He tried bristling for a moment longer, shoulders high and eyebrows low, but the effect was too conscious now, and he abandoned it. I slunk down on to the bottom bunk. My nails were shellacked to a fascinating firmness. My back ached, my uniform belt was tight, and as I pressed my hands against my spine, a thought struck me. “Am I…” I blurted. Coyle stared at me, one eyebrow raised. I ran my hands carefully across my midriff, pressing deep into my soft skin, feeling for something beneath the warmth. “I think I’m pregnant.”
The train rattled, and no one spoke. Then the tiniest shiver passed down Coyle’s spine, his shoulders jerked and he gave a single, high hoot of merriment.
“Bloody hell,” I groaned.
Coyle’s laughter subsided as quickly as it had come. Outside, fields of freshly turned earth stretched away to the flat horizon. A full moon sat in a cloudless sky, promising icy winds and frozen soil come morning. I pressed my hands against my belly and felt something turn which wasn’t my stomach. “This is… peculiar,” I said.
“You’re not enamoured of the joy of childbirth?” asked Coyle. “I thought you would have given it a go, just for the experience.”
I scowled. “During times of stress I have been known to make… unexpected jumps. And while I’m sure giving birth is a wonderfully life-enhancing experience, if it comes with the associated baggage of planning, expectation and the optimism of another eighteen years of happy nurturing by the family fireside, when there’s a fifty/fifty chance that you might mid-convulsion find yourself a mewling infant still attached by an umbilical cord to a shrieking and confused woman, I’m sure you can see why the exercise might lose some of its appeal.”
An idea dawned on Coyle’s face. “You could… ghost into a foetus?”
“What a truly ghastly idea.”
“You’ve never tried.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Never been tempted?”
“Not in the least. I have no delusions about the joy of physicality. Having inhabited almost every size, shape and form of body you can possibly imagine, the only conclusions are these: exercise when you’re still young enough to appreciate it, look after your spine, and if you have the option, use an electric toothbrush.”
“Decades of stealing bodies and that’s your big conclusion?”
“Yep.”
“How long have you been a ghost?”
I glanced up and saw his eyes bright upon me. “Wouldn’t you love to know. How’d you get that scar across your stomach, Mr Coyle?”
“You know it’s not my name.”
“Curiously enough, that doesn’t bother me. A few hundred years.” His eyes flickered, and I leaned forward, one hand pressed instinctively over my belly. “A few hundred years,” I repeated, soft against the bouncing of the train. “I was murdered on the streets of London. My brains were bashed in. As I lay there, I caught the ankle of my killer. I hated him, feared him, dreaded him for killing me, and was so frightened of dying alone, I needed him, longed for him to stay with me. Next thing I knew, I was staring at my own corpse. I was arrested for it, an irony which has never entertained. Not a glamorous beginning, truth be told, but it seems the urge to live outweighs all other instincts.”
“Who were you when you died?”
“I was…” the words drifted somewhere at the back of my throat “… no one of significance. What about you, Mr Coyle? How’d you get that scar?”
Silence.
“Galileo,” he said and stopped.
I waited.
“Galileo,” he tried again. “Stuck a knife in me.”
“A ghost?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d he stab you?”
“I was the last one left standing.”
“Where?”
“Santa Rosa.”
“You said these things before.”
A small shake of his head, a smile. He can’t believe what he’s saying. Now would not be the time to question the notion.
“There’s… a rumour,” he murmured. “A myth. Over time the story has outgrown the seeds that sowed it. Yet for all that, there is some truth in it. A ferry ride, a few hours, across the Straits of Malacca, perhaps through the Baltic Sea. The engine stops, and as the passengers and crew wait for rescue, a body is found. The body is… someone, doesn’t matter. Throat cut, blood on the deck and everyone panics until someone points out that the killer cannot have escaped being seen, must have been caught on camera, drenched in blood. They look. They find the murderer, who sits huddled in a toilet, shaking with fear, blood on his, her–whoever’s–face, on their hands, their clothes. We have the killer, they say. As soon as the engines are fixed we shall take this murderer to the police on shore.
“Then another body is found, intestines pulled out, eyes popping up at nothing, tongue lolling in a vacant mouth, and everyone goes, it is not the killer we have caught, or perhaps who we’ve caught is working with someone else, and the panic spreads, and this ferry has too few staff to too many passengers, no hope of order, so the captain orders all passengers to a muster point. Everyone stay in one place, he says, no one move, and we shall be safe. Safety in numbers. It is a comforting thought until the first mate sees that at the muster point on the first-class deck the passengers are all dead. Some have blood on their hands, some on their faces; some tried to bite the ears off their neighbours; some ran; some fled, but one remains, standing, grinning at the camera, before he too waves goodbye and is, within a few minutes, himself found dead.
“In the three hours it takes the coastguard to board the ferry and fix the engines, seventeen people are dead, five are in a critical condition. And when the forensic police examine the corpses, they find that each body carries the stamp of someone else’s DNA, as though for every victim there was a different murderer, a different set of fingerprints on the blade. Do you know this story?” he asked, gaze returning from a distant place.
“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”
“Do you know the names? Of the ships, of the dead?”
“Some,” I replied. “There was a frigate in 1899 off the coast of Hong Kong. A cruiser in 1924. A ferry in 1957, though that was never confirmed–someone opened the cargo bay doors and the living went down with the dead. Something similar happened in 1971: twenty-three dead, the authorities claimed pirate attack. A yacht in 1983 off the coast of Scotland. Two people died on board, a small body count by his standards, but still him. We all know the rumours.”
He nodded at nothing at all. “Santa Rosa,” he breathed. “October 1999.”
“You were there?” I asked.
“Yes. I killed a man. I don’t remember doing it, but I opened my eyes and there was blood on my hands, and a man with a hollow of blood filling the indent beneath his throat. He was alive, but when he breathed, bubbles popped, and then he wasn’t alive, and I was holding the knife and a woman stood in front of me and watched me watch him die. She took the blade from my fingers–it was a kitchen knife from the canteen–and put one hand on my shoulder like a mother and stuck the blade in me, rocked it around, smiled and didn’t say a word. They classed me with the dead until the pathologist called out that I had a pulse. Then they called me murderer. Which, in a way, I was.”
“Galileo?”
He nodded, though barely at me or the word I spoke.
“You should have said,” I breathed. “I could have helped.”
“Helped?” The word choked out, almost a laugh. “You’re a fucking ghost. What good are you to anyone?”
“Might’ve been some. I’ve met your Galileo.”
Now his head turned, eyes striking like an axe on ice. “Where?”
“St Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Miami. Not since Miami.”
“You’re sure?”