t understand …’
Jillian eventually dried her eyes and pushed away from Gully. ‘Harry and I finally got the radio to work, and we found out what happened. It is an alien plague. Mr O’Reilly already worked out the plague part because his tigers weren’t touched. The Americans are calling it the Wild Card Virus.’
‘Wild Card?’
‘From poker,’ she explained. ‘You call a card wild and it can be anything, and you make a virus wild and it can be anything too, from the sniffles to turning a man into King Neptune. Nine times out of ten it kills you, and of those who survive, nine out of ten are turned into something horrid.’ She grimaced. ‘No offence.’
‘The lucky ones get something good, even if it’s not what they wanted.’ John gestured, extending his forearm by three feet.
‘Then why are you afraid you’re going to die?’ Foxworthy asked Jillian.
‘Mr Philips changed when he heard the news from New York,’ John said, pulling his arm back in and shuddering. ‘We all thought he’d been spared.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Foxworthy’s heart felt as heavy and black as the stone it undoubtedly was. ‘How far are we from England?’
Gully squinted out of the window, his neck extending several inches. ‘Not far at all, Captain Flint. We won’t win the Blue Riband for passage west, but we should break the speed record east at least from where we were.’ His neck went back to its proper length while his legs extended, keeping his head at the same level, and Foxworthy saw the grey irises of the boy’s eyes whirl like spyglass lenses. ‘The Queen Mary never had King Neptune to help with the crossing before. We should be in Southampton in a few hours.’
‘We’ve radioed ahead,’ Jillian said. ‘They want us to anchor offshore for quarantine. When they’re sure it’s safe, they’ll send doctors, maybe take us to London Hospital.’
Which was hours by train. Foxworthy felt an awful premonition in his stony heart, made worse by the fact that he had seen this story before: Three ships had gone down in Lübeck’s harbour, seven thousand lives lost.
All the ritual phrases had been said: errors were made, an unforeseeable tragedy, a sad, sad day, etc. Hands that were wrung in one instant had been washed the next.
It wouldn’t be an RAF bomber. Too blatant. Maybe a stray mine, something that could be denied. Or a torpedo from a captured U-boat. The Nazis had been trying to sink the Queens for years, but they were too fast. But anchored off Southampton for an indefinite time? The Queen Mary would be a very large sitting duck, and to abuse the bird metaphor further, it would kill two birds with one stone to sink the plague ship and blame the deed on Nazis who’d flown south to Argentina.
Churchill would have done it quickly. Attlee? It might take a few more days, but Foxworthy knew what foul deeds could be contemplated then ordered for sake of security and safety. He felt a stone-cold certainty now. ‘That will not be happening,’ he decreed. ‘We will go straight to London, closer to the hospital.’
‘Why?’ asked Jillian. ‘They were very clear.’
He told them, glad for the moment for his new whispery voice. They were appalled, but not disbelieving. They’d been through the war themselves.
‘Where do we go, sir?’ asked Gully.
‘The further in, the better. The Isle of Dogs if we can make it. We can be quarantined, but in London, they dare not sink us. They won’t risk plague victims fleeing into the city.’ He glanced to John. ‘Our King Neptune – can he talk?’
‘No,’ said Gully, ‘but Lieutenant Waters taught me semaphore.’
‘Good. Then let us break that record. To London.’
The Thames flooded its highest since 1928. Ships fled the Queen Mary, but those vessels too slow to avoid the onrushing ocean liner found the watery enormity of Lieutenant Edward Waters rising up, but with longer, wilder, literally flowing hair and whiskers, not King Neptune but Father Thames as depicted by Gustav Doré. The crowned titan pushed the ships out of the way with a far more defined set of translucent hands.
Around the bends they went, past Canvey Island and Cliffe Pools, past Gravesend and Grays, past Purfleet and the Dartford Marshes, past Erith, then around the bend to the Isle of Dogs, straight to the infamously noisy bascule bridge miraculously spared by the war. Father Thames reached into his river and pulled out a geyser shaped like a trident, sweeping cars off the bridge and down Manchester Road each way, like a croupier clearing chips off a gambling table.
The drawbridge began to rise, groaning mightily, but it soon became clear that the bridge’s aperture was far smaller than the Queen Mary’s beam. Her draught, however, was narrower. Father Thames dropped his trident back into his river where it dissolved into bubbles and put his watery arms under the Queen Mary and lifted, sloshing right, like a man attempting to manoeuvre an awkward parcel through a narrow gate. He himself stepped through the north end of the bridge, a giant man-shaped wave crashing over it in slow motion, then set the Queen Mary down on the other side.
The ship washed into the lock leading to the West India Docks, everyone aboard clutching the railings. Sparks flew from Foxworthy’s fingers as he gripped the rolled steel joist beside his head, then he ducked down to see out of the window. Lieutenant Waters stood, tottering, thigh-deep in the river, fluid leaking from his sides where the bridge had passed through him, not so much a wave passing over a rock as a hot knife cutting through gelatine. With a look of distress in his swirling blue eyes, he dissolved into water. Foxworthy braced himself as the wave slammed into them.
Sparks flew, people screamed. ‘Aiyeee!’ wailed Chandra from her wheelchair, Paddy behind her, bracing it. ‘O wise Varuna, Ruler of all the Waters, do not let your most blessed and faithful servant perish!’ She raised her elephantine stumps in praise. ‘I have failed in my duties to Ganesh and Kali, and for that I accept my rightful punishment, but heal him! Lend him your strength! His name is your name! His fame is your fame! May the Waters heal and be praised!’
Tears flowed down her cheeks, staining the elephant hide of her once-beautiful face, while Paddy laid a comforting still-human hand on her shoulder.
Jillian Fisher was also crying, but not so much as the Gully twins, bawling from all four heads, and Handsome Harry and the headless crewman whom Foxworthy had never learned the name of had anguished expressions on their handsome and horrible faces.
Foxworthy stood like a stone. This was not the first time he’d seen a brave man die, nor, he feared, would it be the last. But then the waters of the West India Docks’ outer lock began to boil and bubble like something out of Shakespeare’s plays.
‘Praise Varuna!’ Chandra cried, waving her stumps to the Thames. ‘Praise the blessed Waters!’
A wave rose up, frozen like the tip of an iceberg, then two more on each side and two again, the tines of Father Thames’s crown as Lieutenant Waters rose up even larger than all his previous manifestations, a watery titan swelling with the inrushing tide into an aqueous colossus.
He lifted the Queen Mary, like a child picking up a large toy boat, and stepped over the lock to the main pool of the West India Docks, waded a few paces as he drew in more water, growing even larger, then stepped over the Marsh Wall and the sluice gate shattered in the Blitz, stepping into the upper elbow of the Millwall Outer Dock. As if he were picking his way through tidepools, he manoeuvred carefully to the larger lower elbow, now half-drained, and sat down in the rectangular pool as if it were a royal bath, holding the Queen Mary steady as if it were his favourite bath-toy. He glanced over his shoulder to the west, to where the old channel to the Thames had been filled in twenty years ago, the ground now pocked with bomb craters. He gave a jerk of his head and the waters of the Thames flooded over the lip, refilling the pool around them. Lieutenant Waters leaned back, the cataract of water erasing the war’s scars, his whiskers flowing with the incoming tide. His left hand pushed the Queen Mary drifting gently towards the South Dock. Then he waved and slid into the pool, disappearing into the water he was.
A great cheer came from the port bow. Foxworthy followed as everyone rushed there, seeing a crowd of dockers, waving and tossing their hats in the air, then one of them taking to the air himself, screaming as he drifted away on a light southerly breeze like a child’s lost balloon. Another screamed, sinking into the dock as if the wood were quicksand, then a third fell forward, his head breaking off, bowling across the planks as it changed into a coconut and dropped into the water, more coconuts rolling out of his clothes.
The remaining dockers ran away, most still on two legs.
Foxworthy dozed unpleasantly, but that was nothing compared to the past week: the Queen Mary had docked, the crew lifted down by Lookout to secure her anchor chains, but they had remained for quarantine, especially once Jillian had restored her radio repairs and given the authorities a load of codswallop about fears of a hull breach which is why they had come to London rather than anchoring off Southampton.
That a thirteen-year-old girl raised by theatricals could lie like an army requisitions officer should not have come as a surprise.
Foxworthy affirmed Jillian’s false story, then left it to her and Paddy, equally skilled in confabulation, since the radio room was cramped for his new stature and his whispery voice made him hard to understand. He’d then gone outside to smoke, one of the few things that still gave him pleasure or, it seemed, nourishment.
Over that week, he’d sneaked a few nips of Scotch and swallowed a shot glass, but even once he’d succumbed to his monstrous appetites for alcohol and glassware, it was like trying to survive on sugar water and crisps. The contents of the on-board tobacconist only sustained him by chain-smoking.
Other virus victims were starving as well. Lady Arkwright could pretend her tastes had not changed while letting her lei of ravenous ermines gorge themselves on steak tartare, but others were not so fortunate. Foxworthy saw a woman with flowers rooted in her hair swear she would die if she could not go to Kew Gardens. They had prevented her, then watched as she fainted, withering like a cut tulip in the sun.
More victims joined them – dockers they’d infected and soldiers who’d strayed too close to the quarantined Isle of Dogs. Others came from across the city, sent with food, medicine, and promises that doctors would come once they knew how to sanitize the alien spores.
Foxworthy had retired early, still hungry, but mainly cold. He had drifted into a dreamless sleep, but he was awake now.
He heard voices somewhere, one of them a woman’s, familiar. Alice? No, not Alice. He tried to open his eyes, but could only force them open the barest crack, seeing light and then a skeleton. ‘What fresh Hell can this be?’ he tried to say, but couldn’t. He realized his jaw was numb, his arms as well, all of him save the tips of his ears and his eyes, numb as when he was a lad and nearly froze in the blizzard of ’33, the winter his father had died.
Foxworthy then realized that while he couldn’t feel his feet he was standing up, as was the skeleton opposite him. A skeleton only a couple of inches shorter. At first he took it for another victim of the virus, until he saw a sign in eighteenth-century lettering:
‘The Irish Giant’
Acquired 1783
Behind the giant’s skull was a railing displaying a collection of horns and antlers, and beyond that was the walkway of a gallery lined with bookshelves containing volumes going back centuries.
Foxworthy shifted his gaze to the left, seeing the head of some long-necked dinosaur, then glanced right, at a Doric column on top of which sat the silvered form of Francis Fisher the younger, still in his army uniform, forever frozen with his hand outstretched. He looked more like a beatific icon of St Simeon Stylites, reaching out in benediction, than a young Tommy who’d been unfortunate enough to touch a silver tray just after he’d inhaled an alien virus.
Beyond Francis stood another column topped by a pyramid of coconuts and a small potted palm and beyond that hung a giant speckled egg sitting in a chandelier ring like an enormous egg-cup, suspended like the roc egg in the palace dome in Aladdin. It shone, a dozen lamps trained on it, not just illumination but incubators.
It was the heat from the lamps that had woken him, Foxworthy realized, the warm air circulating in the upper level of the museum, liquefying the bitumen that served as his blood, but only in the top of his head. He was like a stove with the ashes banked, perhaps a few smouldering embers left within him, but not enough fuel for a fire. Pipe smoke and Scotch were not enough to sustain him.
He also realized where he was: the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, the biggest collection of freaks and oddities in London, at least dead ones.
‘I’m not dead!’ he tried to yell, but nothing came out. ‘I’m still alive!’ Again, no words came out of his mouth, not even the faint crackling sound his voice had become, the whisper of flames in a furnace. ‘Please, somebody, hear me!‘
Somebody did. The familiar voice sounded close, somewhere beneath the plinth he must be standing on … and it sounded not like just any woman’s voice, but his mother’s. ‘Lord Webb-Johnson, I don’t care if your man from Pompeii was shattered during the Blitz,’ Foxworthy heard his mother say, ‘you’re not exhibiting my Kenneth as a statue – and naked no less!’
‘Mother, I’m here!’ he tried to call, but again, no words emerged.
‘Please, Mrs Foxworthy, think of it this way,’ said a cultured man’s voice. ‘We are a research institution, yes, but we also subsist on donations from the public, including medical oddities. Your Kenneth is gone, but the wild card virus has left behind a very grand statue. Consider it a monument to him. It’s what he would have wanted.’
‘I’m alive and I don’t want it, you bloody toff!’ Foxworthy screamed in his head.
‘I’m a better judge of what my son would want than you,’ his mother said.
‘Your son wanted to save lives,’ the lord pleaded, ‘and so do we!’
‘How?’ his mother asked. ‘You declared him dead!’
‘By every objective medical standard, yes. He has no heartbeat, no pulse, no brain activity – but this wild card virus is entirely new territory!’
‘I live in the old territory. The real world, not some castle in the air! I trust you will see things my way and release my Kenneth’s body to me so I may take him back to Aldworth to be buried beside his father.’
‘No, mother! No!’ Foxworthy tried to yell. ‘I’m alive! I’m still alive!’
‘As you wish, Mrs Foxworthy,’ said Lord Webb-Johnson, admitting defeat.
The last thing Foxworthy recalled was losing consciousness in the back of a cold lorry. He awoke to a drop of sweet fire on his tongue, trickling down the back of his throat. His vision swam, then resolved itself to show him a familiar freckled face. ‘Just a drop of poteen,’ said Paddy. ‘Brought it for the wake, but saved you a taste.’
‘More,’ Foxworthy croaked weakly. ‘More …’ But no sound came out of his lips.
Chandra joined Paddy, who protested, ‘Dear, you shouldn’t be out of your wheelchair.’
‘I can stand,’ Chandra told him. ‘It would pain me more to not say goodbye.’ Her baby elephant foot touched Foxworthy’s cheek. ‘Paddy is taking me back to Bengal, but I am the elephant’s daughter and I shall never forget you. Sleep well.’ His mother smiled down at him next. ‘My Kenneth,’ she said sadly. ‘My brave boy.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘When you returned from the war, I thought you were safe. A mother shouldn’t have to bury a son.’
‘I’m alive,’ he tried to say, but couldn’t. ‘I’m still here.’
She smiled then, as if she had heard, and his stone heart leapt, but then she said, ‘King George knighted you. Star of India and the George Cross too. I couldn’t be prouder. But I don’t know what I’ll do without you …’
‘I’m not gone!‘ he tried to scream. ‘Get Paddy to give me more of that damned whisky!’
His mother left, and after the glittering of the sun, he saw Alice standing over him, a vision of loveliness and grief, a veil over her cornflower-blue eyes. She caught her breath, covering her barberry-bright lips with her glove. ‘Oh, Kenneth, what did those monsters do to you?’ She leaned down, whispering, ‘You never asked me, but I know you wanted to. I thought you were going to when you came back. But I wanted you to know, I would have said yes.’ She bit her lip, her lipstick smearing as her tears rolled down. ‘Even like this, I would have said yes.’ She kissed his cold stone lips. ‘I love you, Kenny. Goodbye.’
Alice stepped away, and after a last glimpse of sunlight, the coffin lid was shut. Not even the hellish light from his eyes illuminated the darkness. The fire in his heart was extinguished.
He felt the coffin lurch and then lower, heard the mumbled prayers which could only have ended in ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
He heard the earth hitting the coffin lid.
