Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

ONE

Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 3, 1912

Sifted coal dust rained unseen over them, choked them. A fine shower of it fluttered about the men like a million black fairies that insisted on entering them. The dark dust created of itself a ghostly, unruly smoke. Despite how fine the black particles were, their helmet lights captured it as a sparkling array before their eyes. “Black angel dust,” commented the taller man.

“Stuff always looks to me as if, you know, alive,” said the stouter of the two.

At the same time, the earth around them groaned and stretched, as if disturbed from slumber, just awakening. Tim McAffey, mine superintendent, along with his assistant superintendent, Francis O’Toole, dared enter to inspect the recent damage that had been left unattended for two months—this after the mine had sat unused for two years previously. This fresh and somewhat minor cave-in had shut it down anew. Still the order was to get Number 9 operational again at all costs.

At times like this, McAffey wondered why he’d ever become a miner. Then as the floating grave dust ahead of them settled, he thought of the bonus promised if he did his job. He thought of home and family and food on the table.

The day had ended with little to show for his efforts, so McAffey remained frustrated and upset. He knew from experience it’d take days if not a week to get the men comfortable enough—even now after sixty days—about reentering this section of the mine to even begin to clean up the mess where some timbers had given way. “Hell, this amounts to a sneeze,” he said to O’Toole.

“Minor inconvenience at best,” agreed Francis O’Toole. “Thank God, no one’s been kilt this time by her; two injured and off to hospital’s all.”

Still, men were superstitious; once an area underground shook with the slightest tremor, they bolted and often refused to return unless the owners offered a bonus or other incentive. Two years previous, there’d been a god awful mining accident the likes of which Belfast had never seen—twenty seven men killed in an instant. But that, while in Number 9, was in another section quite aways from here. This most recent set-back was a minor one, nothing of consequence beyond a six-foot high pile of rubble in the way of going forward to where it was believed the finest iron ore ever seen lay waiting for harvest—in the shaft where the twenty-seven had perished.

“We’ve little choice, Francis, but to push on. Bosses signed a big contract with the White Star line. Provide iron for three ships that’re between fifty-three and sixty-three tons.”

“Aye… building two more to match that monster Britannic we saw launched some time back. The three of ’em…” O’Toole shook his head. ..“they’ll be the grandest ships ever the world has seen.”

“This one they’re calling Titanic will be even larger than the first, I’m told.”

“She’s almost ready for launch, I ’ear.”

The talk of the British-owned White Star’s plans for a fleet of ships large enough to compete with the Seven Wonders of the World had the two miners’ discussion turn to politics. “No matter a man’s politics or feelings toward the British, Francis, White Star has brought a level of prosperity to Belfast sorely needed.”

“They’re calling this new one The Unsinkable Titanic, ’ave you heard, Tim?”

“Aye—and Belfast Iron’s a big part of her; a part of history now, Francis.”

“Getting the ore to the foundry and the shipyard, that’s all that matters—one more ‘Titanic’ to go.”

“Aye—the one called Olympic.”

“Hold on.” Francis stopped cold in his tracks and pointed with an unlit pipe, asking, “What ’ave we ’ear?” asked Francis. He pointed to a darkened corner of the troubled shaft.

“What is it?” McAffey directed his helmet light at the spot and gasped.

“Some sorta dead dog looks like, but he’s froze in the rock wall for God knows how long.”

“Look at the size of them fangs, would ya? Thing’s gotta be old as the bible, I warrant.”

They stared at it. The thing was indeed embedded in the cave wall, recently uncovered by the fallen debris all round it. The snout was huge, the gaping incisors prehistoric in appearance. “May Gawd ’imself blind me,” began McAffey. “Francis, tell no one about this monster, not a word of it, ya hear?”

“Why? What’re you thinking, Tim? We could put it on display, charge folks to ’ave a look-see! Make ’nough to keep us in ale and bitters for months.”

“Word gets out ’bout this, Tim, and-and we have two problems, old man!”

“Two problems?”

“Yes—one with the men, the second with the long-hairs over’t the universities.”

Francis shrugged, frowned, and asked, “How’s that, Tim?”

“The men’ll claim tis Satan ’imself at work here! You know that. And the professors—they’ll want to turn this shaft into a laboratory—an archaeological dig.”

“Aye… I see your meanin’.”

“This stays with us. We pickaxe this… this ancient badger outta here, wrap it up, and toss it into the nearest river. Let it be somebody else’s bloody discovery. I want nothin’ to do with it. Agreed?”

O’Toole poked at the brittle creature in the wall with his pipe only to knock away an entire tooth the size of his finger. He lifted the tooth, pocketed it, and said, “Something to tell my grandchildren about!”

“I just said no one’s to know!”

“After I retire one day.” He laughed and turned to McAffey who shoved a pick into his hands.

“So long as you tell ’em that’s all you found—a tooth. Now let’s start diggin’.”

The two veteran miners intended to make short work of the unusual find. In fact, they soon had the creature extracted from the wall, and were chipping away at the remaining ore attached to the carcass. “I can just see this flesh-eater tearin’ away at his kill, can’t you, Francis?”

“Aye—he’s dried out like a mummy but from the girth at the shoulders, he’d’ave been a real monster, this one.”

“We’ll get a tarp, wrap it, take it down to the mill creek,” suggested McAffey, puffing now from the work. “Either bury it or tie a rock to it and dump it there.”

O’Toole pictured the spot his boss was talking about, a curve in the creek that accumulated debris floating in the current above the millworks north of the shipyards. His thoughts were interrupted when suddenly McAffey sucked in a deep breath of the mine dust and stumbled to a rock, squatting there. He tried to shake off a sudden fatigue, his face turning an odd shade of pale grey and a strange greenish hue in splotches here and there.

“Musta overdone it,” he muttered, out of breath.

“You OK, Tim?”

“Just get the tarp! I’m fine. Catch me breath in a minute. Go!”

O’Toole studied his boss for any additional signs of danger, wondering if the gases down here had turned him sour, and if so, they might both be dead in minutes.

“Just somethin’ I ate, Francis, so stop lookin’ at me like I’m a dead man.”

“Sorry, Tim. It’s right-cha-are!” After nodding, O’Toole set off for the surface to fetch the tarp; he couldn’t help grumbling and cursing under his breath that he was ordered about like a dog himself, while McAffey sat on a rock to wait for his return.

Fifteen minutes elapsed when O’Toole returned with the tarp only to find McAffey bent over in serious pain, asking the other man for help. “G-Get me to-to the surface; imperative. Need fresh air… now. Help me, p-please.”

He didn’t even sound like McAffey anymore, so distraught was he.

“Sure… sure… I can come back later for the carcass.” But McAffey had forgotten about every other consideration. He simply kept repeating, “Air… I gotta have air. Get me air!”

O’Toole thought of the amount of dust they’d both swallowed on first entering the shaft. O’Toole, a big man in his late fifties, held his wobbly boss who seemed about to faint dead away any moment. The man’s knees buckled; he could hardly take a step like some newborn pony on spindly legs. “Hold on to me; I’ve gotcha, Tim, me boy.”

“Feels like I picked up something, Francis. Got no time for this. No time for sickness.”

“You’re nose is bleedin’, Tim—gushin’ it is.”

“Get me to the surface, now!”

McAffey’s ears began to bleed now, but in the darkness, O’Toole didn’t notice. “Never been sick a day in your life, Tim, so what’s this?” he asked, but McAffey could not form words. Blood strangled any attempt to speak or to breathe. Halfway up the lit elevator shaft, Superintendent McAffey died in O’Toole’s arms, his eyes first imploring as if to ask why and then going absolutely blank. As if a shadow was crossing over his brow and eyes—a gray-greeness turning to sienna. Yes, in the eyes. Francis, distracted, paid little heed to this. He was too busy trying to forgive himself for his first thought—I’m sure to be promoted to McAffey’s job… make more money.

The lift platform creaked and bumped its way toward the surface.

By this time, under the elevator light, O’Toole watched McAffey’s body turn into a stiff, brown-skinned mummy. Francis knew that Tim had died a terrible death. A death which left his body looking like a brittle ancient unwrapped mummy, yet despite the bizarre desert-like dry condition of the body, a strange odor emanated from every orifice, an odor Francis could not place at first until he thought of Hades as it must surely be the odor of fire and brimstone and sulfur.

Francis knew also that he was himself feeling ill and far from normal.

And this terrified him.

He feared whatever had destroyed Tim McAffey before his eyes; feared it was no doubt now inside him, infecting him. He hadn’t time to feel guilty over his earlier thought of taking charge—finally—as mine superintendent. His hand went for his pocket, and he grasped the saber-tooth cradled there and cursed it. He knew, like McAffey, that he was on his own way to a horrible death, and it had to do with handling that beast he’d left below in the mine, all save the damnable fang.

He recalled having first tapped the damned thing with his pipe; recalled how they both had dug it from the wall, how they’d both tugged at it with their gloved hands, exerting themselves, breathing heavily as they worked. He thought of Tim’s fateful decision to remove it rather than call in the experts from a local university to give it a name—whatever the hell it might be.

Francis felt a stirring in his body like a foreign emotion. He tightened his fingers around the overlarge tooth resting in his palm now and squeezed until the tooth bit into his flesh. He did so just to feel something other than the numbing fear overtaking him. Something suggested that while he had no future, that he would live longer than McAffey had; that whatever this was, it had fed on Tim like a starved dog over a piece of meat, but that it would take its time with Francis O’Toole who had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Mistake was goin’ back into the mine the second time… being human—of caring, of doing me best to help Tim to the surface air he craved in his last moments.”

Whatever had killed Tim, he feared now may well have spread to his body, but what in God’s name had killed Tim? It’d all happened so fast. One moment good old Tim’s feeling nauseous and begging for air—to get to the surface—and the next moment, he’s gone! Just like that!

But Tim McAffey calling for the surface and the air like he did, pleading like a frightened child—that was so unlike Tim; didn’t seem like Tim at all. Tim’s appearance, so changed, his skin resembling beef jerky, leather to the touch, like some ancient Egyptian. What did it all mean? What did it herald? Something Old Testament? A plague? Could there be any disease that could kill a man so fast and so surely as this? If so, O’Toole had never seen it nor heard of it. Not even the dreaded smallpox could take a man so fast and do such hideous things to the body.

It’d been a swift end for Tim.

“If I’ve picked it up, I should be dead as well,” he ciphered aloud, “or shortly now sure. Yet I’ve me legs—a bit stiff, to be sure, but I-I feel fine,” he tried reassuring himself.

However, deep within, he felt an overwhelming fear that this disease, whatever it was—some new strain of malaria, smallpox, the bubonic plague, whatever—it was beginning to sap his strength and resolve. Still, Francis fought it, suddenly as anxious for topside air as Tim had begged for—that and the company of men.

Air I m-must find… find air, said his mind. Survive I must, came a second voice in his head, yet so real.

And for no reason he could fathom, O’Toole suddenly began kicking out at the inert, now petrified body of his former boss and sometime drinking buddy, McAffey. Then again he landed another hard kick, and suddenly he was again kicking him repeatedly with a booted foot and leg that acted without reason.

The body lay now at the edge of the lift, an arm hanging over. Once again, he viciously kicked McAffey’s dehydrated form, until the body rolled off the platform altogether. He heard the nasty thump of the other man’s body hit the stones lining the shaft as McAffey returned to the mine shaft below to spend eternity there for all O’Toole ucared now. “With god and the beast now,” he said, for a moment sounding like his old self. But only for a moment.

“Off with ya, now,” he said to the darkness below where the body had fallen. “No time for ya have I.” Then he haltingly chanted in what seemed another voice: “Out I must get… out… g-get out… got to get out…”

Before he could analyze these uneasy feelings, the lift finally came to ground level, and he stumbled onto earth as if finding his sea legs, appearing a disheveled drunk in a gait that did not seem his, and yet these were his feet.

He stumbled and fell, gasping for all the air he could place in his lungs, choking as he did so. Whatever this was, a voice inside his head was now telling him to go forth toward the city piers and the shipyards. This hypnotic suggestion felt so strong; he could not fight it. At the same time, he wondered, “W-Where’s me-me own will got off to?”

It was late, no one around, and no one to ask help of. He knew he’d live; something told him so, but he had an inkling it would prove to be a short-lived future at best. Knew in his heart and mind that whatever had destroyed Tim was soon to overtake him, but he didn’t wish to die in a hole in the ground. He wanted to die among men here at the surface, yet he feared infecting others at the same time that this overwhelming need arose in him—to die among men, in a crowd, the first men he came to. It might be his last wish, his final desire, but he could not fathom why he’d not rather die among family than strangers but there it was—an insistence to go nowhere near anyone he loved yet to seek out human contact.

It was a powerful suggestion, one that must be obeyed, one he could not combat no matter how much he longed to see home, hearth, the wife.

He knew the nearest fellows to the mine were men working at the shipyards. He knew that his feet—the same as had kicked McAffey back into the mine shaft, now moved toward the distant lights of the shipyard at Belfast as if made of wood on the one hand, and as if they had a mind of their own, these extremities, and were guided by a hand other than his own.

“Company of others… don’t want being alone… time like this.” He heard himself saying now as he ambled in mechanical fashion toward where they had labored for so long now building Titanic and her sister ships via the iron ore provided by the mine.

Francis had forgotten McAffey’s name now; could not dredge it up. Then he realized he’d forgotten his own name as well. He wondered if he might live at least long enough to take in the air of the world outside the mine in the company of other fellows, perhaps raise a pint to his lips, smoke a cigar before his mind should completely go—but what else did it all mean? A man spending a lifetime, learning, filling his mind and for what? So it ends a blank slate? Why? How? What was at root of living and dying?

“Some seed in that damned, cursed prehistoric dog carcass,” he muttered to himself, feeling an overwhelming urge to live, and to do so among other men—other men who would allow life to continue—yet a life he did not recognize. All he knew was that he must survive long enough to get to others of his kind. In fact, it replaced the one mantra in his head—to get out and to get air—with another that pleaded for other warm bodies.

Some time later, O’Toole stumbled into the sprawling Belfast shipyard looking like a drunk at the midnight hour. He passed below the huge gantry, a part of his brain unsure in the dim light how he’d gotten here, how he’d come so far, how he remained alive when that other fellow… a man with whom he’d been… someone he’d known but could not so much as picture in his mind now… how that other fellow had died so quickly and violently. That much he remembered.

He felt not at all in control of his limbs, felt no control of his will, yet he was alive, despite the horrible belief that some kind of dreaded disease had grabbed hold of him and would never release its grip. It seemed madness to contemplate, but it felt as if the thing that’d taken hold had somehow transferred itself from this other fellow’s corpse—to him. And there had been this curious creature he’d carelessly handled. It may well’ve come from that ancient creature.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t killed him as it had the other miner. Instead, it was intentionally stretching out its time with O’Toole—using him up in a more controlled fashion as if it could… as if it could manage to control its feeding within.

While it had so quickly and voraciously fed on the other man, it had now ushered in a powerful self-control. Whatever it might be called otherwise, this thing was sentient.

It directed him deeper into the shipyard; it seemed to want to get as far from its former prison as possible. To that end, it wanted O’Toole aboard the ship just built, a ship that was made from ore taken from the mine that it had snuggled alongside for how long—as if it had an affinity for the iron walls.

Or perhaps it realized that Titanic could act as its perfect lair.

While his conscious mind had no true evidence of any of it, his every remaining human instinct said it was so.

In any case, O’Toole had no choice but to carry out its wishes.

By now realizing himself to be just a conduit, a vehicle to move it from the mine to here, O’Toole thought of killing himself, but he had no ready method of doing so save leaping into the water as he could not swim. He made a move in that direction but was turned about. While his mind still fought for itself, his body was no longer his. He guessed that he’d debated over suicide too long, and it knew his thoughts, and as a result, it was ahead of him on this.

Francis moved now below the giant letters a hundred feet overhead and twenty feet apart. Letters that read: TITANIC.