at all, could be weighing down the ship. Treasure? Rocks?
Corpses?
Chapter Eighteen
What we found was… unexpected.
On the Red Cow, the hold consisted of a big area for the crew, and several smaller rooms for things such as sail locker, galley, and carpenter’s cabin. The captain, quartermaster, and sailing master also had quarters there. The ceilings were low and beams crossed them inconveniently. Below the hold was the bilge, where water and rum barrels were stored.
This ship had none of those. Its hold was one big empty room from bow to stern, and from the deck down to the keel. No bulkheads, no bilge.
The four huge portholes let in plenty of light, but there was little to see. Mold grew in places, and the same heavy cobwebs filled the corners and edges. A few mosquitoes rose from the stagnant water that had collected in the very bottom. A raised walkway, perhaps all that was left of the keelson, ran the length of the hold. A round wooden hatch covered something at the walkway’s center.
The smell was also odd. There was the odor of stagnant water, damp wood, and mildew, but over all this was something I couldn’t quite identify. It was fishy, both literally and metaphorically.
Jane stepped off the ladder and stopped, keeping the rest of us on the steps above her. She muttered, “What the hell?”
“There ain’t nothing here,” Veasely said.
Jane took a few steps down the walkway and swiped at the mosquitoes swarming to us. If they hadn’t fed since the Vile Howl, they had to be starving. “Mosquitoes don’t cross the ocean. They must’ve come aboard when this ship was docked somewhere.”
“What does that tell us?” I asked.
She chuckled. “Not a damn thing, really.”
We followed until we all stood single-file along the walkway. The flat ceiling was as featureless as the walls that curved in toward the keel beneath us.
Jane sheathed her sword and scratched her head. “This doesn’t make any sense. With this much open space, the ship should bob up and down like a cork.”
“Maybe it is anchored,” I said.
“Where’s the anchor chain, then, smart-ass?” she snarled, then sighed. “Sorry, I just don’t understand this at all.”
Duncan said, “And what do you figure that hatch is for?”
No one answered. Jane and I looked at each other. She eased along the walkway, falling into rhythm with the ship’s slight roll. I looked behind the ladder, where the walkway continued until it dead- ended at the stern. There was nothing.
Duncan looked as pale as the first winter snow. Even Veasely and Kaven were visibly nervous. Only Suhonen seemed entirely unaffected.
“What made those?” Kaven asked. He indicated a series of random, deep scratches in the hull walls.
I examined one. It was about the width of my little finger, and at one end there was a slightly deeper puncture. The wood was gouged away from this hole in one direction, like something had been stuck into the wood, then pulled along. It reminded me of a bear’s claw sign in a tree, but none of the other scratches were parallel, or even seemed remotely related. Was it the mark of some weapon? If so, judging from the vast network of similar marks, whoever wielded it hadn’t gone down without a fight.
“I’m going to fall back on Jane’s standard answer,” I said. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Jane was nearly to the hatch when she stopped and said, “Uh-oh.” We all waited while she knelt, reached into the water, and retrieved a white head scarf stained with water and what looked like blood. She also pulled out a seaman’s dagger and a woman’s slipper. Then she held up the most disturbing thing of all: a child’s doll, clearly the mate of the one we found on the Vile Howl. She gently placed it on the walkway beside the shoe.
“That can’t be good,” Suhonen rumbled.
She continued to the hatch. The lip rose about two feet above the walkway. The hatch itself was round, a yard across and hinged on one side. There was no apparent latch.
“Man, this stinks,” she called. “I don’t know what’s under here, but it must be nasty as all get-out. Come on and help me open it.”
Veasely and Kaven exchanged a look. Duncan sat heavily on the lowest stair as if he might pass out. I looked at Suhonen. “I guess she means you and me.”
He looked disdainfully at the others. “Someone has to guard the way out, I suppose.”
“Exactly!” Kaven almost yelped. “We’ll make sure the path to safety stays clear. Right?”
“Let them try to get past us,” Veasley agreed. I didn’t press him on who he meant by “them.”
I scanned the bilgewater as we walked and saw other scraps that spoke of previous visitors. It certainly wasn’t enough for the whole crew of the Vile Howl, let alone the other ships that had turned up crewless. But someone had been here and met with serious trouble.
Jane was right. The smell grew almost unbearable by the time we joined Jane at the hatch, and I recognized it: vomit. The vomit of someone who’d lived on nothing but fish for quite a while. But there was no sign of puke anywhere on the ship.
We stood around it in silence. Kaven called, “Do ye think it’s going to open itself, then?”
“You’re welcome to help,” Jane said.
“Take your time,” he replied, extra magnanimously.
Finally I said, “You sure this isn’t like a bathtub plug? If we open it, it might sink us.”
“I don’t think so,” Jane said. “It’s hinged, but it ain’t locked. And that smell ain’t pure, sweet seawater. I’m betting the source is under there.”
“Garbage?” Suhonen suggested.
“You throw garbage over the side; you don’t keep it in the hold,” Jane said.
He nodded at the relics she’d recovered. “Dead bodies?” “Does it smell like dead bodies?” she shot back. “No,” he had to admit.
“Arguing about it isn’t going to tell us anything,” I said.
Jane lifted the edge, and it rose about an inch before she stopped. “Someone wants this to be easy to open.”
“Nobody makes a trap hard to get in to,” Suhonen said.
She took a deep breath, then lifted the hatch all the way.
The smell that surged forth made us gag. Jane and I stepped back, and even Suhonen stepped off the walkway and into the bilgewater. Except for the smell, though, nothing emerged. Water didn’t gush in to send us to the bottom.
Suhonen set the hatch aside, scowled, and said, “That’s really unpleasant.”
Jane, holding her nose, said, “Nothing gets past you, does it?”
I didn’t hold my nose, but I tried to mouth-breathe as I pointed to the hatch. “Look.”
On the underside was carved the same double X.
“What does that mean?” Jane seethed.
“Maybe ‘gotcha,’ ” Suhonen suggested.
Then the three of us peered down into the round chamber the hatch had covered.
For a long moment we were silent. I heard someone down at the ladder vomit into the bilge as the odor hit him, and assumed it was Duncan. Kaven called, “It smells like a vegetarian’s outhouse! What the hell is in there?”
That was a good question, because even though I was looking right at it, I couldn’t answer.
A round mass of pink, veined flesh was stuffed into the opening. It was puckered toward the center. The wet surface gleamed. It looked almost as disgusting as it smelled.
