I took the morning train to Liverpool and the ferry across to Belfast. The ship was rolling uncomfortably on a rough Irish Sea and I had the misfortune to sit beside an elderly Brit who wouldn’t shut up. He went on and on about his six wives and his kids, then his grandkids, where they went to school and their dogs.

I could barely manage intermittent nods. I was getting seasick and sliding lower in my seat. I sank through the depths, changing from blue to green to black and on to blinding light. I crossed the river without paying my fare. I was met in purgatory and escorted straight to living hell.

I finally took a hard look at the side of his face, judging how long it would take me to choke him unconscious. His head was small and round with sunken cheeks. His lips were uncontrollably moving, like he was working up a good spit. The top of his bald pate reflected a strange, decaying glow that folded back around his ears.

Please don’t let this be the last man to see me alive.

“The whiskey is the reason I go across, of course,” he said, abruptly changing the subject.

“What?” I moaned.

“The ferries are duty free, you see. I can drink my fill over the weekend until I can’t stand upright even wearing clown shoes and braces. Then I can bring as much as I can carry back to Sheffield.”

Why are you telling me this? The old bastard was trying to kill me. I have money. It’s yours if you promise to disappear right now in a fiery explosion.

“I can manage enough to ration a couple of weeks,” he continued. “Then I’m back on the ferry again. Yep, twice a month like clockwork.”

He turned to me with his decaying smile.

“Ya know, rocking and rolling. Rocking and rolling,” he repeated.

That was it, I lost it.

In a panic, my eyes flashed around the compartment for a quiet place to die. The line at the loo was twelve deep so I headed for the door to the outside deck. I had to throw up. Now. But a vicious wind held the door shut. It wouldn’t budge.

That’s all I needed now, anyway; to be washed overboard. But somehow, taking flight and floating away on the bitter, wet morning sounded preferable to dying in a pile by the doorway. I shook the door. The wind shook it back. I glanced at the old man. I shook the door again and the wind shook right back.

Dark clouds closed around the ferry like cold, black hands as the rain shifted from vertical to horizontal. Blasts of wind wiped away the sleet as fast as it pounded the windows. Waves rolled over the main deck and splashed nearly thirty feet up to where I stood. ​

​​London Bridge is Falling Down Excerpt 10

​The Hollow Man     |     The Hollow Man Series, International Espionage​

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