That which sleeps forever is not dead.
‘Here you go. Anything else?’ asks the bartender as he serves the drinks.
‘No,’ says the man, sticking the matchbook in his pocket before drinking the ice-cold whiskey in one gulp.
‘That’ll be twelve hundred,’ says the barman, wiping sweat from his forehead as he thumbs through his notebook till he finds ‘Slot-machine Kalli’. ‘Which brings the bill to nine thousand one hundred.’
The man pats the front of his jacket and checks under the left side, where he feels something thick underneath. He sees a thick wad of bills but shows no reaction. In his hip pocket he finds a thin wallet, which he opens and inspects.
‘I seem to be broke for the moment,’ says the man with a smile, after searching through his wallet and finding only 1500 crowns.
‘Can’t you pay your bill?’ asks the bartender, irritated, staring into the infinite deep of the man’s eyes.
‘Just chalk it up,’ says the man with a bearded grin, taking a sip of his soda. ‘Open an account or something. I’ll pay tomorrow.’
‘You don’t have credit here, as you’re perfectly aware,’ says the bartender, shaking his head. ‘Either you pay up or I get the doorman to—’
The bartender stops talking when the man takes him by the throat and pulls him halfway over the bar. The bartender’s feet leave the ground and the veins at his temples swell and darken.
‘You chalk it up or I kill you! Understood?’ says the man, tightening his grip on the bartender, who is going bright red and blue round his nose and eyes, and nods as best he can.
‘And your full name?’ asks the bartender, gasping for breath as he takes out an account book and pen.
‘Satan,’ says the man, knocking the ash off his cigarette as he grabs the pack of Princes and gets down off the bar stool.
‘Satan?’ says the bartender, looking up, but the man is halfway out the door.
Outside the bar is a little garden. The sky over the city is dark and the air is cool and bracing. Under a tree sits a black dog of doubtful parentage who looks at Satan with its brown eyes and wags its tail.
‘Come here, boy!’ says Satan, slapping his left leg, and the dog trots up to him.
Satan bends down, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and scratches the dog behind its ears, then they stroll together into the night.
XL
He’s standing on a curved balcony looking over a brightly lit assembly room the size of a ship’s hold. If this hall has a name it must be ‘The Golden Gallery’. The walls are covered with golden squares from floor to ceiling. In front of the squares are smaller squares and, between them, lights that flicker on the smooth gold like fire in a dream. From the ceiling hang cylindrical chandeliers the size of ships’ funnels, made up of crystal threads. The chandeliers are two-layered, the inner cylinders reaching below the outer ones. Inside them shines a light that refracts, creating thousands of lights that give the impression of stars in the sky or diamonds in water.
In the distance is the sound of old-fashioned jazz, though there is no band to be seen.
He walks down the broad, curved staircase to the assembly room. As he steps out on the polished wooden floor he sees a similar staircase on the port side. Above him is the balcony, but there’s no-one there now.
He walks through the middle of the room. There are formally decked tables to each side. First he passes tables set for two and four but then he comes to long tables for eight, sixteen and thirty-two. There are white tablecloths and heavy silver cutlery, linen napkins in silver napkin rings, handpainted porcelain dishes and cut-crystal glasses arranged on them.
Very good, he thinks, as though he is responsible for it all, that things are exactly as he requested, that nothing in the assembly room disappoints the guests or upsets them.
Off and on the room seems to fill with the sound of chatter, light laughter and the clink of glasses, then he turns around and looks at first one table then another. But the moment he looks over his shoulder the voices are silenced and the clinking of glasses dies out between the echoing walls.
Or was it the screech of metal and rattling of chains?
At the front of the assembly room is a cognac lounge. Heavy leather chairs around uncovered round tables of dark wood, a thick carpet on the floor and the aroma of cigar smoke, although no-one is smoking. Stoker walks up a broad staircase leading to a doorway with heavy wooden double doors opening into the bright room. He pulls a rusty key from the pocket of his tailcoat, sticks it in the lock and turns it counter-clockwise three times.
Beyond the door is another room: a vast, stinking space – dark, cold and empty. At first he can see nothing – it’s as if the bottomless dark absorbs all light – but little by little he sees a slow movement in the dark, as though a huge, formless fish were crawling ashore out of a black lake. A huge fish that makes a long, drawn-out, terrifying noise:
Slrrrrrghhhhh…
‘Master!’ says Stoker, as he bows low and opens the door wide.
About the Author
Stefán Máni grew up in Ólafsvík, a small village on the west coast of Iceland. He left school at an early age and became a fisherman, which meant a hard and often violent life at sea. Over time Stefán realised he wanted something else from life, especially as many of his friends ended up in prison – or worse. Sixteen years and several books later, he wrote Skipið, which won the 2007 Drop of Blood prize for best Icelandic crime novel. The Ship has been translated into many European languages and at last is now available in English. Stefán lives in Reykjavík.
Copyright
Published for the first time in the English language by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Australia Pty Limited, 2012
Murdoch Books Australia
Pier 8/9
23 Hickson Road
Millers Point NSW 2000
Phone: +61 (0) 2 8220 2000
Fax: +61 (0) 2 8220 2558
Copyright © Stefán Máni 2007
Title of the original Icelandic edition: Skipið
Published by agreement with Forlagið, www.forlagid.is.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: (ebook)
Author: Mani, Stefan.
Title: The ship [electronic resource] / Stefan Mani.
ISBN: 9781743438497 (ebook)
Subjects: Crime--Fiction.
Suspense fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.4
Cover design by Madacin Creative
Cover images by Malcolm Fife / © Alamy (ship); Kim Westerskov / © Getty Images (sea);
Maga / © Shutterstock (lightning)
Author picture courtesy of Jóhann Páll Valdimarsson