CHAPTER 4

FALL DOWN THE STAIRS TO WHERE I AM

The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son’s fifth day at sea was an historic day in that, for the first time in decades, Harvey went without smoking. He didn’t have any memories in recent years of doing something so admirable as to refrain from smoking when he wanted to smoke, so his behavior impressed even himself. By the time night rolled around, though, his hands naturally grew fidgety, and he would unconsciously light and extinguish his lighter.

“You’re getting on my nerves,” a grumpy voice scolded him, so Harvey cursed under his breath, “Leave me alone,” and shoved the lighter into the pocket of his work pants.

“I’m bored…”

He uncrossed his legs and threw them in front of him, readjusting his position, then leaned against the wall and gazed out the round porthole. All he could see through the thick glass, filthy with sandy dust, was the never-ending blue-gray ocean and sky; even if he kept watching, in the end, he would still be bored.

The fourth division was moderately peaceful. It was just about dinnertime, so almost all of the passengers had cleared out to the cafeteria on the first-level deck, and he could only see a few people sleeping here and there. The low sound of the engine came up from the bottom of the ship and quietly filled the room.

As he looked at the window, more at the dirt on it than the scenery beyond it, the next thing Harvey knew, he was extracting his cigarettes and lighter again. He swore and shoved his hand back in his pocket, then stood up, immediately hitting his head on the ceiling, and swore again resentfully. The ceiling was low beyond reason, so he was sure to hit his head against it several times a day.

“Hey. Where are you going?” The radio’s voice followed him as he ducked down and headed toward the exit.

“The main deck. I’m gonna have a smoke.”

“Stay with Kieli.”

“You watch her for a while. It’s not like there’s anything I can do, and just staring at a sick person’s face for twenty-four hours isn’t gonna make her better.” It took him an entire day to come to that realization.

“That’s not the problem, and you know it. You need to be more seriously concerned about her. Talking about being bored and all that garbage.”

“Hey, are you trying to say I’m not worried?”

The conversation started taking a rough turn as they grew increasingly irritated with each other, when a faint moan from the girl they were discussing shut both their mouths.

Atop her pillow, Kieli opened her eyes slightly.

“You awake? How are you feeling?” the radio by her pillow asked anxiously. Kieli simply answered, “Mm,” which didn’t really answer either question, and moving her head just a little and with great effort, she directed her eyes at Harvey. A lock of her hair slid limply onto her pallid cheek.

“Going somewhere…?”

“…No. Not really.” Having missed his chance get out, Harvey shook his head, his expression indeterminate. He sighed, sat down next to Kieli’s bed, and reached his hand out toward the hair on her cheek.

“Kieli, Kieli!” cried an out-of-place, cheerful voice; Harvey suddenly felt tired and pulled his hand away.

He turned to look at the door to their room and saw a smiling boy peering through it, out of breath. “Kieli, there’s chocolate pudding for dessert toda—” He started to say something that seemed extremely inconsequential, but then he sensed the mood around him and cut himself off as if surprised.

“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

He took his shoes off and threw them aside by the door, then crawled into the room and made his way noisily toward them, ransacking the bedding the other passengers had strewn across the floor as he went. Not caring an ounce about the obstacle in his way, he didn’t hesitate to attempt climbing over Harvey’s lap. A nerve twitched in Harvey’s cheek, and he grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck.

“Wah, what?!”

“Shut up. Pest.”

He tried to stand up, and as usual, he struck his head on the ceiling, swearing a third time as he dragged the boy to the door and threw him rudely into the hall. The boy got up immediately and glared at him in protest.

“What’s the matter with Kieli? I didn’t see her all morning; I was wondering if something was wrong.”

“She’s just seasick. Go away.”

“If it’s so bad she’s stuck in bed, then it’s not ‘just’ seasick at all. What did you do to her?”

“What did I do? It’s not my fault…,” Harvey retorted, fed up with the groundless accusations, but he actually didn’t believe what he was saying either and ended up looking away to escape. He did get the feeling this was a little severe for “just seasick.”

Just then, his runaway gaze caught sight of someone. A man clad in an ivory jacket was walking toward them from the end of the hall.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” beamed the captain of The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son when he spotted Harvey. “I heard from the other passengers that your companion isn’t feeling well.”

“Yes…” Harvey didn’t have a very good first impression of the man, so his response was a little less than enthusiastic.

The captain didn’t seem to pay it any mind; he cast a glance at the ceiling and indicated a corner of the deck above them. “If you like, feel free to take her to the medical office. The beds there should be more comfortable.”

“…Thanks. That’s very kind of you.” He couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, so for now, Harvey just thanked the captain, but something felt a little off. Inwardly, he put up his defenses. Harvey had only spoken with him briefly under the stairs the day before, but the ship’s commander was suspiciously more solicitous this time.

Glancing at Kieli, though, whom he could see sleeping on her bed inside the room, he figured, well, it would probably be much more comfortable than that poor excuse for a bunk, so for the time, he pushed his cynicism aside.

“It’s kind of weird how fluffy it is…,” Kieli said, burying her cheeks in the medical office’s pillow and looking uncomfortable somehow, and Harvey started laughing in spite of himself. “You talk like a poor person.” He stifled his laughter as he pulled a steel chair over and sat backward on it, leaning against the chair’s back.

The medical office was a small room deep inside the first-level deck. A steel cabinet and bench were placed on one wall to make up a simple examination space, and on the opposite side were single beds that looked ten times more comfortable than the bunks in third class.

“Because…when I’m with you…it’s more unusual…for me to sleep in a real bed…,” Kieli replied crossly, but maybe the mere effort of speech wore her out. She sounded like she was only managing words while exhaling, and it took some time before she finished her long sentence.

“Stop talking and sleep.” Harvey felt winded just looking at her.

“Where’s Juli?”

“The captain took him back to his room.”

“I feel bad. He came to play with me…”

“I said stop talking and go to sleep. I wanna go smoke,” he repeated a little more emphatically, and Kieli nodded reluctantly and pulled the blanket over herself. Just as he thought she was going to go to sleep, her eyes peered out through the folds of the blanket, and she looked up at him and asked, “Will you wait here until I’m asleep?”

“No. I’m leaving.”

“Then I’ll go right to sleep, so stay.” She finally closed her eyes and buried her face in the blanket.

A medical officer had given her some medicine, and it was probably because of it that he heard her breath slow in slumber shortly after she stopped talking. Peaceful…was definitely not the word for her weak, irregular breathing. Her pallor was as bad as ever; her skin, which was white to begin with, was now even paler, and Harvey could almost make out her blood vessels.

“How is she? Is she sleeping?”

He said he was leaving, but Harvey rested his chin on the back of the chair for a while and was contemplating her sleeping face when the captain returned from delivering Julius to his special-class room. When he glanced at the ivory jacket standing in the door and nodded, the captain closed the door and approached him.

“What takes you two to South-hairo? Visiting relatives or friends, perhaps?”

“No, neither of us have any of those.”

“Then you’re traveling alone? And you have no relatives?”

“…What about it?” he answered brusquely, clearly unhappy with the captain’s lack of hesitation in asking such personal questions. The captain stroked his chin and nodded; Harvey had no idea what he was nodding about. He hated the idea of being asked any more questions and quickly rose from his seat.

“Where are you going?”

“To smoke. I’ll be right back.”

Before he left the bed, he remembered to grab the radio next to Kieli’s pillow by its cord. There was something he wanted to discuss outside. “No, no. Please take your time,” the captain’s abnormally gracious voice called after him as he walked through the office door.

There wasn’t a soul on the first-level deck. The light from the cafeteria door a little way ahead had dimmed, but when he looked even farther, he could see the last passengers disappearing down the stairs as they finished their dinner and returned to their rooms. The radio dangling from his good hand, he started to walk in that direction at a stroll.

“That’s not seasickness. It’s probably caused by spirits or something.” The radio beat him to saying that very thing.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t ‘yeah’ me. If you knew, then you shoulda hurried to do something about it.”

“If I knew a way to do something about it, I would have done it already. Why is this my fault?” Harvey replied, scowling. First Julius, now the Corporal—did they think he didn’t think about Kieli at all? (Although they probably said those things because they thought that.)

He had vaguely picked up on the presence of some deep, black manifestation, but when he focused on it and tried to identify what it was, he immediately lost the trail. It was something like a hazy, shapeless entity that blended like static with the engine noise and vibrations confined onboard, encircling the entire ship.

“I think she’ll get better when we get to port and get her off the ship.”

“We can’t be so patient. We can’t just leave her in that state for days. Ah, damn it, I can’t stand to watch. I’m worried she might keep getting weaker and weaker until finally she dies…”

“It won’t do any good talking like that. Just calm down.”

“You’re too damn calm. Taking it easy like that.”

“I’m a patient guy; comes from life experience. If I weren’t patient, I would have gone crazy and torn my heart out long ago.” Even though he was the one saying it, the line disturbed him immensely the minute it slipped off his tongue, and he cursed in irritation. It would seem he wasn’t quite calm enough to be telling other people to calm down.

“Argh. Anyway, just let me smoke,” he spat, half pleading, just as he came out of the hall and stepped onto the stairway.

As he placed his foot on the first step leading to the main deck, he happened to look down under the stairs. He could no longer see any passengers coming out of the cafeteria, and the abandoned stairway zigzagged downward. A brighter light leaked faintly from the bottom-most third-level deck, but that one corner had sunken into darkness, as if rejecting all light. It was near the spot where the captain stopped him the day before, at the stairway that led to the crew-only deck.

He felt a tug at his mind, and the instant he directed his attention that way—What the…?

Something like a chillingly cold tentacle crawled up his spine. Instinctively, he froze and braced himself, but by the time he tried to ascertain what it was, all signs of it had disappeared.

“Hey, did you feel that? What was it…?”

“Dunno…”

“Let’s go. I won’t let you tell me there’s nothing down there this time,” the radio said timidly, but somehow triumphantly.

“I’m not gonna say it,” he said, annoyed, and changed his direction from up the stairs to down.

His footsteps were strangely amplified as they echoed in the deserted stairway, and the distance to the third deck felt as if it must have been ten stories, but he actually only went down exactly two floors before arriving at the bottom. He went around the stairs without venturing into the corridor that led to the third-class rooms, and a dim light leaked from the work stairway that led to the lower level as it had the day before.

He didn’t have any particular reason to hesitate, so he wrapped the radio around his wrist and put a hand on the stairs’ rail. Holding on, he practically slid down the steep incline, descending onto the fourth-level deck.

Bags sandwiched the aisle on either side as it stretched into the darkness ahead. (He seemed to remember someone being told to stow things away yesterday, but from what he could see, it didn’t look like anything had been done at all.) There were probably fuel tanks on the other sides of each wall; a smell resembling oil hung thick in the air. He’d heard that giant fossil fuel tanks occupied most of the sandship’s lower levels, and the work corridors wove between them, stretching out like a maze.

“Is this where that strange presence came from?”

“No. I think it was farther down,” Harvey muttered, looking down at the tips of his shoes.

“Farther down, he says,” replied a bitter voice from the radio. It was right; he looked around, and there was no stairway leading any lower.

“I guess we’ll check farther in…”

When he started to walk away from the stairs…

Help me…

An emotionless voice clung to the back of his neck. He hadn’t heard it with his ears but rather seemed to perceive it around his spinal cord. The cry had an unpleasant air about it, like a feeler that had stuck to his backbone and wouldn’t let go.

He shook the chills off, wiped all expression from his face, and turned to look behind him. An iron fence closed off the area behind the stairs he had just climbed down, and beyond it was just a wall—a dead end—but an iron door stood sunken silently in the darkness, almost one with the wall.

He could still feel the voice on his spine and thought it called to him, “This way.”

“Herbie.”

“…Yeah.”

He used one hand to vault himself over the fence and approached the door. He touched the handle, licked his dry lips, and moved his hand.

As soon as he turned it a little, he heard the creaking sound of metal on metal.

Oof…

The noise of the engine was so loud that this new sound shouldn’t have stood out, but even so, he started for a second and his hand stopped.

He checked again to make sure no one was in the corridor behind him, then strained his nerves as he turned the handle clockwise to three o’clock. He felt the lock give, and the door opened toward the other side. He pushed it wide enough for himself to pass and peered inside.

Not that he hadn’t expected it, but inside the darkness was near complete. Still, he had relatively good night vision, so after straining his eyes for a bit, he was gradually able to just make out the inside.

A steep, narrow staircase stretched into the darkness below. In reality, its incline was probably fifty or sixty degrees, but to Harvey it looked like a vertical descent; he would believe it if someone told him it wasn’t a stairway, but a ladder.

He lightly placed his hand on the door and very carefully put his foot on the first step. The place he stepped creaked, and his sole trod on sand. The sand and rust had been left to build up; it didn’t look as if the crew used this stairway every day.

“What do they use it for…?” Harvey wondered suspiciously, but for now it seemed as though it wouldn’t have trouble supporting his weight, so he went down to the next step, keeping his hand on the wall, and started to head downward. The sound of metallic creaking and trodden sand echoed in the darkness, keeping time with his pace.

He didn’t have to go far before the scent of sand in the air got stronger, and another smell, an irritating odor that pricked at his nose, drifted faintly toward him.

It had been decades, but that smell still remained firmly rooted in his memory—there was no doubt about it. It was the rotting stench of an abandoned human corpse.

He stopped automatically. He tried to go back up a step, but his heel gauged the height wrong, and he came dangerously close to slipping and falling before digging his nails in the wall. The sand at his feet wafted downward, making a dry, pattering sound. “That was close! What are you doing?!” the radio protested, just barely caught around his wrist.

“Sorry. I can’t do this.”

“What? You can’t?”

“I don’t want to go any lower.” Harvey fixed his gaze on the darkness at his feet and searched with his heel for the step he’d just missed. He was clearly running away.

“Look. You’re not a baby. What are you afraid of now? How many decades have you lived?”

“Say what you want. I don’t want to…”

Just as he dragged his heel and went up a step, he felt a presence behind him.

The instant he turned around, something like a metal rod flew into his line of vision. “What the—?!” Harvey took a powerful blow to the side of his head, and not a second later, a hard shoe kicked him in the shoulder, dropping him to the bottom of the stairs.

For the briefest moment, he could see work clothes, like the crew’s overalls, out of the corner of his eye. “Uwaah!” the man screamed, tossing aside the metal he’d grabbed and running up the stairs. “Th—” That’s my line! Harvey shouted inwardly, as he grabbed the handrail and tried to regain his posture, but apparently the rail had gotten brittle—his right prosthetic arm pulled it off with a devastating crunching sound. He failed to right himself and tumbled backward down the steep stairs. Partway down, the stairs themselves gave way and threw him into empty space.

Harvey couldn’t see a thing in the darkness; he had probably fallen more than ten meters…

Harvey struck the ground suddenly. He hadn’t managed to brace himself, and he heard a crack from somewhere around his neck—the sound of something clearly breaking.

But oddly enough, the first thing he worried about was where the radio had fallen.

I’m cold…

She was supposed to be asleep on the soft bed in the medical office, but Kieli felt like she was lying on the ground with her cheek on cold sand.

I’m cold. I can’t breathe. It hurts. Help me. The thoughts had been swirling around inside her clouded, misty mind for a while, but half of them were not things Kieli felt. Someone besides her was groaning in the core of her brain. She directed her consciousness there, wondering who was suffering, but it seemed it was no longer a single consciousness—more like an amalgamation of thoughts.

“Harvey…,” she said hoarsely as she exhaled, but there was no reply.

He said he was going to smoke a cigarette. Hurry back…

She lifted her cheek a bit from her pillow to look, but even the radio, who had watched over her this whole time, was missing. The Corporal’s gone, too? What, did they both go off somewhere?

“…Cap’n…” Kieli heard subdued voices from the opposite end of her bed. She turned her head and looked over the blanket covering her feet at the medical office door beyond. The captain in his ivory jacket was standing with his back to her facing a sailor in overalls in the hall who seemed to be appealing to him for something. A man with a narrow face and round glasses—she didn’t remember him addressing her in the engine area the previous day, but later she realized that she had met him before, at the port town. It was that sailor.

“I really don’t want to do this anymore. If we keep it up, I know they’ll…”

“Don’t talk nonsense, you spineless coward. You took care of the man, right?” The captain cut himself off and glanced back toward her. Out of reflex, Kieli pulled her face into the shadows of her blanket. “We can’t talk here. Come on.” The whispers moved away. She peered out of an opening in the blanket, and the last thing she saw was the captain’s back before he closed the medical office door.

The handle turned from the outside, and she heard it being locked.

…A lock?

After a pause, Kieli gasped and threw off her blanket. “Kuh…” She pulled herself up but got dizzy and slid off the bed; fortunately the room was small, and she managed to crawl along the floor to the door. She clung to the door to stand herself up and tried turning the knob, but it wouldn’t budge, as if it was welded in place.

“What’s going on…?” she murmured, stunned. That instant, the moaning voices she heard in her brain grew louder, as if coming through a megaphone, swelling to shouts so intense, she thought her head would burst from the inside.

“St…stop!”

Kieli cowered, holding her head. It hurts! Help! I hate him! Throngs of heartrending screams, male and female, howled inside her brain, and she couldn’t tell which thoughts were her own anymore.

It probably wasn’t Kieli who staggered to her feet, grabbed a steel chair with one hand, and banged it against the doorknob.

Regardless of the many hardships he’d endured, Harvey had come to terms with the fact that they were probably all payback he couldn’t escape, and he never felt sorry for himself. But now, at this moment, he felt as if he wouldn’t mind if somebody sympathized with him a little. Why should an innocent, good-hearted passenger on a ship be kicked to the bottom and left to die?

The one thing that might be considered a small consolation in the midst of this misfortune (although it wouldn’t be anything nearing consolation to a normal person), was that sand had piled up where he fell and absorbed some of the shock, so he got off with only a few broken bones and was pretty much unharmed, relatively speaking. Had he crushed his skull on the hard ground or something like that, he wasn’t confident that he would have lived. He definitely wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see him.

Well, I don’t have to worry about the broken ribs…What I do need to worry about is the collarbone and, uwah, my left arm, huh…?

Harvey surveyed his condition as he lay on the ground with his cheek in the sand. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his broken collarbone sticking out of the skin on his right shoulder, and when he lifted his left hand to put it back in place, it dangled from his wrist at a strange angle. For the time being, he used the joint to force his collarbone back in place.

The damaged areas had already begun healing, but it looked as if he had no choice but to wait on the ground a while until he could move properly. He consciously blocked off the pain so all he felt was a throbbing, dull numbness, but that sensation, too, was extremely unpleasant, like beetles crawling all over his body.

“Corporal…”

Darkness enveloped his field of vision, but he could vaguely make out radio’s lead-colored casing a little ahead of him. All that came out of the speaker was feeble, intermittent static; he heard no response. Harvey wanted to reach out and pull it to him, but it was just barely out of reach.

He gave up and looked around to inspect the rest of his field of vision. His cheek rubbed against the ground, making a small crunching sound by his ear.

He seemed to be in a relatively wide area; he could make out something that looked like blackish walls pretty far off, and an unreliable glow, just enough to let him see, reached him from a small emergency light. Maybe its connection was bad; the light would suddenly go out, and then after a while, seep back in from the darkness, as if remembering it was supposed to be on.

The muffled sound of the fossil fuel engine filled the air around him. He was probably in one of the holds between the fuel tanks at the bottom of the ship.

In any case, figuring out where he was wasn’t the problem.

The problem was figuring out where this rotting stench came from.

Harvey could see something whitish, like a bent stick, protruding from the pile of sand on the ground in front of him.

It was a woman’s arm. It was oddly white and smooth. The surface of her skin had started to decay, like melting plastic.

Harvey shifted his gaze slowly, as if tracing the scene, and squinted at the dim floor beyond where similar objects lay, not entirely hidden, clotting the whole area. These things, looking like a collection of abstract sculptures standing above the sand, were the arms and legs of people who had started to rot or their already bleached bones.

There were easily more than ten bodies lying bent in a heap under the sand, pushing their limbs toward the ceiling, as if pleading for help.

Crap. By the time the warning sounded in a corner of his consciousness, Harvey had already recalled a certain scene from his memories, like a chain reaction, and it flashed before his eyes with abnormal clarity.

A battlefield in the wilderness where he’d taken refuge from Church Soldiers; mountains of corpses filled his vision, as if they went on to the ends of the earth. He had spent tens, hundreds of days staring at nothing but that scene. It attached itself forcibly to the core of his memory and blazed to life in his brain as if it were yesterday. Beetles scavenging bodies ate through the skin on the back of his hand, burrowing into his arm, and crawling all the way to his shoulder, devouring his flesh as they went, exiting via his collarbone.

Stop it. Don’t remember that…, he said to himself, trying to sweep the thoughts from his head, but the image clung to his retinas against his will and refused to go away. After the bugs left, the ghosts of soldiers—one with a slit throat, one with his eye gouged out by a bullet—would crawl up to him, cling to his arms and back, and hatefully accuse him. You killed me, Ephraim…

It’s not my fault, it wasn’t me…

He shuddered as he felt something stick to his neck, and he looked to see the rotting woman’s arm slither up out of the sand to strangle him.

“Uwah!”

He winced and tried to jump up, but now a man’s arm held his shoulder down; yet another pushed his head into the sand. Shff, shff…Numbers of rotting corpses crawled out of the sand, wrapped themselves around his neck and body, and started to pull him into the ground.

Hey, calm down, stupid…He cursed at himself; crouched on the ground, held down by dead bodies and unable to move, he had no right to be talking to Kieli as though he was so much better than she was. Corpses don’t move. It’s only their ghosts, coming after you because they want more friends. Ignore them and they’ll give up and go away; don’t get dragged down.

You killed me…, one of the corpses said, taking on the face of a soldier.

No, they’re not the same thing. Calm down, damn it! He knew it in his head, but he couldn’t break free of the illusion in front of him. He cast a pleading gaze at the radio lying just within his field of vision and muttered, “Corporal…,” in a voice that stuck in his throat; it was so hoarse it surprised even him. The radio really must have been broken—it made no sign of responding.

The ghost with the soldier’s face pressed his head down with inhuman strength, trying to force him into the sand. You killed me. You killed everyone. Everyone…A low voice, almost like a buzz, cursed him over and over right in his eardrums.

Bam!

Suddenly, Harvey heard a crash, and sand flew up and obscured his vision. At the same time, a dull sound resounded in his body, and he almost cried out at the intense pain that pierced through a gap in his consciousness, but thanks to that pain, he revived from his mental paralysis.

The ghosts weighing on him vanished, as if blending into the billows of sand and dust.

…They disappeared…?

He couldn’t immediately grasp what had just happened and looked around, dumbfounded.

Harvey’s metallic right arm had punched the sandy ground with its fist. The prosthesis acted independently of Harvey’s will, mowing down the ghosts, and as it did, pain shot through the Undying’s broken collarbone.

Of course he wasn’t in the wilderness or on a battlefield; it was just a ship’s hold littered with corpses, that was all (all?).

Still half in a daze, Harvey slowly sucked the breath he was unconsciously holding into his lungs.

“…Aahh…” With a deep, indescribable sigh, he felt his forehead hit the sand. He felt pain, as if his collarbone jumped out of place, but instead of blocking it off, he left it alone. He had the impression that he would be better able to maintain his sanity that way.

He didn’t have the willpower to move, and he lay limp on the ground for a little while. His right arm moved on its own again, crawling over the sand, and timidly picked up his left hand where it had been dislocated—that instant, an intense pain shot up from his wrist to his shoulder. Come to think of it, his wrist was broken, too.

“Oww! Stupid, don’t touch th…” Harvey stopped complaining midsentence, and blankly watched his right arm’s actions. It was a little forceful, but his right hand straightened the left wrist that was twisted at an odd angle and held it tightly to keep it immobile. Of course, it wasn’t acting at Harvey’s behest; he had almost forgotten the arm since it had sublimated its consciousness and started working like his own limb the day before, but now it moved haltingly on its own.

Harvey swore, thinking selfishly, If you’re going to do it anyway, help me sooner! Then he finally remembered what he’d threatened the previous day.

So it was staying faithful to the last minute to his threat never to move on its own again.

“Oh. Thanks…,” he said, somewhat brusquely, to hide his embarrassment. His right arm maintained a tight grip on his left hand, as if protecting it, and didn’t budge. “…You saved me. Thanks. I’m sorry…,” he muttered again and, with a sigh, closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the ground. I’m pathetic, he cursed at himself.

After a while, as he lay on his side not really listening to the low sound of the engine coming through the floor under his cheek, his bones and nerves connected enough for him to manage movement. He got up, supporting himself on his right arm, and looked down at himself to assess the situation. His left wrist was still bad enough that it could easily break again with just a little force and wouldn’t be of any use, but if he cut off the pain, then for now, it wouldn’t get in the way of his escape.

He looked up at the ceiling he’d been kicked down from, but it looked pretty high. All he could make out was the consuming black darkness that looked as if it could descend on him any second. He surveyed the walls in all directions, but there was nothing he could use to hold on to. It seemed reckless just thinking about climbing up, so he ran his gaze around the inside of the hold, looking for another way out.

There was a hatch with a rectangular border on part of one of the side walls that appeared very slightly paler than the black around it. The hatch for loading and unloading cargo—it probably opened to the outside of the ship.

He stood up and stepped firmly on the sand for two, three steps.

So I can walk…

He seemed to be doing okay. He was still a little unsteady on his feet as he walked over to where the radio had fallen a little ways off. He picked it up by its cord and tried waving it up and down; he heard sand and parts sliding around inside.

Guess I’ll have to take him apart…He sighed and, using only his right hand, took some time pulling the cord down over his head.

Then he dragged his feet (he tripped once over a body buried in the ground and almost fell) over to the hatch in the wall and, leaning against the door, placed his hand on the handle. There was no telling when it was last used; it was completely rusted over and stuck in place.

“…Can I leave this to you?” he asked his right arm, and a motor around its elbow let out a short buzz as if to give the affirmative. He was prepared for his collarbone to break again, but his right arm used only its own power, so skillfully that it didn’t put any burden on his shoulder, and wrenched open the worn handle. Rust scraped off and fluttered down to his feet.

The lock came undone with a heavy clank, and an opening formed in the thick iron door. He pressed on it with his body, pushing it open.

“Oof…”

A sandy wind blew in, ruffling his hair; out of reflex, he ducked into the door’s shadow to get out of the wind.

Shh…sshhh…

A low din of sand sliding against sand came through the door. He pulled himself away from the hold, drawn by the sound, and stepped on the hatch’s doorsill. Sand flowed in gentle waves just beyond where his foot landed. Sometimes a slightly higher wave would come up, splitting at his toe, lapping around his shoe, only to merge again on the other side, and flow on.

He looked up to see the night sea, painted a deep blue-gray, and the night sky of the same color, spreading endlessly, uninterrupted, as far as he could see.

He became a sailor, oh, about six years ago; at the time, he would go out onto the main deck every evening after finishing his day’s work, and even though he would have to get up early the next morning, he would stay up late, gazing at the night sea. Now he couldn’t remember a shred of what it was he liked so much about this scenery that was so drably colored such a thick, dark blue-gray.

The crewman took off his round glasses and wiped his face, now thoroughly soggy with tears, with the sleeve of his work clothes.

“Sniff…Sniff…”

“Oh, cut it out already. How old are you? And you call yourself a man of the sea,” spat the captain, standing next to him puffing his silver pipe. The smoke formed a thin line, and the cold night wind carried it off as it blew across the deck.

The sailor cast a hate-filled sideways glance at his boss and retorted in a tearful sob, “I didn’t become a sailor to do this!”

“And I didn’t become a ship captain to do it, either.”

“Then let’s stop already!”

“We don’t have a choice. You know that now that we’re involved, we can’t pull out so easily.” The captain twisted his lips, his pipe still between them, and said, glaring back at the crewman, “You know, you’re always, always talking like that, and yet you’re still on my ship.”

“Well, I…!” He faltered; the officer had hit a sore spot. The captain blew smoke right in his face, and the sailor coughed violently.

The captain had no right to say so, but that was exactly the case. His fellow sailors had washed their hands of the matter and left the ship one after another, but as for himself, he kept whining and crying about it. But he was still here. Well, he couldn’t help it; no one wanted to lose his job and end up on the streets. The actual owner of The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son was an import dealer whose main office was in South-hairo. Both he and his boss, the captain, were mere employees, and if they didn’t want to get fired, they had no choice but to shut up and do the job they were given.

Only the captain and a part of the crew knew about it, but the imported goods the ship’s owner dealt in sometimes included girls and children, and they were the ones responsible for obtaining those goods. The captain, the captain before him, and the captain before him all carried the work out indifferently, as though there was some kind of manual. They targeted tramps, women, and children who wouldn’t cause any future problems, and dropped their companions in the ship’s hold.

The sailor shivered, only partly because of the cold night wind.

“I just know they hate us. When I think about them turning into ghosts and crawling up from the bottom of the ship to curse us to death…”

“Ha! Ridiculous.” The captain was clearly mocking the sailor, but over his jeers…

“…They actually did come haunt me,” another voice suddenly interjected.

They looked around, but there was no sign of anyone other than the sailor and his captain on the main deck. “Wh-wh-wha…?” The sailor shuddered and retreated, but after half a step, his back hit the handrail. The deck ended there. On the other side of the rail was nothing but dark ocean.

A metal arm suddenly shot up from directly under the edge of the deck, and five metallic fingers grabbed the handrail with a clank. The crewman forgot even to scream, and just left his mouth gaping open as he sank to the floor. He was too scared to even hold himself up.

The metal arm was followed by one of flesh and blood. Instead of grabbing the rail, it used its elbow to haul up a body that was muttering, “Damn, it’s hard not being able to use one hand…” This was without a doubt the one-armed, redheaded, third-class passenger whose distinguishing feature was his surliness—the one the sailor thought he had just pushed down a stairway with his own hands (or more accurately, with the metal pipe he was brandishing). Supporting himself on his metal prosthetic arm, the passenger half slid onto the deck and, breathing as if soaked in fatigue, checked the cord of the radio hanging from his neck—that old, familiar radio that always seemed so valuable to him for some reason.

Its rusty casing dully reflected the light of the main deck. Copper-colored eyes caught it and emitted a somehow bottomless, eerie glow.

“Gh…gh-gh-gh-ghost…!” After wagging his chin a few times, the sailor finally got out the scream caught in his throat.

Maybe his feelings had been hurt. The man looked obviously unhappy. “This is your fault, you know. Who would act so superhuman because they wanted to?”

“I-I’m sorry, spare me…!”

“That may be enough for me, but an apology won’t cover it for the guys who died down there…,” he said in a low, threatening tone, taking a step forward. The crewman tried to run away but was so scared he couldn’t stand; he crawled backward on his hands, but one of them slipped; “Eep!” he cringed and closed his eyes tight. The footsteps came closer. There was no way he could gain forgiveness, but he opportunistically prayed to God to save him anyway.

But the footsteps passed right by the crewman and continued. A scream—“Gya!”—came from behind him, and he opened his eyes and turned nervously to see the captain, who had abandoned him and was trying to escape from the main deck (That’s going too far, Boss!), struggling as the grotesque false arm hoisted him by the collar.

“You haven’t done anything to Kieli, have you…?” A voice blew in the captain’s ear, with an air ten times more dangerous than before.

“She’s just sleeping in the medical office. I haven’t done anything!” the captain wailed, flailing his arms, and then, without warning, the door to the main deck slammed open, as if caught by a sudden gust of wind. But that door wasn’t light enough to be opened by the wind.

The captain and his attacker both swallowed and looked up; the sailor, too, felt a foreboding presence and timidly turned to face it.

A small girl stood there, dull light illuminating her from behind as it bled through the doorway. She was wearing only a camisole and shorts, but she didn’t seem to feel the cold as her arms hung limp at her sides. The crewman remembered that the captain had locked the door to the medical office, and a chill ran down his spine.

The girl held a twisted metal pipe—it looked as if it had been the leg of a desk—loosely in her hand.

As everyone stood frozen by the clearly abnormal sight, the girl slowly surveyed the main deck, stopping with the captain’s face. Completely expressionless, she raised the metal pipe over her head with a force no one would have thought possible of her small build and suddenly swung it sideways.

What the…?

The next thing he realized, Harvey had been flung to the edge of the main deck, caught behind the captain. He gasped and clung to the nearby handrail. While he was at it, he grabbed the captain’s arm right before he slid off the deck from the momentum. Maybe the impact from the pipe had broken the bone—the captain screamed, but Harvey wished he would have thanked him for automatically saving him. The pipe she had thrown made a shrill sound as it rolled off the main deck and disappeared into the black ocean.

Tap. A bare, white foot stood before him.

He looked up to see Kieli leering down at him, or probably more accurately, at the captain, an ominous light filling her eyes.

Oy…

He gulped, flinching despite himself. No matter how you looked at it, this wasn’t normal.

While Harvey was distracted, the captain tried to crawl away on all fours, but Kieli grabbed his collar, and he let out a pathetic scream. The girl’s slender arm dragged the captain up by his neck and began strangling him with a bizarre strength. “Gweh…!” A choked squeal came from the captain’s throat, along with the sound of creaking bones, but at the same time, Harvey heard a strange sound from Kieli’s arm, too, as if it was snapping.

“Stop it, Kieli!”

Harvey had been watching Kieli’s actions in dumb amazement, but that sound brought him back to his senses; he panicked and got between them. She’d gone beyond the limit of her own physical strength and was exerting an absurd amount of power. “Let go! Stop!” He grabbed her hands and peeled them off of the captain’s neck, but she struggled against him with such inhuman strength that he couldn’t oppose her without using every ounce of force he could muster, and an unpleasant snap came from inside his left wrist. He immediately suppressed the pain, but in that split second, she shoved him, forcing him to relinquish his grip.

As he tottered a few steps backward before regaining his balance, he saw Kieli stumble in the opposite direction, lean against the handrail behind her, and…

“Ah…!”

For just a second, he thought he saw the real Kieli looking shocked. The next instant, she flipped over the rail and disappeared beneath the main deck.

“Kieli!”

He jumped to the rail and leaned over to see a hole open up in the surface of the ocean far beneath. She was immediately swallowed by flowing sand and vanished.

The inside of his head went blank. His brain wasn’t functioning, but he instinctively jumped over the rail and into the ocean below.

As waves of churning sediment battered him, he could no longer tell up from down but soon managed to get his face above the surface and looked around. He caught sight of the white face of the girl, almost buried in sand, then grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him just as her face sank completely below the surface.

“Heeey, grab hold!” came a shout diagonally above him. He looked up to see the sailor in glasses releasing a raft from the main deck. He reached out and caught the raft that fell, gliding through the air, and first pushed Kieli’s limp upper body onto it. Supporting Kieli with his right arm, he dragged himself up with his left elbow, then checked to make sure that the radio was securely around his neck and sighed in relief.

“Aaahh!” The crewman let out a slow yell. At the same time, the wire that was supposed to connect the raft to the deck slid smoothly downward; it must not have been secure on the deck side.

“I-I’m sorry…!”

“You’re useless, damn you!” Harvey’s jeer was pointless. The sand carried the raft, now having lost its foundation, away from the ship in the blink of an eye, and the stupid look on the sailor’s face as he watched them go and the name The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son carved on the side of the ship disappeared beyond the darkness.

The solid blue-gray of the night sea and sky gradually lightened, taking on a sandy color. The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son was scheduled to be at sea for ten days, so that meant they ended up disembarking (falling) from the ship exactly halfway through the voyage.

Soon the morning of their sixth day at sea would be upon them.

Harvey wondered how many hours he’d been at it, but as he had nothing else to do, he remained perched at the edge of the raft, resting his cheek on his hands, propped up on his knees, and gazing at the bland scenery that spread before him.

“I’m bored…,” he muttered to himself, then dropped his chin limply onto his arms crossed on his lap. He’d have welcomed a bit of conversation, but of course the radio was broken at a time like this. He’d been doing his best to kill time rolling his lighter around in his hands, but that did nothing to ease the boredom. He’d dropped his cigarettes at some point, so his smoking ban continued after all.

Harvey felt it exceedingly odd to hear the words “I’m bored” coming from his own mouth. When he traveled, it was natural for him to go weeks without speaking to anyone, let alone one night. Talking to people was just annoying and depressing. Once, he might have been tempted to just leave himself to the sandy currents and see where the ocean finally deposited him—but now, of course, there was no way he could take her drifting with him on such a stupid expedition.

He shifted his chin on his arms and looked down at the girl lying next to him. The profile of her small body, curled in sleep, looked so weak it made him uneasy. Her white cheeks looked even paler as they reflected the color of the predawn sky.

For a second, he involuntarily saw in her the rotting corpse of the woman he’d gotten tangled up with in the ship’s hold.

Uwah…!

He knocked a fist against his forehead, hurriedly erasing the scene projecting itself in his brain. He kept pushing his fist into his forehead and sighed. What am I thinking about? I’m really losing it…

After a while, he half opened his eyes and glanced, somewhat nervously, back at the girl; he no longer saw the impossible (absolutely impossible) scene that haunted him a moment earlier.

“…Kieli, wake up already. Do you enjoy wearing on my nerves like this?” Harvey grew increasingly bitter and tried complaining, but of course he got no response. Thinking about it, he realized she hadn’t even rolled over in her sleep for hours.

You’re breathing, right…?

He suddenly wasn’t so sure. He leaned over and put his face close to hers. After confirming that faint, but regular, breaths escaped her barely open lips, he heaved a sigh of relief for the time being, but her pitch-black eyelashes remained firmly shut, giving him the impression she might never open them again. “Hey, come on, wake up. I’m begging you…” Please wake up, he murmured under his breath and put his forehead on her cold cheek, feeling like he was praying.

Crunch, crunch, crunch…

Intermingled with the quiet sound of shifting sand, he heard the muffled thrum of screw propellers. He gasped and looked up, squinting into the distance of the now brightening ocean.

He vaguely made out a black shadow approaching on the other side of the morning mist.

A ship…Where’s it from…?

It wasn’t big enough to be a passenger ship; it seemed to be an old clipper model. He didn’t see the world as being kind enough to let him innocently rejoice over being saved, so for the time being, he put up his guard and tried to determine the ship’s nationality. As the vessel drew closer, the haze thinned, and he could clearly make out the name on its bow.

“Oh…” All his strength fled his body, he was so relieved.

A familiar name was engraved there: Sandwalker. He didn’t know who’d heard his prayer, but it seemed that somewhere on this planet, a god felt like offering them a hand.