XVI
IN THE MORNING, the Captain showered and dressed and went to the bridge, only to find the door locked. He looked through the portal, and saw the Pale One standing at the steering wheel, surrounded by the Pale One’s own crew, who appeared to have taken over the navigation of the ship.
“Captain!”
He turned to find Bloodbeard standing behind him, wearing an even more impressive outfit than he had the day before. While yesterday’s clothes were embroidered in gold, this outfit appeared to be actually made of gold. His robe seemed very heavy, perhaps a hundred pounds or more, but Bloodbeard seemed to be wearing it lightly. He was quite a man.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to the Captain, and, putting his arm around the Captain’s rounded, fleshy shoulder, turned him from the bridge door and down the steps to the lower deck. As they descended, the Captain sensed that the ship was indeed going in the opposite direction than it had been going before he went to bed. It was as if the Pale One had taken control of the ship and turned it around completely—which seemed like just the kind of naughty surprise the Pale One would devise.
“That’s a shame,” Bloodbeard said. He was pointing to a small group of dinghies and junks approaching the Glory.
The Captain’s face went hot with embarrassment. He’d been throwing people off the ship, in part to thwart the arrival of any newcomers to the Glory. And yet, from time to time, new boats and rafts still approached, full of desperate women and men and children. It was a disgrace.
“The problem is you’re wasting a precious resource,” Bloodbeard said. “You throw these people into the ocean and this sends a message to your passengers, yes, but it says nothing to those from far away who cannot see these people drown. They sink too quickly.”
What was needed, Bloodbeard explained, was a constant and horrifying signal to those who might arrive by boat looking for safe haven. It was essential, he said, that those approaching would be confronted by a clear visual deterrent.
“Why do you think I carry this around?” Bloodbeard said, indicating the covered birdcage he’d been holding since he came aboard.
The Captain did not see the connection between a pet bird and a deterrent to boat people, but he didn’t know how to say this without risking looking uninformed. He positioned his lips in a serious pose meant to imply contemplation.
“Did I not show you this?” Bloodbeard said, and with a flourish removed the cloth from the birdcage. Inside was not a bird but a head. It was a man’s head, severed at the neck, and appeared to have been decomposing for weeks. Seeing it, the Captain had a flicker of recognition. He’d heard something about a man who had been asking annoying questions of Bloodbeard, and then this man had disappeared. Now the Captain made the connection between the missing man and the severed head, and also made the connection between the birdcage and the visual deterrent Bloodbeard had described.
“Speaking of which,” Bloodbeard said, “I noticed that you have hundreds of cages for lobsters and crabs and such.”
The Captain had never seen any cages for lobsters or crabs, but then again, he’d never seen much of the ship, and did not know where its food came from. So he took Bloodbeard’s word for it, and listened intently as Bloodbeard laid out a plan.
That afternoon, the ship’s passengers, who had grown accustomed to hearing the thumping resistance of whomever the Snowmen had found and decided to throw overboard, and had become inured to the otherworldly screaming of the victims’ spouses and children, were surprised to hear nothing of the kind this day. They were so curious about the lack of thumping and wailing that they peeked out of their rooms and took furtive steps toward the promenade and railings to see what was not happening.
What they found were Certain People being kept in cages meant for lobsters and crabs. These cages were placed every thirty feet or so on the outer decks, so that no passengers had to walk far from their rooms to encounter a human in a cage meant for mollusks and crustaceans. There were enough of the cages—easily ninety, on multiple decks—that any desperate vessel approaching the ship would notice the cages, would see the humans within, and would get the clear message that the ship was an unfriendly place where compassion had died and wherein reigned a towering disregard for the vulnerable and dispossessed.
“Love it,” said the voice in the vent that night.
“It was Bloodbeard’s idea,” said the Captain.
“We’re lucky to have friends like this,” said the voice in the vent. “They give and they give, and they ask for nothing in return.”
The passengers went about their lives with minor adjustments. Because the marauding crews of Bloodbeard and the Pale One regularly robbed the passengers and plundered their rooms, most passengers preferred to stay inside with their doors locked. When the brave few did venture outside, they tried to avoid the decks where the humans-in-cages were located, because even on windy days the smell of decaying flesh was very strong, and the sight and sound of the humans-in-cages—even though evidence of the Captain’s decisiveness—was nevertheless hard to bear, especially when the humans-in-cages were children, with their dying wails high-pitched and feral.
Even the passengers’ long-standing tradition of watching the sea, or the sunsets, or being outside for any period of time, was not the same sort of beautiful as it had been, given the three dozen or so former crew members and various enemies of the Captain trailing behind in leaky rowboats, some of them already dead and being picked apart by carrion birds and the occasional shark.
Because most of the sanitation and custodial workers had been thrown overboard or were now in traps meant for crustaceans, the boat had taken on a ragged appearance and a fetid odor. The Captain’s daughter one day opened her own cabin door and noticed this smell, which seemed a hybrid of rotting flesh, despair, and stale urine, and saw an opportunity. Her forward-thinking line of push-up bras, nose-narrowers and thigh-minimizers had been a hit among the Most Foul, but—an oversight veritably insane, she realized—she had no fragrance to her name. Now the ship needed one, and she rose to the challenge, calling it Eau de Oubli and making sure, through thorough testing on Certain Children and the elderly, that it was safe for humans, and effectively masked the ship’s overwhelming stench of strife and decay. Almost immediately, the scent was very popular among the dozens who could afford it. These passengers soaked their scarves in it, covering their mouths in order to walk outside, and breathed comfortably for minutes at a time.
Otherwise leaving one’s cabin was unpleasant and was not often done. Which was just as well, given that most of the restaurants on board had been shuttered long ago, because the makers of these foods were Certain People and thus had been thrown overboard. The Thai place was closed. The Chinese places were closed. The Ecuadorian place was long shuttered, as were the Nepalese, Ethiopian, and Peruvian eateries. The Mexican restaurants had been closed so long they were now being used to assemble and store more cages. The one remaining food option was the cheeseburger outlet favored by the Captain. That establishment was run partially by machines and partially by teenagers, who thus were not in immediate danger of being thrown into the sea.
During the day, the passengers watched television news, the hosts of which enumerated the many dangers outside the passengers’ cabins, which made the passengers’ habit of staying indoors even more prudent. Because the passengers got no exercise and rarely saw the sun, they had trouble sleeping, and between their restlessness and the many fears they had of rectal-bleeding spiders and various other threats—including the remaining Certain People and of course the marauding crews of the Pale One and Bloodbeard—they, like their Captain, took to hiding under their beds, and when they did, one by one, they too discovered the voice in the vent. And like the Captain, the Most Foul found that the voice in the vent really understood them and voiced their innermost fears with great candor and insight. Between the voice in the vent, and the cheeseburgers, and staying inside paralyzed with fear, and having the Glory commandeered by its historic enemies and ransacked daily, and surrounded by the dead and decaying bodies of Certain People, and with no one talking to anyone else, and the only joy in anyone’s life being the occasional hour when the Most Foul dressed as chickens and chanted for the deaths or jailings of their enemies, there had never been a better time.