The Woman in Cabin 10(68)

She smiled, and then with one sinuous movement she pulled off the shirt. Beneath it she was skinny as a whippet, all ribs and collarbone and jutting pelvis, her elbow joints wider than her forearms, her wrists knobbly as a child’s. She looked down at herself, and then she pulled off her bra, slow as a striptease, except there was nothing erotic about it, nothing sexy about her small, shallow breasts and the hollow of her stomach.

But as I lay on the bunk, panting, paralyzed with fear, she didn’t stop there. She kept stripping. Her knickers slipped from her narrow hips to form a puddle at her feet. And then her hair, yanking it out by the roots. Then she pulled off her eyebrows, first one, and then the other, and her lips. She let her nose drop to her feet. She drew out her fingernails, one by one, slowly, like a woman loosening her evening gloves, and let them fall with a slight clatter to the floor, followed by her teeth, click . . . click . . . click, one after another. And finally—and most horribly—she began to peel away her skin, as if she were stepping out of a tight-fitting evening dress, until she was just a bloody streak, muscle and bone and sinew, like a skinned rabbit.

She went down on all fours and began to crawl towards me, her lipless mouth spread wide in a horrible parody of a smile.

Closer and closer she crawled, until at last, though I backed away, I came up against the rear wall of the bunk and could retreat no farther.

I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.

She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak—but then she reached inside, and pulled out her own tongue.

I awoke, gasping and crawling with the horror of it, the blackness like a clenched fist around me.

I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium—if I scream, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear. Let them hear, and maybe they’ll come and get me.

So I let it out, the scream that had been rising up inside me, growing and swelling and pressing to get out.

And I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.


I don’t know how long I screamed for, how long I lay there, shaking, my fists curled around the thin, limp pillow, my nails digging into the bare mattress beneath.

I only know that at last it was quiet in the little cabin, except for the low roar of the engine, and my own breath, rasping in a throat scoured raw and hoarse.

No one had come.

No one had banged on the door to ask what was going on, or threatened to kill me unless I shut up. No one had done anything. I might as well have been in outer space, screaming into a soundless vacuum.

My hands were trembling, and I could not get the girl from my dream out of my head, the idea of her raw, moist form crawling towards me, clutching, needing.

What had I done? Oh God, why had I done this, kept pushing, kept refusing to shut up. I had made myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what happened in that cabin. And yet . . . and yet what had happened?

I lay there, my hands pressed to my eyes in the suffocating darkness, trying to make sense of it. The girl was alive—whatever I had heard, whatever I thought I had seen, it wasn’t murder. Had she been on the ship all along?

She must have. We hadn’t stopped. We hadn’t even got near enough to land to see it. But who was she, and why was she hiding on the ship?

I tried to ignore my aching head, to think logically. Was she a member of the crew? She had access to the staff door, after all. But then I remembered Nilsson punching in the code, me standing behind him as he did. He’d made no effort to shield the keypad. If I’d wanted to, it would have been child’s play to note down the numbers as he entered them. And after that, once you were below decks, there were not many further locked doors.

She’d had access to the empty cabin, though—and that did require a passkey, either a guest one, programmed to that door specifically, or a staff one that opened all the cabin doors. I thought of the cleaners I’d seen in their little hutches below decks, their scared faces looking out at me before the door swung shut. How much would one of them sell a passkey for? A hundred kroner? A thousand? They wouldn’t even need to sell it—I was certain there were places you could get key cards copied. They would just have had to loan it out for an hour or two, no questions asked. I thought of Karla—she had practically told me that it went on, that someone might have lent the cabin to a friend.

But it didn’t have to be that. The passkey could have been stolen, for all I knew, or bought off the Internet—I had no idea how those electronic locks worked. There might have been no one else involved at all.

Was it possible that all this time I had been looking for an accomplice—a perpetrator among the crew or passengers—and they’d been innocent all along? I thought of the accusations I’d hurled at Ben, the suspicions I’d had of Cole, of Nilsson, of everyone, and I felt sick.

But the fact that this girl existed and was alive, that didn’t automatically rule out someone else’s involvement. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that someone had been helping her above decks—someone had written that message on the spa wall, had tipped Cole’s camera into the hot tub, had stolen my phone. They couldn’t all have been her. Someone would have seen and recognized the girl I had been shouting about for two days if she’d been wandering around the ship.