Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [6]
Simpkins said nothing. He merely shrugged in a laconic way that suggested a lack of interest. Or, perhaps, a mind that was already made up on this matter.
'I have never believed in ghosts,' I repeated. As much, I suspect, for my own benefit as for his.
'You will,' Simpkins said at last as we walked back towards the place where the TARDIS had landed. In particular he seemed keen to warn me about a specific cabin on the ship. It took me a moment fully to grasp what he was saying, and I asked him for further details.
Simpkins seemed lost for words; surprised perhaps, that I did not simply take what he was telling me at face value. Why should I not believe him? After all, I was the stranger on board. 'Don't go to Cabin 672, in the First Class area,' he said at last. 'Deck four, near the grand ballroom. That room is never occupied. Even when the ship is full to bursting. Something terrible happened there once and now no-one will enter it.'
His words seemed to be mocking me. Making light of the difference between things that are known and things that are unknown.
'Something terrible?' I repeated, contemptuously. 'Would you care to elaborate?'
'You know how some places just have a feel about them?' Simpkins asked in reply. I indicated that I did. 'When I was a kid, right,' he continued, 'there was the copse near to where I lived in Birkenhead. You didn't go there after dark. It's impossible to explain why, you just didn't. And everybody knew this, the old, the young and them that was in-between. It was a bad place.' He paused. 'That cabin's the same, and all the tea in China and all the bananas in Jamaica wouldn't get me in there. Know what I mean?'
Yes, I did.
We came to a bulkhead door and stopped. I pressed my hand against the smooth, gun-grey metal.
'They've got razor-sharp edges for a watertight fit when they close. Obvious when you think about it,' noted Simpkins. 'They're shut at high speed if a section of the ship has to be isolated, like if we get a hullrupture. Back in the war, when the crew did practice sessions, some of the lads used to play "chicken" with a door, and see how many times they could jump from one side to the other before it slammed shut. I hear tell some unlucky sod got caught by the door once and lost his leg. And that's not the worst story I've heard by a long way.'
There was a resonating sadness within Simpkins's voice, something I had not previously noticed in his jovial, cheeky-chappie persona. If he, like most humans, had a melancholy side to him, he had hidden it well up to that point. But it was unmistakably there, marbled in his words like a layer of archaeology, mere inches beneath the surface.
'Do you ever wonder sometimes if it's all worth it?' he asked me, suddenly. I caught a flash of something darker and troubled hiding behind his eyes.
'I'm sorry?'
'You know, the whole kit and caboodle? I don't know, this place. Sometimes it depresses me. And there's no end to it. We sail on and we sail on, and nothing ever changes or gets any better, do you know what I mean?' I was about to sympathise with him when he seemed to pull himself out of his momentary depression, and returned to the tale of the notorious Cabin 672. 'A bursar went mad in the room in 1938, midvoyage,' Simpkins noted. 'They reckon he was starting to scare the passengers, so they locked him down in the dark with the engines, until they reached New York. When they got there, he was found dead, so he was. He had, literally, been frightened to death.'