The Captain’s Uniform

by Eloise CC Shepherd

 Wolfgang Hasselmann

The Captain’s uniform is stained with coffee, or worse. It hangs on the back of the cabin door, empty and rigid. Heavy collars and cuffs. We don’t know where the Captain is. Not since we ran into trouble. The rumour is he undressed and, so unshelled, let himself fall over the side into the black rushing water.

I strip and pull on his uniform. It closes over my tattoos. I find we are the same size. Every button does up. Guilt is eating me up. Not for this, putting on his uniform, his responsibility. But from something terrible I’ve done that I can’t remember.

Outside the cabin, things are hazy. The ship is bare metal; my boots ring against it like bells. Some of the rooms are full of bodies half submerged. We go on, but the water is rising. We don’t have enough time. There is never enough time.

I know what we have to do now, what I have to do.

Some of the crew sit in the control room, no longer looking at panels or each other but down at their feet. None of them say anything to me; perhaps they notice that I’m wearing the Captain’s uniform. Some of them have families back home. They would be missed. They can get home. I can see a way, only it isn’t palatable.

“We need to be lighter.” I say, surprised at the sound of my own voice.

The first mate raises his blunt head to look at me. Two days of stubble. Sad eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but I know what he means. Already we have ripped out non-essential machines, most everything we can over the side.

“There is a way to be lighter,” I say, amazed at how a cold certain knowledge has awoken in me. I continue speaking.

“Souls don’t weigh the same. Some of the dead are light, pushing for heaven. If we get rid of those who aren’t, we’ll be buoyant enough to reach the rescue ship.”

“How would we know?” the first mate narrows his eyes.

“I know,” I say.

Reluctantly, they follow me. You always follow the stripes on shoulders.

It’s the easiest thing. I can’t see my own sin, but I can see the dead’s. I can see the light of good souls rising from dead flesh. Trapped in the ship they’ll carry us high enough not to drown.

On my instruction the crew pick up the bodies of the damned and throw them overboard like wet dolls. They were crew mates. We used to drink together, sleep on the same thin mattresses. Now they are lost and won’t rise. I can taste their sins. The wounds inflicted. The rapes. It’s bitter.

The first mate stalls over a man I barely knew. He touches his dead flesh with love. The eyes are already closed or he would close them. I don’t need to say anything though. He doesn’t get in the way.

Nearly a hundred we lose to the depths and now more of us can see the golden light reaching up from the corpses of the good, knocking against the flat metal ceiling. It will keep us afloat.

Now it’s a waiting game. The remaining crew retreat. The course is set, and they sit and watch our progress towards the point where our lifeboats can reach the rescue ship.

I return to the Captain’s cabin. An inch or so of dirty water swills around the floor. My boots are letting it in. The Captain kept a box of cigars in his locker. A carafe of port. I light a cigar, pour myself a glass. The cabin door is closed. I know. I know my fate. It’s too late to change the fact of that. All the things I’ve done that I can’t remember. I hold the smoke in my mouth and exhale. The little light from the flickering bulb above hits my wedding ring, and I keep smoking.

The hours pass. I don’t sleep. The port buzzes in my head, deadens limbs. I smoke more.

When he died, did he know, like I know, the weight of his own soul?

I walk back up to the control room. The rescue ship is visible now. Its lights flash with a vigour we’ve forgotten. I rouse the crew. Arrange them into lines by the lifeboats. Someone has to stay. To lower the boats safely down to the water. I knew that. I knew it would be me. The first mate starts to protest when he realises. I silence him with a look. Would he rather change places?

They board the boats quietly. I watch all three go down to the water, launch off safely towards the waiting rescue ship. Now it’s just me and the ghosts. I can almost hear them. They follow me around the ship but we can’t touch each other anymore.

In the control room I lay a new course, directly into an iceberg the size of a city. It is sharp. Blue-white in the black water. Unforgiving. I have perhaps half an hour. I could radio the rescue ship and they would talk to me. Their voices might be some relief. But I don’t try. It is too late for relief. It is too late sometimes.

The ghosts can feel now that something is coming. They swirl around me, brushing my face with their golden light.

I wish I could remember what it is that I did.

When we hit the iceberg, I hold on hard. The ship lurches. Anguished metallic groans. I’m thrown against the now vertical floor and slide down it. We rip apart, open to the sky, the white stars. And the ghosts rush out through the rip, like an intake of breath.

The ship crumples. Remembers what it weighs. Their souls are rising up. Mine plunges down into mile upon mile of ocean.

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Eloise CC Shepherd is a writer and poet, with a surprisingly successful sideline in boxing. Her work is featured in New Writing 13, Best Horror of 2018, and MIRonline. She is the co-founder of www.liminalresidency.co.uk, a writers’ retreat in unusual and abandoned spaces. Her website is http://www.eloiseccshepherd.co.uk