Crawford got to his feet and scooped up a couple of pounds of the stuff and swung the load toward the ship, but he nearly overbalanced and had to lean back quickly, and his shovelful of gravel slid off the blade and down into the dirty water between the boat and the ship’s hull. He felt he had done well to hang on to the shovel.
“Drunk, are you?” asked the man beside him. “Work below if you haven’t got sea legs.”
Stung that a landsman should say this to him, Crawford shook his head and dug the blade in again; he hefted a load of the gravel and then watched the way the man flung the stuff in through the porthole. A moment later it was his turn again, and he did it just the way the other man had, using the shovel blade against the rim of the porthole to catch himself before dumping the gravel inside, and then bracing it there again to push himself back upright afterward.
“That’s better,” the man allowed, and Crawford was embarrassed to realize that he was blushing at the praise.
After an hour his arms were aching with the effort, but it was only when his finger stump began to bleed that he thought he would have to stop. He was about to feign some kind of illness when a banging started up nearby and the men below stopped tossing the gravel up onto the stage.
The other ballast-heaver boat appeared from around the ship’s bow, and he could see that the noise was being made by two of the men in it clanging their shovels together overhead like actors portraying a fight with broadswords; and when he saw the men below him drop their own shovels and begin pulling baskets from under the gunwales he understood that this was the ballast-heavers’
customary supper ritual. He put down his shovel and let his arms hang limp at his sides, ignoring the blood that pattered regularly onto the wet boards of the stage.
His companion had jumped down into the boat and was scrambling to get at the baskets, but for a moment Crawford just watched, catching his breath and wondering if each workman had brought his own food or if this was some kind of common supper, provided by the contractor, that he might hope to get a bite or two of.
Just when he had decided to climb down and try for a bit of food, there was a yell of alarm from another ship, and when he looked up he saw a broad wooden pallet falling from a crane; it was tipping as it fell, and among the several tumbling crates that had been on it Crawford could see a man, his arms and legs waving uselessly as he dropped down through the misty air. From this vantage point it was difficult to guess whether he would hit the deck of the ship he had been helping to unload or splash safely into the water.
And, without thinking, Crawford turned and leaped across the gulf between the boat and the ship and caught the edge of the porthole; one kick and a convulsive jackknifing slither got him through it, and then he crossed his arms over his face an instant before he plowed headfirst into the heaped wet gravel and did an avalanching somersault down to the pebbled deck.
He sat up, cradling his bad hand and whimpering softly. The hold was dark, the only illumination being the beams of gray light slanting in through the dusty air from the portholes, but he could see that the deck was crisscrossed with knee-high partitions to divide it into low, square bins. He got up and walked to the farthest, darkest corner of the deck, being careful to step over the partitions and not kick them, and in the last bin he lay down, confident that he couldn’t be seen.
He hoped that the dock worker had hit the water.
For what seemed like an hour he waited, wondering if the ballast men would deduce where he had disappeared to, but eventually another shovelful of gravel came cascading in, and then another, and he knew that he was safe for now.
After a while he heard men come into the hold and begin shifting the piles, shovelling the gravel from one bin into another and arguing about whether one side had more weight fore or aft than it should, but they finished up and left without getting to the one he was hiding in. After that there was nothing to hear but the occasional faint thud of booted feet on some upper deck, and distant cries from out in the dock, and nothing to watch except the ponderously slow dimming of the light from the portholes.
He slept, and didn’t wake up until the ship was rocking in ocean swells, and moonlight rimmed the porthole edges and raised faint points of glitter on the higher gravel piles. The hold was chilly, and he wished he hadn’t lost the rest of his clothes. Despite the sea air, his head was filled with the smell of river-bottom rock.
Then he heard gravel shift, once, somewhere out across the deck, and he realized suddenly that it was the same noise that had awakened him.
A rat, he told himself nervously. Fattened on whatever cargo this ship carried to London, and now left with nothing to nibble on except gravel and my face. Better not sleep anymore. Too cold anyway—and getting colder by the moment.
The rattle came again, prolonged this time as though someone were letting the gravel run out from between cupped hands; then there was a noise like something heavy being dragged along. In the darkness the hold seemed vast, and the noise sounded far away, but he got an impression of terrible weight moving out there.
Crawford was suddenly much colder. Whatever that is, he thought, it isn’t a rat.
Dimly he could see that something had stood up in some farther region of the deck, something tall and broad. It wasn’t human.
Crawford stopped breathing, and even closed his eyes in case the thing could sense his gaze, and though he knew that even the most labored heartbeat can’t be heard at any distance, he was afraid that the shaking his own heart was giving him would knock him audibly against the partition of the bin.
But a moment later he was horrified to realize that a perverse impulse to make some noise was building in him; he managed, with some difficulty, to suppress it.
The thing was moving—walking, to judge by the regular, ponderous jars Crawford felt through the deck—and he opened his eyes in fear or even eagerness in case it might be coming toward him; but it was crossing to one of the portholes, and as it got closer to the moonlit circle he could see it more and more clearly.
Its torso seemed to be a huge bag at one moment and a boulder in the next, and the surface of it was all bumpy like chain mail; and when it had plodded its way on elephantine legs to the porthole, he could see that its head was just an angular lump with shadows that implied cheekbones and eye sockets and a slab of jaw.
Oddly, it seemed female to him.
It didn’t have arms to rest on the porthole rim, but Crawford sensed something weary about it—he got the impression that it had had no particular purpose in getting up … that it was just looking thoughtfully out at the sea as any sleepless voyager might.
For many long moments neither of them moved; Crawford lay stiff with something like terror, trying not even to tremble in the intense cold, and the thing by the porthole just stared out, though it didn’t seem to have eyes. Then finally it stepped back, grinding gravel to powder under its inconceivable feet, and it turned and faced Crawford across hundreds of feet of deck.
He was in total darkness, but he knew intuitively that the figure saw him, saw him by his body heat rather than by any light, and recognized him, knew him. Crawford wondered desperately how long he would be able to continue to keep from screaming—and again he almost wanted to scream, wanted it to come toward him.