He rammed into the flimsy wooden door with the top of his head and continued to crawl for a moment, unaware that he was no longer moving forward. But then the new situation slowly registered in the icebound cells of his brain and he stopped trying to crawl and began trying to pull himself up. Of course he could not move his hands for almost all of their musculature lay behind him, frozen into the ice. The wood of the door was as slick and cold as the ice and the last shreds of flesh tore off the bone of his fingertips as he scrabbled hopelessly to pull himself up.
The door was in the wind shadow of the rest of the simple construction, so Lamia could at least look upwards — for as long as he could bear the agony of his tearing eyelids, frozen wide as they were. What he could see was a cliff of wood halfway up. It was a simple door latch. Hardly more than a metre above his head, it stuck out tantalisingly, begging to be caught, lifted and pulled.
This is very stupid!
The thought entered his head as though someone else had thought it — or whispered it — close by.
Stand up!
He began to obey. It was impossible that he should have the strength and yet he actually began to pull himself onto his feet, reaching up unerringly for the latch.
But as soon as he put weight on his left leg, he felt the shattered bones grating across each other and a thunderbolt of agony crashed up the left side of his torso, hurling him bodily down onto the ice with such power that he was knocked insensible.
And he sprang immediately awake.
It was an unutterably vivid transition, as though the act of falling had smashed him from one state of existence into another. As though it had not been a dream at all, but another level of genuine experience. Lamia remembered every detail of the excruciating nightmare, every lancing needle of agony in every nerve of his hands and face. He remembered it so completely that he still seemed to feel it now, even in the safe, warm, dark fug of his berth deep in Psyche’s crews’ quarters.
‘Lamia!’ a voice whispered urgently, and the burly Greek jumped, for it was very much like the voice from his dream. ‘Lamia! Are you all right?’
Only on the repetition did Lamia recognise the voice of his crony and berth mate August Lebrun, a weasel-like ex-smuggler from Marseilles.
‘Of course! Why do you ask?’
‘I heard you cry out. I thought perhaps you were having a nightmare.’
‘Such things are for children. What is the time?’
‘I am not sure. Sometime in the graveyard watch.’
The two men chatted in their less than perfect English, the lingua franca of the sea, already falling into severe disuse as Britannia no longer ruled so many of the waves. Time passed, and Lamia’s heartrate began to ease. He stared upward in the darkness, his eyes seeing nothingness but his mind still full of the image of a door latch for ever far beyond his reach. It was soon clear to him that the terror of the nightmare had filled his body with so much adrenaline that further sleep would be out of the question, even had he dared return to it.
It was at about 6 a.m. that Lamia ordered Lebrun to switch on the light so that he could replace the haunting vision of that mocking door latch with the gaudy pictures of very much more easily attainable women which he kept pasted on the walls round his bunk. Lebrun did as he was told and Lamia was dazzled by the cabin light as he had been blinded by the brightness of his dream. He slitted his eyes against the light, then as his eyes adjusted he lay for a little longer, waiting for the memory of the agony in his fingers and face to fade.
After a while, the pain in his cheeks eased to a simple itching and, with his eyes fixed upon the gleaming orbs of a model’s naked buttocks, he moved his right hand for the first time since he had woken, and scratched his cheek.
His mind was blank, save for that part of it which was lazily exploring the carnal possibilities offered by the naked model, so it took him a moment to realise that something was wrong. It was a question of feeling, to begin with. It felt as though he was wearing gloves and a face mask. The scratching failed to ease the itch in his cheek. He folded his fingers into a fist and scrubbed at his cheek with a little more energy. The effect hardly varied. He felt an unsettling sensation as though there were loose surfaces between the skin of his fingers and that of his jowl. Loose, silky surfaces which slid about independently of the movements of his hand and head.
He lifted his hand until the fat fingers swam into the space between his eyes and the bright pink curves of the model’s buttocks. He refocused his eyes almost lazily. And for a moment wondered whether he was wearing gloves. Had he come to bed with a pair of white gloves on his hands after all? He thought back, trying to cut through the fog of forgetfulness engendered by the alcohol which he usually consumed between coming off watch and coming to bed. No. There was no possibility that he had put on gloves before retiring.
He brought the oddly coloured appendage closer to his face and looked at it more closely. His stomach twisted and vomit burned at the back of his throat. He shuddered with shock and the nightmare threatened to wash through into the solid reality of the cabin. His palm was covered in patterns of tiny blisters which spread into bubbles over his fingertips. He slowly turned the hand through one hundred and eighty degrees until he could see the back of it. Here the skin was completely detached and hung in wrinkles weighted by lymph, like a series of yellow balloons full of water.
Lamia jerked his left hand up. The back of it brushed against the blanket in such a way that it arrived in a warm rain of liquid as the blisters on it burst. Lamia screamed and this time there was nothing of dreams in the nightmare vividness of his horror. He sat up with such violent motion that he tore the muscles of his beach-ball belly. ‘Lebrun!’ he yelled and the Frenchman rolled over into full wakefulness and, horrifically, also shouted out with fear.
‘Mon Dieu!’
‘What is it?’
‘Merde, Lamia.’
‘What…’ The Greek seaman’s voice cracked as this long drawn out word spiralled towards a panicked scream.
Lebrun rolled out of his berth and crossed to the small chest of drawers built in against the far wall. Three strides took him to it. A wild wrench tore the mirror off the top of it. Three strides brought him back, holding the reflecting square in front of his chest.
Lamia’s narrow eyes fastened with sick horror on the wavering image. He jerked back, his whole body reacting with revulsion against what he had glimpsed. He was, in common with many Mediterranean men, more vain about his appearance than the appearance itself seemed to warrant. He considered his round, heavy-jowled face with its oily, dark-hued skin and glistening, tight-curled hair irresistible even to such visions of beauty as adorned the walls round his berth. But his vanity was destroyed by what he saw in the mirror.
It was not that the flesh itself was swollen — this might almost have been preferable. It was that the skin seemed to have been pulled off the underlying structures and inflated into puffy yellow balloons all over its surface. The forehead was grotesquely swollen and the eyes beneath it puffy and narrow. The squat nose was all but lost in a soggy ivory bubble and the pale grey jowls sagged as though they belonged to some kind of hound. His mouth, too, was puffed out and his chins were doubled, trebled into pendant, trembling fullness. Only where he had scratched his cheek was the skin flat, hanging in shreds off his face and glistening where the lymph had burst from the broken blisters.
John lay, wakeful even at 6 a.m., with his arms folded on his pillow behind his head, sensing the stirring of his command all around himself as she plunged unhappily through the unvarying headwind, thinking of the responsibility he now bore for the other five ships and their mysterious icy charge, wondering how Asha was caring for Richard, and wishing there was someone to care for him now. The longstanding joke in Heritage Mariner that John Higgins was ‘Little John’ to Richard Mariner’s Robin Hood was not a jibe against his stocky size or a wry comment about his undoubted intellectual stature; it was a comment about the relationship he had always had with Richard. But John did not feel like the definitive right-hand man now. The burden of his extra responsibilities weighed heavily upon him. It had been massive enough even before Professor Jones had phoned through from Aldermaston to warn him that the iceberg which it was costing so much in effort, ingenuity and lost life to move across the ocean might well be contaminated with a mysterious form of radioactivity.