Midnight Ferry With Vending Machines
The ticket blepped out the machine like a tongue. Laughing to himself, giddy with jetlag, Rory used both hands to take hold of it. One hand would be impolite in Japan. Written in English: Midnight Ferry with Vending Machines and onboard Entertainments.
The waiting room was empty, and too bright, with pale gray walls and wan blue seats. The sterility spoke to Rory. A bottle of hand-wash gel sat on a tiny, wheeled stand, placed against a pillar with a no-smoking sign and other warnings he couldn’t read. He’d left his muddy, thread-trailing rucksack against a row of chairs nearby.
Rory thought to grab his camera, but felt as likely to drop and break it as frame a good shot. He needed sleep. Plus, though the placement of the rucksack had been unintentional, he worried people might think otherwise. Someone else’s rucksack, sure, great image. Not his own.
He sat down; immediately the PA bonged. Even in Japanese, Rory could hear the polite smile in the woman’s voice. Eventually, in English, she told Rory it was time to board. There was no one else to listen.
Arrows pointed the way. Up the stairs, into the umbilical-cord tunnel, the Plexiglass lashed by rain, port workers just visible on the dock, readying for cast off.
The ship’s white-painted steel shone in the dark. Dahlia. Five huge pale-pink petals decorated its front end, overlaying the windows, like God had been crafting with potato stamps.
No one was there to welcome Rory aboard. He’d been traveling for days now—Glasgow to Dubai, Dubai to Osaka, Osaka to Maizuru—and everywhere there had been a surfeit of staff welcoming him to this or thanking him for that. Here: nothing. Had he taken a wrong turn?
No—on a giant flatscreen in the lobby, an animated lady with big eyes and pleasantly patronizing manner welcomed passengers and ran through the safety briefing. Rory deduced this from the graphics alone, because it was all in Japanese. He waited for her to repeat herself in English, or for some fellow traveler to arrive, but neither happened.
The lobby was split over three levels, with wooden double staircases arcing round the elevator shaft. They’d gone for brown and beige walls, an odd choice that somehow worked. And round a corner: vending machines. As promised.
Rory examined them. He expected food, that this was where he’d get his sustenance from for the next twenty-one hours, but instead these machines sold an eclectic assortment of the useful and the bizarre. In one: underwear, toothbrushes, shaving kits. In another: screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars. A third sold only keys.
Rory thought to take a picture, again thought better of it. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t go too heavy on the isn’t Japan weird? angle. A cliché. But still: weird. Anyway, he’d have plenty of time for photography after he’d slept, and that meant finding his room.
He checked his ticket again. Apart from the chat about the vending machines and the entertainments, everything was in Japanese. No, wait—three familiar characters lurked among the kanji: C71. He’d seen a deck C on the safety lady’s graphics. He set off to consult her again but found a floor plan on the way. Deck C, one floor up. No problem.
Deck C had no proper doors. Instead, it had those traditional sliding paper ones Rory couldn’t remember the name for. Pretty cool, but on a ship? Again: weird. And surely far from safe. With the narrow corridors, Rory was forever in danger of turning round and sending his rucksack crashing into someone’s room.
Inside C71 was a proper bed, low to the floor but comfy looking. There was even a window, and a bathroom with an actual bath.
Rory knelt on the bed to look out the window. Nothing but the rain, and the streaked, distant lights of the far side of the port. He lay down to test the mattress, told himself not to fall asleep, not before finding someone, and woke up hours later in rough seas.
Rory sat up, closed his eyes again while he acclimatized to the ship’s heavy sway. He found his phone, squinted at it. 6:14pm. Shit. He had wanted to be on deck for cast off. Traditionally, the port crew lined up to see the ships away, waving with glow sticks until they passed from sight.
Ah, well. He’d get another chance. He was heading up to Sapporo to spend the weekend at the snow festival, then over to Tomakomai and another ferry back down the country’s eastern side for a week in Tokyo. Months of planning and a small fortune just to take the same cyberpunky street photos everyone else took.
Rory staggered to the toilet, peed with one hand on the low ceiling to steady himself. He was starving now, and grumpy with it.
Back in the room, a whiff of fust, like a clammy foot fleetingly revealed. Ah, last night’s dinner. His plane had been delayed, leaving him only a few hours to do Osaka before he had to catch a train, and between fitting in the castle and some harried, piss-poor photography, he forgot about eating until it was almost too late. He found a Western-style deli, attempted to buy a slice of Japanese Camembert but couldn’t make himself understood and ended up buying the whole thing, big as a pizza. He scoffed about half with bread and jam before stuffing the rest into his rucksack and dashing for his connection.
The Camembert had warmed in the night. Yeesh. It needed dumped, the room aired. But the window wouldn’t open, and Rory didn’t fancy wandering about the ship clutching half a wheel of fetid cheese. He’d deal with it later, once he’d found some signs of life.
He left his room quietly, given the hour, though it’d be difficult anyway to slam a paper door. In the corridor, he listened for snoring, for morning groans, running showers. Nothing.
He came across another floor plan but preferred to explore, to let himself be surprised by whatever was round the next corner. There were quicker ways to traverse Japan, but Rory had always liked ferries, and the idea of twenty-one hours aboard one had struck him as a fun adventure.
He headed up to deck B, reminded himself he was having fun, and decided: find one person, then I can eat.
Deck B opened out into a lounge area with high-backed yellow chairs clustered in fours round tables, or facing out the windows to sea. The waves were still strong, so Rory toured the area wide legged, peering round seat backs, apologetic smile at the ready.
No one.
Built into the far wall: a bar, its top half in-filled with vending machines. Soft drinks, alcohol, coffee, cup noodles. No staff.
Rory held onto the bar lip, turned to face the room, and waited. It’s still early. Someone will arrive. Any moment now.
Nothing. He tried the gents’ toilets and it was empty. He considered checking the ladies’ but had no desire to be branded a pervert with over fifteen hours of ship time to go. This section’s shut, that’s all. I’ve missed a sign, walked round a barrier.
He headed back downstairs, toward the ship’s aft, along a corridor that ran parallel to his own. More rooms, their paper doors shut, everything silent and still.
At the back of the deck, he found another seating area, this one featuring a tiny stage with a Yamaha keyboard and a microphone. That’ll be the entertainments, then.
One wall was entirely vending machines—deep, glass-fronted behemoths that towered over Rory, stuffed full of vacuum-packed meals. Soba, udon, onigiri, spaghetti, sushi, ramen, rice omelet, ice cream, more cup noodles. To one side, a kitchen area with six red microwaves, cutlery, chopsticks, condiments.
Rory stepped back from the vending machines to get an overview, his hand already on his wallet. Back home, in the supermarket, he’d walk right past meals like these. But this was Japan, where eating this crap was somehow the future, and not just grim.
But no. He still hadn’t found anybody. Vending machines or no, there should at least be crew about. Someone had to be stocking these things, and running the engines, and steering. One person, then breakfast.
Back through the ship he went, ducking into another gents’ toilet—also empty. And an odd thing: apart from the flimsy cubicles, there were no doors. The entrance was a curved partition, just like the toilets up on deck B. In fact, Rory was yet to find a single solid door on the whole ship. How can that be safe?
He stumbled on, thinking about bulkheads and watertight compartments and a half-forgotten Titanic documentary, his empty belly complaining all the while.
Ah! But there were real doors—leading out onto deck. They were riveted into the metal, with portholes and everything. Rory peered through one. The sun hadn’t quite risen and the waves were still high, but at least the rain had lessened.
He had to fight the wind to squeeze through the door. Immediately he regretted his lack of jacket, and of course the deck was deserted, but he persevered, encouraged by a memory: the ship’s bridge was a wide T. If he walked toward the stern he’d get a view of it.
He staggered forward, clutching the railing, and there it was, the bridge, lit up against the dark. And silhouetted in the windows—people. Crew. Maybe half a dozen busy figures.
Rory’s relief was inordinate. Of course there’s a crew. Plainly, there has to be a captain. He smiled up at them, dark imaginings fading from his mind—of ghost ships, purgatory, a bad fall then coma dream, of waking up years later with a thicket beard and ruinous medical bills.
He thought to wave, but with the low light and his position beneath them, he’d be difficult to spot. Plus, he might just look ridiculous. A comedy tourist man, making a spectacle of himself. No thanks.
He’d found some humans. Time for breakfast. He’d promised himself.
Rory shivered as the door slammed behind him. He was sure he hadn’t climbed any stairs but he was back on deck B, back in the lounge area with the high-backed yellow chairs. Odd. He had the strange sense too that the room had somehow grown, that the vending machine bar was further away and a whole new yellow-chaired section had been inserted in the gap.
Unlikely. Just going mad with the hunger. He found a floor plan in front of him and this time deigned to use it. Beyond the lounge, another dining area, from its size likely the main one. Maybe that’s where everyone is.
He walked the length of the room again, once again wide legged against the sway and peering hopefully around chair backs. Still no one.
Surely he couldn’t be the only passenger. That’d be a catastrophic way to run a business. Maybe in the ship’s bowels there was a boatload of cargo, and that’s where they made their money. Or maybe Rory really had boarded the wrong ship. A skeleton crew were sailing it to some obscure port for repairs, or across the ocean for scrapping. They did that in India, mostly, on a beach befouled by heavy metals. Rory had read about it.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. His mind was running away from him. He needed fed, to get outside some stodge, then he’d be better prepared to face whatever was happening. If it came to it, he’d head up to the bridge. It wasn’t like there were any doors to stop him.
The main dining area was sectioned off from the lounge—more partitions—and its layout matched the area at the back of the ship: a row of hulking vending machines, a little kitchen section with microwaves. Surrounding it, a vast array of tables and chairs, all empty.
Rory sighed. Fine. He fed a thousand yen note into a machine, punched in the number for rice omelet, then bought another because the portions looked small.
Each vending machine had a paired microwave, complete with helpful pointing-hand sticker to indicate the correct program. Rory inserted the first of his meals, jabbed the button. As the microwave lit up, he noticed something reflected in its glass.
A tray, left behind on a table. Scrunched packaging, a tall, thin can on its side, the remains of breakfast—a sandwich, the bread still fluffy and fresh. Was that there a moment ago?
“Hello?” shouted Rory. “Is there someone here? Hello?”
He dashed into the gents’ toilets, this time tried the ladies’ too. Nothing.
“Hello? Konnichiwa? Anyone?”
Back through the partition to the lounge—no one. Rory sighed. Okay, fine. Pretty spooky but also comforting. He wasn’t alone. Someone had eaten breakfast in here, and recently too. Maybe they were just shy.
By now, Rory could smell his omelet. He returned to the dining area, stopped dead when he saw his microwave.
New on its front: a yellow Post-it. What the hell?
Rory approached. Something was written on the note, in Japanese. He looked around, said to the empty room, “But I can’t read Japanese.”
Again he sighed, reminded himself that not knowing Japanese was very much a Rory problem, then dug out his phone, loaded up the translation app, pointed the camera at the note and waited for the software to do its work. It took some time—Rory was hardly an expert, but the penmanship looked sloppy, like it had been written in a hurry.
The microwave pinged. At the same moment, on his phone screen, the Japanese script morphed into English.
Don’t eat the food. That’s when it gets you.
What the hell? Rory spun round. When what gets you? Somebody was fucking with him. Maybe lots of people. He was on one of those crazy Japanese gameshows, the victim of some unspeakably cruel practical joke. Now it all made sense—the empty ship, the lack of doors, the eerie atmosphere.
He shouted, “I don’t consent to this! I… I withdraw my consent, if I ever gave it. I won’t participate! You can all come out, because I’m not playing!”
Nothing. He looked around for cameras but found none. Probably hidden. Probably the microwaves were fake, stuffed with recording equipment. Bastards. Rory opened them all, even the one he’d been using, though it had cooked his food and had to be real.
They were all real. Whatever. Rory peeled off the Post-it, held it up to his hidden audience. “Fuck you guys.”
No way they were going to torture him, little chance they’d keep him from eating for a whole day straight. He grabbed his warmed omelet, marched to a table and sat down, then had to perform the whole routine again because he’d forgotten a fork. He could have done with a drink too but wasn’t getting up a third time.
He cleared his throat, said again, “I do not consent,” and peeled back the plastic from his meal.
And that’s when he heard it.
Running. From the lounge, someone was coming. No, not someone—something. An animal. Heavy, panting, moving at speed, paws thudding, claws clinking on the floor.
Rory shot up, backed away from the partitioned entrance, fork out in front of him. No, don’t fight, you idiot—run.
He spun, looked for some means of escape, something solid to put between himself and whatever was coming. No doors. Oh, you bastards.
But no—there were doors, out onto the deck. He just had to find one. He ran, away from the noise, up to the far end of the dining area, desperate for an exit, for salvation.
The thing was in the room now, those pants morphing into growls, furniture clattering in its wake. Rory didn’t dare turn round.
There—a door. He barrelled through it, slammed it shut, saw back inside, through the porthole, a flash of brown fur.
Jesus living Christ. He held the door handle tight, but it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t stop this thing for a second, so he scrambled away, slipping on the wet deck, rain in his eyes, his clothes already soaked through and hanging off him.
Did it see me? Does it know where I am? He ran without destination, hoping for distance, praying for a plan.
Above him: a long drop-down ladder, access to a closed-off section of upper deck. The ladder was withdrawn, too high even with a running jump. Inaccessible. But maybe therefore safe.
Got to get up there.
Despite his sprinting, Rory was still outside the lounge with the high-backed yellow chairs—Christ, has it grown even longer?—and not far from another access door. He scanned the deck. Nothing coming.
Worth a shot. Rory slipped inside, nearly tripped over the step in his haste. He grabbed a high-backed chair and birthed it back through the door, the thing too big until he maneuvered it sideways and sent his shoulder into it, snapping one of the legs.
Out on deck, he dragged it under the ladder, finagled the broken leg back into place.
He looked around again. Still alone. The chair was already shifting, upset by the ship’s sway, unsteady on its three good legs. Need to be quick.
He took a running jump, placed one foot on the seat, the other on its back. The chair collapsed beneath him but he managed to grab the ladder with both hands. His ribs crashed into the bottom rung and his left arm yanked in a way that suggested ball and socket were soon to part. Breathless, he climbed, feet swinging uselessly until he managed to insert his knees between two rungs, then curl into himself awkwardly and get a foot placed and keep going.
Hardly elegant, but it worked. Rory climbed, the rain fierce, sun rising through a distant crack in the clouds.
He reached the top, hustled away from the ladder. There was no one up here, and not many places to go—Rory was boxed in by giant exhausts and industrial-sized pipework and other oversized ship gubbins. But he now had a far better view of the bridge. Surely the crew would see him.
He made to wave but hesitated. Something was off. Rory was behind the bridge, looking at the figures from the back. They were still moving, ostensibly going about their duties. But they were also still silhouetted, despite the strengthening light. And their heads looked wrong, like they were too big for their bodies, or like someone had messed with the aspect ratio.
Or like they weren’t designed to be viewed from this angle.
Shit. They’re not even real. They’re projections.
Rory’s guts lurched. There was nothing in there to expel but his body tried anyway, spasming so hard he bent over double. He spat up bile, mucus, whatever, then leaned against the railing to recover, the rain against his back, sleeves sodden and directing the water like sluices. What the hell’s going on?
Beneath him, the yellow chair was on its side, waterlogged and now two tones darker. The broken leg had come off again. Each lurch of the ship brought it closer to the deck’s edge, to oblivion. Rory looked away, toward the horizon. He was on the boat’s starboard side and they were heading north, up the west of the country. Land should always be in sight. Rory saw only sea.
He stepped back from the railing and tried to find a corner to cower in.
Instead he found a body.
Half a body. The legs were gone and the chest cavity had been hollowed out, blood and entrails everywhere, as if some mad beast had used its torso as a bowl. The face was missing a cheek and a nose. An eye hung loose, its tendrils tangled up in rain-slicked hair.
Rory spun away from it, the urge to move almost overwhelming. But he had nowhere to go. Panting, he ran a lap of the deck space, could find no way out but back down the ladder.
No choice. He couldn’t stay here. This was where it ate.
Rory crouched at the top of the ladder, trying to release its drop-down section with numb, freezing fingers. He glanced behind, shivered with his whole body. Tried again. He was a crouton in a bowl of soup. A prawn awaiting the skewer.
Release, you bastard! Finally, the ladder obeyed, chunking down in stages, reaching its terminus with a resounding metallic thud.
Rory hesitated; wary the creature would rouse to the noise. But if it did he was no safer lingering at the top of the ladder than fleeing from the bottom of it. The thing could come from any direction.
He climbed down, eyes on the deck beneath him, hands almost fizzy in the cold. Despite what he’d just found, outside still felt safer than in. But he couldn’t stay out here. He’d get hypothermia. If he didn’t dry off and change his clothes soon, he might be in trouble anyway.
Rory dropped onto the deck then crouched under a window and peered into the lounge. No one. No thing.
He inched toward the door, opened it, slipped inside. The Post-it Note had suggested the beast attacked while its victims ate, and Rory now had little reason to doubt that. Maybe if he kept away from food, from the smell of food, he’d be safe. Maybe.
The stairs to deck C were nearby. Rory waited, heard only the crash of the waves, the plasticky creak of the window fittings as the ship pitched and yawed.
Time to go. His shoes squelched on the floor so he kicked them off, then lost the socks too. They were only making him colder.
The deck C corridors seemed to stretch away from him, ripe with danger on both sides. Anything could burst through those paper doors. He hustled forward, could see from half a corridor away another Post-it Note, stuck to his own door.
It wasn’t safe to linger, but he needed to know what it said. Only when he had the translation app loaded and his phone pointing at the door did he remember Post-its were movable, that he didn’t need to be out here at all.
Fuck’s sake, Rory. Use your brain. He grabbed the note, hid behind his flimsy paper door, and tried again. This message was longer, so far as Rory could tell written in the same hand as the previous one.
On his phone screen, the English translation overlaid the Japanese.
Not secure. Only in secure locations within the selling device.
What the hell does that mean? This wasn’t the time for a dodgy translation. The first part was clear enough—obviously the room wasn’t secure, but Rory only intended to stay a minute or so. The second part was just nonsense.
He stuck the Post-it to the wall above the dresser, propped his phone up facing it. He’d let the app run while he got changed, see if it couldn’t conjure up something sensible with more thinking time.
Quickly, he stripped off, dried himself with a bathroom towel. He opened his rucksack to extract fresh clothes and the stink of the Camembert rushed out to assault him.
Shit. Food. Rory froze, naked, hand still on the rucksack zip, his mind a gaping chasm of dread.
Move. Get out of here. Away from the smell. He bolted for the door, fumbled it open, heard a feral grunt.
Another came, accompanying the double thud of the beast landing at the foot of the stairs. Then the loping horror of its run.
Rory threw himself at the door opposite his own, crashed through, landing hard on his hip in a mess of paper and wood, then up, into the bathroom and out of sight.
The beast arrived, panting and slavering and letting loose a deep, appreciative growl.
Rory risked peeking out. It was in his room. He could see its swishing tail. Clothes flew everywhere. His jeans landed on the dresser, shredded below the knees.
As quietly as he could, Rory climbed into the bathtub, and lay fetal inside it, and listened, and waited for the beast to find him.
The beast didn’t find him. It slunk away, and Rory lay silent and naked and freezing in the bathtub for a long time after, just to be sure it was gone.
Cramp forced him to move. He climbed out the tub, stretched his legs, noticed for the first time signs of habitation in the room. A wheeled case lay open on the bed, clothes still folded inside. Someone was staying here. Or at least they had been.
Rory peeked across the corridor to the wreck of his own room. All seemed quiet, but the smell of the Camembert lingered and most of his clothes were ruined. Rory looked again at the open suitcase.
Sorry, pal. The attire belonged to a large man and was Western in style. Probably not this guy leaving notes in Japanese, then.
Rory picked out a woolly jumper, a Bruins-branded T-shirt, a pair of sensible trousers. Quickly, he dressed, putting extra turn-ups in the trousers and securing its belt in the tightest notch. One look at the shoes told Rory not to bother with them. The guy had feet like oil tankers. Barefoot it was.
On leaving, he lingered at the doorway to his own room. His suitcase appeared to have exploded. Cheese remnants splattered the ceilings and walls. The bed lay in bits. Among the wreckage: his phone.
Shit, I’ll need that. Rory stepped inside, picked it up. Now he was in here, it seemed sensible to take his jacket, in case he had to go out on deck again. He found it half under the mattress, streaked with cheese but otherwise intact. It was a good, warm jacket, perfect for a snow festival. Rory slipped it on. His hand went to the pocket and in there was his fancy camera.
Good. Rory didn’t imagine this beast would pose for photos, but he liked the feel of the device in his hand. He’d traveled alone to five countries now, armed with only his camera and translation app, and survived them all. And though it pained him that he hadn’t yet taken a truly great shot, he’d made friends and memories and shrugged off the timidity that had plagued his adolescence. That wasn’t nothing.
He slipped the camera back into his pocket, spotted on the floor a little yellow square. The Post-it.
Not secure. Only in secure locations within the selling device.
Someone was trying to help him. Equally possible, they were drip-feeding him riddles in the service of some crazy death game, but Rory chose to believe the former. He retrieved his wallet from the remnants of his jeans and headed toward the back of deck C, a plan forming.
From the machines, Rory bought another rice omelet, spaghetti, ramen, onirigiri, deep-fried chicken, and a burger, then place each in the microwave. If he was going to coax whoever was leaving the notes out of hiding, he had to be sure the beast was elsewhere.
He turned on each microwave, readied to flee while they whirred away, but hesitated. The camera. Maybe it could be useful after all. It’d be good to see what he was dealing with.
He powered it up, had to wait for three different logos to clear before he could select its record function. Then—wishing he thought to do all this before he’d put his plan in motion—he looked around for somewhere to hide it.
A windowsill would do—nice height, far enough away that the beast wouldn’t notice it, and it framed the microwave area nicely. He just needed a way to keep the camera from falling over.
Ah—the microwaves. They all had pointing hands stuck to their fronts, indicating which program to use. Rory ripped off the hands, liberated blobs of weird white Japanese Blu Tack from their backs and applied them round the camera’s sides.
He stuck the device in place, pressed record. He could smell the food already. Time to go.
Out onto the deck, the rain pelting his back as he peered back through the porthole and waited for the beast to arrive.
It didn’t take long. The thing roared into the room, all fur and fury. Rory only allowed himself a glimpse before he flinched away, but it was enough.
He ducked beneath the windows and ran toward the ship’s stern, bare feet slapping on the wet deck as he pieced together what he’d seen—the horned, bovine head; the hunched back; the muscle-bound, almost human torso.
There could be no denying it: the beast was a Minotaur.
This was its labyrinth.
The ship lurched and Rory lost his footing. He went over, landed heavy on his back, on looking up saw a door. Fine.
He staggered over to it, slipped inside, found himself surrounded once again by high-backed yellow chairs. Back in the deck B lounge.
He kept moving, trying to tamp down a rising horror at the size of the room, long as a football field now. Or maybe he was just panicking, his eyes bleary with seawater and tears.
Through the partitions, into the dining area. Still empty, but this is where they’d been, this person, this savior, when they’d snuck from somewhere with their Post-it note.
Rory dug out his phone, into the translation app wheezed, “Hello, please help me. I’ve tricked the beast with food. It’s safe to come out.”
His phone repeated in Japanese. Rory boosted the volume, made the app say it again, but received no reply. He spoke again, something simpler this time, in case his meaning had gotten scrambled.
“You can come out for a moment. Please, I need your help.”
Then, “The Minotaur is distracted at the back of the ship. The beast.”
Then, “We could work together to defeat it.”
Nothing. Rory sighed, tried again. “Thank you for your assistance. I know you’re trying to help, but I don’t understand. I got a bad translation. Secure locations within the selling device, it said.” He turned on his heel as he spoke, looking for movement, and found himself staring at the vending machines. “Does selling device mean vending machine? Secure within the vending machines? What’s secure in there?”
Rory examined them again. The food was secure, but that couldn’t be it. He approached one, peered in through the glass, found in the gloom two eyes staring up at him.
“Jesus Christ!” He jumped, scrambled backward, gathered himself. There was nothing scary in those eyes. Only fear.
He approached again. A young woman lay in the base of the machine, glowering at him and shaking her head. Don’t reveal me.
Rory spoke into his phone. “I’ve distracted the beast. You can come out.”
The app translated, but the woman just shook her head again, then shifted to extract something underneath her. A stack of Post-its. A pen.
She wrote a new note, stuck it against the inside of the glass.
“Hold on.” Rory pointed his phone at the note, waited for the translation.
Occupied. Single occupancy rooms only. Find it yourself. You will need a key.
“A key? Is that right? A key?” Rory mimed twisting a key, but the woman gave no response, just ripped the note from the glass and gestured for Rory to get away. He backed up, spied the keyhole near the bottom of the vending machine’s heavy-duty door. A key.
“Okay, sorry, just one more question,” he said, holding up a finger. “Where do I find a key?”
She scowled at him, wrote a new note and slapped it against the glass.
Selling device.
Then she whipped the Post-it away and cowered like she’d heard something. Rory listened.
The flick of a door handle.
Rory flattened himself against the machine. The door opened and the wind whistled through, a baleful howl then sudden, violent slam. Reflected in a laminated poster on the opposite wall: the horned head of the Minotaur.
Rory’s breath caught. He found himself staring into a second vending machine. Again, from its depths, someone stared back at him.
Oh, fuck. He inched down the length of the machines, and in each it was the same—some terrified soul hunkered down in the machine’s base, silently pleading with him not to give the game away.
He swallowed, kept moving. He’d lost track of the Minotaur, could hear nothing of its movement. Maybe it was gone. Maybe it was inches away and ready to pounce.
At his back: the microwaves. Beside one was a rice omelet, the second he’d bought for breakfast but hadn’t cooked.
He picked up the omelet, mouthed a prayer, and hurled it overarm toward the front of the ship.
The Minotaur roared. Rory fled.
Out onto the deck and into the storm, a barefoot sprint down the length of the ship, one hand on the railing, stopping and clinging on when the waves came high. Past the saturated yellow chair, its broken leg now lost to the sea, and trying all the while to think. The key is in the selling device.
Ah! Rory stopped dead. He’d seen a vending machine selling keys when he’d boarded, down in the entrance lobby. That must be it. He just had to find it again.
He checked the coast was clear then peered in the nearest window. High-backed yellow chairs clustered round tables. Fucking hell.
He gripped the deck railing, risked peering over the ship’s side, found among the windows the outline of a door. He’d boarded through an umbilical-cord tunnel. That must be the belly button. Two floors down.
He slipped back into the lounge, as usual found the stairs to deck C beside him. He raced down them, hoping the stairwell ran through the whole ship, that he’d be able to keep descending, but no. The stairs linked decks B to C, and that was all. How did I even get up here?
He found a floor plan on the wall, barely recognized what it depicted. You are here, it said in English, above a tiny red dot among a maze of squares and rectangles that ran all the way to the edge of the display, no end in sight. Someone’s fucking with me. They’ve changed the signs.
Rory ran the length of deck C, found new turns in the corridors, an endless array of paper doors. He passed the ruined entrances to his own room and its neighbor opposite. Five minutes later, he ran past them again.
“Fuck!” In a fury, Rory punched the nearest paper door. He stared at the hole he’d created, an idea forming.
Three doors down, he punched again. Another three doors, another punch. Good. Let’s keep it going. Now he’d know where he’d been, when he needed to turn around.
He turned around often, punched through dozens of doors, faster and faster, sweating in his jacket, bare soles reddening, panic tightening his throat, his mind a clenched fist, praying for the next corner to reveal something new, but there were only doors, and holes in doors, and—
Rory slowed to a stop. That last hole. Something was odd about it.
He backtracked, peered through, found beyond the door, inexplicably, the rear dining area, complete with vending machines and Yamaha keyboard. Thank fuck!
Rory burst through the paper. The room looked normal, as he’d left it. He was desperate to sit, maybe to weep, but didn’t dare take the chance. A door to the outer deck was in sight. He needed to get out of here, to put his eyes on the horizon and reassure himself that the ship still had an end and dimensions he could grok. He couldn’t risk the room rearranging on him before he got there.
The smell from the meals he’d cooked lingered. Rory half expected to find smashed microwaves, food strewn across the floor, but all looked normal. One microwave door lay open. Someone had removed the meal, peeled back the plastic and picked at the chicken inside.
Rory approached the vending machines, peered into their depths. More eyes stared up at him; all machines occupied. Someone must have crept out to eat the food. But why only pick at it?
He dug out his phone, spoke into the translation app. “Please help me. I need to buy a key from the deck below, but I can’t find the stairs. I’m not sure there are stairs any more. How did you get down there?”
The app spoke the translation aloud. When it finished, there was only silence.
Rory closed his eyes, tried again. “Please talk to me. Please. I’m—”
A male voice, hushed, speaking Japanese, cut him off. It came from the machines. Rory shaped to reply but his phone spoke over him, translating his most recent remarks.
The voice came again, and Rory was able to pinpoint its location—one machine from the end.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me…” He pressed his phone flat against the glass, mimed speech with his hands.
Rory saw only a forearm, a tuft of hair. The man had wedged himself in under the rows of food, could barely move.
But he repeated himself, slow for the app, and the phone translated it to English.
Go away.
Rory sighed, fought the urge to punch the glass. Right. He headed out onto the rear deck, pausing only to collect his camera on the way.
The storm was worse out here, the rain driven by winds raging unencumbered, droplets lashing kamikaze into Rory. He staggered forward, reaching for the back railing to avoid being carried off, hands already numb.
The deck below jutted out like an underbite. Rory tried to judge the distance, his body tensing in outrage even as the thought formed. There’s no way.
He glanced back inside. But there might be no other way. Down there was deck D, the entrance lobby, the vending machine selling keys. Safety.
It was a long way to fall. If he misjudged it, it’d be an even longer fall into the propeller-churned sea.
But maybe he wouldn’t have to jump, exactly. The sea-tossed ship was heaving this way and that, forward and back. Below the balcony he clung to, a thick strip of white metal jutted out at an angle, separating the floors. If he timed it right, while the ship was tilted forward, for most of the distance it’d be less of a jump, more of a controlled slide. He’d only have to free fall the last section.
No point hesitating. He’d only get colder, his fingers clumsier. He’d only talk himself out of it.
Carefully, Rory climbed over the balcony, thinking again about the Titanic, trying not to think about how stupid all this was. He faced the ship, and when it pitched forward he climbed down the railings, knees against the metal, bare feet in the air. No way back now.
The waves crashed, knocking the ship sideways, backward, and Rory hung in the air, only his hands in contact with the ship, the deck seemingly above him, an impossible sight.
And streaking across it toward him: the twin horns of the Minotaur.
Rory gasped. Let go.
Rory bounced off the back of the ship then fell in a spin, all attempts at control futile. Deck D rushed up to meet him.
He crashed into it knees first then flipped onto his back, slid headlong across the deck and thudded into the railings.
His left knee throbbed, a furious swollen thing without center, the core numb but ready to bloom. If the Minotaur jumped down after him, he was done for.
A wave crashed over the deck, shocking him toward movement. He levered himself up, knew better than to expect his left knee to bear weight but still screamed anyway on moving it. The scream was swallowed by the elements; there was no obscuring the searing pain.
He had to get inside, away from here. The ship was too unsteady to hop straight across the back deck so he slid along the railings, a rook on a chessboard, moving at right angles until he got round the side and aligned with a door.
A deep breath, then a dive for the handle, letting it take his weight as he forced the door open and squeezed inside.
He collapsed down into the first available seat. His knee pulsed like a supernova, and along with it came the sense that this was it, he was done, an ending was near.
Sure enough, on rising, Rory glanced out the back windows and found the Minotaur, upright, watchful, still against the storm.
He tried to scramble away but his knee gave out, sent him sprawling to the floor. He levered himself up against a chair then hopped between the tables, chairback after chairback keeping him upright. Too slow.
He didn’t dare turn round, knew in any case what the beast’s arrival would sound like: the clunk of the door handle, the howl of the wind.
It didn’t come. Instead, the pleasantly patronizing voice of the animated welcome lady drew him forward through the vessel. A siren song.
Rory ping-ponged between the walls, bad knee in the air, grateful for the handrails which let him anchor himself and recover. The Minotaur had to be toying with him now, letting the doomed mouse flee before swiping at its tail.
On he staggered, expecting trickery, for the maze to reassert itself, the lady’s voice to flit around, a taunt at his back, but no—here where he’d left it was the lobby, with the safety briefing still on a loop and the vending machines round the corner, and in one of them, a solitary key.
Rory approached the machine warily, mistrusting his luck, hand on his sodden wallet but eyes on the machine’s depths, expecting a matching pair to meet his own.
Empty.
He glanced into the machine’s neighbor, found not a soul but a skeleton, arm reaching, the rest trapped like a rat in the wall.
Right. An ending. Rory had only to pick his own.
He flattened a note from his wallet and fed the machine. As it whirred to life, he examined the dangling key inside. Universal, or specific? If he had to hunt down a matching machine, he might as well surrender to the beast now.
The key fell into the hatch. Rory collected it, twisted it in the machine’s lock. The door swung open. He squeezed in feet first under the empty pegs, suppressing a scream as he jarred his bad knee, then folded himself small and brought the door to. The lock clicked and he sighed. Hiding, he told himself. Not entombed.
His wallet was making him uncomfortable so he dug it out his pocket, chucked it into a corner. It landed with a squelch. A triangle of white poked out. The ticket.
The thing was so waterlogged it nearly fell apart in his hand. The kanji had faded, and only two English words remained.
Onboard entertainments.
Huh. Rory remembered the camera in his jacket pocket. Still recording. He pressed stop, scrubbed through the footage until he found himself in shot, coming back to collect the camera up in the deck C rear lounge. He scrubbed back further, found the Minotaur bounding into the room, glimpsed himself through the windows, fleeing.
Rory pressed play. The Minotaur sniffed the air, padded over to the microwaves, then searched around, hunched but calm, chest rising and falling in a gentle pant.
Then, finding no one, the beast straightened, ambled to a microwave, removed the meal and peeled back the cover with a huge claw. Then he removed the claw itself, then the horned head, and with human hand and human head picked at the roast chicken, leaning against the counter like a bored office worker.
Rory gasped. “Oh, you fucking bastards!”
In disgust, he threw the camera away. It clanged off the vending machine walls. He’d been tricked. But the skeleton, the moving ship walls, the half-eaten body on the upper deck—was any of it real?
Rory reached again for his camera, seeking answers, but finding himself sidetracked by some inexplicable, nebulous excitement. There was something on that camera. Something important.
He scrubbed through the video, nudging back and forth ‘til he found the best frame. There. His heart beat faster. The composition was striking. That office worker stance, the way the light caught the vending machine glass in the background—that was good. Better than good. And that double face, human and Minotaur, made you look and look again.
Rory delved into the camera’s menus, selected Export frame from video. He closed his eyes, rested his head against the unyielding metal and for the first time in his life allowed himself to think what he knew to be true. Great shot.
About the Author
Kieran McCaffrey’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Daily Tomorrow, Baubles From Bones and State Of Matter, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Cymera prize. Kieranm.bsky.social.