Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

THIRTY NINE

Titanic continued her screeching and moaning from her steep descent of two and a half miles to the ocean floor until her bow dug out a sixty-foot trough to lie in for eternity. By the time Titanic hit bottom, few survivors in the water remained alive, almost all were victims of hypothermia. Aside from Alastair Ransom and Declan Irvin, others who had remained aboard for the ride to the bottom either did so because they had become trapped inside the hull or had intentionally wanted to go out this way. Among them were some of the richest families on board who had secretly locked themselves away in a cargo hold, the one that included the bolted down automobiles in the sealed cargo hold at the bow below decks. They’d climbed into the cars for one hell of a ride.

No one caught inside Titanic, hiding in cubby holes and even sealed compartments could have long survived what most assuredly felt like an elevator ride straight to damnation at impact against the ocean floor, two and a half miles below the surface.

Mercifully, Declan and Alastair had come to form a still life not unlike the paintings of the Madonna and child, as Declan’s body had been thrown across Alastair’s lap. Neither man suffered the agony of a slow death here.

They would also never know if Thomas had survived, and if Thomas had saved the journal.

Two and a half miles above the final resting place of Titanic, lifeboats remained in the water as did survivors screaming for the boats to return for them, but the screams quickly diminished, soon dying altogether. The forty-nine degree water temperature claimed anyone remaining in the sea. Those dead with life jackets attached in dull gray and beige floated on the calm sea like so many mannequins disturbed only by huge air bubbles still rising from Titanic’s descent, the surface waves sending the dead in all directions from the exact spot where Titanic had lifted her aft section to tower above the sea, to then pivot like a giant top, and to finally slip below the surface like Neptune’s play toy.

Men, women, and children in the life boats who hadn’t fallen asleep had seen Titanic’s bow dip below the water and her aft section with the enormous propellers rise to what seemed a mile in the star-filled sky. Some aboard the lifeboats had called for Lightoller and other officers to do their duty, to do all in their power to save as many of those in the water as possible. “The damn boats are only half filled!” shouted an American woman named Molly Brown. “Do something!”

“Do what?” began a chorus of crewmen in reply.

“There’s naught to be done!”

“The cries’ve ended; they’re all dead!”

Lightoller finished for the other crewmen in all the bobbing lifeboats. “Do you wish to share your lifeboat with the dead? Shall we have a vote?”

This rhetorical question silenced the passengers, but Lightoller, losing his calm for a moment, added, “Then please do shut up! We-We had to ferry away from the ship! Else… else it would have sucked us down with it.” He then exchanged a look with Thomas, both of them knowing that Captain’s Smith orders went against all that was human nature. Self-sacrifice was all well and good, but no one knew if he had it within them until faced with such an awful circumstance as this.

Murdoch had escaped it; gotten around the problem with a bullet to his head. Smith had wandered about in a daze there at the end. Lightoller had last seen him returning to his berth. He imagined that the old man had simply laid down in his bed until fate—which seemed to have stalked them all tonight—came for him.

Nothing noble in it, Lightoller told himself. No winners here. Thomas Coogan could no longer meet his gaze.

Thomas said nothing. He knew of Captain Smith’s orders for the lifeboat operators to maintain a position in close to the ship—that the plan was they all go down with the ship, leaving not one possibility that any of the disease organisms be transported to a port of any kind other than on the River Styx.

A shivering, drenched Charles Lightoller, who’d jumped ship at the last moment and had a life and death struggle with the sea when caught up in debris pressing him under, had somehow gotten a hold on collapsible B, which was over-loaded with survivors, but then life boat #14 came and crewmen lashed collapsible B to #14. Once aboard B, Lightoller made his way onto the less crowded #14, and being the most senior officer, he took charge even as his teeth chattered and his body shivered.

He now moved among the passengers on board the boat, sadly only half full. He made his way to sit alongside Thomas Coogan and the dog beside him. “Appears our plan did not completely succeed, Thomas, and I am sorry for the loss of your friends left aboard.”

“You saw Ransom. He was going after Declan; they may well have gotten onto another lifeboat the other side of the ship where Mr. Murdoch was in charge.”

“I’d’ve insisted he get aboard, but we still had women and children to board. Damn people. Why couldn’t they’ve all cooperated? No one wanted to get on the bloody boats!”

“Everyone calls them suicide boats, you know.”

“But it was suicide to remain on board, and yet… they waited too late.”

“Every crewman knew they had to get their boats away from the ship as fast as possible. You all did your best. What you had to do.”

“Our best? We all disobeyed Smith’s orders. All but Murdoch.”

“What do you mean?”

“I skipped over to talk to him, to tell him it was useless, but before I got to him, he’d gotten the last collapsible boat away, and then he shot a fellow coming at him as if… as if he believed the man infected. The bastard had bitten him. Then when he heard me shout his name, he turned, looked at me, raised his gun and shot himself in the head. That’s when I was knocked overboard.”

“I helped pull you from the water,” Thomas said.

“And for that I’m grateful. I was completely under, held there by some passing debris, almost knocked unconscious. Lucky to be alive.”

“Sad… sad business. We’ve all lost so much.”

Lightoller stood and made his way back through the crying and moaning of the discomfited passengers, going for his position at the helm. “Keep her steady, Mr. Coogan,” he called back to Thomas. “We sent out a number of distress signals at the last with the flares going up. A ship called Carpathia is steaming for our position, and if we keep rowing in the direction I indicated, we should be seeing them sometime around dawn, perhaps.”

It was 3:10am.

Thomas looked down at his forearm where Varmint had bitten him. He kept telling himself that the dog was in distress, terrified. That it had nothing to do with the parasitic creature that had brought down Titanic and had killed his best friend along with Andrews, Smith, and Alastair Ransom. Fine men all. “Better men than I,” he muttered.

A young woman beside him, the one Ransom had helped aboard, asked, “What is it you’re saying?”

“Nothing… nothing really.”

“Do you think us safe now?”

“Hardly, ma’am. Not till we step aboard the deck of this ship coming to our aid will we be safe.”

“Oh dear… oh dear.”

Afterward for 1912 Inspector Alastair Ransom storyline:

Altogether the White Star-commissioned ships sent out to the North Atlantic in search of bodies find a total of 328 corpses still in their life jackets.

May 2 to July 3: British Board of Trade Inquiry is conducted. 25,622 questions are asked of 96 witnesses, including such expert witnesses as the inventor of radio, Marconi, and the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton regarding ice and icebergs. The only passenger witnesses are Sir Cosmo, Lady Duff Gordon, and J. Bruce Ismay. Other witnesses include Captain Lord of the Californian, Lightoller who endures 1,600 questions alone, members of the crew, the ship's owners, and even select experts who happen to be members of the British Board of Trade itself. The final judgment recommends "more watertight compartments in ocean-going ships, the provision of lifeboats for all on board, as well as a better lookout."

1913 April: International Ice Patrol created to guard sea lanes of North Atlantic under direction of U.S. Coast Guard.

1914 February: Titanic's second sister ship, Britannic, is launched.

1916 November: Britannic, converted to a hospital ship, is sunk by underwater German mines.

1929 November 18: The Grand Banks Earthquake is thought to have triggered a huge underwater mudslide which some feel may have buried wreck of Titanic in same vicinity.

1935 After 24 years of safe and reliable service, including war service carrying troops, and four major re-fittings, Titanic’s other sister ship, Olympic is retired. She had crossed the Atlantic 500 times, steamed a million and a half miles, and earned the nickname Old Reliable.

Afterword for 2012 David Ingles storyline:

1980 July: U.S. entrepreneur and explorer Jack Grimm funds scientific expedition which sets out to locate wreck of Titanic. Dogged by bad weather and equipment malfunction, expedition fails to find Titanic.

1981 June: Jack Grimm's second expedition sets out to locate Titanic, but again fails to find the wreck.

1983 July: Third and final expedition funded by Jack Grimm fails to find Titanic.

1985 September 1: Franco-American scientific expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard finally discovers and photographs remains of the wreck of Titanic at a depth of 12,460 feet on the ocean floor.

1986 July: Dr. Ballard returns to Titanic with a second expedition. Landing the submersible Alvin on her decks, he explores and photographs the entire wreck and debris field in detail.

1987: The U.S. Congress moves to make Titanic an international memorial. A French expedition recovers approximately 900 artifacts from the Titanic wreck.

1995: Director James Cameron begins production on a movie based on the disaster starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet.

2012: Captain Juris Forbes’ expedition to Titanic has, for the first time, divers entering these depths and independently entering Titanic’s hull to investigate her interior with cameras mounted on their persons. Expedition ends in disaster when all members of an eight-person away team die along with the loss of a submersible. This failed expedition promptly put an end to any further visits to plunder Titanic.

The end…

Let Author Robert W. Walker know what you think of his retelling of the Titanic epic as your remarks could become “blurbs” and reviews for the book on Rob’s Facebook Wall. You can contact the author directly at: inkwalk@sbcglobal.net

Author website located at: www.robertwalkerbooks.com and for a blog devoted to the creation of Titanic 2012 along with instruction in creative writing, visit Rob at Dirty Deeds, at Write Aide, at Acme Authors, and Make Mine Mystery. Articles on the art and science of fiction found at: www.speakwithoutinterruption.com and www.1stTurningPoint.com or purchase Rob’s how-to on writing—Dead On Writing—at Amzon.com/Kindle or Wordclay.com for print copy. Finally, if you liked Titanic 2012, seek out Children of Salem by this author.