Page 55 of Shadow Ticket
A don’t-waste-my-time smile. “Not Hicks’s innocence I’m concerned about, it’s hers. He could corrupt the girl so easily.”
“Now, Pip Emma…” warns Alf.
“Someone has to tell him, he’s a loaded weapon, not that you’d be the expert on that, of course.”
Pips being actually herself the hired gun around here, “Brought us through some unhopeful innings indeed, remember in Dar that time, thank goodness for the extra Webley in your pocket—”
“Oh, Alfalfa,” eye-rolling innocence, “it was KL, and I scarcely knew which end of it to point.”
Raising his gin and It, “Sticky days, my conference pear…you see,” as he later explains to Hicks, “on any given yearly audit, it was Pips who handled most of theBoy’s Ownactivities whilst I was only the Room 40 O.B. crypto whiz confined in that crowded little sweatshop where we were all breathing each other’s tobacco smoke…”
“Don’t listen to him, he loved it in there, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself outdoors.”
“Never thought I’d miss minesweeper duty that much.”
“All you had to do was drop a hint, they’d’ve been happy to redeploy you.”
They’re down in the casino decks, more extensive than you’d expect, just because a liner’s designed for speed doesn’t mean there won’t be time for cutthroat baccarat or lightning roulette, or certainly a go at the high-velocity fruit machines, though as for emotions and high drama, Hicks has seen more vivacity in old-time Wentworth Avenue opium joints during the graveyard shift.
The bar turns out to be strangely vertical, reaching down all the way to the orlop deck refrigeration spaces where the beer and champagne are kept, having over several voyages become an informal skip-tracing bureau, for not only are there more passengers aboard theStupendicathan at first appeared, but their numbers also have beenstrangelyincreasingday by day, despite no ports of call so far having been stopped at, and the overflow tends to congregate here.
Passageways long after hours clamor with what sounds like an immense unsleeping crowd, not to be explained away by corridor acoustics or the unceasing friction of the sea.
“Not too many of them exactly visible,” Alf speculates, “yet still wandering the ship at will, in and out of spaces both authorized and forbidden.”
“He’s embarrassed to say it out loud,” Pips with an upward roll of the eyeballs.
“This wasn’t always a passenger liner,” Alf doesn’t exactly explain, “converted during the War to a hospital ship…Still populated by casualties physical and psychical and those in whose care they were conveyed…unquiet stowaways with broken odds and ends of unfinished business from the War, common to all being a hope no longer quite sure and certain that injustices would be addressed and all come right in the end.”
—
Summers when hewas a kid visiting his mother’s side of the family in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, out in the Driftless about twenty miles from Baraboo, “There was this what they called spiritualist camp,” Hicks remembers, “séances and so forth going on all the time.”
Hicks and his friends used to hang around Wonewoc hoping to see ghosts or other supernatural visitors, unaccountable lights up on Spook Hill after dark, sounds of warning, of lament, which couldn’t be explained away as owls or the wind. Shapes which did not respond when addressed.
“And one of your relations,” Alf guesses, “possibly a great-aunt, was in touch with other forces.”
“Cousin Begonia,” Hicks amiably, “once removed. At the time it all seemed normal. For Wonewoc anyway.”
“And the séances?”
“Once or twice. Nothing much happened. Lights out, everybody quiet, it was like listening to the radio.”
“Parlor tricks,” footnotes Philippa.
“Many are the misguided,” Alf putting a hand on hers, “who need to believe that’s all it is, poor old dear, seen it a hundred times, hasn’t she, but can’t admit it.”
While not a dues-paying member of the Society for Psychical Research, Alf is more sensitized in these matters than Philippa, who attends impatiently to her fingernails or hums music hall tunes whenever Alf reports a sighting of uncertain luminosity, or a wordless voice that might be more than wind strumming the guy wires of the radio masts.
“It’s a strange time we’re in just now,” Alf reflects, “one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.”
Which now may have come to include recent paranoid suspicions the liner is being tracked by a mysterious submarine. Some see it, some don’t.
“There, look, see that? It’s a periscope, I tell you!”
“More like a whale spouting, if anything.”
“Report to sick bay, you’re only seeing things.”
