New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

STEEL BODIES Ray Cluley

With a subtle turn of the outboard, Abesh steered them towards a narrow gap between the two nearest vessels. Before they slipped into the dark channel, Samir cast another glance along the coast, taking in all of the tankers and container ships beached there. Some of the vessels were still very much intact, and if they did not look as good as new they at least looked functional. Others were merely skeletal outlines of steel, stripped down to holds empty of all but shadows. Or so they seemed.

The ship Abesh was taking him to was in a state of only partial decay. Several attempts had been made to take it apart, but work was now far behind schedule. It usually took three to six months to break a ship, but the Karen May had been sitting in the mud for nearly a year.

They passed massive propeller blades that sat only half submerged, huge fans of rusty red-brown metal hanging mud-crusted over seawater they had once twisted into currents, churned into froth. And then man and boy were past them and between ships, moving through the shadows of giants.

A sudden chill enveloped Samir as they left the sun behind, its warmth and light eclipsed by the ships either side. The metal walls channelled a cool breeze between them as Abesh steered them in and through with the tide, bump-bumping over the small waves that swelled in the reduced straight space of the sea. The shadows here were deep, deep as the cavities exposed in the steel, the metal skins of the ships pockmarked and stripped of material. Enormous superstructures, rising out of the water, they threw a vast darkness that seemed to leak from their hulls, casting them into premature dusk until there, suddenly, from high above, a shower of shooting stars that were gone before they could reach the water. Sparks from an acetylene torch somewhere nearby. Someone was working late.

Abesh muttered something, his Chittagonian fast and clipped with urgency. He put a finger to his lips to hush Samir, though he wasn’t the one to have spoken.

“They will tell us it is dangerous,” Abesh said, his voice low.

“It is,” said Samir.

Abesh cut the engine and they drifted, carried by their momentum. It was the same way Samir had travelled for years now. Momentum. All that had ever happened drove him towards all that was yet to occur.

“Listen,” said Abesh.

Samir could hear the waves slapping against the sides of their own small boat and the enormous ships to their left and right. From somewhere hidden within one of them came some deep gurgling, the throaty rumble of an ocean contained, longing to escape. He heard the resounding clank of something heavy, its echo swallowed by other settling noises.

“Can you hear them?”

Abesh was joking, or trying to, but Samir said, “Not yet.”

The boy shrugged. “This is it.” He pulled their drifting boat closer to the structure beside them. The sea lapped into an exposed corridor or hold, Samir couldn’t tell, and a set of steps led deeper into the vessel. “This is a good place,” Abesh said as he roped them to the framework.

“That’s not what I was told.”

Abesh laughed. “Are you scared?”

Samir shook his head. “No,” he said, but he was lying.

Samir had come to Chittagong three days ago. More specifically, he had come to a single stretch of coastline where ships came to die. Not so many years ago, it was a part of Bangladesh that would have been dense with mangroves. Now it held more than a hundred ship-breaking yards, the mangroves cleared to make way for the ever-expanding and always-profitable business of destruction.

For Samir’s first visit to one of those yards, he’d arrived at low tide and watched as a line of men and boys—too many boys—dragged heavy lengths of cable through the mud towards a row of beached liners. The mud that sucked at their legs and caked their skin was loaded with all sort of toxins—poisoned blood from the beached vessels dying on the mud flats—but all they wore for protection were shorts and T-shirts. It was exhausting even to watch. The cable would be used to heave pieces of ship inland, vast sections of steel excised from vessels that had once known the glory of the open water but now stood mired in mud. They had been tourist attractions once, even in their ruin; there was little else this region had to offer. Now each yard was fenced off. Some were even patrolled, or so Samir had been told, though he had seen no guards. Only signs that promised danger. Signs warning against trespass. Signs forbidding photos. Samir had looked at one of those signs and had taken a picture of it because it would have amused Kamala. She would have admonished him, laughing or shaking her head.

Samir shook his head now, watching the men at work. Danger, said the signs, and yet beyond the fences people worked. The rest of the world had strict health and safety regulations, Samir had no doubt. In Bangladesh, safety precautions ranged from optional to non-existent, and there would always be plenty of men in the local shanty towns desperate enough for the dangerous work that paid so little. If it meant they could feed themselves and their families then they’d face the physical hazards of injury and fatality, risk poisoning from a range of toxic materials Samir could only guess at. Ship-breaking was big business, and almost all of the local men worked in one yard or another. Children, too, like Abesh. They were cheaper. All of the ones Samir spoke to said they were fourteen years old, but most of them were lying; it was the minimum age for ship-breaking work. Children or not, they were no less aware of the dangers and difficulties. They wore the same slack expressions of exhaustion as the men. It was what they had for a uniform, along with their filthy T-shirts and grubby shorts and the mud they wore up their legs and arms. Some already had their own “Chittagong tattoos”. That’s what they called work-related scars. The shanty towns were filled with men carrying such marks. Many of them were missing fingers. Some were missing entire limbs, or were disfigured in other ways, bent and crippled. More than few carried the clean smooth scars of burnt skin. But still they worked the yards, and the children followed their example. They had little choice.

“Our bodies are made of steel,” one of boys had said, flexing his scrawny biceps. “Strong.”

One of the other boys had pointed to Samir’s face and said, “Tattoo,” for the scar that cut a line through his beard. When Samir tried to smile it twisted like a broken snake.

“Tattoo,” he agreed. It was work-related, so he supposed it counted.

A foreman of some kind, or someone who wanted to be, came over and yelled at the boys, his Bengali quick to emphasise the hurry. He clapped his hands once, and children who thought they were men rose to their feet to get back to work. They trudged through the mud towards a line of waiting vessels. Boys against giants, Samir thought. Every ship a Goliath waiting to fall.

“They’re very young,” Samir said.

The man looked at Samir. “You here to work?” He clearly didn’t think so, not the way Samir was dressed.

Samir nodded. “Yes.”

The man shook his head. Said, “There is nothing here for you.”

The ground reverberated beneath their feet at that moment and thunder roared, shaking the beach. The enormous noise of fallen metal as a huge section of ship collapsed down the shore. Many days of cutting through deck after deck after deck had cleaved a massive section from the main body and it crashed to the ground in a shower of sparks and sharp metal, slapping hard enough into the mud to reshape it. None of the boys walking away were startled by the noise, but Samir had ducked and the foreman had laughed at him. The thunder lingered in Samir’s feet and charged his legs with a quickening tingle.

“I’m here to work,” he said.

The man sighed his laughter to an end and shook his head again. “Follow me.”

A crowd of workers gathered down the beach at the section of fallen hull. The metal plate would be dragged across the mud to a waiting truck, dragged using chains and rollers and the flagging strength of malnourished men and boys. Thousands of pounds of metal moved by skinny people in tattered shorts and sandals. Sandals. Some of them even barefoot, risking tetanus at the very least. And there, clinging to the framework of what remained like fiery barnacles, were the cuttermen who sliced the ship into pieces. Samir saw how they leaned for hard to reach places, an assistant paired with each to hold not only the trailing hose of the acetylene torch but also the cutterman’s free hand as he suspended himself over a fatal drop.

Samir said a prayer for them, and as he concluded he saw the ship he had come for. It loomed over the other vessels from further down the beach, as if creeping slowly back out to sea. A hulk of steel, rusted red like some scabbed wound. The Karen May.

Brine and diesel. The smell of it seemed to cling to Samir’s skin even just sitting close to the ship. Abesh stood and leaned to clutch at one of the exposed struts of the Karen May and pulled them closer.

Samir tipped away what was left of his water and refilled his bottle from the sea. He fastened the lid tight and tucked it away in his bag as Abesh tied the boat secure.

Samir looked inside the exposed section of ship and saw only shadows and absences where once there was steel and substance. It was disorientating, so many missing walls and floors in this section of the ship, and each missing floor a missing ceiling. Samir leaned to look further in and up. There was a rectangle of sky above where a stairwell used to be. The sky was tinged orange, with hues of pink turning red, a fire suspended above him that shed little of its light into the ship.

“Tell me about your brother again,” Samir said as he eased himself into a standing position in the small boat. He’d made a list of those killed in various accidents over the last year in the ship-breaking yard, and of those he’d made a second list that he’d brought with him of those killed or otherwise lost on the Karen May. Abesh’s brother was on that list.

“Ibrahim?” Abesh asked. He was little more than a dusky shape in the shadows of the ship, a grubby baseball cap and thin limbs and, incongruous with Samir’s question, a bright smile. He made the sound of a blast, miming an explosion with his hands. Bravado, Samir thought. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, performed with a simple gesture and sound effect.

Abesh’s brother had been a cutterman, slicing up sections of the ship when his torch ignited a gas pocket. He was killed in the explosion. His assistant too. Abesh had seen it happen from the beach, he’d said. Saw them both thrown hard against metal and engulfed in sudden flames. He’d told the story like it was a film he’d seen. Like a story he’d heard from someone else and hadn’t been a part of himself. “It’s okay,” he’d said. “I have lots of brothers.”

He was looking into the ship now as if his brother might still be in there.

Perhaps he was.

“How old are you, Abesh?”

“Fourteen,” the boy said, and grinned.

Samir climbed from the boat into the remains of the far larger vessel they’d anchored themselves to. “I never had any brothers,” he said. “Just a sister. Kamala.”

Abesh made a sympathetic noise.

“I lost her when I was just a little older than you claim to be.”

Abesh had no additional sympathy for that. Perhaps he thought it was worse to have a sister than to have lost one. The only sound was the boat knocking against the ship and the water lapping.

“We were living in Munshiganj when Aila hit. Do you remember Aila?”

“One of the storms?”

Aila had not been a simple storm. Aila had been a cyclone, killing hundreds, leaving thousands homeless. But Samir agreed.

“Yes, one of the storms.”

Abesh shrugged. “I remember lots of storms. They are all the same storm.”

All the same storm.

Samir remembered how the water had rushed into their home. How it had filled the rooms and toppled the mud walls. Remembered how his sister had reached for him before the water took her away. He told Abesh some of this, staring into the Karen May. What remained of his family had fled to Dhaka, already crowded with those running from other floods. Other storms.

All the same storm.

Samir had often looked for Kamala in those crowds.

“Why are you telling me this?” Abesh asked. He had stopped looking into the ship’s shadows and instead looked set to follow Samir.

“Wait here,” Samir told him.

Abesh looked disappointed, but he sat down.

“I’m the only one left,” Samir told him. “I told you about Kamala so that you can remember her.”

He shrugged his bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder and pulled his way deeper into the Karen May.

The foreman had taken Samir to an office made from an old cargo container. It sat on short stilts of recovered scrap but still it sank into the mud at one end. The lean was even more obvious inside thanks to the papers, maps, and notices pinned to the walls.

“Wait here,” the man said.

Samir waited.

The paperwork on the walls all concerned the ship-breaking, of course. Each vessel had its own hanging clipboard of papers, and a large map of the beach illustrated where they were located with barely legible script, circled numbers, and shorthand symbols, like some mystical chart. The trappings of a spell that summoned wealth. Samir read some of the details, though he’d already done his research. Ships were bought by an international broker, and a suitable captain—a good captain—was hired to beach it properly on the narrow strip of mud-beach like someone else might park a car. Then more people were paid to take the thing apart. A ship had a lifespan of only thirty years or so and then they became too expensive to maintain, too costly to insure. With profits dwindling, each ship became more valuable as scrap, with more than ninety per cent of each vessel recyclable. A lot of the material was resold right away: the liquids, machinery, the easily removed fixtures; it all got sold on to salvage dealers. Engines, wiring. Everything. Samir saw a list detailing all the copper pulled from one of the vessels, and the sum beside it amazed him. The steel would be converted into building materials like rebar, tension devices to reinforce larger constructs. Samir thought of the workers standing in bent shapes or taut with the strain of some heavy task, sticking from the mud; they were like exposed rebar themselves, holding the yards together. Profits in excess of eighty-three million taka, depending on the price of steel, were built upon their strength, and at great cost. He had a list of dead men who knew the truth of that.

He turned from the records when the door behind him opened. A large man stepped into the office. Samir knew already that this would be Mabud Kibria. He barely glanced at Samir, making his way to a heavily loaded desk and rifling through the papers piled there. The foreman who had escorted Samir earlier followed.

“This is the man looking for work.”

Judging by the number of clipboards and the red underlines on the map, there would be plenty of work for those who wanted it. India may have dismantled more ships each year, but here in Bangladesh they recycled more deadweight tonnage than anywhere else in the world.

“I’m not looking for work,” Samir reminded the foreman.

Mabud gave Samir more than a glance this time, clearly annoyed that whatever little time he was going to spare had already been wasted.

“I am here to work,” Samir told him. “Rokeya Begum sent me.”

Samir fumbled for a handrail he’d forgotten was no longer there as he climbed. He would start from the top and work his way down. He had to be careful; the handrail was missing, but so were some of the steps themselves. The portholes had been taken from the walls, and in many places the walls were gone as well. Inside the ship was an absence that expanded. Samir walked within a steady decomposing of steel. There were no railings on the deck either. Samir passed mounts for missing cranes. Saw signs for lifeboats that weren’t there.

Out to sea, in the fading light of the setting sun, children were playing in the dieselled waters. They swam around a raft of wreckage, clambering up only to throw their young careless bodies at toxic water and whatever scrap metal might lurk submerged there. Despite what they might have thought, their bodies were not made of steel. Each was susceptible to breakage, all too easily opened up and spilt empty, or filled with fluid instead of breath. Samir had to look away from their play, unable to stop imagining the worst.

Port and starboard, the Bangladeshi beach was an open graveyard. The ships here did not sink, they slumped; rotting, rusting corpses alive only by day with the men who took them apart reducing them to rivetless pieces. But in the dark they looked almost whole again. It was easy to imagine each as it might have once been. Their slow progress across the world’s oceans; the sudden climb and plunging fall over waves the size of mountains. Leviathan, each of them, forging paths that disappeared almost immediately behind them as they fell and rose again. These were cruise liners and tankers and container ships from all over the world. Who had sailed them? What had brought them to the ships, and where had each ship taken them? And what else had each ship carried? Here they were now, these amazing constructions, at their journey’s end. Waiting to be torn apart, they spilled silent stories into the mud, into the sea, like slicks of oil, each sinking or getting dragged away with every outgoing tide.

In the bridge, every monitor and machine, every button, every wire, had all been taken. Samir stood where the windows used to be, imagining himself the captain looking out at a vast ocean and a sky full of stars. Now windows empty of glass framed a landscape that was all mud and lights coming on in the city inland, or from the fires on the beach where workers kept the evening chill away burning unsalvageable materials in old oil drums. Burning asbestos and worse, probably.

Samir retrieved a small bound bundle of sage from his bag and wedged it into a tight corner of metal. He lit it and wafted the aromatic smoke with his hands as he recited a prayer. He was combining his faith with “smudging”, a Native American ritual which cleansed a space of negative energy, and with science; sage cleared the air of bacteria.

He would descend now and wind his way through the corridors until he found the “dark heart” of the ship. It was a suitable metaphor. Much of what Samir did was couched in metaphor. That was how faith worked, and it made the supernatural easier to understand. He had grown up Christian in a Muslim country but he knew all the faiths now. He liked the stories. Stories were useful. Powerful, sometimes.

Inside the ship again, it was difficult to remember the noble majesty he’d imagined from the bridge. What he saw here, in the beam of his torch, was decrepit. There was no engine thrumming life through the body of this giant, and no rhythmic movement of tide around it that he could feel. Yet there was something. Some vibration of life inside, something more than silence. Sounds that rose from its own depths. The sudden clank-spank echo from some unseen place as something fell. The metallic groan of steel grinding on steel, like the drawn-out inhalation of a final breath. From somewhere deep came a steady ticking, like a swinging chain striking a wall in a hidden chamber. And always, everywhere, dripping. Wherever Samir touched, his hand came away wet, red-brown with rust.

Throughout the ship, Samir inhaled the thick smell of the saltwater mud sump it sat in, breathing in the sharp odours of steel and copper and whatever else remained to oxidise. He could smell oil and some pungent chemical that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He fancied he could feel the odours on his skin, and the dark he moved through, too. He rolled his sleeves down against it.

Samir explored. He found a galley stripped of its sinks, seeing only rectangles in the metal where they used to be. He cast the beam of his torch over holes where once there were pipes. He found sockets and vents in a long line—a laundry room, maybe, or somewhere for computers or some other kinds of machines, all of it gone now. Yet for all the absences, the atmosphere was still oppressive. The passages were tight, and stepping through doorways stripped of their hatches seemed to take Samir into closer confines instead of opening up into empty vacant spaces. He was walking a labyrinth of steel that seemed to narrow around him.

He needed some air. What he was breathing was thin, like others had exhaled it countless times before, leaving little for him. It was metallic and sharp like blood. And though what he breathed in seemed thin, the air around him seemed dense. A thickening of atmosphere that pressed against him. He had experienced such contrasts before, such oppressiveness and shortness of breath, but even in Dhaka it had never been as severe as this. He took a small canister from his bag, fixed a plastic piece that would cover his mouth, and pumped a deep fresh breath from it. Another.

Stepping aboard the Karen May had been like stepping into the inhalation before a scream. Some had told him the ship was brooding, waiting for someone to come aboard, and he’d felt that. Now he felt like he walked poised on a pendulum at the highest point of its swing, waiting to plummet.

He descended walkways that hadn’t felt footsteps for months, maybe a year. The sound each step made was strangely muted, stifled before it could echo fully. Surprised to find a handrail at one section, he had taken it, only for it to come away from the cancerous sheet metal. He dropped it in surprise and it made only the briefest noise in falling. Even with the torch beam cutting a way ahead of him, Samir felt like he barely had any presence of his own. Like his passage through the dark was a temporary unseaming of the shadows he walked through, shadows that sealed up again behind him, and for a moment he couldn’t shake the impression of having been swallowed whole. Like Jonah in the body of Leviathan.

The thought brought him comfort. The whale had swallowed Jonah to protect him from a storm.

All the same storm.

As if to mock Samir’s train of thought, the ship released a sudden low groan and, on the tail of it came a soft stuttered sound. Like someone sobbing in the dark.

“Peace be with you,” Samir called. It came back to him only in part, a repetition of peaces—

Pieces?

—and then a sudden scream. Shrill, and brief, like wrenched metal.

“Samir?”

The voice came quietly.

“I’m here,” Samir said. He set his bag down and swept his torch behind, and up, and down. It showed him only narrow passageways like ventricles and walls red with rust, and he thought again of being held inside the body of a beast, only now he thought of the other Jonah, the one sailors thought bad luck. He took another puff of air from the canister and flinched at the hiss of it. Thought he heard it come back to him, closer than it should have been, and sharper. A gasp of sound. He swept the torch behind again and was startled when a shape pulled away from the wall. A body peeled from the gloom, dark but for the wide eyes and the teeth suddenly grinning.

“You frightened me!” said the boy.

“Abesh!”

The boy spoke again before Samir could admonish him fully.

“I want to see my brother.”

Samir sighed. “He’s not here.”

“Then where is he?”

“He’s with you.”

“But what if he’s here as well? Like the others?”

Previously, Abesh had feigned to not believe the stories. He had scoffed at the idea of a haunted wreck and, according to Mabud, was not only unafraid but actually keen to work the ship, though nobody would work it with him. Now, though, it seemed the stories had convinced him, at least partially. Only partially, because still the boy was unafraid.

“Will you help him?”

Samir nodded. “I will help him. Now go. Back to the boat. It’s dangerous here.”

Abesh did as he was told. Samir only stopped him when he heard a quick rasp and saw the sudden flare of flame that came with a lit match. The boy held it aloft to light his way but dropped it, startled, when Samir yelled at him.

“Dangerous!” he repeated, and handed the boy his torch. He had another.

“You’ll help him?” Abesh said again, shining the beam close enough to Samir to see his face. “You promise?”

“I’ll do all I can,” Samir said.

He watched the child carry the light away until it was gone.

Rokeya Begum had served Samir choddo shaak almost as soon as he’d arrived at her house. It was a vast dish, made up of fourteen different vegetables, but he was hungry and thankful for the meal and did not care that this was not the right time to eat it, that this was not Bhoot Chaturdashi. She had prepared it thinking of how it might help him, but he ate only to satisfy his hunger. He would welcome the protection, but he had other wards, other charms. Symbols of his faiths, which were all the stronger for being plural.

He had in his bag a selection of photographs he’d taken of the ship after speaking with Mabud Kibria at the breaking yard. He’d zoomed in on the vessel after downloading the pictures to his laptop, and had printed several copies of what he’d found. He retrieved them now, as he ate.

“Please, look at these. I took these this morning. What do you see?”

Even enlarged, the pictures showed little more than the ship. Presented in a state of partial deterioration, it held shadows like blemishes, and looked in places as if the picture had not developed fully. There were many dark spaces. But if you looked long enough…

“Faces,” Rokeya said. “I see faces.” She pointed. “There. And there. And—there are so many of them.”

Samir noted how she would not touch the photograph. Didn’t poke them when she pointed, hadn’t picked up a single one, just looked at where they lay on the table amongst the dishes of food. “Are they all…?” But she didn’t finish her question. She looked at Samir and said again instead, “So many.”

“Your son?”

She nodded.

“Where?” He tried to hand her one of the pictures but she recoiled, albeit subtly; she half-stood and leaned across the table to fetch him more water.

“Will you help them?” she said, refilling his glass.

Samir gathered up the photos.

“I’ll do all I can.”

“Muhammed Goswami said you helped him. In Dhaka?”

Samir touched the scar on his face but turned the gesture into a rub of his beard, remembering. “Yes.”

It had been difficult, but yes, he had helped.

“You are Christian?”

“I am.”

Less than one percent were in this country, but Samir had been taken in by missionaries after Aila and though they hadn’t forced any of their teachings on him, he’d learned from them anyway.

“Christian,” she said. “Not Muslim.”

“Muslim too.”

What did it matter, he felt like asking. God is the ocean, and religions are the ships that carry us.

But of course, it did matter.

He drank some of his water. It tasted salty. “I can help.”

Rokeya sighed. She had little choice but to let him try, at least. They always had little choice by the time they were requesting his help.

“I want you to free my son’s spirit,” Rokeya told him. Samir knew this already; she was only saying it to hear it herself. “Release him from that terrible place.”

It was likely that the only ones he would be setting free were those left behind. Those who grieved and held on so hard that it hurt. Like squeezing a handful of keys. He would ease them of that, at least.

He looked around the room as he closed his bag on the photographs. There were many pictures of her son. He was well-remembered. This was good. It would help him more than the choddo shaak.

“Tell me about him.”

She nodded again, but said nothing for a long time. “There was an accident…” she managed eventually.

“I know. Tell me about him before then.”

She found that much easier.

The Bengali word for ghost is bhoot or bhut. It is also the word for past. So Samir listened to all of her stories, and he ate all of the vegetables she gave him, and he hoped it would be enough.

Samir had been told once, by a man in Jamalpur, that ghosts could only exist for as long as it took their body to decompose. Samir could understand how such a belief might be born, how it could stand as a metaphor for the grieving process. He could see, too, how it might appeal to those who’d had little time to prepare for a great loss. A transition period in which loved ones could linger but not be trapped, able, still, to pass on to whatever it was that came next. For the brief time he had known Dr Shahid, a missionary he’d met in Dhaka, he had come to recognise a different belief. That the dead remained, in some form or another, for as long as there was someone else to remember them. This was how Christ could still be with us, she’d explained, and Samir had nodded like he was supposed to, and stored the story away with all the others that made up the different faiths he carried with him.

When it came to the Karen May, he was more inclined to believe Dr Shahid’s version than what he’d heard in Jamalpur. He thought of Abesh’s brother, incinerated in a blast; what had remained to decompose in a case like that? He thought of Nasir, Rokeya’s son. He’d fallen through a hatch, plummeting deep into the vessel’s hold. Enough water had flooded the wreck that the fall didn’t kill him, but he broke so many bones on the way down hitting struts and part-walls that he couldn’t keep afloat or swim and the man had drowned before anyone could help him. His body had been recovered. It had been cleaned, shrouded, and buried, as according to Islam. No doubt something of him still remained in his grave, though for many he was already forgotten. Rokeya remembered him for who he had been, Rokeya and Abdul, but Mabud Kibria in the ship-breaking office hadn’t even remembered the name, was reminded only when Samir explained how the man had died. That’s all he was now. A death. Like all the others. Every dead worker had become the method of their ending: the one who fell, the one who burned, the one who suffocated. The one crushed flat beneath tonnes of freed steel. The one thrown and broken by an unexpected blast. Each of them united in that their work had killed them.

And that this ship had taken them.

The ship wanted him too; Samir could feel it. Not Samir specifically, just someone; it had been so long. Nobody would work the vessel anymore. It was the only reason he had been allowed to even take a look. Often Samir would need to convince people to allow him to complete his work, persuade them with a mix of cajoling or something spiritual if they seemed that way inclined—he knew various faiths well enough to talk about them with authority. This time, though, he had been granted permission with little hesitation or reservation. The men in charge were more interested in profits than prophets and didn’t care what had to be done, so long as people would work the ship again. Whether Samir could cleanse the ship or not didn’t matter. So long as they had been seen to try, the workers would be less afraid.

Samir found a suitable spot for his purpose and stopped. He estimated he was near the middle of the ship, both regarding its length and his position between decks. Where he stood, the passage branched off in two directions. Taken with a missing wall opposite, he was positioned at an improvised crossroads. Not exactly the points of the compass, but it would do.

“This is it, Kamala,” he said. He took a final puff from the oxygen canister and readied other items from his bag. “You ready?”

Of all his faiths, his sister was the one Samir believed in most of all. Reciting her name was as much a part of any of his rituals as any sacred text or practised gesture. She looked after him still, just as he cared for her in carrying her with him. She—

From the dark ahead, the opened room, came the tiny scrape of furtive movement. As if a sandal had trodden rust underfoot.

“Abesh?”

But Abesh would be behind him, would be back at the boat by now, and the boy had been barefoot.

From the dark again, another sound. Someone panting, like the breaths between hard sobs. Or the noise someone might make as they suffocated.

Whimpering.

And from over there, a muttering he couldn’t make out. A trailing of words he couldn’t quite hear, quick but quiet, like a desperate prayer or the hasty promises someone made when in trouble.

Samir set his torch down on the floor, leant it within the loop of his bag’s strap, opened both arms to all he heard, and spoke so they might hear him.

He told them about his sister. He told them she liked ice cream and the way birds flew in patterns and how she hated to be called Kami. He told them about how she died too, and how she was forever with him.

This was how he always started.

A standing shape came into the corridor, rolling in from behind a door frame as if detaching itself from the wall there. It was a man. He had a shredded face. His skin was hanging in thin wet ribbons from his brow, cheeks, and from his jowls where the front of his throat was open. Lower, and Samir saw the chest was open too.

“My name is Samir Zakir Hamid,” he told him, and his voice wavered. He could see the broken bones of an exposed ribcage protruding from the man. He nudged his torch so the grisly sight was illuminated clearly and saw amongst those bloody bones rows of metal struts curving from the flesh. Rusted bars, like railings or corroded pipes.

From deep below, beneath his feet, a wallowing groan swallowed its own echo in rising through the decks. It engulfed Samir, heavy but brief, and faded like some distant whale song.

The sudden stench of charred meat announced a second presence. Emerging from further away, clambering up from the floor as if it had knelt there all this time, a red-black man scorched featureless of all but wet glistening limbs and a blackened nub where a face used to be. It took faltering steps towards Samir, guiding itself by bumping into one wall and then the other as it stumbled forward.

“You don’t have to—”

And now there, from between the legs of the first, came another. Drawing itself across the floor with torn arms. A man whose torso marked the end of his body, save for what trailed out of it. He reached for Samir with the hand that wasn’t pulling him forward, the left, then the right, in some tortured dry-swimming crawl.

Samir looked back the way he had come and saw more shadows than had been there before. He nudged the torch with his foot and saw others of those who’d perished here. Brought them into life by seeing them. They had changed, forced into new shapes by what had killed them and wearing scars that disfigured them beyond any Chittagong tattoo, each carrying some aspect of the ship. This one rusted where it should have rotted. This one with struts like splints, another with rivets where eyes should be, or a gaping porthole for a face.

Their stories were mingling. All who died here found their identities bound together and bound to the ship.

Samir talked about each of the men who had died on this ship, knowing those who approached were some of those same men. And as corrupted as they had been, as disfigured and reduced, they recognised something of themselves in what Samir said. He had a notebook filled with what their families had told him, and he had photographs too, but he relied on his memory, speaking in a rush not because he was afraid—though he was—but as a sort of litany, a tribute given not to appease but to convince. I can keep you alive, his stories said. I will remember you, and you can live on in me. Not here, in this rusting hulk of cold metal. In the flesh and blood of me, where my own spirit is anchored. Where my sister lives. And Christ. And Allah. Ninety-nine gods, and more. Replace this vessel with me. Let me carry you.

“Nasir?”

The nearest dark passenger of the Karen May made a guttural sound, a thick growl that bubbled from a throat choked with water. It reached for Samir with hands black and slick with oil.

“Your name is Nasir. You fell and you drowned.”

He saw it happen in more detail than he had been told, saw it more vividly than was contained in any written report. He saw how quickly and quietly the man plummeted, and how he landed across a beam as yet untaken. Saw him fold over it, heard the crack of spine and the way his feet kicked against metal as he flipped around it, and fell. Saw him face down in the filthy water, drowning in the ship’s black dregs.

The man pulled a fistful of Samir’s shirt, yanking buttons from their threads and tearing one half of the garment almost entirely free. It exposed the crucifix he wore. The blue peacock eye of a nazar boncuğu amulet. The scriptures he’d tattooed across his chest. Whether from one or the sum total of all, Nasir recoiled vampire-like, though perhaps it was simply the momentum of his violence as he staggered back with a wet handful of Samir’s clothing.

“Your name is Nasir, and you lived with your mother, Rokeya, and your father, Abdul, who is too old for physical work but loved to hear about yours. Your mother told me. She remembers your life well.”

What had once been a man came again at Samir, pushed him hard to the wall and went in quick to meet him and—

Was gone.

“And which one are you?” Samir said to the next. “Did you fall, did you explode, did you burn or bleed? Because I remember all of you, now. I wasn’t there when you died, but I’ve heard how you lived and I’m here now; I can take you away with me when I go.”

There was a sharp, high grinding whine of metal from somewhere within the ship. Sheet metal torn and folded. A deep wailing came up from the bowels of the vessel as a foul-smelling wind. A fetid stench, channelled to Samir through empty chambers and corridors stripped down to metal bones. It passed over him like breath, sour and dank. With the buffeting of his clothes, the tousling of his hair, some of those Samir had come to see collapsed back into the steel that had taken them. One fell, and burst into red flakes of rust that were dispersed by that same air. Another staggered into a wall, then a second wall, ricocheting in frantic spinning turmoil before falling against a space where a wall only used to be and tumbling into a dark that swallowed him whole. The ship would regurgitate him when it needed, unless…

“There’s more to remember you by than how you died,” Samir told those who gathered to him, moths to his flame of hope. “There are others who remember you better than this.”

The crowd was dispersing and growing and dispersing, all in flux. Some were taken by shadows, others birthed by them, but there were those who flared, consumed suddenly not by fire but some bright burning light.

“Yes,” said Samir. Memories and ghosts. Each so easily became the other.

Still, many remained. Those whose families Samir could not find or would not speak to him. Those who had no one but those they worked with, who knew them now only as ghost stories.

“Tell me who you were,” Samir said. “Before this place.”

One by one, they came to him. They held him tight in desperation, pulling him hard to support their listing forms as they breathed their stories into his ear. They smelled of rust and oil and mud, burnt flesh, blood, and the bilge of old flooded compartments. Their words fluttered like scraps of wind-blown tarpaulin, and with the last whispered one, so did they.

Samir, exhausted, lowered himself to sit when they were done. His breath came in thin bursts, like he’d run some long race, so he took another full blast from the mask and canister he’d brought with him. Then he began unpacking other items from his bag.

He wasn’t finished.

Some had called the Karen May haunted, and others had called it cursed, when in fact it was merely dying and trying not to. The Karen May had slowed her own demise by creating a new identity. Rather than suffer an undignified death at foreign hands on a dirty shore, she would make others suffer, and she would live.

“You’ve sailed every ocean,” Samir said, fumbling at the clasps in his bag, “sailed all of them so often to know there is only really one. We give it different names. The Atlantic. The Pacific. The Bay of Bengal. We recognise the strength that comes with a name. The containment.”

Samir grabbed handfuls of paper and cast them about the floor in front of him. Maps and charts and travel records.

“You are the Karen May, and you have known the power of the sea.”

He spread rolls of paper and weighted them at the corners with piles of salt, lined the edges with it to hold them. It was used in many rituals, but this was the first time he’d used it to represent the sea. He cast photographs of the Karen May upon them, none of the ones he’d taken, nor those from the ship-breaking office, but pictures of her in harbour, at sea, loaded with crew, with passengers, containers. He splashed water over them, anointed them as if with something holy but using the sea he’d brought in with him in his water bottle. There was an article from a newspaper he read aloud before adding it to the pile, an itinerary, a manifest of documents and statistics and records that he shared, though he mentioned nothing of money or of costs, said nothing of profits. He did not reduce her to that.

Her. Like all ships, she had been given a name and personified. Given life. Why would she not be bitter about seeing it end?

These ocean-going giants were never meant to be broken. They had withstood the world’s most ferocious conditions, crossing oceans that rose like mountains and dropped like valleys, burdened with cargo or passengers and taking them safely to wherever they needed to go. And now they sank only in mud, with the sea behind them. Sliced into sections and repurposed, more savaged than salvaged, and all they’d ever done before was forgotten.

The Karen May was not a graveyard, haunted by those who had died within her. She was a corpse, haunting the shore and doing all she could to be remembered. That was the problem. She was a ghost, existing only for as long as it took to decompose but no one willing to take her apart anymore. Or existing only for as long as she was remembered, but being remembered wrong. Every life she took became a new story and built her anew, created a cursed or haunted ship none would dare venture aboard, prolonging her own destruction by building her into something terrifying.

“We are each of us vessels in the same turbulent sea.”

Samir thought of all people did to stave off their gradual collapse into irrelevance and insignificance. Whenever Samir’s faith faltered, he found another to cling to. And another. That was their beauty, that was their strength. Surely it didn’t matter to God?

The salt piles shifted in a gentle trembling. The papers moved askew and some were picked up in a new breeze. The torch fell from where it nestled in the bag strap and began to roll, turning half-circles this way and that and jittering with the new vibrations that were passing through the ship.

Samir stood. He clutched at the nearest support.

The lost engine, and all the ghost machinery of the vessel, was making itself heard for a final time. From somewhere distant came the sound of water churning. For a brief moment Samir wondered if it was his turn to be taken and was glad there were few to remember him. Then the ship listed and Samir staggered with it. He clutched at a frame where a hatch used to be and his legs kicked out into open air as the vessel suddenly slumped violently to one side. Pieces of it fell. Lots of them. A thunderous succession of crashes, metal clattering on metal. Samir felt a wash of heat, and for a moment shadows were cast into dancing shapes by some blooming flare of orange somewhere distant in the ship’s belly.

The echo of whatever blast that had been faded like a sigh.

Samir found his feet again, though the floor he stood on now was angled and it groaned as if the weight of him was too much to bear.

Samir scooped up his torch and ran.

He’d done it. What he hadn’t expected, though, was the quick disintegration of the ship once it had let go. Now metal buckled beneath his feet and he stomped boot prints into each panel as he fled. Each step of the stairs bowed in the middle as he climbed, the last few giving way entirely under him just as he set foot on the next. He stumbled onto the deck and rolled, got back to his feet. The entire ship was leaning, as if pitched in some slow violent sea, and Samir was disorientated. His torch still worked but he might as well have been in darkness; he did not recognise where he was. Until there, on the ground, a spent match. This was the way Abesh had come. And there—another. He followed them quickly, found more stairs, and hauled himself up as parts of them crashed away beneath him.

He burst out of the ship’s confines into the free fresh air of its uppermost deck and saw they were being swept out in a rush to sea. Pulled from the shore that no longer held them, water washing in and around them as the land receded, receded—

Samir threw himself overboard. For a moment he held a graceful dive, like he’d seen the boys doing at dusk, and he panicked, recognising how he had been tricked. He had been expelled, jettisoned like spray from a cresting whale, and he had a moment to worry that he had flung himself from a great height towards mud flats that would smack him dead. But there was tide enough to catch him after all, and though it was so shallow that he felt the seabed in his kick to resurface, it held him safe.

Beside him, looming huge where it had always been, was the mud-mired steel-picked wreck of the Karen May, hollow and unhallowed. Sullen and spiteful, and silent now, but for the quiet hush of the shallows around it, and the bumping of the boat in which Abesh had brought them, still tethered to its hull and empty of all but shadows.