The water was up to Harley’s thighs, and he was beginning to freeze. The lights flickered, but they stayed on. Inside the box he saw what looked like a mummy — a petrified face, all teeth and hair, grimacing with empty eye sockets, the hands folded to touch its own shoulders. Still, it was recognizably the corpse of a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and dressed in what looked like the frozen remains of a woolen tunic, with a rounded, Cossack-style collar, and black sealskin coat. But around the young man’s neck he saw what he had come for. It was one of those old Russian crosses, the ones with three sideways beams of different lengths, but embedded in it there were several old stones, glinting green in the dim light. He tried to pull it loose, but it was still on its chain. Much as he loathed the idea, there was nothing to do but reach down and lift the corpse’s head. Touching it felt like touching a bag of old shells and crumpled paper; the skin rustled and the skull weighed on his hand like an empty, fragile egg.
But the cross still wouldn’t come loose.
The chain was entangled in the boy’s long brown hair, and it was only after he had yanked at it several times, hard enough that the head was nearly severed from the spine, that it came up and over the crown.
He stuffed it deep into the inner compartment of his anorak, then zipped the pocket firmly closed. A couple of crabs had already clambered over the end of the coffin and spilled onto the corpse. Their claws were shredding the remains of the fabric and probing the hard flesh. One was worrying a toe and would have it loose in no time.
Let ’em have it, Harley thought, and the sooner the better. The water was still rising. It was up to his waist now, and the ship was so canted over that he could barely keep his balance as he reached for the stair railing. He hauled himself up, hand over hand, as the water surged behind him, and as something — hard and persistent — batted at his calves. Glancing back, he saw that the coffin lid, carved with the saint or angel or whatever it was, was floating up the stairs with him, like a faithful hound nipping at his heels.
On deck, everything was chaos. The howling wind was ripping at the lines and the pots, and the lifeboat had already been launched. Fuck you, too, Harley thought, looks like it’s every man for himself tonight. He wondered who had made it on board and who hadn’t. A flare went up from the water, and in its dead-white glow he saw the lifeboat, cradled between two mighty waves off the starboard side. The deckhands were trying to put some distance between themselves and the Neptune, lest they be sucked under when it sank. Harley thought he could make out Farrell at the tiller and Lucas clinging to the oarlocks, but over the wind blasting in his ears he heard a voice — Richter’s — shouting from somewhere down the deck.
The Old Man, in an orange life vest, was clinging to the mast.
Harley couldn’t hear a word he was saying — what could it matter? — but he saw him lift one arm and point out to sea, toward the looming black mass of St. Peter’s Island. It was big as a mountain now, and through the spray and the waves Harley could see the jutting rocks sticking up like spikes and barricades all around its shoreline.
Another flare rocketed into the sky, this one leaving a phosphorescent green trail, and in its light Harley saw the lifeboat spinning around and around in a whirlpool, before it suddenly broke free and was dashed against the rocks. The crew spilled out like jelly beans from a jar, and the splintered timbers of the boat flew in every direction. Before the green light had dissipated, Harley saw the bobbing vests of his deckhands caught in the eddies and the swirls, each one of them being sucked under and lost beneath the angry black tide.
As he looked up at the wheelhouse, a blue computer screen came crashing through a window, and the lights went black. The deck lurched under his feet, and he was sent sprawling into the crab pots. The cages were still full; when the boat went down with the cages still sealed, the captured crabs would have to eat each other until they died.
Harley’s mind was racing, wondering whether to stick with the wreckage of the boat or try making it to the crew cabin to retrieve a raft, when a wave crashed over the bulwarks on the port side and carried him, head over heels, into the ocean. He plunged in an instant into the icy water, the breath nearly knocked from his lungs, the salt stinging his blinded eyes. He was struggling to regain the surface, but the water was churning so hard, he couldn’t tell which way was up. He tried to stay calm enough to let the oxygen in his chest, and the air in his life vest, right him and send him upward again, but it didn’t seem to be working. He panicked and kicked out, pumping his arms. He collided with something, a rocky outcropping, and used it to push himself away. Gasping, he broke the surface of the water, and reaching out in the darkness, clutched something floating nearby. It was wood, and as he grappled it more tightly in his arms, he could feel its rough carvings. And he knew it was the coffin lid.
He managed to pull himself halfway on top of it, then wrapped his arms around its sides. The waves lifted him up and threw him down, over and over again, eventually pushing him through a narrow passageway between the jagged rocks, with the sea boiling all around him. He could barely see where he was going, and his arms were so numb he wondered how much longer he could hang on. But when he felt his knees scraping on the rocks and shells of the shoreline, he somehow managed to stagger to his feet, then struggle through the pounding surf until he reached the beach. There, he collapsed in a shivering heap, with the cross, still lodged in his pocket, poking him in the ribs.
The coffin lid, gleaming in the moonlight, skimmed to a stop on the pebbles and sand.
How long he lay there he didn’t know. Cold and hard as the ground was, it felt like a warm blanket compared to the icy sea. He took deep breaths, coughing out the salt water and the gravel that now clung to his lips, but he knew that if he lay there much longer, he’d die of exposure. Rolling onto his back, he gazed up at the night sky, where even behind the banks of angry, scudding clouds, he could see the dazzling pinpricks of the distant stars. Shaking himself from head to foot like a dog throwing off water, he sat up and stared out at the sea. There was no sign of the Neptune II, or any of the other crewmen. Even their flares had long since disappeared from the sky. Harley prayed that the Coast Guard was on its way.
Fumbling at the straps of the life vest, he yanked its straps off, then groped for the flare he’d stuck in its pocket. He didn’t want to use it too soon, but he didn’t know how long he could survive in the state he was in, either. He searched the length of the beach for any kind of shelter, but there was nothing. Not even a rock large enough to huddle behind.
The only alternative was to scale the cliff somehow, and that would have been impossible even in broad daylight, with all the proper ropes and gear. Harley had always harbored nothing but scorn for climbers. It was bad enough to risk your ass crabbing, but at least there was money in it. Why do it for the glory of getting to the top of a pile of rocks?
The wind tore at the sleeves of his anorak, and the ocean spray forced him to shield his eyes and squint. He strained to hear anything besides the roaring of the wind, to see any sign of rescue.
But there was nothing. He was going to freeze to death on this island — all those fucking legends were true, and he was going to wind up as one more of the miserable souls that haunted the place — and to make it even worse, he was going to die with the first piece of good luck he’d had in ages jammed into the pocket of his anorak. He could feel the Russian cross, with the emeralds embedded in it, prodding his ribs.