The Hope Read Online Free PDF

parents were and charity on the Hope doesn’t go too far or last too long. Mind you, Reverend Chartreuse offered me a job in the chapel but, though he’s a nice enough bloke, I preferred the idea of helping to run the ship herself, of being where it all happens, over handing out hymn books and putting on a white dress to light candles. Charlie continued: “Horror is being somewhere you don’t want to be with something that doesn’t want you there.” He looked at me straight, over the rim of his tumbler, over the deep-ridged soles of his boots.
    “I’d call that being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “You’d be right. But it’s because that something wants you in the wrong place at the wrong time so’s it can beat on you good. It wants you there because it wants to show you that it doesn’t want you there.”
    He’d lost me and I said so.
    “OK, pal,” he said, putting his feet on the floor, setting down his whisky and leaning forward, “I’ll put it another way. You know old Creaky Stan, right? You know he walks like he’s got a steel bar up his ass?” I smirked. That was how old Stan walked all right. “I’ll tell you a story about me and him and a few other guys you won’t have heard of. This was way back, soon after the Hope set sail and we were just getting into the swing of things, learning the ropes and discovering that no one runs the Hope – she just runs herself and minds her own business and all we do is check the gauges and oil the pumps and make sure the turbines keep turning…”
    And Charlie’s story went like this.
    Before your time there were rats down here, hundreds of the buggers, big ones as long as your forearm from tip to tail, bigger than the ones we used to have back in New England. They weren’t exactly dangerous but they didn’t make the job any easier. You’d reach up into the space above the vent levers and one of them would be waiting for you, maybe give you a bad bite if you weren’t wearing gloves, and then you’d need all kinda shots up your ass from Dr Macaulay. They hung around behind the air ducts and you’d see the scaly tail dangling down in front of your nose and it’d jump ten years’ growth out of you. One even got up here into the playroom, when Big Fred was running the show. He went crazy, completely bugshit, and throttled it with his bare hands. Came down the ladder with this dead rat in one hand to show us all. Worst was when you went into the storeroom and found a mother rat in a bucket and she had given birth to a brood or litter or whatever you call a bunch of baby rats. She’d hiss at you like she was made of snakes and there were all these pulpy pink things sucking at her tits and it took two of us armed with crowbars to batter the bitch to death. That’s mothers for you.
    Did they have rat poison in the ship’s stores? Like fuck they did! No one had thought there would be rats on board their brand-new shining Hope . I’m not blaming anyone, but you wonder, don’t you, if the people who design these things have a brain or not? They should have asked someone like me. I’d have told them what they needed on a ship this size. Industrial-strength rat poison, that’s what I’d have said. Anyway, Fred went and got some cyanide off the black market, Bart’s or somewhere, and dusted all the corners and dark areas and we had to wear face masks for the next week just in case. We didn’t see the rats for a while and then they came back with a vengeance, more than before, bigger then before (unless my eyes were playing tricks on me), as if cyanide was the greatest thing rats could ever want to eat. Rats’ smoked salmon. We got a cat down here too, black one from the upper decks, some stray a rich person didn’t want, I guess. Black cats are supposed to bring good luck. Do you know how long it lasted? Three days. I came down for my shift one morning and Tommy – Thompson – showed me kitty in a box. Kitty had no head and no