The four men moved from the rail at double speed, as eager to have something to do as the veteran ship’s master had suspected. But like his experience with the key, the brawny seamen could not move so much as a link of the chain. Had someone welded the entire mass of rusted steel to the hatch, he couldn’t have done a better job of adhering the chain to the ship.

It was just occurring to Urquhart that his ship had turned into a giant magnet when he heard the scream, an unworldly peal of anguish that keened higher and higher without letup.

The noise galvanized him because he recognized the voice despite the agony tearing through it, and he knew what was happening to the man.

The chief engineer, a Scotsman, had his cabin down the hallway from Urquhart’s own. Urquhart reached McTaggert’s door and burst through it only seconds after hearing him scream.

In the beam of the brass hurricane lantern Urquhart’d snatched from the second mate, he saw the shirtless Scot atop his bed with a look of terror etched upon his face. He was pawing at his chest, or, more precisely, at the big scar that bisected his left pectoral muscle. The scar was a souvenir of a boiler explosion some twenty years back, and behind it, as McTaggert liked to brag, was a piece of pot metal the ship’s cook who’d stitched him up at the time had been unable to remove.

“Flip over, Conner,” Urquhart shouted, but knew he was too late.

A fresh scream exploded from the engineer, a sound so sharp and so full of pain that Urquhart winced. And then a sputter of blood bubbled from Conner McTaggert’s lips. The two men’s eyes locked, and a silent message passed between them. Good-bye, it said.

The sputter turned into a continuous gout of rich arterial blood as the shard of metal lodged in his chest tore through his heart and lungs as it was drawn inexorably deckward by the powerful magnetic forces at play. The pain that had transformed his face into an ugly mask had passed, and the crimson stain running from chin to chest was the only testament to the man’s last horrifying seconds.

A moment later came a wet sucking sound, then the metallic ting of the chunk of shrapnel hitting the deck after passing all the way through McTaggert’s body.

Urquhart closed the cabin door before any of the other crew members saw the corpse. He returned to the bridge, his face ashen and his hands a little unsteady. The glow still spread over the ship with its eerie light, while the men on deck had given up their task of stowing the chain and peered anxiously toward where the glow had first emanated.