The Second Shot
AFEW DAYS FOLLOWING, the Silver Swan was far out to sea and making good time as her great steam-powered engines motored the ship through the ocean. Waking just after dawn, Cornelius Quaint decided to take a morning constitutional along the deserted deck. He had so far lapped the ship six times, a distance equivalent to a couple of miles.
Quaint strolled along, setting his eyes out to sea. Soon he came upon a gentle old man idly mopping the deck as best he could – only for a wall of water to rise from the side of the ship and soak the walkway. As Quaint approached him, he stowed his mop into his iron bucket against the railings.
'What is this now, Mr Quaint? Seven or eight times?' he asked.
'Six, Alf…only six,' Quaint replied.
'You'll wear out your shoe leather at this rate,' Alf said cheerily, wiping his forehead with a cloth from his overall pocket. 'So which is it?'
Quaint frowned. 'Pardon me?'
Alf chuckled to himself. 'In my experience, there're only two reasons why a man loses himself in a haze such as yours, Mr Quaint. You're either walking to remember something…or walking to forget it. So which is it?'
'A bit of both, I suppose,' Quaint smiled. 'The walking helps.'
'Oh? And do you reckon whatever it is it'll shift any time soon?'
The conjuror shook his head. 'Not until we reach Egypt, at least.'
Alf nodded his head knowingly. 'Bit o' sunshine does wonders, Mr Quaint, you'll see,' he chirped, as he wrung out his mop and continued to swab the puddles of seawater from the deck. 'I'll see you on your next lap. That is, unless you manage to shift that cloud afore then, eh?'
Quaint walked past the old man, but spun around as a loud crash behind him set his nerves on fire. Two smartly dressed children thrust open the door from inside and rushed out onto the open deck. One was a boy of about five years old, dressed in a blue sailor suit, whilst the other was an older girl. All pigtails, gap teeth and pleated skirt. They were both squealing madly, running in circles around Alf's bucket playing tag. Slipping on the wet deck, the young girl careered into her brother, sending both the young boy and Alf's bucket flying.
'Bleedin' mongrels, what have I told you?' cursed Alf, shooing the children away with his mop. 'That's the third time them little buggers've knocked my bucket over this morning. Their parents need to keep 'em locked up!'
'Children will be children, Alf,' the conjuror said with a smile.
'Aye, mebbe,' Alf half-heartedly agreed, swabbing up the water. 'You got any of your own, Mr Quaint?'
'None.' Quaint held his smile, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch.
Children. Now there was a subject seldom spoken of. He was fifty-five years old and it was far too late for him to even think about starting a family – even if he weren't blessed with immortality. But that did add another layer to the question of his 'condition'. How could he watch his kin grow up and grow old as he was captured in a perpetual state of eternity? How could he explain that? How could he expect them to live with that as he buried them one by one as he himself never aged a single day? He didn't think he could bear it. He didn't even dare think about it. No, it was better this way. He was better this way. With a wave of his hand he continued his stroll, his mind quickly regaining its clouded state.
He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he failed to notice the furtive form of Heinrich Nadir peering out onto the deck through the porthole set into the door behind him. The German turned to a man at his side clothed in the grease-stained garb of ship's engineer. His low brow overshadowed his simple features, and he slapped a heavy iron wrench into his open hand.
'That's the one there, is it?' he asked Nadir. 'The tall one?'
'Ja. Do you know what you are to do?'
'Yep. I'm going to wait for him to pass again, crack this tool onto his skull, and then watch his brains go splat all over the deck,' rattled the engineer, taking up his position behind the door.
'I do admire a man that takes pride in his work,' said Nadir.
Some minutes later, Cornelius Quaint had nearly completed yet another lap and he was beginning to tire, so he decided to make this his last. Destine would no doubt be waking by now. As he saw Alf in the distance, he steeled himself for the impending conversation. So far that morning, every time he had passed him, the deckhand had continued his conversation virtually from the last word without missing a beat. Quaint prayed that he would gloss over the subject of children. Perhaps if he were to trigger a conversation first, maybe it would throw Alf off the scent?
'Nasty storm coming in from the west there,' Quaint chimed.
'So, what would you have preferred then, a boy or a girl?' Alf asked.
Quaint could have spat.
'Me, I've got three boys and a girl,' continued Alf. 'They're all grown up now course, but when they were young? Strewth! The boys were no trouble, but my girl was a proper madam, by crikey! I swear she's to blame for this sorry state of affairs upstairs!' He whisked off his cloth cap to reveal a practically bald head, save for sporadic patches of white tufts of hair. 'I used to have a thick mop of chestnut up top, and now look at it! Old age happens to us all at some point, I suppose.'
'Hmm,' agreed Quaint. 'I suppose.'
'I think you might be right about that storm, Mr Quaint,' said Alf, looking out to sea. 'Looks like there's something nasty heading our way.'
Alf could not have realised just how right he was.
Behind him, the door to the deck silently swung open and through it stepped the engineer. He scoured the soft pink flesh at the back of Alf's skull and made a mental note to sort him out too once his target was taken care of – just for fun. Taking a couple of swift steps towards Quaint, he raised the wrench in the air…
Just then, the door behind the engineer was smashed open and its full weight slammed into his back. His boots skidded on the slippery deck, launching him at a rate of knots towards the ship's railings, flipping him upside down and over the side like a rag doll. The last thing the engineer saw was two small children on their backsides in a pool of water with an upturned bucket between them, their excited squeals masking his screams as his skull smashed against the ship's hull.
Quaint and Alf spun around.
'Sorry, mister!' exclaimed the boy with an impish grin, before he and his sister poked out their tongues and ran off.
'Bloody damn bastard kids,' mumbled Alf.
'Oh, it's just high spirits,' said Quaint merrily. 'It's not as if anyone was hurt.'