The Lazarus Curse Read online

  Kneeling down to the body nearest him, he pinched a corner of the white sheet and slowly peeled it back from the head end. It was like removing a sticky bandage as the sheet reached the eyes and mouth, the blood clinging to the fabric like glue. Underneath the sheet was a woman (‘was’ being the operative word). Her face was drained of all colour and texture as if she had been left out in the sun for weeks. Every vein in her face had burst; a roadmap of red lines over her sunken features. From her eyes she cried blood tears, tracks dripped down her gaunt cheeks. It was as if the bacterium had drained its victim of all life, and what was left behind was nothing but a husk. Quaint wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and looked around at the many bodies surrounding him.

  ‘This is going to take a while.’

  After forty-five minutes, Quaint was relieved to see that he only had a handful of sheet-clad corpses left to verify. He crouched down, ripping the sheet off the nearest body. It was a young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in the white uniform of a crewmember. He was emaciated, and the blood corpuscles had burst within his eyes like a spray of red carnations. Quaint fell back startled as the body suddenly moved, and with a violent, spluttering cough, the young man opened his blood-soaked eyes. Quaint snatched up the man’s hand. He was in the last stages of death.

  ‘Son… can you hear me?’ asked Quaint.

  The young man swallowed awkwardly and when he opened his mouth, Quaint saw why. It was full of blood. He had lost most of his teeth and his gums were just lumps of bruised flesh. His lips were dried and split, with seams of yellow pus within the cracks. He was practically a living corpse, ravaged by the bacteria as it consumed him from the inside out. Callous to an almost sentient degree, it kept its host alive long enough to enable progression to another, devouring only minor organs until it had completed its meal.

  ‘Are… are you in pain?’ Quaint asked.

  ‘No, sir… not any more,’ the crewmember replied eventually.

  The rotten stench of dead flesh wafted under Quaint’s nose and he stifled the urge to vomit. ‘You have to rest, son,’ he said, his words sounding uncomfortably hollow.

  ‘Are you here… to save me?’ the young man asked.

  Quaint’s heart sank. ‘I’m sorry… but no. There’s nothing I can do for you.’

  The crewmember closed his eyes, crying yet more bloody tears. ‘That’s all right, sir… ’ he said, almost relieved, ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Where is the rest of the crew? Did they jump ship?’ asked Quaint.

  ‘No, sir… Cap… Captain Adamson, that is… said we needed to get home. Get proper treatment. Our doctor is good… but with so many people sick… I suppose he got a bit snowed under.’

  ‘I read in the ship’s log that there might be others in the Fountain Room?’

  The young man coughed a mouthful of blood, and it dribbled from his lips like strawberry juice. ‘Downstairs, sir… deck below this one. They said – they said they weren’t prepared to sit about… and die like the rest of us. So they locked themselves in… waiting for help to come.’

  ‘And the captain?’ asked Quaint. ‘Do you know his whereabouts?’

  ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  Wearily, Quaint ran his fingers through his silver-white curls. Villains with knives and guns and dastardly plots were one thing. They were solid objects, he could fight them, he could defeat them… but the Eleventh Plague was something else entirely. It was like trying to fight fog. Looking around at the bodies like discarded litter, he knew this was just a small percentage of the ship’s complement. How many more were in the throes of living death like the young man at his feet? And how many more were already dead? He could not help any of them. But those people in the Fountain Room… perhaps it was not too late for them.

  Uncertain what he might find once he got there, Quaint headed along the carpeted corridors towards the Fountain Room. He had been on board for over an hour by this time and apart from the dying crewman he had yet to see anyone in a state that could be deemed as alive. The dead lay everywhere. Few had the dignity of being covered by sheets, their corpses in the ship’s lounges and slumped in corners. They looked as if their clocks had wound down and just simply… stopped. Quaint had been to the library and seen corpses with their heads flopped into books. He had been to Tanner’s Tavern, where the corpse of the barman lay just inside the door, eyes sunken into his sockets. He had also been to the ship’s dining saloon. Some passengers looked as though their flesh had attempted to crawl free of their bones, whereas others resembled chickens, stripped of their feathers until only pockmarked grey skin remained. Every single place that Quaint visited brought a memory of his own time on board the ship. He had seen all the rooms before, but not like this. If he listened, he could almost hear the sound of cutlery against china, the hubbub of inebriated cheer; ghostly echoes from another time.

  The Silver Swan had become a floating graveyard.

  Quaint took a double staircase that led to the deck directly below, his boots making no sound on the plush carpet. This part of the ship was shrouded in darkness, and soon he was completely lost. He had not been a frequenter of the Fountain Room during his time onboard previously – he and ballrooms were unlikely bedfellows. Quaint’s eyes were drawn to the glint of a large brass plaque fastened to the wall. It was a map detailing the layout of the ship cut into deck-by-deck cross-sections. The Fountain Room was right around the corner at the foot of a grand staircase.

  Finally, some luck. He was beginning to forget what that felt like.

  After a speedy sprint, he arrived at the ballroom doors. Quaint moved his hand towards them, but then hesitated. There could be anything waiting for him. A gaggle of people scared out of their wits begging for salvation, or a scene of utter devastation… not that it mattered; there was nothing he could do in either scenario. He gripped hold of the door handles but they refused to budge. Repeatedly he pulled, but the doors remained firmly shut. Locked… from the inside. Quaint could just about make out a fine seam of amber light through the gap. There was something on the other side of the doors threaded through the handles, barring the entrance most effectively.

  ‘Hello? Hello, is anyone in there?’ Quaint called. ‘Can anyone hear me?’

  A faint sound echoed. Someone knocked against something. Quaint heard a monotonous, rhythmic sound as it righted itself.

  ‘Please… I know someone is there,’ he called. ‘I can hear you.’

  ‘Get away!’ snapped a gravelly voice from the other side of the door. ‘You keep coming, don’t you? Keep coming here, trying to get in? well, it won’t work. So be off with you!’

  ‘I can’t do that, sir,’ Quaint said. ‘I want to help.’

  ‘Help? You can’t help us! Nobody can help us! Have you brought a miracle cure to make this all better? Are you going to heal all those that are infected? Can you help the ones that are dead? No, so what help can you possibly be?’

  ‘Sir, I… I just need you to open the doors,’ said Quaint.

  ‘Like hell! You’re trying to come in here and pilfer our supplies, is that it? Well, forget it. We’re staying in here where we’re safe. Where you lot can’t infect us!’

  ‘How many of you are in there?’ asked Quaint.

  ‘Not many… any more,’ replied the man. ‘There were over fifty of us before. It’s been barely a week and already we’ve lost more than half of them. They’ve been going quick, see. Sometimes one a day, sometimes more. If you’re crew, you’d know that!’

  ‘Sir, I’m not with the crew. I only came onboard to find a… well, I suppose you could say she’s a friend of mine,’ explained Quaint. ‘Her name’s Polly. Do you know her? Polly North?’

  ‘What, you think she’s in here?’

  ‘She might be,’ said Quaint.

  ‘There’s never been anyone called Polly,’ said the man. ‘I should know… I’ve ticked off everyone’s name once they go.’

  ‘What about the others in there with you?’ Quaint asked. ‘
Sir, please… if you’ve got people in there that are sick – that have died – and you’ve barricaded yourselves in with them… do you understand what I’m saying?’

  There was no reply from the ballroom.

  ‘Sir?’ Quaint asked, as he heard a faint whimper through the doors.

  ‘We thought locking the door would keep death out,’ said the man, composing himself. ‘Turns out it’s been in here all along.’

  Quaint tried to form words of consolation but his mouth was numb. Everyone in that ballroom would die eventually and there was nothing that he could do about it. He knew it, and so did the man on the other side of the door. Quaint knew that he needed to find Polly even more now, and he needed to do it quickly. Just as he was about to set off in pursuit, he felt a low rumble beneath his feet and it took a moment for him to work out what it was.

  Someone had just started the ship’s engines.

  The Silver Swan was moving again…

  Chapter IV

  The Other Survivors

  Quaint ran until splinters of pain sliced through his legs. Bypassing the atrium, he scaled three flights of carpeted stairs and flew outside through a side door. His boots skidded and he gripped the railings tight, trying to gain as much purchase on the deck as possible. The wind slammed a gale into his face, but still he pushed on towards the bridge. It was empty when he got there, as empty as it had been before. The engines were on full steam, and Quaint could see Dover’s docks getting closer through the windows. He was lost in a whirlpool of panic, barely noticing the sound of movement behind him in time.

  He stowed his bulk away behind the bridge’s bookshelves, peering through the gaps in the shelves. His eyes fixed on the bunkroom’s door as the wheel began to turn. A gloved hand emerged, belonging to a man clothed from head to foot in bright orange overalls, stained with grease. The metal floor shook as huge clunking boots stomped down, echoing around the enclosed space. On his head the man wore a helmet of bronze and glass, with a circular porthole at the front, fastened onto a neck support by several brass bolts. A large canister was affixed to his back – containing air, Quaint presumed. He had seen suits such as this used by deep-sea divers salvaging shipwrecks, designed for the high pressures of the seabed. Quaint remembered the log entry from the journal – the captain had presumed that the threat was some sort of gas leak, and so it followed that wearing such apparatus would enable a man to move about relatively freely without breathing the air of the ship. A sound plan – except this disease was not born of the air.

  Quaint watched as the inhabitant of the diving suit dragged his leaden feet along one at a time, painfully slowly. His breath fogged up much of the helmet, which was fortuitous for Quaint: despite his best efforts to crouch in the shadows of the bridge, his broad frame was not one built for stealth. The man in the suit carried one of the kerosene lamps from the bunkroom’s cupboard, and as he completed a one hundred and eighty degree turn, he picked up the jacket hung over the chair and the journal from the table. He manoeuvred around again so that he was facing the exit from the bridge and set off – one sluggish footstep at a time.

  Following the man was simplicity itself. His bulky apparatus meant that a brief glance over his shoulder was impossible. In fact, the hardest part of Quaint’s task was keeping his boredom at bay. He only hoped that the path would take him exactly where he needed to be – if not necessarily where he wanted to be.

  Eventually, they arrived at another door, and the man in the diving suit turned the wheel to enter. Quaint looked around for somewhere to hide, but in the white-painted corridor there were no shadows to consume him. His only option was to retreat around the corner by a staircase, watching as the man stepped over the raised threshold and through the door. Quaint had seconds to act. As the man manoeuvred around to close the door, Quaint moved in with him like a shadow.

  Not far inside, the man approached another oval-shaped door just like the last, and methodically began to open it. A blast of light illuminated the enclosed space and the hairs on the back of Quaint’s neck stood to attention. The man again manoeuvred himself around in a circle to close the door, and Quaint followed him one step at a time. Once inside, as his target trudged on along the corridor, Quaint hid around the corner of a bulkhead and wait until the clunking footsteps dissipated.

  A set of white-painted steps at the far end of the corridor led the conjuror deeper down, into the comfort of the shadows. The further that he ventured into the belly of the Silver Swan, the closer he got to the engines. The sound pounded in his ears, setting his teeth on edge. Up ahead was another door, marked: ‘CARGO HOLD: CREW ONLY PERMITTED’.

  Quaint opened the door, hearing its metal cogs grinding, and he looked around at his surroundings. Below decks had a different feel than the rest of the ship. Everywhere was bathed in deep shadow, but so far Quaint’s luck was holding out – someone had left a lantern on a hook attached to the wall. Snatching it up, he soon came to another door of a shuttered design, this time much wider, and manufactured from slats of iron attached to a chain pulley. It was almost closed to the bottom, but there was just enough room for him to crawl underneath. He slid the lantern through the gap and then began snaking his way forwards on his elbows. He had made it halfway under when something solid barred his way. Dragging the lantern towards him, Quaint saw something that made his stomach lurch – a pair of white shoes.

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ demanded their owner.

  Quaint craned his neck up to try to make out the owner of both the shoes and the voice, but it was pitch-black from the ankles up.

  ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ the voice asked.

  ‘It don’t matter, Whitlock. He won’t be getting back out!’ shouted another.

  Quaint’s back erupted in excruciating pain as the full weight of the corrugated iron slats crashed down upon him. Bright white flashes of light danced before his eyes. Through the blindness of his pain, he struggled to keep from passing out. The door was crushing all the air from his lungs, and every breath constricted his lungs further. He clamped his mouth shut, hoping to preserve what oxygen he had left. He didn’t know when he would get the chance to breathe again, or even if.

  ‘How did you get in?’ asked the voice again.

  Quaint clawed at the rubber floor, forcing air into his lungs. ‘Here… to help.’

  ‘Here to pilfer our supplies, more like!’ snapped the newcomer, squatting down on his haunches to get a better look at his prize. ‘He’s with that lot upstairs in the ballroom. They must be running pretty low on food to risk coming down here!’

  Quaint got a look at the man closest to him through the dancing white spots before his eyes. He was dressed in the white uniform of a crewmember, open at the neck and stained with grease and filth.

  ‘C-Captain?’ he wheezed.

  ‘Lieutenant, actually,’ replied the man.

  ‘Gidlow, what are we going to do with this bloke?’ asked his mate.

  ‘Leave him be until the captain gets back,’ said Gidlow. ‘Keep your eye on him, not that he’s going anywhere. One thing’s for sure, once we get back on dry land I’ll be glad to get off this bloody ship.’

  ‘Yeah, but then what?’ asked Whitlock. ‘We’ve got dead passengers all over… and those that aren’t dead probably soon will be! This one seems to be on his own, at least. We don’t know how many passengers are left up there.’

  ‘Please!’ gasped Quaint, charging his lungs with air. ‘I’m not… a passenger!’

  ‘Not a passenger?’ laughed Gidlow. ‘You hear that, Whitlock? So what are you then, if you ain’t a passenger?’

  ‘Came aboard… from Dover,’ replied Quaint.

  ‘And how’d you manage that? By hitching a ride on a seagull?’

  ‘I know what happened here… on this ship,’ Quaint wheezed, his throat scorching like acid. ‘I know… what has afflicted your crew. How it was caused… ’

  ‘So do I! One of our passengers was obviously a plague carrier, an
d now he’s sealed all our fates, you lying thief!’

  Quaint shook his head. ‘Professor… ’

  Gidlow laughed. ‘Oh, so you’re a bleedin’ professor, are you? Well then, you should’ve been a bit smarter than to come down here trying to nick our supplies.’

  ‘Not me, idiot,’ hissed Quaint. ‘I’m looking for a professor! It’s her… that I’m trying to find!’

  ‘Oh, really?’ sneered Gidlow. ‘Well, all right then. If you really are from Dover then tell me this… what’s the name of the harbourmaster, eh?’

  Quaint knew the answer, but he was lacking the breath to respond. As the last vestiges of his strength petered out, his grip on consciousness loosened. A thick black cloud descended over his eyes as oblivion claimed him…

  Chapter V

  The Uncomfortable Position

  Regaining consciousness, Quaint was unpleasantly surprised to discover that his predicament had not improved. If anything, it had got quite a bit worse. The pain was throughout his body now, and the iron gate crushing his spine was not nearly the most painful part.

  ‘Get this thing off me!’ he snapped at the two blurred figures in front of him. ‘I told you, I’m here to help. My name is Cornelius Quaint, and I’m—’

  ‘You’re a bloody thief, is what you are!’

  ‘I’m not here to steal from you, man!’ yelled Quaint, trying to summon enough strength to lift the iron gate from his back. It was no use. His spine had given in long before his willpower would submit. For the time being, all he could do was support himself on his elbows and try to make the officers see sense, which was proving remarkably difficult.