The Levanes Call The fog in Liverpool did not roll in. It descended. It came down from the grey heavens like a curtain being drawn across a stage where no performance was worth attending. Thomas Harrow stood on the edge of the dock and watched it swallow the cranes and the warehouses and the distant chimney of the distillery, and he thought of his right leg, which was not a leg at all but a piece of mahogany turned by a craftsman who had been paid too little and died too young. He had been in Lisbon when the amputation was performed. The surgeon had asked if he wanted to see the leg afterward. Thomas said no. Some things you carry inside you better. The pub was called The Rusty Chain, though no chain had rusted in it since the Crimean War. Old Finn sat in the corner with a pint of porter and the look of a man who had seen something he could not unsee. Thomas found him there on a Tuesday in November, which in Liverpool meant it was already dark by four o'clock and the wind carried the smell of salt and coal smoke in equal measure. "They came in at dawn," Finn said before Thomas even sat down. "HMS Leviathan. Or what was left of her." Thomas lifted his wooden leg over the bench and settled his body weight onto the remaining limb. "She was lost three months ago. Irish Sea." "She was lost. And now she is not." Finn's eyes were red from drink and something else, something that looked like fear but had been there too long to be just fear. "She appeared off Holyhead. No fog, no storm, no signal. She just materialized like a ghost that forgot she was supposed to be invisible." Thomas did not answer immediately. He ordered a whisky and watched the fog press itself against the pub window like a beggar at a door. "Where is she now?" "Docked at Queen's Pier. The harbormaster doesn't want her there, but who argues with a ship that has no crew to argue with her?" Thomas finished his whisky in one swallow. "When was the last time you saw her?" "Three days ago. I rowed out to her at noon. The gangway was down. The decks were clean, swept as if someone had been expecting guests. And the coffee—God help me, the coffee was still warm in a cup on the captain's table."

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