Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winner (Best Short Story) with stories published in various magazines and anthologies. He has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s ‘Best Horror of the Year’ series and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, as well as Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. His work has been translated into French, Polish, and Hungarian, and Chinese, while his novella, Water For Drowning, is currently being developed as an audio book. His debut collection, Probably Monsters, was short-listed for a British Fantasy Award and is available from ChiZine Publications.
While Ray loves all kinds of horror, he is particularly drawn to stories of the sea. The extract below is from ‘Steel Bodies’ which appears in New Fears 2, available now from Titan Books.
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Samir fumbled for a handrail he’d forgotten was no longer there as he climbed. He would start from the top and work his way down. He had to be careful; the handrail was missing, but so were some of the steps themselves. The portholes had been taken from the walls, and in many places the walls were gone as well. Inside the ship was an absence that expanded. Samir walked within a steady decomposing of steel. There were no railings on the deck, either. Samir passed mounts for missing cranes. Saw signs for lifeboats that weren’t there.
Out to sea, in the fading light of the setting sun, children were playing in the dieselled waters. They swam around a raft of wreckage, clambering up only to throw their young careless bodies at toxic water and whatever scrap metal might lurk submerged there. Despite what they might have thought, their bodies were not made of steel. Each was susceptible to breakage, all too easily opened up and spilt empty, or filled with fluid instead of breath. Samir had to look away from their play, unable to stop imagining the worst.
Port and starboard, the Bangladeshi beach was an open graveyard. The ships here did not sink, they slumped; rotting, rusting corpses alive only by day with the men who took them apart reducing them to rivetless pieces. But in the dark they looked almost whole again. It was easy to imagine each as it might have once been. Their slow progress across the world's oceans; the sudden climb and plunging fall over waves the size of mountains. Leviathan, each of them, forging paths that disappeared almost immediately behind them as they fell and rose again. These were cruise liners and tankers and container ships from all over the world. Who had sailed them? What had brought them to the ships, and where had each ship taken them? And what else had each ship carried? Here they were now, these amazing constructions, at their journey’s end. Waiting to be torn apart, they spilled silent stories into the mud, into the sea, like slicks of oil, each sinking or getting dragged away with every outgoing tide.
In the bridge, every monitor and machine, every button, every wire, had all been taken. Samir stood at the hole where the windows used to be, imagining himself the captain looking out at a vast ocean and a sky full of stars. Now, panes empty of glass framed a landscape that was all mud and lights coming on in the city inland, or from the fires on the beach where workers kept the evening chill away burning unsalvageable materials in old oil drums. Burning asbestos and worse, probably.
Samir retrieved a small bound bundle of sage from his bag and wedged it into a tight corner of metal. He lit it, and wafted the aromatic smoke with his hands as he recited a prayer. He was combining his faith with ‘smudging’, a Native American ritual which cleansed a space of negative energy, and with science; sage cleared the air of bacteria.
He would descend now, and wind his way through the corridors until he found the ‘dark heart’ of the ship. It was a suitable metaphor. Much of what Samir did was couched in metaphor. That was how faith worked, and it made the supernatural easier to understand. He had grown up Christian in a Muslim country but he knew all the faiths now. He liked the stories. Stories were useful. Powerful, sometimes.
© Ray Cluley 2018