The body lay now at the edge of the lift, an arm hanging over. Once again, he viciously kicked McAffey’s dehydrated form, until the body rolled off the platform altogether. He heard the nasty thump of the other man’s body hit the stones lining the shaft as McAffey returned to the mine shaft below to spend eternity there for all O’Toole ucared now. “With god and the beast now,” he said, for a moment sounding like his old self. But only for a moment.
“Off with ya, now,” he said to the darkness below where the body had fallen. “No time for ya have I.” Then he haltingly chanted in what seemed another voice: “Out I must get… out… g-get out… got to get out…”
Before he could analyze these uneasy feelings, the lift finally came to ground level, and he stumbled onto earth as if finding his sea legs, appearing a disheveled drunk in a gait that did not seem his, and yet these were his feet.
He stumbled and fell, gasping for all the air he could place in his lungs, choking as he did so. Whatever this was, a voice inside his head was now telling him to go forth toward the city piers and the shipyards. This hypnotic suggestion felt so strong; he could not fight it. At the same time, he wondered, “W-Where’s me-me own will got off to?”
It was late, no one around, and no one to ask help of. He knew he’d live; something told him so, but he had an inkling it would prove to be a short-lived future at best. Knew in his heart and mind that whatever had destroyed Tim was soon to overtake him, but he didn’t wish to die in a hole in the ground. He wanted to die among men here at the surface, yet he feared infecting others at the same time that this overwhelming need arose in him—to die among men, in a crowd, the first men he came to. It might be his last wish, his final desire, but he could not fathom why he’d not rather die among family than strangers but there it was—an insistence to go nowhere near anyone he loved yet to seek out human contact.
It was a powerful suggestion, one that must be obeyed, one he could not combat no matter how much he longed to see home, hearth, the wife.
He knew the nearest fellows to the mine were men working at the shipyards. He knew that his feet—the same as had kicked McAffey back into the mine shaft, now moved toward the distant lights of the shipyard at Belfast as if made of wood on the one hand, and as if they had a mind of their own, these extremities, and were guided by a hand other than his own.
“Company of others… don’t want being alone… time like this.” He heard himself saying now as he ambled in mechanical fashion toward where they had labored for so long now building Titanic and her sister ships via the iron ore provided by the mine.
Francis had forgotten McAffey’s name now; could not dredge it up. Then he realized he’d forgotten his own name as well. He wondered if he might live at least long enough to take in the air of the world outside the mine in the company of other fellows, perhaps raise a pint to his lips, smoke a cigar before his mind should completely go—but what else did it all mean? A man spending a lifetime, learning, filling his mind and for what? So it ends a blank slate? Why? How? What was at root of living and dying?
“Some seed in that damned, cursed prehistoric dog carcass,” he muttered to himself, feeling an overwhelming urge to live, and to do so among other men—other men who would allow life to continue—yet a life he did not recognize. All he knew was that he must survive long enough to get to others of his kind. In fact, it replaced the one mantra in his head—to get out and to get air—with another that pleaded for other warm bodies.
Some time later, O’Toole stumbled into the sprawling Belfast shipyard looking like a drunk at the midnight hour. He passed below the huge gantry, a part of his brain unsure in the dim light how he’d gotten here, how he’d come so far, how he remained alive when that other fellow… a man with whom he’d been… someone he’d known but could not so much as picture in his mind now… how that other fellow had died so quickly and violently. That much he remembered.
He felt not at all in control of his limbs, felt no control of his will, yet he was alive, despite the horrible belief that some kind of dreaded disease had grabbed hold of him and would never release its grip. It seemed madness to contemplate, but it felt as if the thing that’d taken hold had somehow transferred itself from this other fellow’s corpse—to him. And there had been this curious creature he’d carelessly handled. It may well’ve come from that ancient creature.
Whatever it was, it hadn’t killed him as it had the other miner. Instead, it was intentionally stretching out its time with O’Toole—using him up in a more controlled fashion as if it could… as if it could manage to control its feeding within.
While it had so quickly and voraciously fed on the other man, it had now ushered in a powerful self-control. Whatever it might be called otherwise, this thing was sentient.
It directed him deeper into the shipyard; it seemed to want to get as far from its former prison as possible. To that end, it wanted O’Toole aboard the ship just built, a ship that was made from ore taken from the mine that it had snuggled alongside for how long—as if it had an affinity for the iron walls.
Or perhaps it realized that Titanic could act as its perfect lair.
While his conscious mind had no true evidence of any of it, his every remaining human instinct said it was so.
In any case, O’Toole had no choice but to carry out its wishes.
By now realizing himself to be just a conduit, a vehicle to move it from the mine to here, O’Toole thought of killing himself, but he had no ready method of doing so save leaping into the water as he could not swim. He made a move in that direction but was turned about. While his mind still fought for itself, his body was no longer his. He guessed that he’d debated over suicide too long, and it knew his thoughts, and as a result, it was ahead of him on this.
Francis moved now below the giant letters a hundred feet overhead and twenty feet apart. Letters that read: TITANIC.
TWO
The Pier at Woods Hole Institute, Massachusetts, April 11, 2012
The screeching pelicans and seagulls overhead seemed quite out of their minds with the unusually early morning activity surrounding the bizarre-looking research vessel in its slip at the harbor. Human activity. Human excitement. It must mean food scraps for them. What else might it portend, wondered David Robert Ingles, feeling a bit like Ishmael of Moby Dick fame, readying for the voyage with the mad Ahab—in this case Captain and Doctor of Oceanography, Juris Forbes, a man obsessed with Titanic, but then who wasn’t?
The research vessel, Scorpio IV—four times the size of anything else docked here in Woods Hole—was jam packed with superstructure that supported two enormous cranes, affording sea birds all manner of handy perches; in fact, the birds patiently awaited any opportunity for scraps and fish heads to eat. However, the primary purpose of the two super cranes was hardly for the birds, but rather for lifting tons of weight from the depths of the ocean and positioning heavy objects weighing tons onto Scorpio’s deck. In a matter of weeks, the computer operated, hydraulic cranes would be hauling up treasures plucked from the mysterious interiors of the one-hundred-year-old shipwreck named Titanic. The treasures would be placed in sealed vaults to protect them from the change in pressure from the deep to the surface.