The old derelict looms
above us in the darkness as we approach in the dinghy. We spotted
her on our arrival here in port, and instantly knew we needed to
explore her. There is a mystical, magnetic pull that draws me to old
ships, and this one has it stronger than most. We pass under the
stern, with "Helje, Kherson" written in faded white paint,
past rust scales that look as if they would kill a man if they
dropped.. After tucking the dinghy safely out of sight between the
ship and the dock, we find a sturdy fender chain and climb aboard.
The deck is absolutely
covered in crap that nobody cares about any more. Lines, oil barrels
and miscellaneous detritus all abandoned in a fantastic jumble. We
gingerly make our way across wooden deck covering rotted to mush,
listen to the creaking of the old steel plates, painfully aware that
there is a ten meter drop into the cargo hold beneath us. Up rickety
stairs, maintaining separation so we don't both fall if one of us
goes, up three deck levels to the bridge roof.
Wow, the size of the
thing! She is big. Not really big, of course, but at three hundred
feet or so, the deck is absolutely vast compared to the ones I'm used
to staring at. Quietly, careful with the flashlights so as to not
alert the dock guards, we start searching for a way in. Open doors
lead to electric utility rooms, deck lockers and god knows what, but
all the doors leading inside have been welded shut. Astrid finally
finds one that has been cut open, and we step into the darkness,
flashlight beams playing across the bulkheads.
The place gives me the
creeps. I'm usually pretty comfortable around shipwrecks, having
left my boyhood fears behind, but not with this one. Before I'm to
steps inside, the hairs at the back of my neck are standing on end,
telling me forcefully that this is an evil place. We go forward.
Old pyrotechnic distress signals are strewn about everywhere,
covering the floors in all the main deck level cabins. There must be
a hundred kilos of the stuff, way more than would ever have been
carried on board, and the distribution tells a clear tale. Idly
wondering why the insurance scam never got further than that, we keep
going.
The hallway to the galley
is blocked by stacks of welding sticks. Nice, new, vacuum packed
ESAB sticks, in quantities that makes me stop and wonder. What
happened here? Somebody bought a half ton of welding sticks, and
there it stopped. My feeling that something evil took place here
deepens as we go down the hallway. Cabins, and lots of them. This
thing must have carried a crew of thirty or forty. A huge crew, for
the size of the ship. Posters line the walls, dirty bedsheets on the
floors, and throughout are obvious marks of fighting. Doors forced
open, cabins ransacked, broken bits of furniture.
One level down, and there
are more cabins. Pornographic posters on the walls, more porn on the
floors, mixed with postcards, Russian documents, tacky little books
of bible quotes and cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes.
The infirmary stinks like no other place. Here too we see stuff
strewn about, a huge medicine cabinet all stocked. Down the corridor
and left through a watertight door into the engine room. A spare
stream turbine rotor blocks the hallway, still in its crate. Spare
parts and tools strewn everywhere. Two levels down, and we find
ourselves deep in the bowels of the ship.
The water is just an inch
below the deck plates, lapping gently against the bed plate of the
massive, straight eight main engine. Everything is covered in
Cyrillic writing. Astrid steps through a deck plate. Half finished
maintenance, some of it shoddy work. A generator pulled apart,
cylinder head and all left on the deck, unprotected. More tools,
drawers full of fuses, spare electric motor brushes, huge machinery
the function of which I can only guess at. Hilarious Soviet health
and safety posters on the walls.
Three levels up, into a
small, spare galley. The place has been used for keeping birds.
Empty cages, must be ten of them, and bird seeds on every surface.
Filth. Eggs wedged behind a fridge that smells like death. Soviet
propaganda maps on the walls, with the United States omitted. Up to
the bridge. The compass is missing, but the rest is there. The
charts we found in another cabin. The radio room has been tossed
worse than the rest of the ship, the floor covered in circuit boards,
thermal printing paper, an inflated life raft, and more. Back down,
and Astrid stops: "Baby, what is this?"
It is blood. Lots and
lots of it. Sprayed on the walls. On the ceiling, even. Probably
some on the floor, as well, but that has been lost in dust and gunk.
I trace it back to where it started, by one of the starboard cabins,
door forced. Spatter stripes. Drag marks on the walls. Fantastic
amounts of blood on the left side of the corridor, around the corner,
to the head of the stairwell. Down the stairs and to the right is
the infirmary. So that's where he was trying to go. Poor guy
obviously never made it further than the stairs, though, because
that's where the blood stops.
It's beginning to make
sense to me now. Crew confined to the ship, a bad captain losing
control. Fights breaking out. Thirty men in that space with nowhere
to go, it must have been hell. The murder is the last thing to
happen on board, and they are all spirited away, leaving the mess
behind for us to contemplate.
P.S: Sorry about the pictures. I uploaded them all correctly rotated, and Blogger somehow decided to convert them all to landscape. You'll just have to tilt you head on the side.
