“Done… done, Constable and please… accept my apologies for being… for not being… that is for disbelieving you… for not listening when I might have saved O’Laughlin. He was a good officer and a fine doctor,” he repeated, befuddled and dazed, looking in shock.
“And a friend. I could see that clearly.”
“I was hoping my last voyage before retirement would be uneventful.”
“For that, sir, I’m sorry; seems trouble and events have a way of finding men like you and I. I would hope that under different circumstances that we may well’ve been friends, Captain.”
Declan shook the captain’s hand. “Sir, I’ve read about your career in detail. I am honored to be in your presence.”
“No, young man… I am the one who should be honored by the three of you.”
“Where do we start in search of finding the disease carrier?” asked Thomas.
“Other than you men here, I have only one ally I trust,” replied Ransom.
“And who might that be? Lightoller?”
“Varmint.”
“The dog?”
“The dog, yes. His nose may be our last hope, gentlemen.” Ransom had reclaimed his cane, and with a little twirl of the silver wolf’s head, he recalled the gift of the cane; it’d come from his best friend in Chicago, Philo Keane, a professional photographer and sometime police photographer, always a willing listener. He thought of his other close friends and acquaintances back in America as well and simultaneously wished them here with him now and happy that they were not.
“Varmint wherever he and Farley’ve gotten off to.”
We need to get that dog back. He just might be able to point out the alien among us,” Declan was saying, but Ransom only half heard as his weary mind wandered.
Declan repeated himself, and then Alastair whispered, “The dog may be our last hope.”
With the blessings of Captain Smith, and with Lightoller and Mr. Farley and Varmint, along with a hundred crewmen working in pairs, the hunt for the monster began in earnest. This time other dogs from the kennels were pressed into service as well, and each team searched for the scent of the carrier. Everyone agreed their best hope lay with Varmint or one of the other dogs, but time was fast running out.
The captain had located the ship’s architect, Andrews, who’d provided the latest blueprints. Captain Smith then set a hundred men scouring in pairs and threes to every nook and cranny. But so far nothing, no results.
With hopes pinned on Varmint, Ransom and his young mates watched the dog for every nuance, any slight change in demeanor as he was led from deck to deck. At one point, he sniffed the air around the Black Gang and exhibited a pained expression but without the kind of results they’d seen in the freezer.
Given that both Burnes and Davenport had been stokers, it made sense to have the dog sniff these men in order to rule them out.
This plan failed; it ended in the various stokers reacting to the dog in every conceivable way, from indifference to kicking out at Varmint to falling to knees and giving the dog a big hug and a ruffle of its fur. But in no instance, not even with the stoker who’d kicked out at the dog and threatened the animal with a shovel did Varmint alert. In all, it seemed a dead end.
All the same, Lightoller intensely disliked the man who’d threatened Varmint, and he whispered to a subordinate, “Keep an eye on this fellow Morrell.”
The parade of searchers behind the dog had steadily grown as they next had Varmint sniff out the cooks, kitchen staff, pantries, pursers, maids, the two fellows who manned the Marconi wireless, officers and their quarters, again to no good end.
As the third body had been that of Dr. O’Laughlin, they followed up by having the dog walk through the officer’s quarters, which turned up nothing significant, although Varmint lingered about Will Murdoch’s personal items. Murdoch merely raised his shoulders and laughed a bit nervously. When Ransom escorted the dog to where Murdoch stood, again the dog did not become agitated. It proved just another dead end.
They moved on to the infirmary and repeated the performance with the assistant ship’s surgeon and what was now his staff of nurses. At this point it was difficult for anyone to believe that their approach was anything but a lost cause.
However, after a series of missteps that led them in blind searches and circles about the mammoth ship, Varmint hit on a trail that appeared promising. The Retriever grew more and more agitated as it followed along a first class passageway until he came to the stairwell leading to the first class passenger rooms.
“Like I said… this thing is moving up in the world,” Ransom whispered to the others in the corridor. “First class berths.” Varmint had passed one after another until he had come to this sudden stop before Room #148.
“Whose room it this?” asked Ransom.
Lightoller turned to the purser behind him and tapped the younger man’s clipboard. “Well, Mr. Phelps? Answer the question, man!”
“This is the stateroom of Mr. Olaus Abelseth, sir—a well mannered old gent, perhaps in his mid-sixties. Made his fortune in military uniforms, civilian garments, and supplies.”
Ransom insisted they open the door.
“Unusual circumstances dictate, Mr. Phelps,” said Lightoller, snatching his firearm—the one Murdoch had gotten into his hands—from his hip. “Open it.”
Carney Phelps used a first-class skeleton key, and in seconds, he shoved the door wide open. In a matter of seconds, they saw Abelseth on the floor in his death throes, turning to a wooden state before their eyes, when suddenly a screech and a black shape like a banshee tore itself from the dying man’s mouth and ripped about the room like a maniacal, winged angel of death. In the next instant, Lightoller fired several shots, missing repeatedly as the inky shapeless creature flew out an open portal and was gone up the side of the ship’s hull, leaving behind one agitated, barking dog and several stunned men in a quivering silence—ears in pain from the proximity to gunfire.
“It’s getting away!” shouted Ransom, quickly regaining his senses. “Give me the gun, now!”
Lightoller did so without hesitation.
Ransom raced back to the nearest stairwell, with Varmint ahead of him. The creature was a dark, oily-skinned spectral being that had left Mr. Olaus Abelseth of Scandinavia like all those before him.
“We’ve gotta transport Abelseth’s body to the freezer compartment!” Declan said.
“He can wait!” Thomas shouted over his shoulder as he’d already begun to follow Ransom. So had Lightoller, but not the young purser, Phelps. He had raced off in the opposite direction, terrified out of his mind. For the moment, Declan found himself alone with the body, and he helplessly, fearfully, imagined the creature swooping back into the room to target his body and slip into him as easily as it’d slipped out of the dead man at his feet.
THIRTY TWO
When they all arrived topside in the direction the creature, the disease organism had gone, up and along the outside hull of Titanic toward the officer’s quarters, there was nothing. Not so much as a tell-tale slug trail. No evidence they weren’t all simply hallucinating. It had disappeared as quickly as it’d slipped from Abelseth’s room.
Captain Smith had gone white and was unable to keep up with the others, but with the help of Wilde, he managed to catch up. “My god, Ransom. What are we faced with here? It’s absolutely vile.”
“There is no telling how many staterooms in first, second, and third class have a dead man or woman lying within and incubating these things, Captain.”
“And no stopping this monster,” added Declan, shaken at having actually seen the thing as it slipped from the body, from Stateroom 148, from gunfire, and from capture.