Titanic 2012

He simply could not have allowed that vile creature to use Declan as it had others.

Thomas would get free with the journal; perhaps one day the truth of Titanic’s ordeal this night of April 14, 1912 would come out. Some day, Declan would be heralded a hero—perhaps the only hero aboard Titanic. Some day.

The ship listed, lifted, then repeatedly groaned like a dying elephant.

He could only imagine the horror of those on the six or so decks still above water over his head. The door he had come through was surely under water by now. The freezer was completely sealed; air tight and water tight. He laughed at the sight of all the provisions around him, enough food and water to last a man years, and none of it useful now.

He hadn’t wanted Declan to die down here alone, but the entire way down, he kept feeling a nagging, clinging doubt about the boy surgeon. How many of those infected corpses had he opened up? He and Thomas. What were the odds Declan wouldn’t get some sort of parasite growing within him? Or perhaps not. Perhaps the carrier had discarded another body for Declan’s in the brief time that Ransom had let the young doctor out of his sight. Then he recalled the stranger at the bar, slipping and falling into Declan, spilling his drink on him. Could that have been the transfer moment?

Alastair felt an enormous grief intermingling with self-incriminations; could he have done anything at all differently?

No one in any way, shape, or form was now coming through that door, and nothing inside here remained alive save him. Suicide? Was it suicide to end it now before the ship took her plunge? Before he reached bottom where he might actually remain the sole survivor of the wreck for as long as he could stand this solitary confinement?

“Is it suicide under such circumstances if I end it before suffering until I run out of oxygen?”

He toyed with the gun about his ear and head, shaking from the cold, still wet from his swim, becoming more miserable by the moment. There came more tearing and rending of the ship, and the angle of the floor was now so sharp as to send him sliding toward Declan’s body. He pictured their eternal sleep together, father and son.

He was about to put a bullet through his mouth and brain as he slid toward Declan’s body when the creature that they had been chasing rose out of Declan’s lifeless mouth. It came out in a filmy, oily black shapeless mass.

Ransom rolled to one side, got to his knees, and watched it rise to the ceiling like a levitating shaman. He then saw a black single eye within the thing, which he imagined to be a later stage development as Declan had declared the damn things eyeless in their egg sacs.

The eye glared at him as if he were a next meal—and he was, should it get the upper hand.

Ransom took aim at the single eye, but the thing darted straight for his eyes. Ransom fired at it repeatedly, and at the last moment, Alastair hit the floor beneath the table, hearing the entity slam into the tabletop. He knew he must avoid its touch at all costs. That if it got close enough to touch him, it would slip into him like quicksilver.

He grabbed for his Woodbine match box, struck a match, and threw it into the pool of whiskey. This sent up an instant plume of fire that caught the creature aflame in mid-flight toward him.

The thing exploded in flame, screeching as it flew about the room in a mad effort to extinguish itself, sucking up all the oxygen with it only to cause the monster to burn faster and faster until it fell before Ransom’s feet as a black and withered ball of oily flesh.

“Finally dead, you life-sucking maggot!”

Ransom fought to stand up only to find his feet on the ceiling. A moment later, he was slammed hard to one wall, when he realized what was happening. “This is it, the finale!” he shouted just to hear himself. The entire ship was lurching, lumbering like some dinosaur in her death throes. Titanic was readying to dive.

Ransom found no way to brace for it. Then he heard a terrible rending and tearing of metal followed by the sensation that the ship was suddenly racing and spiraling downward like a runaway elevator car. He, Declan, and the remnants of the creature were all headed for the bottom. “With God knows how many others,” he said to himself.

At the same time, Ransom felt the enormous pressure against him, building, he feared exponentially, and he felt confidant he need not put the gun to his own head, that Titanic would save him the trouble and the messiness of suicide.

It was a long and heart-rending, freezing freefall of a ride. It had Ransom pinned to the floor like one of those butterflies stuck through with a needle and mounted on a wall.

He tried to raise his gun to finish himself off, to do the deed, but it was impossible to move his limbs; he was plastered to the wall or was it the floor. No telling anymore. Likely not till he hit bottom.

These thoughts filled his mind when suddenly the seal all around the closed, locked door burst due to the incredible pressures as the ship sank deeper and deeper toward the bottom. The explosion of water into the freezer quickly began to fill the room, lifting Ransom’s body and sending him floating for the wall that had become the ceiling here. He held tight to the gun, assuring himself it was the best way to go even as the freezing water was claiming him, hypothermia setting in. Suddenly, his hand was shivering to badly to align the muzzle with his temple, and he was going in and out of consciousness with the freezing cold while thinking this is how I’ll go… frozen like a damned block of ice.

The descent was like riding a giant bullet to the bottom, and the bottom came faster than expected, the powerful jolt of the ship’s nose digging deep and sending a jarring, powerful reverberation through the body of Titanic’s remains, the jolt also sending Declan’s body smashing against the opposite wall along with Alastair, like a ragdoll, hitting the same wall, pounding his head so hard against it as to mercifully kill him.

Ransom’s final thoughts as the ship had plunged and just before its violent stop were of Jane Tewes’ face, her smile, her open arms that very last night she’d held him to her breasts.

THIRTY NINE

Titanic continued her screeching and moaning from her steep descent of two and a half miles to the ocean floor until her bow dug out a sixty-foot trough to lie in for eternity. By the time Titanic hit bottom, few survivors in the water remained alive, almost all were victims of hypothermia. Aside from Alastair Ransom and Declan Irvin, others who had remained aboard for the ride to the bottom either did so because they had become trapped inside the hull or had intentionally wanted to go out this way. Among them were some of the richest families on board who had secretly locked themselves away in a cargo hold, the one that included the bolted down automobiles in the sealed cargo hold at the bow below decks. They’d climbed into the cars for one hell of a ride.

No one caught inside Titanic, hiding in cubby holes and even sealed compartments could have long survived what most assuredly felt like an elevator ride straight to damnation at impact against the ocean floor, two and a half miles below the surface.

Mercifully, Declan and Alastair had come to form a still life not unlike the paintings of the Madonna and child, as Declan’s body had been thrown across Alastair’s lap. Neither man suffered the agony of a slow death here.

They would also never know if Thomas had survived, and if Thomas had saved the journal.

Two and a half miles above the final resting place of Titanic, lifeboats remained in the water as did survivors screaming for the boats to return for them, but the screams quickly diminished, soon dying altogether. The forty-nine degree water temperature claimed anyone remaining in the sea. Those dead with life jackets attached in dull gray and beige floated on the calm sea like so many mannequins disturbed only by huge air bubbles still rising from Titanic’s descent, the surface waves sending the dead in all directions from the exact spot where Titanic had lifted her aft section to tower above the sea, to then pivot like a giant top, and to finally slip below the surface like Neptune’s play toy.

Men, women, and children in the life boats who hadn’t fallen asleep had seen Titanic’s bow dip below the water and her aft section with the enormous propellers rise to what seemed a mile in the star-filled sky. Some aboard the lifeboats had called for Lightoller and other officers to