The Ecliptic (44 page)

The cover of #1 showed the character in half-light, dangling from a gantry. He was hanging over a vast metallic chasm by the fingers of one hand and it seemed certain he would drop. I was
transfixed by the determination in his face, the glint of vengeance in his eyes. I felt just like him: about to plunge into a world of the boy’s making. And I did—I fell. I devoured the
whole issue and the next.

AT COORDINATES UNKNOWN
. . .
(They all seemed to open with these words, top left). Inside the dank and rusted chamber of what appears to be a
ship, a young man is slumped, unconscious, shackled by the wrists to a steel pillar. A voice fizzes out from a loudspeaker above his head (in spiky word balloons):
Passenger announcement!
Children on B Deck must be accompanied by their guardians at all times.
His eyes slowly creak open, and he seems woozy and disoriented.
Repeat: all children on B Deck must be
accompanied—
He feels a sudden pain in his mouth. A tiny key is lodged underneath his tongue and he spits it out into his hand, unlocks the cuffs. His wrists are chafed and raw.

The angle widens. He is alone and naked in a room containing two generators, oxidised and derelict. There is a smoky auburn light, a metal locker, and a steel hatchway with a reinforced door. He
goes to the locker and removes a leather suitcase containing personal effects: a Bible, a hipflask, a Bowie knife, a wristwatch. Hanging in the locker is a set of blue overalls, streaked with oil.
The name-badge on the breast says:
IRFAN TOL, 4TH ENGINEER
, and stencilled on the back in white is the phrase:
DV-ECLIPTIC
.

Cut to a dark corridor. The man finds his way into a cargo hold where hundreds of giant wooden crates are stacked. He crowbars the lids from three of them, discovering a hoard of taxidermy,
furniture, paintings, boxes of cigarettes (he pockets several packs) and tins of crabmeat (he stabs one open and drains the juice). The announcements continue on the loudspeakers:
This is a
notice for all passengers in first-class. The totaliser on the ship’s run will be announced at 11.00 hours on the Promenade Deck Square. The totaliser will be announced at 11.00 hours on the
Promenade Deck Square. Thank you.
But his watch says it is 3.15 already—a.m. or p.m.? He is not sure.

The man believes he is alone (he says so aloud, in a word balloon). There is no daylight, just flickering bulbs (a greenish hue to the panels throughout this section) and he climbs the crates to
get a view of what is below him, reaching a gantry. His thoughts are shown to us in slanting words: he thinks the ship is moving, but he cannot hear the engines (his words:
the
powertrain
). There are no doors. The space below is dark. The walls are gently leaking. He slips and, dangling from the railing of the gantry (reprise of the cover image here), notices
something: a sway of shadows in the hold below. Dropping down onto a crate and leaping to another, he follows the shadow, but it recoils. He loses it.

Descending to the floor, he side-steps between a maze of crates. At the far end of the hold, there is a line of candelabras, coiled with Christmas lights, that leads into a sort of glade amongst
the cargo. He is surprised to find an old woman sitting in an armchair, playing chess with nobody. She holds a finger to her lips and shushes him, moves her queen upon the board. The Christmas
lights are wired up to a cable conduit on the wall behind her.

The woman has made quite a life for herself in the cargo hold, living off the salvage. She is adorned in a fur coat with a collar of mink-heads, and wears so much jewellery that she gives the
impression of a Pharaoh on a throne. ‘I knew somebody would come for me,’ she says. ‘I knew it would happen eventually.’ And she offers the man a cup of vinegar. He raises
his hipflask and she says, ‘Oh, even better.’ But, as he leans down to pour the liquor into her cup, she points a pistol at him. ‘I’m not going to let you take me,’
she says. ‘I have it too good here.’ There is a tussle—the man lunges forwards; she shoots and misses; he overpowers her. And now holding the pistol at the woman, he forces her
back against a crate. All he wants to know, he says, is where he is, and how to get out.

And so she explains it all to him (in that way that villains do in films, always wanting to reveal the lengths of their true evil). ‘This,’ she tells him, ‘is what they call a
dead vessel. You’re on a ship that’s been retired from navigation, sonny. Listen—’ She points to the air. ‘No engine noise. But what’s funny about that is you
can feel it moving, can’t you? And you’d be right, because we are. We’re going somewhere all right. So if you want to know where in the world the two of us are standing at this
moment, my answer is: anywhere, everywhere. Who the hell can say? You’re on the
Ecliptic
and there’s no way off it, not that I’ve ever found. So I’d get used to
this place, shipmate, if I were you—’ (squinting) ‘—Irfan.’

‘That’s not my name,’ he says.

‘Your badge says otherwise.’

‘Irfan Tol is not my name.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Because I feel it in here.’ (Tapping his heart.)

He insists that there has to be a way to escape the ship. The woman tells him that the furthest she has ever reached is F Deck, and she has no intention of ever going back there.
‘I’m richer here than I ever was on land,’ she says. ‘Look at this garb. It’s best Russian mink.’ The air between decks, she warns, is poisonous and cannot be
breathed. ‘But I can show you a good way to get to F Deck, if you’ll put the gun down.’ In a trunk, she has some breathing apparatus: a deep-sea diving mask attached to an oxygen
tank, marked:
ST ANA
’
S HOSPITAL
. She leads him to a hatchway, sealed with candlewax. He thanks her, gives her back the pistol. ‘Oh, I
think you’re going to need that more than I will,’ she says. ‘Godspeed to you. But don’t ever come back here.’ She lets him go and shuts the door behind him.

The hatchway opens to a narrow metal stairwell. The climb is sheer and he withers after the first flight, slouching, crumpling. There are more steps than he has ever seen (this thought shown in
bold for emphasis). He breaks through the F Deck hatch and collapses, hitting his head. The loudspeaker again:
Notice for stewards in cabin class: the purser’s office is now closed. Thank
you.

AT COORDINATES UNKNOWN
. . .
A leap ahead in the narrative. Irfan Tol, fourth engineer, is still in his overalls. He is straddling the
steel-mesh walls of a baggage lift. He cannot put his feet down because there is no floor beneath him—it appears to have eroded and there is nothing but a very deep shaft underneath. The lift
is going nowhere. His face is knotted and tense. He scrambles to the other side, falling into a room crammed with suitcases (replicas of the one he found in the first issue). Hurriedly, he empties
them, gathering provisions: a first aid kit, a torch, a carpetbag, a tape recorder, a bottle of gin. He encounters a trunk with a military emblem, tries to open it with a little key (from Issue 1?)
and it comes loose. Inside: sticks of dynamite, a gas mask, and a thermos flask. He opens it and dry ice steams out.
Goddamn.
Everything is stowed inside the holdall, and he keeps on
going, through the next hatch. Now where is he? Behind a pane of window glass, looking down upon a swimming pool. The water is stagnant and brown. He sniffs, getting an acrid stench, so puts the
gas mask on.

Coming down the steps, he treads carefully on the poolside. Flies buzz all around him. The tiles are dabbed with animal excrement. He sees a bootprint in it—not his own—and feels a
presence near by. (In slanted letters:
Something’s here . . .
and then a full page of wide panels showing various aspects of the room, but no people.) Crouching by the diving board,
he spots a shape quivering at the bottom of the pool. The water is too rotten to see through (shown as though from the gaze of his steamed-up gas mask). Excrement floats on the surface. Getting up
from his haunches, he is startled.
What the—?
Alsatian dogs are running for him in a pack. He cannot move quickly enough, and they send him toppling into the filthy dark pool with a
splash!
that takes up half a page.

(Dark brown colouring to the panels in this section.) Irfan Tol is underwater, gas mask on, carpetbag strapped to him, almost like a parachute. Bubbles rushing upwards. And the deeper he
plunges, the more is revealed of what is resting at the bottom of the pool: a junkheap of motorbikes. He notices a child playing amongst the engine parts. A young girl wearing goggles. But, as his
buoyancy lifts him back to the surface, he loses her. (Brighter panels here.) The dogs are baying on the poolside. He is gasping for air. Something pulls him under. He is dragged beneath the water
again: a slender hand upon his ankle. And down he goes, clambering, towards the rusty motorbikes. He sees the girl’s pale face is staring up at him. She is breathing through a snorkel. Her
hair is in a very long braid that whips up from her back. And she pulls him further and further, down past the wheels and handlebars. There is a kind of submarine hatch on the pool-bed. She turns
the lever, opens it, and they squirm through. They drop into a dim metal chamber, filling with grungy water. She asks for his help to shut the hatch and they put their shoulders into it. The water
stops gushing. They stand there, drenched. He tears off his gas mask. ‘Where are we?’ he asks her. ‘Sewage tanks,’ she says.
H Deck
, he thinks.
Going
backwards.

I could glean some of the rest of Irfan’s story from the scraps of comics that were left. But there were few complete pages to reckon by. In these later issues, the panels
were laid out in more inventive ways: oblique shapes that intercut at curious angles, text and word balloons that branched out from the frames of drawings and encroached on those adjacent. The
covers hinted at Irfan’s ascent up the decks of the dead vessel, and some of the torn images revealed more serene environments than previously encountered: a gymnasium with stewards lifting
dumb-bells, a cocktail bar serving dry ice in champagne flutes, and a cinema playing what looked like
Gone With the Wind
or a pastiche of it. It was the most dissatisfying feeling: to have
only a quarter of a story, and no way to ever find out the ending.

I reassembled as much of #5 as I could. Its cover showed Irfan Tol armed with fizzling dynamite and a harpoon. There was desperation in his eyes and obvious pain. The title was drawn to look
burned onto the tarnished innards of the ship where Irfan was leaning. Again, the author’s name was cut away, as it was from every other issue I had found. I studied the inside page, reading
through the credits. Story:
name redacted
. Art:
redacted
. Lettering:
redacted
. Colours:
redacted
. The publisher’s information was scratched right off. Except, there was something in the small print there, at the foot of the page, that was not quite scrubbed
clean. It was faded, and difficult to make out with the naked eye. I had no magnifying glass, so I took my glass muller and held it up against the print like a lens. The words bleared and then
sharpened, amplified:

In the mess hall, Nazar was sitting patiently beside Quickman’s feet. He had saved her a few strips of
sucuk
and a small mound of scrambled eggs and was decanting
everything into a napkin. We were not supposed to feed the dog—it was one of the unspoken tenets that we knew the provost took seriously—and so, when I came to the table, Quickman
flinched at the sound of my footsteps, hiding the bundle of food on his lap. ‘Oh,’ he said, seeing it was me. ‘You frightened me half to death.’ He brought the napkin out
and added a few walnuts from Mac’s bowl. ‘I know the rules, but sod them—it makes me feel better.’