Art Pact 39

The ship, which was at the center of the town, was something of a mystery. Its surface was covered in the fossilised shells of barnacles that had grown on it, proving that at some point it had been in the sea. The barnacles extended up roughly to the level where an engineer might put the plimsoll line, so not only had it been in the sea, but it seemed as though it might have been a working trawler. Similarly, there were scratches in the weathered paintwork that implied the odd rough docking, and the sort of striated patterns of corrosion on the lower hull that the more experienced amongst the townsfolk interpreted as the work of the sea (although perhaps to describe any of the townsfolk of an agricultural town three hundred leagues from the nearest sea as experts in maritime engineering might be considered a bit of a stretch).

Opinions were particularly divided about how the ship had got into the center of the town, given the aforementioned distance to the nearest point at which a ship might be reasonably assumed to be capable of reaching. The ship itself did not do much to help out, providing what can only be descrbed as extremely equivocal evidence as to its age and origin. It was clearly too new a ship to have arrived more than seventy or eighty years ago, but considerably older buildings had been built over and around it - indeed, being at the center of the town the buildings which incorporated or surrounded the ship were among the oldest, some more than three or four hundred years old, in fact. The more venerable townsfolk reported that the ship had been in place when they were young, and that their grandparents even then had talked about it as though it had always been there. Of course, hearsay is hardly the most scientific evidence, and there is something to be said for the theory of a number of the town's younger and more sceptical inhabitants that the whole thing was a massive hoax perpetrated on the old in preemptive revenge against their offspring's inevitable longer, happier, and generally more galling lives, but there was a ring of truth in how the elders described the ship which made their tales seem not just plausible but almost likely. Even among the true skeptics, for every person who pointed to the ship's massive rusting diesel engines and made the point that they could not have existed earlier than the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two amateur alchemists who had sampled and assayed the mortar in those buildings which used the boat as part of their structure and pronounced that it matched perfectly with the rest of the venerable structures.

The arrival of the telephone - and some years later the internet - only served to deepen the mystery. The word eventually got out that the town had something extraordinary nestled within it, and it became the destination for a small but steady trickle of UFO enthusiasts, maritime scientists, debunkers and religious... well, as the townspeople politely described them: "enthusiasts." Scientists of the engineering and chemical disciplines confirmed that yes, the buildings that encased the ship had definitely been built after the ship arrived. Maritime specialists confirmed that yes, the ship was full of design features that clearly dated it to the nineteen-sixties or later, so it could not have been in place for much more than twenty years. The religious said that it was clear evidence of a miracle, the debunkers that it was far more likely to be the work of some particularly talented village fraudster, but neither they (not the scientists, nor the worshippers), could say how or why such a thing might have been done.

"It seems a pretty rum sort of miracle," the mayor at the time had said, when asked for a quote by the regional newspaper. "I remember we had an outbreak of food poisoning in the fifties. If God wanted to prove his existence, surely he could have done something about that rather than dropping a ship on us."

There was one piece of evidence, however, that for some reason passed everyone by until Rufus Grace came to town. He had been in his digs in the loft of the town's sign-painter for three months before he finally made his pilgrimage to the stranded vessel, and within twenty minutes of setting out he was back in the library using their pitiful dial-up link to search the various registries of sea-going vessels.

For within ten minutes of leaving his garret he had looked at the stern of the ship and seen what thousands of others had missed, obscured under layers of corrosion and barnacles.

The ship's name.