Night Gallery 1 Read Free Page B

dishes or glassware. No squeak of a ship's lamp as it undulated slowly in the ocean's swell. There was absolutely no sound.
    And then the survivor's voice continued. "The ship's band was playing. Some kind of hymn. And there was this . . . this great wailing cry. I could look up at the deck and see faces along the rail. Hundreds of faces. Then there was this explosion. She was going down by the bow, and everything inside that ship was moving. Pianos, furniture, deck chairs—everything . . . all crashing down into the bow. And then there was this . . . this cry . Then one by one the funnels disappeared . . . and then the ship. Then there was nothing but bodies floating. Stars . . . dead calm . . . and bodies."
    The ship's doctor felt mesmerized.
    The voice of the survivor continued in a dead monotone. The night light swayed back and forth from the ceiling.
    "An illusion," the ship's doctor finally managed to say. "Understand? It had to be an illusion. You couldn't have been on the Titanic . You couldn't have survived in an open boat for three years."
    He rose from the chair, bewildered and shaken by the spectral voice and the skeletal figure who spoke so calmly and so believingly about something that was beyond belief.
    "There is an explanation for this," he said. "A rational, believable, altogether understandable explanation. And it'll come out eventually. In the meantime—"
    The survivor interrupted him. "In the meantime, doctor—let me tell you something."
    The ship's doctor felt his hand shake, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
    The man on the bed swung his legs over the side and rested them on the floor. Skin and bones. Skeleton. Just a frame covered by a thin parchment of flesh.
    "You're going to be hit by a torpedo," the man said, "off the Old Head of Kindale. You're going down in eighteen minutes flat."
    The voice was so soft, so matter-of-fact, that for a moment the ship's doctor found it difficult to connect tone with words. What had the man said? Something about a torpedo? Something about going down in eighteen minutes? And what had the Captain said? The man was a spy.
    "By God," the ship's doctor said finally. "By God, you are a German agent."
    For the first time the survivor smiled—thin, slit mouth just slightly turned up. "A German agent? I wish . . . I wish to God I was." He shook his head. "No, doctor, I'm no agent. Not a spy. Not a saboteur. But you know something? I'm beginning to understand just what I am ."
    Again the blanketing silence.
    "What . . . are . . . you?" the ship's doctor asked. The survivor stood up, swaying slightly, holding onto the night table for support. "I'll tell you what I am, doctor," he said. "I'm a Flying Dutchman, built of flesh, blood, and bones. Damned and doomed. An eternity of lifeboats . . . rescues . . . and then—"
    "—And then forever being picked up by doomed ships," the ship's doctor said to the Captain as they sat in his cabin. An early-morning light filtered through the porthole as the night gave way to day.
    The Captain sat behind his desk and folded his hands behind his head. "Justice, of the poetic sort," he said, smiling.
    "He believes it," the ship's doctor said.
    The Captain's smile was fixed. "Does he, now? He believes it." He leaned farther back in his chair. "Very fanciful," he said. "Altogether bizarre." Then he put his hands down on top of the desk. "Except for a very notable flaw. If this is his damnation, his punishment for an act of cowardice "
    "He believes that it is," the ship's doctor interrupted.
    The Captain shook his head. "So we take a torpedo and share his punishment?" He smiled. "Not exactly fair, you'll admit, since none of us have done anything to make us damned and doomed, eh?"
    "It doesn't work that way," the ship's doctor said, as if pleading a case. "He tells me that when the torpedo hits only he'll be aware of it. We're only here to . . . to people the scene, so to speak."
    The Captain rose from behind the desk, the smile gradually