Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [7]
The story was a good one, even I was forced to admit that. Though the penny-dreadful style of some of its telling left a little to be desired. More a cod Algernon Blackwood than the chilling skill of an M.R. James at his peak. Dickens, of course, would have been proud of such a yarn.
'It's nonsense such as this that has filled Miss Lamb's head full of her notions, seemingly,' I told him. But despite all my misgivings about Simpkins's story, and I had plenty, something about the ship disturbed me greatly. As I bade my new acquaintance good evening, that nagging voice inside me was telling me that I had been witness to something unnatural.
For once, I was ready to listen to it.
CHAPTER TWO
I'LL SAIL THIS SHIP ALONE
We are fools of time and terror.
Days steal on us and steal from us.
LORD GEORGE BYRON, MANFRED
MOODS ARE CURIOUS AND AFFECTING. THEY CAN BE FUNNY things. Funny peculiar, that is. Having left Simpkins, my mood was one of sombre introspection. I was distracted by the events of the evening and by some ill-formed but lingering doubts in the back of my mind as to the purpose of my being in this place. At this time.
Not that every adventure to which I am party requires a purpose, of course. Not every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Indeed, some stories have no meaning, being driven merely by random causality as the cosmic dice-player takes a break for tea and crumpets and forty winks at the absurdity of it all.
I wandered aimlessly around the top deck of the Queen Mary in the early hours of the morning, lost in my solitary thoughts and in the midst of a howling storm. Perhaps it was just my mood, but it seemed to me that there was something almost Biblical about the weather at this time, as the wind and the rain lashed against my face and the ship yawed, dipped and then rose in the enormous churning Atlantic waves beneath.
A line of poetry, written in iambic verse, about a sailor's wife and her shipwrecked husband, from Shakespeare or Marlowe or John Donne, was lodged in my brain. But I could not, for the life of me, remember who had written it or, more importantly, how it ended. And that irritated me, as such lapses of memory were always prone to do.
Too much trivial information in there, do you see? Too much for one head to hold.
With my eyes fixed on the point in the slate-grey and starless sky where I believed the distant horizon would most likely be, I stood my ground, held fast against the elements and waited for the coming of a brand new day. My coat billowed behind me, and the ends of my scarf, which was wrapped tightly around my throat, flapped like the wings of a great bird in distress. I was grateful that, for once, I had left my hat in the safety of the TARDIS, for it, surely, would have been swept away by the tempest.
I found myself thinking about Henry Purcell. He was an interesting and jovial chap with whom I had spent many long and pleasant winter evenings, drinking fine wine from his cellars and eating mature cheddar from his buttery whilst he fiddled with his violin and wrote 'Arise ye Subterranean Winds'. And were they not arising now with their full and majestic might?
Fiddled with his violin? You must excuse the dreadful pun.
I clung, with all my might, to the ship's rails, my knuckles bled white by the force, and stared out at the angry black ocean. The vessel on which I sailed felt like a small insect, trapped in a sea of tar, trying to escape from something bigger and more inexplicable than itself.
Here, in this fashion, I brooded for hours. Time lost all meaning in the darkness, until the first indications of the arrival of dawn brought something like peace to the raging waters and calmed the savage winds. As thin streaks of pale, brick-orange light began to filter through what seemed to be cracks in the sky, my solemn mood was temporarily banished.
A new day, with