Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [12]
After an hour of so of pleasant distraction, I was leaving the lounge when I had another brief encounter with Simpkins. He gave me a jovial, if somewhat conspiratorial, smile, which managed to irritate me, and introduced a fellow steward named Jarvis. He was a thin and sickly palelooking man with a sharply pointed face and lank black hair that flopped in a fringe over one eye.
'No more emergencies like last night then, Doc?' Simpkins asked.
'No, indeed. I had breakfast with Miss Lamb. She seemed much improved,' I lied.
Simpkins nodded. Jarvis did too. They clearly came as a double-act. 'So, did you encounter any more visitations around and about the ship?' Simpkins asked
I sighed, deeply. 'I thought I had made my position on such phenomena clear when we last spoke,' I began, but found that I didn't have the heart to continue ranting at him. I felt weary, as though the exertions of the dead of night had finally caught up with me. I slumped into a chair beside the door, the energy in my body sucked from me like the juice from a lemon. Simpkins sat beside me. 'Terrible things have happened on this ship over the years,' he said. 'Many terrible things. Suicides. Mysterious deaths. One time, right, an explosion ripped through the lower decks, killing dozens of soldiers when it was being used as a troop transport during the war.' And on, and on, and on he went, hardly pausing for breath whilst his friend, Jarvis, occasionally butted in with an affirmation that it was all true. Every word of it. Simpkins was fascinated by death.
My head was spinning with information. Horrible, overwhelming, useless information. After a few moments I could stand it no longer.
'I don't believe in ghosts,' I said, dismissively, as I stood up. 'Such stories have no basis in reality. They're full of sound and fury but they signify nothing.' I paused, and in that second, I felt something within me grip me by the throat. Something deep and long-buried that had been suppressed by centuries of logic and reason and dogma. 'I don't believe in ghosts,' I repeated in an almost inaudible whisper.
Nevertheless, when I left the lounge, I was chilled to the bone. Literally, as well as metaphorically.
Outside, in the lengthy and empty corridor, I stood with my back to the polished, oak-panelled wall and closed my eyes, breathing in and out slowly and relaxing, trying in vain to clear my troubled mind of appalling images of burning soldiers, slashed wrists in tiny bathtubs and bodies hanging limply from light fixtures. After several seconds of welcome isolation, I opened my eyes again, hoping that all these imagined horrors might have packed up their kit bags and just gone away.
Instead, to my amazement, an ill-defined apparition floated through a cabin wall in front of me.
And that was very odd because I don't, actually, believe in ghosts.
CHAPTER THREE
DEAD SOULS
For it is a ghost's right, his element is so fine,
being sharpened by his death, to drink from the wine-breath,
while our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
W.B. YEATS, ALL SOULS' NIGHT
THE APPARITION'S VISAGE WAS EXACTLY HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED to appear from within the realms of popular fiction. Of urban myths and oral folk tales of phantoms and ghosts. From down the aeons on many worlds and in many cultures. Spectral, indistinct, almost like an image drawn by fingers in smoke.
I was, I freely admit, terrified, if only momentarily. A repulsion from the hard-headed scientist within me rose to a shouting crescendo of outraged disbelief. 'This is not real,' I found myself saying. That is often the last refuge of the foolish. But if this were an hallucination, which was