Towering over it all were two cherry-red smokestacks and the jack staff—a pole at the ship’s front with a navy flag and the words “Lang Company” in curly red script. Below the flag were the two pairs of golden racing horns we’d won . . . back before the ghosts had taken over. Back when we’d still had passengers.
I sighed and swung my gaze toward Natchez. The city stared down at me from atop a green hill. The muddy wharf at the foot of the hill crawled with burly roustabouts, their job to unload cargo from the few steamers that had already arrived. They were also bringing new cargo down to the Sadie Queen. Tobacco and cotton weren’t nearly as lucrative as luxury passengers, but they kept the steamer afloat.
And they didn’t mind the ghosts.
I strode to the ship’s front, where the boilers stood. They were outside so air could whip through the attached furnaces and keep the fires stoked. These eight long tanks served as the intestines of the ship. If they got clogged with mud, they didn’t work. It was one of the striker’s jobs to clean the boilers because, as a rule, we were younger and smaller than the engineers. While I was certainly thinner than Murry or Second Engineer Schultz, I was a full head taller. In fact, I had to fold my body near in half to get into the tank, and if there was one way I didn’t want to die, it was trapped inside a boiler.
Two months ago, in the middle of the night, I had thought I might die such a death. We’d stopped between Baton Rouge and Devil’s Isle because the boilers had taken on too much mud in the night. Captain Cochran had dragged me from my bunk with only a dim lantern to see by and a harsh order to get the boilers cleaned.
So I’d stuffed my body inside . . . and that was when I felt the cold. It had brushed over my neck. The hair on my arms had shot up. Then blue had flashed at the top of my eyes, and I’d paused mid-scrape to glance up.
To stare straight into the charred eyes of a dead woman.
“Blood,” she hissed. “Blood everywhere.”
White panic exploded in my brain.
“Blood,” she hissed again. Then her voice had changed, shifted into the voice of my mother. The raspy, rattling voice she’d had just before she coughed her last breath. . . . “You left me, Danny Boy. It’s your fault I died.”
Bile burned up my throat at those words, at that voice. How this ghost could speak with my mother’s tongue, I didn’t know . . . but I didn’t care. It was too real.
I had left my mother. It had been nine years, but I would never forget that wet, blood-filled sound of her final breaths. . . .
“You must pay, Danny Boy. You left me, and you must—”
Without thinking, I pitched my hammer at the ghost’s face.
It went right through her. She reached for me with spirit fingers, but her hand slipped through my chest with nothing more than a cold stab.
She yanked her arms back, and that’s when I started hollering—really shrieking—for someone to get me the hell out of the boiler.
And ever since then, even if it sometimes interrupted the Sadie Queen’s schedule, I had never, ever again cleaned the boilers at night.
And no one had really blamed me—not even Captain Cochran.
When I crawled from the eighth boiler almost nine hours later, it was to the sound of boisterous hollers and the hum of other steamboats. The volume had been gradually growing until almost all of my senses were overcome by sound. All the tobacco and cotton would be loaded by now, and our new deckhands—the men who kept the ship running—would be hunkering down for the journey. Cochran couldn’t keep any deckhands longer than a trip or two—the nightmares and ghosts always scared ’em off. These days he was having to offer double wages to hire enough crew to get us to New Orleans and back.
It was then, as I sat there wiping my sweat and watching the deckhands get organized for departure, that I heard the familiar slow, scraping shuffle of an old man. “Striker,” Chief Engineer Murry shouted as he came toward me. I turned and looked at him. His eyes were permanently coated with a white film, and one was half closed—almost sewn shut by scar tissue. The skin was puckered and shiny on his forehead and beneath his eyes.
It sure looked as if Cochran had shoved Murry’s face in the furnace.
Murry’s half-blind eyes squinted, then he smiled. “Just who I was lookin’ for.” He beckoned me over, so biting back a sigh, I went.
“Sir?”
“Cap’n wants to see you.” The edge of his lip curled up. “You shouldn’t have done that, Striker. Mighty stupid of you.”
“Huh?” I reared back slightly. When Murry wore a smile like that, it only meant bad things ahead. “What did I do?”
“You know damned well.” He snickered, almost gleefully. “And by the Shadow of Death, it was stupid. Ha!” He gave a guttural laugh and clapped his big gnarled hands. “It’s nice to see someone else feel the captain’s wrath for a change.”