Unspeakable (16 page)

His mouth dropped as he raised his eyebrows. “So you
felt
the
Storstad
hit?”

“Worse,” I said. “I saw it.”

1:55 A.M
.

I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG
our kiss lasted, minutes I suppose, but your whole life can change in an instant. Mine did. One second Jim and I were lost in each other, and the next we were caught in the white glare of the
Storstad
's masthead lights. It burst from the fog and barrelled toward us. There was no time for it to turn or reverse its engines. All it could do was shriek its horn as it rammed the
Empress
midship. I braced myself for the impact, sure it might throw us from where we stood farther up along the rail, but there was no bone-jarring collision, no screeching or horrendous crash, just the spark of metal on metal as it knifed her deep between her ribs.

“Christ Almighty!” Jim shouted and ran down the deck.

I caught up to where he stood near the middle of the ship and, gripping the rail, looked over it, horrified to see what should not be there. Another ship—jutting out of her side.

“It's in at least fourteen feet,” Jim said, panicking as he leaned over for a better look. “She's breached from Shelter Deck to well beneath the waterline. Maybe even down to her boilers.”

I held my breath. That had to be four or five decks down.

“Keep your engines ahead,” someone yelled from our wheelhouse on the deck above us. 'Twas basic first aid, really. The impaling ship itself might cork our hull, might staunch the wound it had just caused if its engines propelled it to keep the pressure. But even as the man's voice called, the
Storstad
twisted astern and with a groan of metal pulled free, disappearing back into the fog.

My pulse rushed in my ears, a gushing
shwoosh
making my head spin.

This can't be happening!

My vision tunnelled and the ground seemed to tilt beneath me, making me swoon.

Jim's hands were on my arms, shaking me as he yelled. The strength of his grip hurt but it dragged me back to reality. “—do you hear me, Ellie?”

I focused on his face, saw the urgency in his eyes. The panic. His fear sobered me, and I realized it wasn't my lifeblood I heard, but the gush of the St. Lawrence, gallons of it, surging through the hole, the
hole
in our ship.

He yelled it again. “You have to get to a lifeboat.”

“What?” A lifeboat? Surely it wasn't that bad.

“Listen to me!” He shook me again. “She's listing, Ellie. Even as we speak. Do you not feel her?”

I looked down at my feet, steady on the teak deck, and realized it wasn't the shock that left me unbalanced. Jim was right. The
Empress
had rolled slightly toward her injured right side. As she listed, more of the gash in her side slipped under the waterline, and more water thundered in.

“But—” How could this be happening? The hole was probably a dozen feet wide and who knew how deep, but there was no way it breached even three of the eleven compartments. Once the crew closed the watertight doors, we'd be fine. Wouldn't we? She'd been designed with that precaution. I looked back at Jim. “But you said she'd float even with two compartments flooded.”

“It's like the
Titanic
,” he said, his greatest fears realized.

“This is not the same, Jim,” I said reassuringly. He had to
be overreacting. “The iceberg punctured her many times, but there's only the one hole in the
Empress
.”

He turned and pointed the length of the ship, down the hundreds of portholes row upon row. A few shone like torchlights on the water but most were in darkness as over a thousand passengers slept within. True, portholes are watertight, even when submerged.
If
they are closed. I realized with horror—most were not. The night had been calm. We weren't even out on the open seas yet. Even I had left most portholes open for my passengers to get a bit of air.

The ship tilted a fraction lower and the dark water lapped the lowest row of portholes, drawing her down a little further as it burst through.

“Dear God, Jim.” I turned back to him, mirroring the terror in his face as the horrible truth rushed in. “Her hull—it's riddled with holes!”

The emergency horn gave a single blast, making us both jump.
All hands to the boats
. This was no drill. Jim looked over his shoulder as crew members, some half-dressed, burst from the doors and ran to their stations. Within seconds, two men had climbed in the lifeboat while the team swung the davits, the huge pair of cranes that suspended the lifeboat over the Boat Deck. Another four men gritted their teeth as they pushed the boat clear of the rail, where it hung over the dark water seventy feet below.

They'd done this drill hundreds of times, but never on a tilting ship, and even the slightest list had an enormous effect on the two-and-a-half-ton steel lifeboats. Though it looked as if the men might get three or four free, most of the other lifeboats sat jammed against their davits, and no matter how
the men had practised or how they scrambled and bellowed now, the fact of it was, those boats were stuck.

Jim looked over his shoulder and then back at me, torn. “Promise me, Ellie, promise me you'll get to a boat.”

“Come with me!” I gripped his dark coat, not wanting to let him go. A great trembling ran through me and wouldn't stop.

He took my hands and held them tight. He'd somehow calmed himself, even as the ship rolled another few degrees. As though he'd resigned himself to her fate.

Or his.

“Go now,” he pleaded. “Warn your passengers. And then get yourself to a boat. It's your only hope.”

“But—but what about you?”

He drew me in his arms and I felt safe. Stronger. “You are my hope … and I won't lose you, Ellie. I won't.” His mouth trembled as he said it, but his resolve was firm. Contagious. Even I believed him. He kissed me, hard. Then suddenly he was gone. Running for the stairs to the engine room, running toward the flooding hold of a sinking ship.

And I never saw him again.

Chapter Twenty

2:00 A.M
.

I WANTED TO RUN AFTER JIM
. My heart screamed to follow him, but my head overruled, mindful of the passengers, the families still abed, who had no idea of the danger they were in. Suddenly all those drills kicked in and I knew what I had to do.

I fled down the deck to the back stairs and down the alleyway, passing pyjama'd crew mustering to their tasks. A few passengers milled about the hallways; others poked their sleepy heads out their doors as Gaade's voice belted through the halls, “Please put on your life vest and proceed to the Boat Deck.”

“What did he say?” they murmured.

“Have we hit an iceberg?” someone asked.

“Where are life vests?”

“Boat Deck, good heavens … which way is that?”

Their voices grew in panic. At two in the morning, on the
first night of the voyage aboard a ship they didn't yet know, it was no surprise the passengers were so disoriented. A few frantic women clung to Gaade's arms, begging to be helped.

“No one will be saved,” he said, pulling himself free, “unless you give us a chance to get on deck and get the boats out.” His abruptness said it all. Things were bad, very bad.

“Hurry.” I reached the first of my passengers' cabins and pulled the life vests from the cupboards. “Put these on and get up on deck.”

They stared at me, bewildered, as though I'd been into the barman's booze. But they felt the list. They'd only to stand up out of bed to realize something had gone terribly wrong. The floor was slanted enough to send furniture sliding, spilling cups and perfume bottles from the shelves. They staggered about in the small rooms, trying to find their balance as they pulled on coats and shoes and dithered with the long strings of their white cork vests.

“Just go!” I shoved them out the door. A buttoned coat and knotted vest would do them no good if they never made it on deck. The ship listed further to the right, and by the time I'd reached the Hanagans' room, water exploded through the portholes like a full-on firehose, its foot-wide stream blasting through the small cabins and into the hallways. Passengers screamed as they burst from their cabins, sodden from where they'd been doused in their beds, woken from their dreams to this nightmare. The frigid water gushed up my calves; already my feet were numb. If the water had reached these portholes, what about those hundreds of poor souls in the many decks below—in third class? In the engine room?

The Hanagan family joined the throng of panicked people filling the tilting alleyway, desperately pulling themselves along by the handrail, pushing and shoving their way to the staircase that went up to a landing before fanning left and right. Or at this point, up to open air or down into the water. The pitch of the ship had sloped the stairs so much that the passengers had to crawl up them on their hands and knees, and even with several young Salvationist men lifting and pulling people up the incline, I realized that most people would not make it in time.

“Ellie, where's Meg?” Kate called to me from the crowd, her face as white as her nightdress, hair still in rags. She held a screaming toddler in one arm and his hysterical mother in the other.

I glanced around the panicked mob. She would have done her duty to her passengers, and then … I knew. I knew exactly where she'd gone.

I shoved through the surging crowd, trudging in the water rushing against my knees. Finally saw them both working on the watertight door, Timothy pushing on one side of the T-crank as Meg pulled on the other. They'd managed to jam the crank in the hole in the floor beneath them, but even with both of them trying, it was not moving. Neither was the watertight door in the deck below.

“Leave it!” I yelled, pulling Meg back. Like me, she'd thrown her coat over her nightdress. Timothy's hung from the bulkhead. And we hadn't a life vest between the three of us. In her nightie with her hair matted about her shoulders and stuck to her sweating forehead, she looked like a child after having a nightmare. I suppose we all did, really. It was
a nightmare—and, truth be told, we were too young for this. Too young to be responsible for the lives of so many.

“But we have to close it!” Timothy said through gritted teeth as he took both sides of the T and cranked again, veins bulging blue on his red forehead. He'd prided himself on the fact that he'd been assigned Door 86—one crucial to the safety of the ship—bragged that he could close it in under three minutes in every drill. And he had. But that was under perfect conditions. And these were anything but perfect.

The lights flickered and the ship rolled a little more. She was easily at a fifty-degree angle and falling faster. Freezing water rushed around our thighs, rising quickly. Time was running out.

“It's too late, Timothy,” I said, gripping his trembling arm. Jim had told me all about the watertight doors in one of his life-saving-equipment rants. “The door closes toward the
centre
of the ship. At this angle, that's practically upwards. It's solid steel, you'll not move it.”

The truth of it weighed on his shoulders. He'd failed. Failed them all. All the souls in the decks below whose very lives depended on that door closing.

“It all happened so—so fast,” he mumbled.

“I doubt any of the lads got theirs closed either,” I said. Small comfort, really. But at least it was a burden shared.

“Come on,” Meg urged, shoving his coat at him and grabbing his free hand. She wasn't giving up on him, even if he had. “We have to get out of here.” Turning, she pulled him back toward the crowded stairs and I followed behind. Hands clasped, they stumbled numb-legged down the hall toward the terrified mob surging and falling at the bottom of the
stairwell, each desperate soul grasping at that last glimmer of hope.

I still see them all crammed in the tilted alleyway, their wet nightclothes sticking to their thighs, the sodden tails of her woollen coat dragging in their wake, people screaming and crying as they scrambled frantically for an exit that had tilted out of reach. The lights flared for a moment like a photographer's flash, burning the image forever in my mind.