I awoke, gasping and crawling with the horror of it, the blackness like a clenched fist around me.
I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium—if I scream, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear. Let them hear, and maybe they’ll come and get me.
So I let it out, the scream that had been rising up inside me, growing and swelling and pressing to get out.
And I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.
I don’t know how long I screamed for, how long I lay there, shaking, my fists curled around the thin, limp pillow, my nails digging into the bare mattress beneath.
I only know that at last it was quiet in the little cabin, except for the low roar of the engine, and my own breath, rasping in a throat scoured raw and hoarse.
No one had come.
No one had banged on the door to ask what was going on, or threatened to kill me unless I shut up. No one had done anything. I might as well have been in outer space, screaming into a soundless vacuum.
My hands were trembling, and I could not get the girl from my dream out of my head, the idea of her raw, moist form crawling towards me, clutching, needing.
What had I done? Oh God, why had I done this, kept pushing, kept refusing to shut up. I had made myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what happened in that cabin. And yet . . . and yet what had happened?
I lay there, my hands pressed to my eyes in the suffocating darkness, trying to make sense of it. The girl was alive—whatever I had heard, whatever I thought I had seen, it wasn’t murder. Had she been on the ship all along?
She must have. We hadn’t stopped. We hadn’t even got near enough to land to see it. But who was she, and why was she hiding on the ship?
I tried to ignore my aching head, to think logically. Was she a member of the crew? She had access to the staff door, after all. But then I remembered Nilsson punching in the code, me standing behind him as he did. He’d made no effort to shield the keypad. If I’d wanted to, it would have been child’s play to note down the numbers as he entered them. And after that, once you were below decks, there were not many further locked doors.
She’d had access to the empty cabin, though—and that did require a passkey, either a guest one, programmed to that door specifically, or a staff one that opened all the cabin doors. I thought of the cleaners I’d seen in their little hutches below decks, their scared faces looking out at me before the door swung shut. How much would one of them sell a passkey for? A hundred kroner? A thousand? They wouldn’t even need to sell it—I was certain there were places you could get key cards copied. They would just have had to loan it out for an hour or two, no questions asked. I thought of Karla—she had practically told me that it went on, that someone might have lent the cabin to a friend.
But it didn’t have to be that. The passkey could have been stolen, for all I knew, or bought off the Internet—I had no idea how those electronic locks worked. There might have been no one else involved at all.
Was it possible that all this time I had been looking for an accomplice—a perpetrator among the crew or passengers—and they’d been innocent all along? I thought of the accusations I’d hurled at Ben, the suspicions I’d had of Cole, of Nilsson, of everyone, and I felt sick.
But the fact that this girl existed and was alive, that didn’t automatically rule out someone else’s involvement. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that someone had been helping her above decks—someone had written that message on the spa wall, had tipped Cole’s camera into the hot tub, had stolen my phone. They couldn’t all have been her. Someone would have seen and recognized the girl I had been shouting about for two days if she’d been wandering around the ship.
Ugh, this was making my head hurt. Why? That was the question I couldn’t answer. Why go to such lengths to hide on board the ship, to stop me from asking questions? If the girl had died, the cover-up made sense. But she was alive and well. It must be who she was that was important. Someone’s wife? Someone’s daughter? Lover? Someone trying to get out of the country with no questions asked?
I thought of Cole and his ex-wife, Archer and his mysterious “Jess.” I thought of the way the photograph had disappeared from the camera.
None of it made sense.
I rolled over, feeling the weight of the darkness all around. Wherever we were, it was very deep beneath the ship, I was sure of that now. The engine was loud, much louder than on the passenger deck, louder even than I remembered it being on the staff deck. I was somewhere else, on an engine deck, perhaps, far below the waterline, deep in the hull.
At that thought, I felt again the horror begin to creep over me, the tons and tons of water weighing on my head and shoulders, pressing against the hull, the air in the cabin circulating, circulating, and me here suffocating in my own panic. . . .
My legs shaking, I climbed cautiously off the bunk and made my way slowly across the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, cringing from what might be in here with me in the absolute darkness. My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares—giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms, even the girl herself, lidless, lipless, tongueless. But another part of me knew that there was no one here but myself—that I would have been able to hear, smell, sense another human being in such a confined space.
After a few moments of cautious inching, my fingers encountered the door, and I felt my way across it. The first thing I tried was the handle, but it was still locked—I hadn’t expected anything else. I felt for a spy hole, but there was none, or none that I could find on the blank expanse of plastic. I didn’t remember seeing one earlier, anyway. What I did remember, and what I felt for next, was the flat beige light switch to the left of the door. My fingers found it in the darkness, and I pressed it, my heart beating hard in my chest.
Nothing happened.
I flicked it back, but without hope this time, because I knew what they’d done. There must be some kind of override in the passage outside, some sort of master switch or fuse. The door was already shut when the light went out, and in any case, in any cabin I’d been in before there was always some kind of security light—you were never in complete darkness, even when the lights were turned out. This was something else—this was an utter, total darkness that could only come from the electricity being completely cut.
I crawled back to the bunk and beneath the covers, my muscles shaking with a mixture of panic and that sick flu-like feeling I’d had before. My head felt filled with a spreading blankness, as if the dark of the cabin had seeped inside my skull and was filtering through my synapses, deadening and muffling everything apart from the panic that was building in my gut.
Oh God. Don’t. Don’t give way, not now.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let her win.
The anger that flooded over me suddenly was something that I could hang on to, something concrete in the silent blackness of this little box. That bitch. What a traitor. So much for the fucking sisterhood. I had fought for her, put my credibility on the line, endured Nilsson’s doubt and Ben’s probing—and all for what? So that she could betray me, bash my head into a steel frame post, and lock me into this fucking coffin.
Whatever the plot was—she was in on it.
She had definitely been the person who had ambushed me in the corridor. And the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that the hand that had come snaking in to snatch my food tray was hers, too, a skinny, lithe, strong hand. A hand that could scratch and slap and smack a person’s head against the wall.
There must be some reason for all this—no one would go through this elaborate charade for nothing. Had she been faking her own death? Had I been meant to see what happened? But if so, why go to such lengths to pretend she was never there? Why clear the cabin, wipe away the blood, destroy the mascara, and deliberately discredit everything about my account of that night?
No. She hadn’t wanted to be seen. Something had happened in that cabin, and whatever it was, I was not supposed to have witnessed it.
I lay there, cudgeling my battered brain to try to work it out, but the more I tried to ram the bits of information together, the more it felt like a jigsaw with too many pieces to fit the frame.