Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [16]
'How?' I asked, and the girl pointed to the far corridor wall where the most truly horrifying vision of all was waiting for me.
A message, written seemingly in the blood that had rushed towards me, was scrawled across the cream wallpaper and onto the door of one of the cabins. 'We are damned,' it said. 'We are lost. We are forsaken.'
'You're not helping me very much,' I cried. 'If you don't tell me what ails you, then I'm not going to be able to suggest a cure.'
The child disappeared and a disembodied male head, terrified eyes bulging in their sockets, replaced her. He was of rough-shaven face and with a severe crew-cut. A soldier, I guessed. 'I can't feel my legs, Sarge. I'm scared. It's dark in here and I can't feel my legs,' he whispered at me, as if in confirmation of my suspicions. 'It's dark, and it's cold and we're all going to die. I don't want to die.' Then he, too, was gone and the child was back, this time clutching a translucent teddy bear to her see-through chest. 'You have to help us,' said the little girl. 'You're the only one who
can help us. We are lost.'
'Where?' I asked, for what seemed like the hundredth time.
The message written on the wall had changed. My hearts skipped a beat, sank, slipped to the floor and shattered to smithereens. It was the answer that I had been expecting, indeed dreading, for some time.
'672,' it said.
CHAPTER FOUR
CABIN 672
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear as it is. Infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE, A MEMORABLE FANCY
EVERY INSTINCT WITHIN ME TOLD ME NOT TO GO TO THE CABIN. My body resisted with every nerve, every fibre, every sinew. But, despite that, despite rationality and common sense and all the other things that are supposedly designed to stop us from doing stupid, illogical things, still I went.
Why? Put simply, I felt compelled by overwhelming forces beyond my control. Silly, isn't it? I was drawn to Cabin 672, bodily, like a moth to the flame. I had tried to walk in the opposite direction. Really tried. To get up onto the ship's deck and see if the fresh air and the daylight would help to banish these non-existent ghosts from their haunting of me.
Because I knew, knew for certain, that none of this was in the slightest bit real. At least, not in any sense of reality that I believed I understood.
But every step just seemed to lead me closer, closer, closer to Cabin 672.
Even when I knew I was drawing near to the cabin, I was unable to stop myself. Eventually, with a stony lack of enthusiasm, I found myself at the head of the very corridor that led to the cabin. It was similar to the corridor in which I had experienced the earlier onslaught of visions: a Ushaped trap from which, once ensnared, there was no escape.
I shambled unwillingly. Slowly. My feet dragging through the carpet like those of a small schoolboy on his way to the headmaster's office.
The ship's architecture seemed to mock me and my sorry plight. Taking
on almost hallucinatory properties, the corridor elongated, stretched out before me to infinity and beyond. I was accompanied, as I had been all day, by a thumping sound. At first I believed it to be nothing more than the ship's massive steam engines in close proximity to me. But now I deduced, through a process of elimination, that it was the sound of my own heartbeats.
I finally reached the door of Cabin 672. It looked so desperately ordinary. No looming beasts. No entrance-guarding demons. No alien tentacles snaking from under the door. Just a room, like any other room.
That was, until I inspected it more closely.
I placed a hand, somewhat nervously, on the door's brass knob and felt the sensation of thousands upon thousands of tormented souls, screaming at me simultaneously. All urging me to leave this place. To turn, to run and never to return. I removed my hand, quickly, with a startled cry. Looking down at it, I